In the Summer of 2005, the infamous artistic double-act Gilbert and George were chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. These Saville-row attired doppelgangers were sent as ambassadors, as emissaries, as representatives of our great nation. And what did the dynamic duo offer up for the arbitration of those snooty Europeans? 25 images featuring their V-sign flicking selves. Rule Britannia.
It could have been much worse. In the context of Gilbert and George’s repertoire of motifs: of which semen, excrement, urine and the word c*nt are the perennial stalwarts, a few V-signs were very much the lesser of several evils. But is this really the best we can do? Does this artistic paring, obsessed as they are with bodily emissions and expletives, really represent the pinnacle of artistic creativity in 21st Century Britain? Nicholas Serota certainly seems to think so.
The Tate Modern is currently host to a two-hundred image strong retrospective spanning G&G’s forty year career. The exhibition is so extensive that it spills out of the gallery space into the concourse, vestibules, and café of the fourth floor. That’s an entire floor of Tate Modern devoted to poo, expletives and spermatozoa. What must foreign tourists think of us?
Now I’m no puritan when it comes to art. I’m all for boundary pushing. If Piero Manzoni wants to defecate into eighty small glass jars in the name of art, then let him. If Tracey Emin wants to discard her used condoms on the floor of the Saatchi Gallery, then so be it. What I do object to is artists who pursue the same scant, infantile, attention seeking ideas for the entirety of their careers. What this exhibition makes abundantly clear is that Gilbert and George happened upon a rather good idea circa. 1969 and then proceeded to flog their dead horse for the next four decades. The same urban street scenes, the same expressionless self portraits, the same sexually explicit phrases, over and over again. The most galling thing of all is that the duo’s earliest collaborations yielded some sensational work. But sensational soon turned to sensationalist and well, you know the rest.
The first two rooms of the exhibition are devoted to these early works; ‘charcoal on paper sculptures’ (that’s drawings to you and me) some 13ft in height. These depict the young Gilbert and George on a jaunt to the green and pleasant English countryside, a world away from the urban East End of their later work. In subject these recall those early Et in Arcadia Ego passages of Brideshead Revisited. The long grasses and reeds of a river bank are rendered in hasty charcoal strokes evoking the stir of wind on pasture.
But Arcadian country scenes do not a headline make and so Gilbert and George turned to shock tactics. Their Dirty Words series debuted in the early 1970s. These grainy black and white shots of profane graffiti, toy soldiers, and urban decay make striking images. Like much of Gilbert and George’s work they would make great album covers or bill-board adverts, but that does not necessarily amount to great Art.
Here’s the truth of the matter: Gilbert and George aren’t bad, they’re just limited and endlessly repetitive. They have also lost all power to shock, try though they may with countless images of ejaculating phalluses. Even the BBC, that bastion of the establishment, has now produced a documentary entitled ‘I Love the C-Word.’ Gilbert and George are no more daring than the ten-year old boy who shouts naughty words in the school playground; a fitting metaphor given that Tate Modern's turbine hall is currently over-run with playground slides.
The legacy that Gilbert and George leave behind amounts to nothing more than a few hundred images glorifying distasteful bodily functions and a handful of beautiful drawings no one will ever remember. Leaving the gallery and walking along the South Bank I found myself irresistibly drawn to a suitably G&G verdict : What a load of Sh*t.
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