if you see clay

Gilbert & George, de Young Museum, 2/16/2008

Bloody Mooning 1996

The Gilbert and George retrospective was shocking--shocking not because of the use of profanity, the depiction of bodily fluids and excrement, naked bodies of the artists and various young men, or even homosexuality as subject matter. It was shocking because I really didn’t like their art.

My expectations were set high. I had just finished reading about Gilbert and George in my conceptual art history book. Gilbert and George, a.k.a. G & G, became well-known in the 1960’s for their performance art and its documentation (using photography and video). Their decision to exhibit their bodies as "living sculptures" was a ground-breaking idea, but over the intervening 40 years, this conceptual notion faded and documentation became their primary focus. Then their documentation evolved into assembled photographic images. G & G moved from conceptual art making (1960’s) to photographic art (1970’s) then to digital art (1980’s onward).

Since G & G’s move to digital prints (in the 1980’s I think), documentation of specific experience is lacking. Their images no longer contain concrete events. For me, this doesn’t make the work more accessible, it makes the work seem empty. Their digital manipulations (high-contrast, unreal colors, and the flattening of space caused by discarding the background) make them have more in common visually with Warhol and pop art. Warhol’s work was much earlier (the 1960’s), shocked the audience due to his subject matter (but in an intelligent way... poop and semen are hardly subtle), used a more inherently beautiful medium (silk screen), and intentionally used the lack of time and space in his images as part of the message (fame, icon, etc). Twenty years after Warhol, Gilbert and George’s content, imagery, and medium just doesn’t measure up.

Walking through the retrospective, I found myself wondering why G & G stuck to their grid layout for over 30 years. It’s a surprisingly long time to keep on with some formal constraints that are probably no longer necessary. I got tired of it after about 30 seconds. Obviously, the grid layout was at first due to the size limitations of photographic paper, but maybe now it’s due to printer size. It’s true that the grid, along with the use of primary color, makes their images seem like stained glass windows. Seen in this way, it could raise the status of the pair to religious icon. But it's not stained glass. It's digitally printed paper. Would I like these better if these were stained glass? Yes, probably I would. Then we could talk about the aesthetic beauty of stained glass, and their lack of adherence to the traditional imagery of stained glass. As it is, these digital prints are not that rewarding to look at. G & G have adhered to the same style and format for almost 40 years, but that doesn’t make it successful. I wonder if their art was technically groundbreaking to photographers (40 years ago) and digital artists (20 years ago). If so, time has not been kind to Gilbert and George's artwork. I often see older artists with a name for themselves, but with bland work. As an emerging artist, all this tells me is that it doesn’t matter what I produce, as long as I keep producing the same thing for a long, long, long time. Actually, maybe that is comforting.*


Shitted 1983

Research reveals that there has been outrage at the use of their imagery. The Dirty Words series (1977) made headlines with hardcore obscenities taken from local graffiti; Gilbert and George won the Turner Prize in 1986 amidst criticism from left-wing commentators of their "glamorizing" of skinhead culture and racism; their gigantic photo-pieces, entitled Wanker, Bummed and Prick Ass, caused a furor at the Royal Academy in 1987; the Naked Shit pictures (1995) featured their own excrement and attracted 1,000 visitors per day to the South London Gallery; the New Horny Pictures (2001) used ads for homosexual prostitutes taken from magazines and newspapers and fuelled the debate on gay marriage; and their Ginko pictures made for the Venice Biennale (2005) showed "hoodies" (London hoodlums) in a sympathetic light. I’m surprised at the outrage, but I shouldn’t be. These images shouldn’t be that big of a deal. Maybe the problem is that I am not the intended audience. If this retrospective helps to de-shock people (as G & G claim is their purpose) then is their artwork successful? This type of thing (a forever-changed viewer) is of course unmeasurable. In any case, once our culture moves past its shock at G & G’s subject matter, they will realize the art itself is crap.

In my art review of Paul Kos’s retrospective, I railed against bay area conceptual artists for losing their edge since the 1960’s and 1970’s. In my opinion, these conceptual artists have, over time, traded their playful experimental sensibility for object making. Objects sell. It’s true. Gilbert and George reportedly set an astronomical price for one of their minimalist drawings in the early 1970’s, and its (rather surprising) sale led to quite a bit of drinking, and subsequently to a body of work featuring quite a bit of drinking. The de Young exhibition has one of this series entitled "A Drinking Sculpture" (1974) on display. This is one of the few pieces I actually liked. It is a group of collected photographs presumably from a night where Gilbert and George get drunk on Gordon’s Gin. This is when they were transitioning from conceptual art to photographic art, and by viewing these photographic fragments, I piece together in my imagination the intoxicated evening that occurred. For me, the artwork here is in the action (G & G’s drunken evening), and the fabrication of their memory (in the mind of a viewer). The photographs are just enough to provide a few hazy (drunken?) images for me to use to piece together the evening's events. Maybe G & G were hung over enough to need to use these artifact images in the same way. This piece is very rich, it speaks to me about memory and questions the nature of reality. I see the sale of their early minimalist drawing as the beginning of the end for G & G. Once they saw the money, they quickly dispensed with art of a conceptual nature and focused on saleable art pieces.


Over 2004

In the text preceding the exhibition, Gilbert and George claim they want to make "art for all". They declare,
"We want our art to speak across the barriers of knowledge directly to People about their Life and not about their knowledge of art. The 20th century has been cursed with an art that cannot be understood. The decadent artists stand for themselves and their chosen few, laughing at and dismissing the normal outsider. We say that puzzling, obscure and form-obsessed art is decadent and a cruel denial of the Life of People."
This statement is either based upon extremely dry humor or exemplifies G & G’s lack of success in communicating a message. Gilbert and George's artwork is hardly what I would call accessible. I noticed that most of us in the museum wore puzzled expressions and were clearly trying to understand this art, but were failing.

What I found most fascinating from this exhibition is what I have learned about the artists themselves:
• For 40 years they have maintained their seamless double-act, walk in step and talk in antiphon, all clothes, habits and opinions synchronized, all sentences prefixed by a regal "we". They are never off-duty. Even spotted on the top deck of a passing bus, they wave graciously in unison, like dinky mechanical men.
• They eat every meal out, and have dinner in the same Turkish restaurant in Dalston at the same time every night. George walks there while Gilbert sometimes takes a cab.
• The matching business suits which they wore for their early performance art have become a sort of uniform, and they rarely appear in public unless wearing them.
• It is virtually unheard of for one of the pair to be seen without the other.
• They refuse to disassociate their performances from their everyday lives, and insist that everything they do is art.

In the end, I guess it boils down to this: I would be perfectly willing to view Gilbert and George’s lives as art and sculpture, but these colorful monstrosities are wasting valuable space inside the de Young.



TODO: add response artwork

*By the way, I'm not blind/stupid/naive, i just like to sometimes pretend the "art world" is not a business. As a student who takes artistic integrity very seriously, it is sometimes difficult to see a place for myself in the art/business world. As an outsider, it's hard not to want to take pot shots at it every now and again. Sour grapes? I dunno, why don't you give me a million and see if I shape up. Artists like Banksy make me happy, with their unflinching snarky attitude (the auction piece that said "I Can't Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit"). Ha ha.