Are Gilbert and George for real? “Britain’s most controversial artists”, as
they are so often tagged, have an unerring talent for attracting headlines,
but the amount of theatre attendant on each of their outrages does make you
wonder. There’s the trademark attire of their beautifully cut suits and
their stiff otherworldliness set against their work, which explicitly
renders the urban everyday. They revel in these contradictions and the
mystery swirling around them and their relationship.
My Alice in Wonderland immersion in their world begins when George –
surname Passmore, 65, the tall, beaky English one – welcomes me to their
home, on one of East London’s most beautiful streets. They’ve lived in
Spitalfields since the mid1960s and their work is a riot of what eddies
around them: life, death, violence, beauty, multi-culturalism, homelessness,
wealth, graffiti, hoodies, poverty, sex, intimacy, loneliness, humour and
threat. They have a new obsession: the plane tree, a hardy London survivor
with bulbous buds.
George starts showing me the roughs of The Six Bomb Pictures,
inspired by the London Tube bombings of July 7, 2005, and the only new work
to feature in a retrospective of their career at Tate Modern. The six
floor-to-ceiling panels comprise 136 sandwich board posters, taken from
outside newsagents, featuring headlines from around the time of 7/7: “London
Terror Bomb Plot”, “Bomb Victim Payout Row”. Row upon row of words,
insistent, frenzied, drenched in red (blood, but also forming a flag of St
George) and, as ever, Gilbert and George, in there themselves, bug-eyed,
enmeshed in wire and plane-tree branches, their faces stricken. At the base
of the central triptych is a cartoonish tombstone.
“On one level it’s intended as an indictment of the press for trying to
terrify us and make us buy a newspaper,” says George. “At the same time each
headline shows a deep human tragedy. I was bombed by Germans as a baby
[growing up in Plymouth], bombed by Roman Catholics for years around here
[referring to the IRA bombing the City and Canary Wharf], and on Brick Lane
we’ve been bombed by a white supremacist homophobe and now Muslims [7/7] –
so we’re quite well qualified to deal with the subject.”
Gilbert – Proesch, the smaller one, 63 – appears. George is saying that
“whatever is happening in the East End of London is always what is happening
in the rest of the world”. Gilbert adds that they believe in showing “the
townscape – it’s more real not to paint it”. George is so well-spoken he
makes the Prince of Wales sound like Vicky Pollard, Gilbert speaks in a lazy
Italian drawl (he was born in the Dolomites). Their studio is a massive barn
of a place at the back of the house. They are utterly charming but also
seasoned performers.
They do not like pretty art, wrinkling their noses at the Impressionists. “How
artificial their world was,” says George, “no cripples, no syphilis, no
damaged children. The sun is always shining, they always have a drink in
their hand.” Outside the house, George’s face lights up when he sees an
empty Lucozade bottle and dried dog mess. They say they never reveal what
they’re working on, but show me more newspaper hoardings for future works
around rape and murder. “We also like medals,” says George. (Their own
heraldic motif is the pubic louse, one of George’s. “We wanted to give it
some status,” he says, though he won’t tell me how he contracted crabs.)
The new work is fevered. Gilbert says: “That’s London. It’s at every corner
bombarding you. We are thinking about what we feel about being bombed and
not being bombed and how morally do you accept that.” The reaction to 7/7
was different from that to 9/11 in New York, says George, because London “is
a tough city that has been bombed before”. They first moved to the East End
when it was cheap rather than fashionable. “When journalists write about
gentrification it’s nonsense,” says George. “We still get prostitutes’ s***
on our doorstep and drug addicts kicking our door in.”
The other day an Asian teenager shouted at them: “Get out of this place. This
is a holy land.” George rolls his eyes: “He was 15 or 16. Trendy jacket. The
latest Nikes.” Both men have been mugged, George twice, but they love the
throb and sway of this part of London. They will never be pushed out, but
religion vexes them. George remembers Billy Graham belting out his message
when he was growing up. Every war is focused around religion, says George
miserably. The Catholic Church’s antipathy towards gays “is to do with sex”,
says Gilbert. “They want to be in charge of your penis.” But G&G
are proud to have “lots of support” from the clergy; the Bishop of Stepney
came for a studio visit. “I know exactly when I rejected Catholicism,”
blurts Gilbert, “when the vicar, during confession, asked if I masturbated.
For me that was it.”
You’d think the men would be happy, having finally secured the Tate Modern
show after six years of lobbying. “The two Tate galleries are divided by
race,” says George angrily. “Tate Britain shows work by modern British
artists and Tate Modern should be called Tate Foreign. Its director once
told us he would not show British artists there. ‘Right’, we thought, ‘we’ll
have to kick the door in’ and very slowly we did.” He looks furious, Gilbert
says calmingly: “Either you have modern art or you don’t.”
George looks more measured, Gilbert sparkier. But, as one close associate told
me, it is “Gilbert who has the difficult task of containing George’s
intensity”. Twenty years ago they were both drinking heavily – they joke
that they had lots of money, so why not? – but this “terrible time” was
marked by a feeling that they were being overlooked by the art
establishment. “We are fighters,” Gilbert insists, but you wonder if they’re
picking fights where none exist. They’re represented by Jay Jopling, their
works sell for hundreds of thousands of pounds and their eccentricity has
made them national darlings. What’s their beef?
“The critics. Homophobia,” ratatats George. “When we had young men on our
pictures they called them rent boys.” “Scat queens they called us,” froths
George. That was ages ago, I say, and anyway you mounted an exhibition
called Was Jesus Heterosexual?And you dodo great big
pictures sometimes featuring pretty young men. They smile: their persecution
complex is balanced by a love of chippy banter. But they genuinely feel
discriminated against.
They got together as students at Central St Martins in 1964. “It was something
that came over us rather than something we decided,” says George. Gilbert:
“George took an interest in me because I couldn’t speak English.” Did you
hit on him, I ask George. “Of course,” he says. “Who wouldn’t? At the time
people said it wouldn’t last. We did last.” Gilbert says dreamily: “Forty
years. Extraordinary. The opposition bought us together.” They hate being
called “gay”, or “gay artists” – “We don’t understand those terms, we’re
collaborators: two people, one artist. We reject all labels.”
They began their career as “living sculptures”, singing ditties on boxes.
Right from the beginning they have done everything as a couple. They employ
one assistant. “We do the majority of the work [now on computer] ourselves,”
says Gilbert. They live within absolute routine: the same café for breakfast
in the morning, “the same dinner at the same restaurant every night for
months and months”, says George. “Currently it’s hot aubergine, chops,
cheese, beers, a bottle of wine, identical every night. We don’t have to
think. It frees up the brain for thinking about more serious things. We’re
always amazed that four people can enjoy reading a menu for 20 minutes. It
would kill us.”
The idea of cooking at home unnerves them. “What would we want to do that
for?” George says, aghast at the idea. “We don’t have a stove in the house.
We have a kettle and that’s it.” He adds that they become “crazed” while
working and lock themselves away. They are apart only once during the day: George
walks home from the Kurdish restaurant they go to in Hackney at night. (“I
have flat feet,” explains Gilbert.) They leave London once a year, at
Christmas, to holiday in Lisbon.
They claim not to have friends, except a photographer, or to hang with any of
the East End art crowd, “although we used to take them out in the early
1980s because we had money. People think we drive around sipping champagne
with young men licking our b*******,” says George muckily. He makes quite a
few suggestive remarks which Gilbert responds to by smiling blankly and
occasionally cackling.
They know the general public views them affectionately. The young, in
particular, “get” their work. At Tate Modern you’ll be able to buy a special
G&G swear box, musical figures, a bag. But being a brand is not enough.
“We want to be understood, admired and loved,” says George. “We always
dreamt of waking up and opening the paper and reading that we were
extraordinarily good artists. But if we took away the primary colours, boys,
religion, p***, s***, what would you be left with?”
The duo are not play-acting, they claim emphatically. “We always said we
wanted to be the artist your mother wouldn’t be ashamed of,” says George.
“Not paint-spattered, bearded, ill-mannered,” George says of how their
utterly proper demeanour contrasts with their graphic work. “Everyone is
schizophrenic, but only some people suffer from it.” People who think their
relationship is a stunt, “can’t accept the simple reality of it”. The suits
started as a uniform to get noticed, says Gilbert, but now, says George,
they just mean that they don’t have to think about clothes.
They collect ephemera such as church reports and male erotica and watch TV
only for the news and Paul O’Grady, “who is deeply moving and charming”. “We
are normal Conservative rebels,” says George. “I have always voted
Conservative. It’s the King’s party. As an artist I believe in the
individual, so do the Conservatives.” Gilbert interjects: “Mrs Thatcher
introduced the free market, which was great. We made money.” So, following
the latest convention, will they get married? “No, but we find it
fascinating that straight people used to ape gay people in the 1970s, and
now gays are emulating straights.” ( The Times revealed last
year that George had married a woman in 1967, three months prior to meeting
Gilbert, and fathered two children.)
We meet a few days later at Tate Modern, where G&G are helping to install
the new show; the curators say that the duo have planned it meticulously. It
will feature everything: the videos of them dancing together from the 1960s
through to the sacred and profane masterworks of today. I wonder how they
feel about the prospect of the other dying. George says that “artists don’t
retire”, then muses that it would be amazing if an immortality machine were
invented. Gilbert says they make sure that they cross the road together. If
Gilbert died first George would “get a younger model”. The G&G
brand would continue. “He’d have to change his name,” says George.
Gilbert says: “I always had the feeling that one day we will fall over and
that’s it. We did it all. We don’t need to go to paradise.” George adds:
“It’s not over yet. We’re very privileged and we remind ourselves of that
every day.” Do they love each other? “We have our own feelings inside us
which nobody knows,” says Gilbert. The smoke and mirrors around them and
their work prompts me to ask if they are genuinely together? I have been
told by a close associate that they are (when they travel they share a hotel
room) but no one ever asks them directly. The question offends them hugely.
George mutters: “We just believe everything is anything, we don’t use these
terms.” They stall twice again, but I persist: what’s the problem in saying
that they are together romantically if they are? “Yes, of course we are,”
says George tightly. “Now, you’ve gone far enough.”
The three of us watch the dustsheets come off the first of their 7/7 pictures.
George is visibly moved, awed even. Then they’re off to perform their
theatrics for the photographer. Except it’s for real, even if it’s a reality
only entirely comprehensible to Gilbert and George.
Gilbert and George: Major Exhibition is at Tate Modern,
London SE1 (020-7887 8888; www.tate.org.uk), from February 15 to May 7. Imagine,
Gilbert and George will be broadcast on BBC One on April 17 at 10.35pm
