Non Fiction

‘Always Normal Weird’: On Two Longstanding Residents of E1, London’

London is the centre of the universe. No, Fournier Street, E1, is the centre of the universe, and more particularly the creative universe of none other than Gilbert and George [hereafter referred to as G&G], who have resided there for more than forty years. ‘None other than Gilbert and George’: an expression with an eerily flamboyant musical hall quality that is most apt for two artists who made their name performing Flanagan and Allen’s musical hall classic ‘Underneath the Arches’ in a ‘singing sculpture’, covered in metallic paint, and wearing their now familiar bespoke East End-tailored suits. G&G are a phenomenon like no other in the contemporary art world, cause of both the hostility and admiration that has been directed towards them throughout their career. In their trademark genial way, G&G welcome appreciation, but part of their iconoclasm means they drink in the hostility that in the end galvanises their creative endeavours. Recently, in a melancholy mood, they expressed how much they felt unloved. As if to court the possibility of their public loving them, at the beginning they would not only sign their works, but also leave their phone number. Back in their poverty-stricken days as self-named ‘baby artists’, G&G sent out sculptures to the great and the good in the form of finely executed greeting cards boldly declaring their entrance onto the scene. It is a scene they have defined and separated themselves from, if only because this has been imposed from without, in the guise of the wretchedly hostile and prejudiced media. Never does a description of the pair go by without mention of the words ‘outsider’ and ‘acceptance into the mainstream’. They have hovered delightfully above neither, seeking empowerment through ambiguity.

‘We never wanted to be the artists your parents would be ashamed of’, they have said, and with that has come a whole career’s worth of business for their preferred bespoke tailors. The suits are intrinsically part of their identity, part of the ‘performance’ that G&Gs’ audience has come to expect from them. But how, do we wonder, could this performance be maintained? The pristine suits are but one part of G&Gs’ everyday furniture. From the beginning, everyday life for G&G has been determined by late capitalist epiphanies. G&G saw shoppers struggling home with their supermarket wares, and like a parody of religious conversion, decided never to cook at home, eating out for every meal. Instant coffee is a house staple, since G&G view it as ‘fundamental’. Household necessities are sourced once a year and bought in bulk. Everyday life evolves into an uninterrupted cycle of artistic work. Eschewing the patterns of late capitalist life, G&G offer a contemporary version of the heroic artist. And this would seem to be the source of their audience’s intense disdain or undying love. G&Gs’ life-work nexus demands that their audience call upon that classic act of reception particular to performance and art: the suspension of disbelief. It is this very suspension of the familiar codes and patterns of everyday life that is more recognisably familiar as a theatrical convention, but not one that could possibly be extended to the consideration of the lives of two people. The unwilling suspenders of disbelief sneer at G&Gs’ life together, seeing it as an inevitable outcome of the outré character of their artistic output. In the case of the joyfully willing people, it could be argued that the lives eclipse the work, an inexplicable gesture given the enormity of the G&G corpus. Perhaps these artists are asking too much of us mere mortals. Conversely, perhaps G&G in their work and lives are asking too much about us for us to realise.

The comparison was once made between G&Gs’ The Naked Shit Pictures (1994) and Giotto’s Arena Chapel frescoes in Padua. Both artists collide in their attempt to describe the brute and thrusting reality in which their respective worlds land them. On the part of the audience, taking offence to this vision is not, as is tacitly recognised, the perceptive shortcut to authentic value. Taking offence, that often tawdry but always counter-productive emoting from the supposed depths of melodramatic souls, might otherwise be read as the projection of self-disgust in the confrontation with phenomena that are socially and culturally conceived as disgusting. When the abject substances of life - the bodily fluids and waste matter that feature most notably in the semantically intelligent The Fundamental Pictures (1986) - the sense is that as viewers we are being allured into a full confrontation with that which normally lies outside our bodies; stuff that is separated, relegated, rejected from selfhood. G&Gs’ title is illuminating, the ‘fundamental’ coalescing the etymological root of ‘fundament’ as faecal matter with the metaphysical notion of waste matter as the very stuff of life, of which we are actually and fundamentally made. But G&G go further, by valorising it - their own stuff, it must be noted - and integrating it into their pictures. Placing their own bodily fluids and matter under hi-tech microscopes has involved a process of gradual revelation to the beauty of the patterns in tears, blood, urine, and sperm. And such beauty as we’ve never seen before, which has come as a result of natural deterioration of the samples themselves: the stained glass windows of blood on which bluebottles have fed; the crazy fauna-like patternation of tears; the flowers in urine.

‘Once we tell them what it is, it’s too late’, as Gilbert has said. Beauty is perhaps a cruel illusion, suspending us for a moment between reality and bliss. G&Gs’ work seems to reverse the child’s path into the symbolic order that demands the loss of naïvety, in its strongest sense of being unaffected. To embrace naivety would signal a moral demise, casting us out of social life. Leading their heroic lives together, G&G have a perfect coping strategy against outcast status. Thus, G&G have turned being weird into a policy. Such self-conscious levels of weirdness could undermine the quality itself, but their intention is to reveal that performance is double-edged, simultaneously disinterested and passionately invested in truth. G&G never tire of irony, which is expressive of their charm as much as it is a playfully rhetorical gesture intended to suspend transparent meaning. Giving Alan Yentob a tour of their house recently for BBC1’s Imagine, G&G were keen to open up all the cupboards and rooms that contained the fruits of a life’s-worth of incessant collecting and archiving of their personal tastes, generated by a whim always intimately connected to the wayward patterns of life. In the early days, G&Gs’ increasingly expensive cinema-going was replaced by long trawls through London, peering into the windows of closed shops to save their funds. Once these shops opened the following day, G&G would be on the phone, making enquiries about items and prices. And so their legendary collection of pottery and decorative tableware. When asked by Yentob if they ever look back, the response was as telling as it was hilariously paradoxical:

Gilbert: ‘We never look back.’

George: ‘No, we never do that. Why would we do that? What do you think we are [Laughs]?’  

Like the impulse consumerism, the work originates from the precisely defined limits of the London they traverse daily, walking as if separate from the hubbub of the world’s cosmopolis. London truly is the centre of the universe:

George: ‘The East End is probably the most typical planet earth place that we ever met. It’s more actual here. We always say if you step out of the front door in the morning all of life that’s going on in the world is there.’

London stands for the universal and particular, since there is no place like it anywhere in the world, despite the feeling at times that the whole world is actually and resoundingly there. G&G were drawn to Fournier Street for economic reasons, but the area’s financial suitability seems to have been secondary to identification with the dispossessed. The pain, suffering, and sinister aura that bleed from the paint-cracked façades and the handsomely resilient bricks of this area’s buildings make the past inescapable. But G&G ‘never look back’: their art is a de facto commentary on the most immediate present reality. This has been so from the 1970s, the time of The Drinking Sculptures, when Spitalfields was the capital of alcoholics and disaffected souls, spreading their fist fights and vociferous liveliness over the area. This inspired G&G to do the same themselves (sans fighting), as soon as they received their first lump sum. G&G then submerged themselves in the raw life surrounding them, getting wasted in order to know their subject better: ‘We started to enter the urban reality of London. We were no longer frightened. We were no longer scared. We were able to go into all the aspects of bad behaviour, discovering friendships and nightlife’.

The subject dictated itself, much like street vandalism informed The Dirty Words Pictures (1977), in which the artists give an uninhibited forum to this raw expression of urban reality. G&G are always literally in their works, integrated into the composition or juxtaposed next to enlarged images of their own bodily fluids and matter. In such works, G&G seem to convert the metaphor of the artist’s self-exposure in the work to the literal and giddy heights of presenting their own nakedness. This naked honesty or honesty in nakedness – tantamount to surrendering the self to the world – certainly chimes with their recent statement that ‘Each of our pictures is a kind of visual love letter from us to the viewer, and that it is the space between the viewer and the picture that makes art, the thoughts and feelings that go through the person when examining the subjects in the picture’.

As in their life, the strategy of up close and personal defines G&Gs’ method of living with source materials through the microscope. Speaking recently about the Evening Standard posters stolen by the artists which were integrated into Bomb Pictures (2006), Gilbert has said that, ‘at the beginning we don’t understand what they mean to us so we have to take them again and again and again and again and again’. And as George remarks: ‘When we peer into the lens after taking five hundred, six hundred, seven hundred different Jesus’ slowly we begin to explore ourselves through looking at that subject matter and then they take on the meanings that are inherent that are there and then hopefully we are able to send that message through the picture to convey some of our thoughts and feelings in relation to the viewer’s thoughts and feelings.’

Something of this heroic process of sending love letters to humanity in the form of art defines the figure of the flâneur, whose apotheosis is the French poet Charles Baudelaire. If G&G are heroic artists, they are so in the sense defined by Walter Benjamin: ‘The hero is the true subject of modernism. In other words, it takes a heroic constitution to live modernism’. This might explain the control G&G exert over their everyday lives, which to an extent is echoed by the way in which their art presents an experienced reality placed literally and artistically under the microscope. In this way, the production of G&Gs’ work depends to an extent on the separation of self from the world crossed by the flâneur: ‘An important trait of the real-life Baudelaire – that is, of the man committed to his work – is not part of this [self-] portrayal: his absentmindedness. In the flâneur, the joy of watching is triumphant. It can concentrate on observation: the result is the amateur detective.’ G&Gs’ infamous prolonged walks across London seem to mirror the flâneur’s, who wavers between active and passive modes of contact with the world. In facing sheer reality, G&Gs’ heroic archiving of the world and the universal themes it throws up relies on the sensations experienced by the urban-bound flâneur. G&G early on grew to hating the countryside, and one presumes that this stems from the emptying out of humanity that is involved in this landscape. The opposite is the case in E1, London, where, as we know, the artists have been lifelong residents. And indeed, I think G&G know only too well that the flâneur’s gratification in the crowd’s multiplication of numbers closes the gap between them and the world. Behind this pure pleasure lies the contact they require to sign off their love letters to the viewer, sustaining their ethic of ‘Art for All’.   

Gilbert, Imagine, broadcast 8 May 2007, BBC1

Ibid..

Ibid..

George, Transcript of ‘Film 1: Gilbert and George introduce their exhibition’, http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/gilbertandgeorge/, accessed 14 May 2007.

Ibid..

Gilbert, Transcript of Bloomberg Tateshots, Issue 1: ‘In the studio: Gilbert and George on Six Bomb Pictures’, http://www.tate.org.uk/tateshots/episode.jsp?item=9108, accessed 14 May 2007.

George, ibid..

Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. By Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973), p.74.

Ibid., p.69.

Christopher Madden