The Words of Gilbert and George

Photographs of the pair taken by others over the course of their long partnership interrupt the flow of text, adding a layer of nuance. There is something about them, for instance, of the classic vaudeville team: a consistent contrast, coupled with a consistent sameness; an emphatic ordinariness of demeanor, punctuated by bold departures from so-called norms of behavior; an ineffably comedic air permeated by something else, also ineffable, that is sad and poignant. What else, without effort? Well, the prurient browser's gaze will probably affix itself to a portrait, taken by David Seidner in 1994, of the partners, eyes closed, kissing. The fashion-conscious browser will quickly note a sartorial indifference to changing styles of clothing and tonsure within which their iconic, and by now, in fact, fashionable image - of the working Englishman in his Sunday best, circa 1960 - has evolved only to accommodate subtle, inevitable signs of increasing age. The editorially minded browser will surely and effortlessly catch a good number of dropped letters, misspelled names, and other typographical errors - casualties of this book's unfussy, non-luxurious, get-to-the-point and get-it-out-there approach, or should one say mission.

The Words of Gilbert & George is the perfect, and I am tempted to add necessary, accompaniment to the pictures and living sculpture of Gilbert & George. All are expressed with a similar, singleminded zeal, for the sole purpose, it now seems to me, of immersing people in the G&G experience, which is, among other things, powerful, troubling, life-affirming, pessimistic, and complex. Immersion is the key concept here - a fundamentally baptismal process that I have managed to resist for years.

Since the early '80s, when I first became aware of their work, my relationship to the G&G endeavor has been impeccably superficial. I have liked their pictures because of the slick surfaces and jazzy, supergraphics look, which were an obvious precedent for Barbara Kruger's early word-and-image pieces, and also reminded me of Milton Glaser's '60s commercial designs. As George himself suggests to Carter Ratcliff in a 1986 interview, the pictures, despite being "extremely handmade, laboured objects," do indeed look as if they "had been shot out of our brains, on to the paper like magic." I saw their message, but filtered it out, preferring instead to absorb my salutary doses of sex, shit, booze, squalor, and class-consciousness from Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The experience, however, of reading Gilbert & George's book, of plowing through their endlessly reiterated thoughts, sayings, manifestos, cris de coeur, and dead-on summations, has accomplished what fifteen years of sporadic, uncommitted viewing did not. I have seen the darkness, and there I am, alas, part of it: I know now that my unenlightened resistance lay at the very root of the G&G trefoil - perverse Toryism, coy Christianity, parochial queerism - the cross they have born militantly and tauntingly from the start.

The book evokes a sort of shadow biography of the artists. We set off to a youthful, cheerful start with their mailed "Postal Sculptures" and other sculpturally conceived, printed materials from the late '60s and early '70s, in which the scrubbed-looking pair proclaim themselves "George the Cunt" and "Gilbert the Shit," and set out to conquer. Through reprints from various booklets and pamphlets, we encounter the earliest incarnation of their vaudevillian identities as they become "Living Sculptures" and experience their first hit with "Underneath the Arches" - an actual music-hall song about homeless London "tramps" that they first performed in 1969. The title serves as a rubric for assorted work from this period, including the Shit and Cunt magazine sculpture, 1969, which boasts an enumeration of "The Laws of Sculptors" beginning with "I Always be smartly dressed, well groomed relaxed friendly polite and in complete control." By the mid-'70s, G&G turn wild and grim. Their words reflect their "drunken living": "Dark shadowed living sculptors of human bondage raise themselves from off the crackling emotion spattered floor to make merry time with glass and drink and few words of heavy guilt." Judging from this book, they spend the better part of the '80s and '90s giving interviews - to everyone from Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics (British GQ, September 1995) to the American sexologist Shere Hite.

I urge anyone interested in contemporary art and contemporary London to read The Words of Gilbert & George. Although some speed-reading here and there is to be expected, given the amount of repetition, it should nevertheless be taken from beginning to end in a thorough gulp, for the text builds in rhythm and ferocity like a good sermon. It starts small and tense, with little concrete poems and declarations, and winds up conversational and expansive in a trajectory that parallels the artists' increasingly successful progress, which in turn seems to reflect the emergence of England itself from the inhibiting structures of old Labour governments - a pronounced G&G bugaboo: before Thatcher, they say in 1990, "artists were nationalised. As well as doing their paintings you had to work for the Slade for thirty years and for doing that you were given a funny award and a pension that was enough to drink yourself to death but not enough to rescue your career as an artist. And so they all died unhappy. They had a small memorial at the back of the Tate, and that was it."

But Gilbert & George are their proselytizing best when it comes to the fundamental and unchanging meaning of their work: "The content of mankind is our subject and our inspiration. We stand each day for good traditions and necessary changes. We want to find and accept all the good and bad in ourselves. Civilisation has always depended for advancement on the 'giving person.' We want to spill our blood, brains and seed in our life-search for new meanings and purpose to give to life."

Okay, I think I'm coming round.

Lisa Liebmann is a writer and critic who lives in New York.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning