Review of Gilbert & George at the Hayward Gallery A pulsating panorama of sex, violence and glorious urban grime
By Jonathan Jones
The first picture in Gilbert & George’s retrospective of their art of this century is a portrait of them sitting in a cemetery amid floating drug baggies, their suits bright purple (George) and green (Gilbert) against the grey gravestones. It sums up a stillness, a sadness and a romantic passion that breathes in this show – but you won’t notice it straight away. Instead you’ll be carried along in a rush of cheeky provocations and ludicrous juxtapositions of word and image: a joyous embrace of modern life or even, pardon my French, a jouissance.
The pictures tower and expand in this perfect brutalist setting as if you’re walking through a city of art – a dirty, disreputable city. Ages (2001) is a yellow and red slab almost the scale of a cinema screen on which their blandly smiling faces are surrounded by male sex workers’ adverts: “27 YEARS OLD Latin, and very good looking,” “BLACK GUY 24 Marco. Sexy, horny and waiting,” “SKINHEAD JOE, 26. East End/10 mins Liverpool St. Administers firm service.”
Where are they now? Is skinhead Joe running a cafe or is he dead? You find yourself not sniggering but wondering about these young men. It’s a slice of life, a montage of transactions, moments, relations of power, desire and money in a metropolis. Gilbert & George are great scabrous chroniclers of London in the tradition of Hogarth. Like him, they dive into the dirty alleys of a city that can be brutal and they come up laughing at it all.
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Yet the hardcore truth behind the hilarity is poetic. What stays with you is beauty. For they don’t just find rude objects and words on their walks. They collect leaves and twigs and photograph pockets of urban nature among the comic horrors.
