Gilbert & George ‘We’re not weird bearded artists'
The pensioner provocateurs are still making shocking pictures – and winding up the Left-leaning art world
By Alastair Sooke
“Police, Child, Paedo,” says a bald, bespectacled man. “Money, Pensioner, Kills.” George Passmore, 82, the British half of the artistic duo Gilbert & George, is reciting the titles of artworks in a new exhibition, like a priest intoning a litany; beside him, in their east London studio, Gilbert Prousch, his 80-year-old Italian-born partner, in life as well as art, smiles.
The show, at the Gilbert & George Centre around the corner, will be the second since the gallery inside a former brewery opened last year, with an exhibition of their Paradisical Pictures, in which the besuited artists, semi-obscured by lurid foliage, appeared like (nudge, nudge) fairies. Now, switching from trippy pastoral to urban realism, they’re presenting 28 London Pictures, chosen from their 292-strong series from 2011, in which they come across as wraith-like functionaries of the underworld.
Gilbert describes the series as “a modern portrait of our city”, where they have lived for more than half a century, but George corrects him, expanding its scope to encompass “the world, our times”. “They’re called the London Pictures,” he clarifies, “but, actually, mugging is the same wherever you are, no?”
Reproducing headlines from thousands of newspaper posters pilfered by the artists, over many years, from across the capital, the London Pictures offer a bleak vision of a smashed-up society obsessed with sex, violence and death. Each focuses on a key word or phrase – “Shooting”, “Strangler”, “Stabbed” – picked out in crimson.
Yet, Gilbert & George insist, the series isn’t pessimistic: “It’s all part of that very complicated freedom that we enjoy,” says George, before adding, elliptically: “It’s only mugging and robbing and raping, anyway.” He chuckles. “They never have the local flower show on the placard, do they? Never.”
Six decades after they met at St Martin’s School of Art, on Charing Cross Road (“You felt you were on top of the world! Prostitutes and rent boys on every corner,” George recalls), it remains as tricky as ever to glimpse what these self-described “living sculptures”, walled up behind their arch patter, really think. George, taller (and wittier), has the impenetrably courteous manner of a yesteryear bank clerk, albeit one given to gnomic utterances; Gilbert, shorter, similarly courteous, but more impassioned, has a voice that is still noticeably accented, and often titters at his partner’s quips.
Dressed in tweed suits cut by a local Tibetan tailor, they appear supremely civilised: “We don’t want to be unacceptable socially, do we?” says George over coffee in Tory party mugs with Rishi Sunak’s portrait (“Charming man!”). He says that he votes Conservative “because it’s normal, it’s what everybody votes. We don’t want to be weird, bearded artists voting Labour. Too many tobacco pipes.”
One benefit of this cultivated persona, George continues, is that “we can walk into any restaurant in the world; they’re dying to get a table for us” – although, every evening, they head up the road to a Turkish restaurant, where they dine at “eight o’clock on the dot”. “The idea,” George explains, “is not to think about anything in life that’s not important. People spend hours thinking of where to go for dinner in the evening; it’s just filling up their brains with totally superfluous nonsense. We believe in keeping the brains free.”
They once described themselves as the “imprisoned monks of Fournier Street”, where they live, as well as work, by Nicholas Hawksmoor’s 18th-century Christ Church Spitalfields, and George still gets up at 6am to read classic literature, before turning to The Telegraph.
Among artists, they are a rare breed: on-the-record royalists, eager to praise the King. “The second king of my lifetime,” says George exultantly. “He’s a modern monarch, no? Ecologist, amateur painter, liberal – ideal for our time. With an amazing mother to make sure everything is going to be all right. She’s very there for him, as a parental power, I’m sure. We all have our mothers with us for the whole of life, no? Don’t you?” Elizabeth II appears in each of the London Pictures, in the form of a scuffed, silver profile, based upon her portraits on loose change.
Occasionally, the late Queen’s face hovers beneath incongruous words, such as “Killer” or “Hooker” or “Sex Pest”. Isn’t that a little, well, treasonous? This unsettling note, seemingly intended to needle Middle England, is typical of Gilbert & George’s work, with its in-your-face imagery of sex acts and bodily fluids – including, to quote the title of one famous piece from 1996, Spunk Blood Piss Shit Spit.
“We like to confront the public with our art,” says Gilbert. And if the public finds their art provocative? “So what?” he replies. “That’s what it’s for,” adds George. “Artists don’t paint pictures to please people, do they? They’re pleased without the paintings. Paintings are [meant] to change.” Their polished persona is beginning to look more like a Trojan horse: a ruse that allows them to smuggle in subversive ideas.
“We always had a moral dimension in our art,” explains George. “It is not just to do with taste, and formalism, and playing around with painting canvas.” So, art, for them, needs to be linked to reality? “Yes,” George replies, “and have something to say to the viewer, about their life.”
Inspiration “comes from our heads, our souls, and our sex. The three main life forces – the same you have.” It may sound odd for someone so publicly opposed to religion to refer to the “soul” (during our conversation, George reveals that he once fell out with a prominent art critic for suggesting that the Pope was “causing misery and suicides and murders all over the world”), but, he explains, “The soul is what you can remember of family and childhood and education and experience.”
Art, Gilbert & George believe, can transform society. “We did that,” George tells me. “The world is an entirely different place from when we came out of St Martin’s onto the streets of London, and we think we played a small part in that change.” “We are liberated!” says Gilbert. “We’re spoilt brats!” George adds. “But we fought for it. We achieved that. And we’re very proud of that.”
Is it a better world? “Of course,” says George, quick as a flash. “The world only ever got better. So far. We lived in the last century; it wasn’t such a great success. The 21st century is fantastic! It’s a triumph: the triumph of the West. Never were things so sophisticated as now. All our young friends can travel to any country in the world, and eat whatever they want, drink whatever they want, have sex with anybody they want. It’s an extraordinarily privileged age we’re living in.” Is he being ironic? “No, I’m serious, of course.”
Moreover, he adds, with relish, “We’re free spirits: we can say what we like in our pictures.” He gestures at miniature reproductions of the London Pictures on the table before him: “If you go out on the street and shout all the things that are said in these, you would be arrested!”
