White Cube, London For their eight-millionth exhibition, the naughty boys of art are showing Banners that could be slight and trite β but actually turn out to be nasty prophecies for our dreadful age. F or their eight-millionth exhibition, Gilbert and George have chosen to exhibit their shopping lists. Or not even that: their small but perfectly publicised installation in one room at the White Cube gallery is a collection of hangover rants, raw remarks delivered over a bacon butty in their local greasy spoon.
What naughty boys they still are, after all these years. Come on, I shrug. Come off it. Fuck Gilbert and George. Then I take another look at the Gilbert and George show. It has suddenly become powerfully claustrophobic, electrically nasty. Is this the unconscious of the artists spilling out, or the collective madness of the city they channel, the scabrous soul of London expressing itself in taunts and insults?
It feels like both. The art of Gilbert and George is not explicable by tired textbook explanations of conceptual art. It is prophecy. They burn in the conflagration of their times. These times. These horrible times. The chaos and the fear and the divisions, the violence and the stereotypes. And two men feeling the hidden currents of dread, sucking up the dirt of the street into their minds.
It is a kind of sainthood. In their Banners, it all comes out as gutter prayers. The words, of course, are more ambiguous than they first seem. Gilbert and George love the slipperiness of language, how a changed emphasis can change meaning. But love licks the language, and it becomes: fuck HIM. A manifesto? No, this is a diary of urban mayhem, a dredge into the inner life of London.
Textbooks of conceptual art could indeed be written about how a few terse slogans, that take less than a minute to read and assimilate, can be more eloquent and memorable than a gallery full of paintings. It is a rare alchemy. Gilbert and George found the secret long ago and now, their art is like breathing. That immediacy makes their art as undeniable as a punch in the face. Powerfully claustrophobic and electrically nasty β¦ Gilbert and George.
