Monthly arts column

Shock and awe at Tate Modern

When I was 16 and just getting to grips with my History of Art ‘A’ level, we had a class trip to the 1987 Gilbert and George exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.

I remember the repetitive presence of two odd-looking men in suits set in brightly coloured stained-glass windows amongst representations of crosses, young men and plenty of vulgarity. All great fun for a group of sixth formers, but as a Christian I felt angry and sad because I thought that their representations of crucifixes and other religious symbols were treated with the same level of importance as swear words and images of human excrement.

Rebels against God

20 years later, they’ve done a load more of the same sort of thing. Messing around with the idea of Christ and the Cross may reflect their self-professed rebellion against God, but they are dealing lightly with the source of a salvation that they recognise is needed by humanity. In line with a Christian understanding of human nature, George has said, ‘we celebrate life but we like to be able to realise that there’s nothing in the world that is not also inside you or us or anybody. Anything, any horror in the world, we’re also capable of…’ ‘No one is righteous’, says Romans 3.23, ‘not even one’. The difference is that Gilbert and George seem to be the arbitrators of what is a ‘horror’. ‘Art has always been part of finding out what is good and what is bad’, they say. ‘We confront the viewer with our own kind of morality.’ Their pictures ‘Finding God’ and ‘Life without End’ are inescapably homoerotic and reveal their deep faith in man rather than the divine.

No plans

They say that they don’t plan what they are going to do until they get into their studio. They make their pictures with whatever images they like and leave it up to the viewer to respond in whatever way they like. Yet, through their treatment of ‘the universal subjects such as death, hope, life, fear, sex, money, race and religion’, it is fairly easy to see the views that they hold repeating themselves in different ways. For example, according to their work, salvation is to be found in freedom from taboos that traditionally hamper and shock us. Yet they also suggest that their chosen moralities may lead to death. A wall of personal ads offering gay sexual services is meant to act like a graveyard of personal obituaries for a group of men who will eventually all be dead. Many, they have said, will die from AIDS.

Difficult to analyse

Despite their conventional look and the staid, formal presentation of themselves in language and behaviour, Gilbert and George puzzle critics and the art world who find them incredibly difficult to analyse. Despite their love for some sorts of publicity, their rebellion seems to also target society, the media and all forms of naming or definition. Although they seem to be creatures of habit, living for three decades in their house on Fournier Street in Spitalfields, eating only at local cafes, etc., there seems to be so much that is unknown about them. This suits them fine. They represent themselves in the pictures, they say, because they want to stand alongside the viewer; ‘we are there like the viewer is there’. Yet it is always difficult to know what they are saying about what is being shown. There is no point in looking to them to see how we should respond because they remain enigmatic. Without a moral framework and without a distinct worldview, a viewer could become extremely confused by their pictures. Yet, in the context of a biblical understanding of mankind in rebellion against its loving Creator, the pictures of Gilbert and George have to make sense as the products of rebels, lost as they are in self-love and perversity.

The Gilbert and George exhibition at Tate Modern has now finished but more about the artists and their work can be found at http://www.tate.org.uk

Gilbert and George

Shock and awe at Tate Modern

Rebels against God

No plans

Difficult to analyse

Eleanor Margesson

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