"The Speakers..."

In an earlier blog-entry (9th September 2005) I had visited Gilbert & George's 'Death, Hope, Life, Fear' at Tate Modern. I was nostalgic for this massive work of the '80's, and I'm a big fan of almost everything they produced up to the early '90's but I had HUGE misgivings over their new computer generated art.

In September I said:- "Although produced via the camera G&G's work was always hand coloured with startling photo-dyes and very much hand-made. Having spent years actually laboriously producing hand-printed photopieces they have finally succumbed to photoshop. Their studios in Fourner Street are now crammed full of computer servers and mammoth printers and rather than aspiring to produce a sophisticated art that looks as though 'it has been shot out of our brains' (as they once declared) they are now producing art that looks as though it's simply shot out of an Epsom."

Up until that point, all I had seen of their newer work was the London E1 pictures that were shown in Paris and were effectively collaged street signs of their own design in black and white and red (potboilers whilst they polished off their mouse-control?), and some of the Ginko pictures which were shown in Venice. I suppose in retrospect it's a wonder that they didn't move to a PC earlier. Maybe they tried and had to wait until the technology got better.

Visiting their new 'SonofaGod' pictures (subtitled 'Was Jesus Heterosexual?') I was ready to be knocked out by their work again.... and wanted to be... but if anything grabs you it's probably the size and it's a cheap trick. It's very easy to make an impact using size, every modern artist knows that, but G&G have mastered the effect. The pictures are made to measure, and almost all the space at White Cube is used up... no mean feat.

The backgrounds are great... intricate glistening icons and religious tat... more sensitive than they've managed in years, but the pictures are spoiled (for me at least) by their own over-laid self-portraits in which they have mirrored one half of themselves like standing with a mirror down your middle. It looks clumsy and odd. They've also enlarged the whites of their eyes to look like possessed zombies but it just looks a bit silly. Although I like the backgrounds, especially the grinning evil little cornish pixies, there's a lot of smoothing of edges and airbrushing... Reflectve lights appear as little mists of white but it's too obvious that the effect is software-generated... Likewise the mirrored portraits.

I so long for those good old days of 80's G&G. The idea of boys as 'Urban Knights', and flowers as sexual imagery.... Hoxton rough-trade posing against innercity panoramas, made to look like giants or heroes. The idea of G&G as 'the speakers', surveying the world as impassively as one of their Christopher Dresser vases, acting as funnels or conduits for the experience of life and making symbolic sense of the everyday landscape.

Those pictures reminded me what it meant to be alive. They were arresting and emotional. They deeply affected me, and made me want to be an artist. If it wasn't for G&G I wouldn't have been so hungry to escape Shropshire so urgently and in fact I'd probably be teaching Art GCSE now to Ludlow yokels... I had a show in the West End before I was old enough to order a drink in a pub because they said to me over afternoon tea 'just go out and f*cking do it... if you haven't got any paint use a f*cking crayon!'...

These new pictures approach the power of 80's G&G, but the over-photoshopped self-portraits diminish them. I'm not 'anti-hand'. What matters is the connection with the viewer and however an artist gets there is up to him, I don't think it matters whether you use a camera, a computer or your arse. I just thought that the handmade G&G of old made a better picture. They spoke to me more.

I still believe however that they are the single most important people of their generation in the broader British art-world and quite simply the most mental people I have ever met. They also wrote what I believe to be the best summing up of what it is to be an artist:-
"We are unhealthy, middle-aged, dirty-minded, depressed, cynical, empty, tired-brained, seedy, rotten, dreaming, badly-behaved, ill-mannered, arrogant, intellectual, successful, hard-working, thoughtful, artistic, religious, fascistic, blood-thirsty, teazing, destructive, ambitious, colourful, damned, stubborn, perverted and good. We are artists.".