I’ve often felt vaguely apologetic about my affection for Gilbert and George. There’s something enthusiastically populist about their work which, if I’m honest, sometimes makes me feel it ought to be taken less seriously than it is. But the current exhibition at the Heywood Gallery immediately brought to mind something Hannah Arendt once said about “the sheer entertainment value” of the world’s “views, sounds, and smells”. It struck me how well this characterised their aesthetic in its joyful celebration of how engaging the ethnographic dazzle of the city is. Even when dark material enters into it this exists within the same register, such as the sensory overload which comes with a barrage of headlines about murders and violence. There’s something about this insistence on a uniform register which really appeals to me: a refusal to put on a serious voice to discuss serious matters but rather to recognise them in terms of the continual overflow of sights, sounds and smells which constitute urban life. Perhaps I’m particularly attuned to this because it was the first Saturday afternoon I’ve spent in London for years and certainly the first once since I began to recognise my brain’s ADHD wiring. I was finding the centre overwhelming in a way I just don’t on week days. This left me with a sense of their work’s phenomenological authenticity which I don’t think it would have carried under other circumstances.
Installation shot from Gilbert & George: 21st CENTURY PICTURES @ Hayward Gallery
Their work surfs the intensities of the city in a way that is faithful to the emotions involved: excitement, lust, anger, sadness were the ones that stood out to me in the show. I was particularly struck by the latter in their more recent work, as the gaze upon themselves implicit in their self-representation seemed to suggest a tiredness and melancholy in the face of their own ageing. The ‘living sculpture’ seemed to carry a new weight as they aged, with a more introspective tone in which the chosen visibility feels somewhat more ambiguous than in the early work.
I was also struck by how obviously one of the works seemed to be communicating a sense of shame, or at least hiding. It surprised me this seemed to be the only work grappling with homophobia in a psychological sense and seemed in some ways to fall outside the typical range of their work. I stupidly didn’t get the name or a photo because I had no phone with me. It was a depiction of two eyes covered by a pile of leaves and conveyed to me a sense of internalised shame. As if it was an admission of hiding behind the compulsive and stylised hyper-visibility which characterises a huge body of work in which they uniformly insert themselves as presences.
There remains part of me which wants to insist on a dour critique of the privilege which underwrites their celebration. Two wealthy men unconsciously celebrating the vibrancy of the urban certainly invites it, even taking into account their skilful incorporation of bleak themes into the register of the vibrant. But I don’t want to do that because it feels like it entirely misunderstands the spirit in which their work is offered. There’s a warmth to it which I never noticed when I saw this work in isolation, a cumulative humane atmosphere which I found quite affecting. Seeing the work accumulated across decades, particularly as they aged and changed, created a warmth through repetition that I hadn’t expected. It was more than the sum of its parts in a deeply affecting way.
Mark Carrigan 