A Morning with Gilbert & George (2017)

 

 

I arrived at White Cube Gallery, Bermondsey, at 9am for the Gilbert & George Question & Answer session and press preview of their exhibition, 'Scapegoating: for London'. There was a handful of press photographers waiting at the gate when I got there. All of them had been sent by their various publications to grab some shots to accompany the articles that their reporters, who were to arrive a little later, were going to cobble together after the press conference. As I was both photographer and reporter I had the privilege of being there for the whole lot. The photographers were a mixed bunch: two said they usually supplied images for the sports desk; one wiry, wisecracking bloke, wearing a sleeveless flak jacket, said he had no idea who the artists were and had never heard of them; one woman with raven hair said that she thought they were "into shock value"; one young guy said, "Aren't they the ones who get their bits out in their work. Doesn't the Tate have a picture of theirs, with all their bits 'angin' out? All arse'oles and cocks an' all that?"; a large woman in her early-sixties said she thought they lived in the area and that they were "controversial". All of the photographers carried enormous cameras with great, jutting lenses and flashes and bells and whistles. I stood by with my modest Canon - a toddler amongst the big boys.

 A short while later two young men in their late-twenties, wearing tee-shirts and paint-spattered shoes, walked out of the gallery. The flak-jacketed photographer called out to them, "Oi! Gilbert! George! Stand over 'ere, if you please!" The large photographer woman hissed at him, "No, I don't think that's them." 

 

 Eventually, the real artists stepped out of the gallery and wandered over to where we were standing. As expected they were immaculately dressed in their characteristic woollen suits - today George's was greenish-mustard and Gilbert's a brownish-mustard. George had two side pockets on the right and Gilbert had a single pocket. They each wore a floral tie, and each had a pen in his top pocket. They graciously capitulated to all the shouted demands to "Stand over 'ere", "Look at each other", "Move to the left a bit". The artists took all of this with the utmost seriousness. Throughout all of the photo session I was struck by the absolute professionalism of the pair. They obeyed the photographers' instructions without complaint, even when one old lag ordered them to put their fingers in each other's mouth, after an earlier video piece of theirs which he must have remembered, and which I thought impertinent of him. There is an unspoken language that the pair have adopted between them over their long career: each knew instinctively what the other was going to do and reacted subtly in response; a slight turn to the right, a gentle shift to the left. Gilbert more often stood with one foot slightly to the fore, George more usually stood with feet slightly apart. As I watched them go through this routine, which has been their public face whenever they have ventured out onto the street from their home in Fournier Street, I thought how brilliant it was - this is their armour against a hostile world - first as gay men, secondly as artists: they have made themselves untouchable by subsuming themselves into the G & G entity; they have been made inviolable by this clever shield. I busied myself snapping off shots from behind the photographers and then, later, I found a perch on a low wall and managed to get some reasonable images of the artists without the big wooden heads of the photographers intruding into my shots. After five minutes of this George brought the session to an end by smiling charmingly, and saying, "Enough now?" Then they walked back into the gallery, followed by the photographers and myself.

Inside, there was a small table set up between the enormous gallery rooms upon which were tea and coffee urns and several plates of muffins. The large photographer woman made a beeline for this table. She charged ahead of the pack, picked up two muffins and then wandered off into one of the gallery rooms, pushing one of the cakes into her face and clutching the other one for seconds. None of the rest of us bothered with it. 

 

We were then all called into the main gallery space, where Gilbert & George now sat side by side on a bench seat in front of the enormous title-piece of the exhibition, Scapegoating. Each of the three gargantuan pieces that constitute this massive triptych contain dozens of little slogans written in the various squares that made up the surfaces. There was a decidedly anti-religious flavour to this text: "Rape a Rabbi"; "Vomit in the Vestry"; "Punish a Parson" etc. There was also a pro-queer bias to the rest of the texts: "Suck Off a Sailor"; "Rent a Rent Boy". This combination set the scene for the whole exhibition, as its title, Scapegoating indicated. It later transpired, in the Q&A session, that the artists feel that they have been scapegoated by the press and by society. All gay men have felt the marginalising weight of this particular, insidious blaming and shaming, which is no less prevalent today than it was in less 'enlightened' times, although it is now often more 'disguised'.  The overall effect of this text was both hilarious and exhilarating. Having recently arrived in London from Australia, where a heavy-handed censoriousness currently underpins contemporary art exhibitions, this was indeed a refreshing vision.

 

The artists sat in the blaze of camera flashes and the yelled instructions from the photographers. Then George said, charmingly, "Got enough, now?", and the pair got up and walked into a private room to await the conference. The photographers, their job completed, began to drift back to their offices around London - it was now time for stage two of the proceedings, and reporters had begun to file in for the Q & A session with the artists. The flak-jacketed old lag said to one of the gallery staff as he went out, "All their work looks the same, except for that big sculpture in the room over there that looks like Trajan's column. The gallery woman looked askance at this and then told him that it was by another artist altogether and was not part of the G&G show. I went around the big gallery rooms for another look at this extraordinary and powerful exhibition.

The reporters were then ushered into another room, in which folding chairs had been arranged to face a small stage. On this were three chairs and a small table upon which were a pitcher of water, a jug of orange juice and three glasses.

The gallery assistant brought Gilbert and George into the room, followed by a raffish man with a relaxed mien and a floppy fringe. This was Michael Bracewell, who had written the catalogue essay for the exhibition. They took their seats on the stage and the session began. George remained calm and gracious throughout. Gilbert became rather annoyed at a foreign woman journalist, who wouldn't let go of a silly line of questioning. George sounded a little like prince Charles. Gilbert sounded faintly like Peter Lorre, and had an idiosyncratic way with the English language (which is not his native tongue) that was totally charming.

Michael Bracewell: Thanks so much for coming… My job is to say as little as possible and hopefully to get Gilbert and George to say as much as possible... Gilbert and George, just personally, many congratulations on a phenomenally powerful exhibition which really resonates in so many ways. One of the first things that I wanted to ask you is: Words and text have always been very important to your art; where does the title for this group of pictures come from – ‘Scapegoating’ pictures - it’s quite unusual.

 George: ‘Scapegoating’ actually came from a leaflet, or a poster, we found on Brick Lane that we took back to the studio.

 Gilbert: It was very interesting because we did a lot of designs. First we took the image, and then we took maybe 10,000 different images before starting this group of pictures. We tried to take images of pictures that speak to us – they had to be what is out there that speaks to us. We started to see the little bombs [he is referring to the small empty cannisters of nitrous oxide, which feature in many of the works] and then we saw all these people on bicycles. Not only that but we started to watch television, like Al Jazeera, and we started to see all the bombs going off, and in the east end of London we started to see more and more women in burkas, so all of these subjects became very interesting for us. And then we designed many pictures, and we tried to think of a title for the group of pictures. And for months and months and months we couldn’t think of a title. And one night, after a month or two…

 George: We remembered the picture in the poster that said, ‘Islamophobia is Scapegoating’ – and we realised ‘Scapegoating’ was the title. It was very interesting because the poster was against people being against Islam because of the murder of Drummer Rigby - was he called? And it was reflected in the day before that a young Bangladeshi friend of ours said, “I don’t know why they’re making such a fuss about this drummer, people are being killed and dying every day”. And we just felt an enormous hollowness and powerlessness and sadness at such a remark. And there it was already on a poster, all there on Brick Lane.

 Gilbert: And the word, ‘Scapegoating’ resonated with us so much because we felt, rightly or wrongly, that we have been scapegoated for fifty years, you know?

 George: As well!

 Michael Bracewell:  As well.

 Gilbert: And not only that, we feel that the whole world is a new world where everything is based on blame. Everybody is blaming each other. Scapegoating each other, non-stop – the whole world.

 George: We remember, as baby artists, that we had to join commercial galleries that existed. A very tiny art world. One in London, one in New York, one in Düsseldorf, one in Paris, and those were the galleries that had to represent us. But in all of those galleries colour was taboo, dealing with sex, or love, or hate or death, all those things were taboo. All of the things that we wanted to deal with – Death…

 Gilbert: Hope.

 George: Life.

 Gilbert: Fear.

 George: Sex.

 Gilbert:  Money.

 George: Race.

 Gilbert: Religion.

 George: All those things were not supposed to be discussed in your artworks in that art world. It was the world of minimalism and conceptualism and everything had to be grey or brown or black. Materials were important. Form was important. There was no content. Nobody was to have content in art.

 Michael Bracewell: Speaking of content: One of the things that I think any viewer coming to this is going to notice straight away is the presence, in many of the pictures, of what look like little bombs. And Gilbert just referred to ‘little bombs’. Can you just explain a little where that imagery comes from? Also, what you would imagine… how you think that image, in this context, will communicate to the viewer?

 George: It was very exciting that we started to see, quite a few years ago, now, in the back streets around us, where people park their cars at night, to drink alcohol, or go to the lavatory, or

 Gilbert: Sex.

 George: ...  make contact with prostitutes, we always found these little ‘bombs’ together with human excrement and orange peel, which we never actually sorted out…

 Press: (Much laughter)

 George: ...so if anyone can help us out…? And we started to collect them, and we realised that they have a moral dimension. Every one is slightly different; one is more rusty than another; some have been there for weeks; some are of a different brand. They seem to have all been made in Austria, strangely. And they all come from an individual person. They are like chewing gum on the street; they all belong to a person who is dead, or alive, or is in love, or unhappy. They became signs of life. And we collected them and categorised them in different sections.

 Gilbert:  Then we started to see them more and more and more. Then we started seeing thousands around the clubs near Brick Lane, because each day we go to collect our fruit in Brick Lane – we eat some fruit in the morning – and that’s when we started to see them. That’s why we always say, “Everything that happens in the world is happening in front of our doors. And then we even asked the street cleaner to collect them for us, because at five o’clock in the morning he sweeps them up and we said, “Keep them for us!” So I think we must have got a collection of… thousands.

 George: Thousands.

 Gilbert: And then we divided them up in sections of colours…

 George:  And types…

 Gilbert: Damaged ones, grey ones, shiny ones, all that stuff. So that was an amazing subject. Then we started to take images of people on bicycles because we believe that London – especially East London – is schizophrenic. The whole world is at it. They are all doing it, they don’t even know why they are doing it but they are all doing it - all these bicycles.

 

 George:  And then we found out that the origin of nitrous oxide, which is what the bombs contain, was brought about by a wonderful person, a gentleman called Joseph Priestly – we named one picture after him – who identified nitrous oxide, first of all for medical purposes, and then as a recreational thing. He was such a great libertarian of his age. He was very involved in religion and theology; he was very involved in early electrical experiments, he was a clever, talented, sociable person, very handsome, who had slightly different views about the resurrection, or transubstantiation, that made him an enemy of the orthodox church and they attacked him and they beat him, and they destroyed his house, and he’d built a little church and they destroyed that; he had to leave Britain for having slightly different ideas from all the other people. He is quite celebrated in Pennsylvania, where he settled. He was a good example that we liked very much. We like to think that we are sitting here partly because of JP and partly because of lots of other things.

 Gilbert: Because of laughing gas. They used to have laughing parties back in the nineteenth-century.

Woman reporter: I was just wondering, have you ever thought why laughing gas, or the canisters, are sort of appearing in your neighbourhood right now, and why young people are…

 Gilbert: (Rather tetchily) Yes, that is because of all the night clubs out there.

 George: Because it’s the centre of the universe. You can sit in a restaurant anywhere in the world or an aeroplane and you can count it – we have timed it – within an average of seven minutes you will hear somebody say ‘Brick Lane’. It’s extraordinary. Quite extraordinary. We think that what is happening in our neighbourhood is ‘Telling of the Future’. And during our time there, that has become truer. Whatever happens on Brick Lane will happen in the rest of the world within twenty years. You just have to look at our huge quadripartite picture called ‘1999’, or our picture called ‘MM’, or the ‘Nine Dark Pictures’, they all tell a lot of the time they were made, but of later days. People think that we’re showing life, or reflecting life; we don’t believe that. We think that we’re forming our tomorrows. The world will be more like our pictures because we made them.

 Woman reporter: If that is the case, then this is quite a dark, dark view of the world.

 George: Do you mean: God ‘elp us? [puts on faux Cockney accent]

 [Press Laughter]

 George: No, we’re very optimistic. The pictures are also celebrating this great, complex, cosmological world that we live in and love.

 Gilbert:  I mean, we’re very excited because it’s happening anyway. If you switch on the television and Al Jazeera the whole modern world is evolving in a big way. We don’t know where it is going but it’s happening. So it’s very exciting that we are in the middle of it in the East End of London and we can’t see it happen and we are trying to think what it is. When we first started to see burkas for the first time in the East End of London we didn’t think too much about it. But now, when we start to see hundreds and hundreds, then the world has changed. For us. For us in the East End of London. It’s a different world, and we have to deal with it. And we have to think about it.

 

 George: We like to think how we feel about that. We never had people that we’d say ‘Good morning’ to who didn’t reply. This is a new thing in life. And we have to be attentive.

 Gilbert: Because in some ways we feel we are in a country that is the freest country in the whole world. We fought for our freedom for hundreds of years. You know, the Enlightenment made us free from Rome. And now…

 George: We must be attentive. It’s very interesting, Fournier Street is called Fournier Street  because people came to the East End for freedom from France; Wilkes Street is the next street, that’s the man who invented the free press; in our church, as you go into the church at the end of Fournier Street, there isn’t a crucifixion over the altar, there isn’t a Mary, there’s a great big royal coat of arms, to remind you it’s the Church of England. We are not tied to Rome, thank god.

 Gilbert: But our biggest subject has been for many years now: Ban Religion! We are very anti-religious.

 

 George: Yes, ban religion and decriminalise sex.

 Gilbert: Because even sex recently, now…the whole world… not the whole world, but nearly the whole world, is stoning queers now again for the first time.

 George: It’s quite extraordinary when you think that the privilege that we all live in today, with a beautiful gallery in this marvelous part of London, and coffee and orange juice, is just Europe and Scandinavia, North America, Australasia and a few little outposts like Singapore and Japan. All the rest of the world is completely wretched. One has to think about that every day.

 Gilbert: Freedom for the individual. That is the most important. That the person is free. He can think for himself. Once you are part of a religion you cannot think for yourself because you are part of the dogmatic ideas that are written in stone and you can never change them. The English… what do you call… the Anglican Church is trying to change it; they’re trying to make…

 George: More gentle.

 Gilbert: … women into vicars or priests.

 George: We know that during our time as artists, when we emerged from art school in ’69 till now, our world is a very different place. What a person is, is different; what a man is, is different; what a woman is, is different; what a couple is, is different. Everything changed. And it’s a cultural change. The governments didn’t do that; the police stations didn’t do it; the church didn’t do it. Young people don’t knock on the vicar’s door or the police stations and ask how to behave: it’s what exhibitions they see, what books they read, what music they listen to, what music their parents listened to, what books their parents read. We are cultural beings and it’s an amazing force. We believe in the power of culture and the things that make us think: ‘What am I as a human being?’

 Michael Bracewell: With this exhibition, especially with the vast triptych, the ‘Scapegoating’ triptych, where you have all these slogans, these anti-religious slogans, not just anti-religious but…

 Gilbert: Mostly. Because we were terrorised by religions for two-thousand years. And now we are just poking fun a little. We have nothing – we are not condemning them to eternal flames forever, or things that cry out to heaven for vengeance - that’s extraordinary stuff.

 Michael Bracewell: Do you think that those texts in that picture, plus the imagery that we’ve discussed with the little canisters, plus the presence in the pictures of women wearing burkas and so forth …

 Gilbert: And bicycles!

 George: Always the bicycles!

 Michael Bracewell: Can you imagine that there will be viewers who will come to this exhibition and think it shows a world which is totally riven with fundamentalism – religious fundamentalism – and an ingrained fear of terrorism? When you think that everyone who goes to an airport these days…

 Gilbert: Yes. We always say, just go to Heathrow airport – that’s it – it’s confronting you every time. Even when you go into a bus, it’s confronting you every time. And even when you want to switch on the television, they are telling you that they’re coming to bomb you. We are this now, every day.

 George: For the rest of all of our lifetimes that will be a huge reality. It’s not going to be next month or next year. It’s quite exciting.

 Gilbert: Exciting!

 George: You see I think that some people can think differently and change their minds, whether they are bombers or vicars, you know? When we did the print, ‘Ban Religion’, we were amazed that a few weeks later there was a knock at the door and it was an elderly priest who said that he would love to be able to buy a print of ‘Ban Religion’ because he’d like to put it up in his church, and he said, “I’ll tell you why,” he said, “I have a very nice congregation and they are all very religious, but I don’t want them to be religious, I want them to be good”. It was quite moving, really. And in the last exhibition we had here, the London pictures, we had a call from the museum in Dohar, asking if they could borrow two pictures for an exhibition, and we were rather surprised. We said, yes, of course, which ones would you like to borrow? and they said, rather predictably, ‘Islam’ and ‘Mosque’. I said we also have ‘Vomit’ and ‘Terror’, but…

[Press laughter]

George: But they did take the two of them [‘Islam’ and ‘Mosque’], so it’s quite impressive as well.

 Gilbert: But what is exciting is because in 1969 we have this vision that we could be human artists, that we are the centre of our art, that we are not part of Art for Art’s Sake, which is only towards colours and shapes, that we are human. Humans with visions and views and speaking and unhappiness and all that stuff and that we are living here and how to deal with our neighbour. I think that’s the most important art. You are lonely, that’s what we always feel. We don’t believe in god, we only believe in human beings being here alone, so we have to find ways of liking each other.

 George: More gentle ways. We always say, don’t beat up your neighbor - unless, of course, they like it.

 American press woman: You just spoke about how we’re defined by our culture and our attitudes are affected by culture in general, so I was just wondering how do you think about the viewers in looking at your works? How do you think it affects them and how do you think…

 Gilbert: I mean we are trying to make an art that people can go in and say, Yes or No, that’s what it is. We always feel that some people are attracted, they believe in it and some people don’t. But that’s part of being an artist – and that changes.

 George: It’s not what we are saying in the pictures, it’s what is said to the individual viewer. When journalists say, “Could you talk me through this picture”, we say, “We can’t take over your brain, or your family, or your background: what do you get from it? What do you see.” We do believe that our early slogan ‘Art For All’ was very, very important to us; that we weren’t like the stuck up artists who felt they were in their studio doing something that none of these stupid people on the streets would ever understand, and that this was fine. We always felt that everybody on the street is an amazing person with a love and a life and a fascinating interest in something that we will never know about. We love. We fell in love with the viewer of art rather than fell in love with art. We do believe in Art For All. Yesterday morning we were walking in a neighbouring street with a film crew and we passed a building which happened to be being restored and there was an enormous scaffolding and at the top there were two scaffolders and one said, [adopts cockney accent] “’Oozat dahn there?” and the other said, “It’s Gilbert and George, they’ve got a show comin’ up at White Cube”. That’s Art For All.

 [Press laughter]

 Foreign woman reporter: I’d like to know exactly how do you do that? Are they pictures, or how do you can find? [sic]

 Gilbert: (clearly annoyed): What?

 Foreign press Woman: Your work. It’s only photographs? You don’t like to be called a photographs? [sic]

 Gilbert: (curtly) Well, it’s materials.

 George: (remaining polite and calm) It’s thoughts and feelings and what we felt and what we’ve lived for all these years.

 Foreign press Woman: But the technically [sic] I mean… do you use computers?

 Gilbert: (rather exasperated) But we do like our form. We invented it because we needed to show these pictures next to a Rembrandt, and that was very difficult. And it took fifty years to succeed in that, because in the beginning, when we took an image through a camera, it was not accepted as art. Art means canvases and with brushes. We found a language that we were able to speak through. For us it was very modern, because the artists are stuck; they can only do abstract or caricatures – the painters – but we have a language that we are speaking, and the language is very close to us.

 Foreign woman reporter: But your tools are only the camera? The computer?

 George: The actual tools, yes. Because we want to make twenty-first-century pictures. We believe these are undeniably twenty-first-century. We like that. We want to be up to date.

 Gilbert: (clearly cross with the line of questioning) And it’s done by us, no assistant.

 George: It’s all depending on our research and thoughts and our feelings. In the middle of researching these pictures, for instance, we were walking along the very normal, boring Valance Road, near us, a normal street, and we were carrying a camera and two young men – well-dressed young men – of Bangladeshi appearance came up and said, [adopts a severe, growling, Bengali accent] “You need permission for that! This is an Islamic district! You will need permission!” And we realised that we were doing the right research. They told us, right? We were spot on.

 Gilbert: It’s very important [to remember] that it is not an interpretation of images [by others]. It’s all done by us. It’s no assistants. It’s all done by us. We are making them in our studio that is totally black, and for maybe one year we don’t leave the studio. And that is quite important to us – that we are… it’s our vision, it’s not the vision of anybody else. It’s our vision, our freedom, our individuality.

 George: It’s very important when we go to the studio, that we always go without ideas and without a plan; that we are dead-headed, ‘zonked’, we say; blind, deaf, dumb. And how we are, how we feel about the world that day or that year, is how the pictures will be. We have to lift them out from inside ourselves. There are no pictures in the air, to snatch. They have to be really how we feel and think and fear and hope and dread and love and want to be.

 Gilbert: Yes, when we go to the studio, we don’t think: How is the art world today? It’s nothing to do with that. Or: Should we go and see this exhibition? Nothing to do with that. It’s based on an empty canvas in front of us, without being polluted by other stuff.

 Young press woman: When you left Goldsmiths and moved to Fournier Street you were so poor, I remember you telling me, that a friend came in and stole the sausages from the primus stove you were cooking on. We’ve seen changes; we’ve seen this whole New World Order; the banking; we’re the most surveilled city in the world, possibly where you are living; how do you feel about all this, these cameras and being surveilled and this whole…

 George: Wonderful!  Another first for Britain!

 [Press Laughter]

 George: It’s wonderful. We always accept change as progress. People say: What do you think of your neighbour, now it’s changed? It hasn’t changed, it’s changing. And we always believe that we’re not critical artists – we’re not against the bomb, or war, or… we’re not like that. We are for things. We prefer to think of the things that we’re for. And, also, when we’re in the studio, creating the pictures, it’s like when you are suddenly hit by surprise and attracted romantically or sexually to another person, you know how everything else is changed – the weather, for instance, everything else is different because of that. Well, when we’re in the studio it’s a little like that, we’re on another plane. The pictures are telling us how they want to be. These pictures ‘made themselves’ more than any other pictures we have made. They told us not to put in any blue, not to put in any green. They knew how they wanted to be.

 Gilbert: Yes. It’s very interesting because when we made the pictures we used the red colour and we think: Oh my god, there is not enough… there are too few colours; and then we think: Should we put a blue in? Would a blue colour make the picture better? And the answer comes back: No, it wouldn’t. So we don’t.

 George: If you put in blue, people would think of skies, they would think of heaven, they would think of all sorts of nonsense that have nothing to do with these pictures. If you put in green, they would think of nature; that probably god made it, or something totally misleading.

 

Young man reporter: You were talking about the twenty-first century and being very ‘hands on’ and we live in a world where networks and Instagram…

 Gilbert: Instagram?

 George: (Politely, but with some irritation) And your question is?

 Young man reporter: Well, my question is, to what extent do you like watching other people’s images that are made in that same sort of format?

 Gilbert: (rather furious) We never do!

 George: Oh, we never do that. We never want to be contaminated. We want to remain weird and normal forever… Well, we don’t want to be just weird because lots of people are. We don’t want to be just normal because that would be very boring. But normal and weird is very useful for being creative. Every writer will tell you that, I’m sure.

Gilbert: No, we never look at other stuff, except a little news. And no films, no radio, George reads a lot of Edwardian books because it’s ‘away’ from now.

George: So are we all done with the questions?