Our favorite voyeurs and provocateurs of contemporary British culture are at it again. Artists Gilbert & George have resurfaced with a new and thoroughly annoying collection — Scapegoating Pictures. You can catch their latest treatise on the state of their city (London) and nation at White Cube in London from July 18 – September 28.
From the Guardian.
The world of art is overwhelmingly liberal and forward looking. Unless you start following the money into Charles Saatchi’s bank account, the mood, content and operating assumptions of contemporary art are strikingly leftwing, from Bob and Roberta Smith’s cute posters to Jeremy Deller’s people’s art. The consensus is so progressive it does not need saying.
Gilbert & George have never signed up to that consensus. I am not saying they are rightwing. I am definitely not saying they are “racist”. But throughout their long careers, from a nostalgia for Edwardian music-hall songs to a more unsettling affinity for skinheads, they have delighted in provoking … us, dear Guardian reader.
Their new exhibition of grand, relentless photomontages restates their defiant desire to offend on a colossal scale. I could almost hear them at my shoulder asking: “Are you annoyed yet?”
Then suddenly they were at my shoulder, as I wrote down choice quotes from Scapegoating Pictures, the scabrous triptych of slogan-spattered pictures that climaxes this exhibition. When I confessed I was wondering which ones I could quote in a newspaper they insisted it’s all quotable: “We have a free press.” So here goes: “Fuck the Vicar.” “Get Frotting.” “Be candid with christians.” “Jerk off a judge.” “Crucify a curator.” “Molest a mullah.”
This wall of insults, mostly directed at religion, is the manifesto of Gilbert & George’s new pictures – and yet you discover it only at the end of the show. Before revealing where they are really coming from in this dirty-mouthed atheist onslaught, they have teased you with all kinds of dubious paranoias. What are these old men – Gilbert & George are 70 and 72, and the self-portraits that warp and gyrate through this kaleidoscopic digital-age profusion of images make no attempt to conceal their ageing process – so scared of?
At times this exhibition is like going on a tour of east London with one of Ukip’s less presentable candidates. Just look at that woman veiling her face. And here is a poster calling for an Islamic state in Britain.
Far from being scared, these artists are bold as brass. No one is asking Gilbert & George to go over the top one more time and plumb the psychic depths of Britain. They’re respectable now; they could just sit back in their suits. But, in these turbulent and estranging works, they give voice to the divided reality of a country at one and the same time gloriously plural and savagely bigoted.
In reality, nothing could be further from the mentality of racists and little Englanders than the polymorphically playful world of Gilbert & George. Their images merge with the faces of young men of all races who have caught their eye. Bullet-like metal canisters pulse through the pictures like threats of violence. Yet these menacing forms are actually empty containers for the drug nitrous oxide found by the artists outside their home, things that look evil but are residues of ecstatic nights.
No other artists today portray their own time and place with the curiosity that Gilbert & George display here. Their own lives are starkly visible, as they walk around their local streets in Spitalfiields, collecting the evidence of drug-fuelled mayhem and looking at the latest graffiti.
Read the entire story and see more of G & G’s works here.
Image: Clad, Gilbert & George, 2013. Courtesy of Gilbert & George / Guardian.