Educational Media Reviews Online

Gilbert & George are the most well known living British artists today. They met as young men at St. Martin’s School of Art in the early 60s. They decided to become “one artist” and create art for all, “a complicated art for ordinary people” per Gilbert. Using the chronologically arranged retrospective show of Gilbert & George at the Tate Museum, Tim Marlow interviews Gilbert & George about each stage in the development of their art. This is an excellent introduction to the artwork, techniques and philosophy of Gilbert and George. This documentary will be useful in providing material for discussing the question of when art crosses the line from thought provoking into bizarre.

Their first appearance was as living sculptures, covered in gold metallic paint and standing on a table, miming or singing to the song Underneath the Arches. As they became more well known for their living sculptures and not being able to be in different places at the same time, Gilbert & George started creating charcoal paper sculptures for places they had previously worked. They started by taking a photo and creating a charcoal image of the photo. These works were very popular but Gilbert & George stopped making them because people were admiring them for the form and not the message. Continuing the use of photography, Gilbert & George worked first in black and white creating the Dusty Corners collection, now at the Tate, then segued into the use of color, in particular, red. Their work was described as a “post modern stained glass window,” and they explored new art techniques. It is during this time that the use of frames to help define the art started. The original reasons were technical but have since become part of their signature.

During the 1980s, they put out art that was more provocative, such as the Angry Word exhibit, photographs of derogatory graffiti, as well as taking on the taboo subject of HIV/AIDS. Marten asks about the response to the Angry Word exhibit, noting that there were strong reactions to it. Gilbert & George state that their art has the power to “bring the bigot from the liberal and the liberal from the bigot.” Gilbert & George held an exhibit about AIDS with all the proceeds going to an AIDS charity—the first of any artist at that time to help people with the disease.

Moving into the 1990s, there are more challenging exhibitions, such as the Cosmological Pictures in 1993 and the Naked Shit Pictures in 1995. In these displays they use body fluids such as blood, spit, urine, and sweat as seen from a microscopic viewpoint intertwined with their self portraits. Another more recent exhibit uses microscopic images of pubic lice. Again these were controversial exhibits and Marten does a good job of getting Gilbert & George to talk about the techniques and rationale behind them.

During the 2000s, Marten takes us past the several of their more current works, including Sonofagod. Gilbert & George discuss their views and antipathy of organized religion as the camera focuses in on the Sonofagod exhibit. The retrospective goes up to the 2006 exhibit of the Six Bomb Pictures, dealing with current world events, and which the artists describe as their most chilling ever.