'A couple of cards', The Scotsman

Tuesday, June 26, 2001

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Gilbert and George interview: "A couple of cards" By James Silver.

Gilbert and George have always looked more like provincial insurance salesmen than artists. They arrive in their trademark identical Middle England tweeds. Their shoes are fussily buffed. They sport matching ties and, as they're about to embark on a book-signing session, each has a silver pen poking out of his top pocket. How long do they take to get dressed in the mornings? How much time do they spend looking in the mirror?

We're in the White Cube2 gallery in the hip epicentre of BritArt, Hoxton Square, London, where their latest exhibition is continuing to draw an impressively mixed crowd. The New Horny Pictures are vast canvases featuring row upon row of blown-up adverts for gay escorts, complete with phone numbers: "I am an ex-public school boy ...", "Pedro, Latin-boy, very-well equipped ...". You get the idea.

"We collected these advertisements over ten to 15 years, but we had never used them to make pictures," explains the balding, bespectacled and ever-so-slightly bad-tempered George, "until one day we were looking through a catalogue of pictures we'd done in the early 1980s of cemeteries and we realised that tombstones are the same as sexual advertisements. They give the name of the person, the age and a sentence or two about their lives.

"At that moment we realised there was a connection between immorality and immortality. We think we've immortalised these people rather like soldiers are immortalised by war memorials. These young people will all one day be dead ... indeed, I'm sure some of them are already dead."

The more excitable, Italian-born Gilbert cuts in: "At the big opening party here people were actually able to ring the escorts' numbers in the pictures!" So these are real telephone numbers then? "Yes ... and they were asking the men at the other end, 'Do you know Gilbert and George?' " Were any of the escorts upset? "No - it's free advertising for them." Both men laugh.

"Britain has become awash with sexual advertisements over the last ten years," says George. "Every phone box is stuffed, our continental friends are amazed. Even the Sunday Telegraph, the most Christian, conservative newspaper, has half a page of sexual advertisements. "

Gilbert picks up again. "Everybody's lonely, everybody's randy and everybody's horny." There's a silence. This does not sound like the first time he's uttered that sentence.

Like many long-suffering, middle-aged couples, Gilbert and George, who met on the advanced sculpture course at St Martin's School of Art in 1967, have a tendency to finish one another's sentences. What is it about the British and sex? "Is there something different?" muses Gilbert. George nods. "The similarities are greater than any possible differences." Gilbert again: "We've never managed to find people who are not horny. In Japan or China or America, they're all horny. The English are no different."

"England's very free at the moment, we think," adds George. "We were able to show Naked Shit Pictures (1995) at the South London Gallery without any problem whatsoever. We were able to advertise it. You couldn't do that in America, even though they're the biggest exporters of pornography." Gilbert adds helpfully: "Sexual drive in every human being is more powerful than the brain."

The artists claim to have had few run-ins with censors over the years. "We always try to pre-empt any trouble like that," says George, "because we know the limits and select the show accordingly. "

"We want to win," says Gilbert. "Even with New Horny Pictures ... sexual advertising was always something on the back page, but now we've made it into a visual, powerful exhibition."

Despite their choice of subject matter, the artists say they're not out to shock.

"We're always out to de-shock," explains George, betraying a hint of irritation. So why the controversy-courting? "Because we always do pictures which we find inside ourselves. We never arrive at the studio and go, 'What shall we do today? Monkeys? Trees?' We want to find something that's lying dormant inside ourselves. And if you're very honest, then you have controversy."

The duo have lived and worked in the East End of London for 35 years. Recently, they also moved dealers, jumping ship from the stuffy Anthony d'Offay gallery in the West End to Hoxton's high priest of Young BritArt, Jay Jopling.

"It's amazing that we don't have to go to the West End ever again," says Gilbert. "We used to have to go once a year to our show, now we don't even have to do that. We just stay in the East End of London." "Yes," says George, a touch pompously, "these days, the galleries come to us."

Despite having exhibited all over the world, in some ways Gilbert and George still feel like outsiders at home. They dislike London's art establishment and, of course, the national newspaper critics.

"We have a very big problem with the establishment," Gilbert says. "If we were to have a show in a big gallery we would have a response from the public beyond belief. But the establishment don't want to accept us."

Why does he think that is? "No idea," he shrugs. "We've never figured it out," agrees George. "At the opening of New Horny Pictures we had 2,000 people in this gallery, people from all over the world - America, Japan, Hong Kong - coming in specially to see these pictures.

"But we've never had a retrospective, nobody has come to ask us to do a big exhibition ... yet," says Gilbert. "Not one gallery or museum in Britain," muses George sadly.

Of their "simplistic, bigoted" tormentors in the press, they are more sanguine. "The anti-brigade is very good for attendance," says George. With that they whip out their pens and begin book signing.

New Horny Pictures, White Cube2, 48 Hoxton Square, London N1, until 15 July. Tel: 020-7930 5373. James Silver copresents BBC Radio Five Live's The Juice.

Posted by James Silver - On Tuesday, June 26, 2001

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