Duo Personality

London's Provocateurs Are Themselves a Template For a Changing Society

NEW YORK

Some of the most important, influential works in the history of British art were produced over the past 40 years by a duo known only as Gilbert & George. The Brooklyn Museum is giving them a massive two-floor retrospective.

Their artworks? Themselves.

One early "sculpture" consisted of the two artists standing on a table in their gray flannel suits -- they never appear out of them -- slowly dancing to a music-hall tune. In footage of the performance, they look like wind-up figures from the lid of Grandmother's music box. Another "sculpture" fills a room with equally sentimental drawings of the couple in a public park, done wall-size in charcoal. A third is the men themselves, still in their suits, but with their faces and hands painted red. There's also a famous video, titled "Gordon's Makes Us Drunk," that simply shows the artists slowly, methodically . . . . making themselves drunk.

The duo's wall-filling grids of framed photos, a G&G trademark, present all kinds of imagery gathered from and around their home in East London, where they've spent their entire lives as a couple. Early black-and-whites include the besuited artists in a pub getting plastered and nasty anatomical graffiti from the streets of their iffy neighborhood. Later grids move into garish color; the imagery expands to include images of semen and excrement and anuses.

To make sense of all this peculiarity and variety, there's one vital thing to know: Until 1967, gay sex was against the law in England.

That was the same year the two artists -- Gilbert Proesch, born in Italy in 1943, and George Passmore, an Englishman born a year earlier -- met at St. Martin's School of Art in London, became a couple and a team and first donned their suits. Some people view those clothes as foppish or reactionary or as signaling pretensions (ironic or not) to the upper class. I think that's wrong. They strike me as the clothes of bank clerks from the terraced suburbs of postwar England; they represent the middle-class normality from which the two artists were excluded.

The sentimental drawings of the couple in a park show the artists as two "normal" young Londoners out for a Sunday stroll. But they also hint at public parks and shrubbery (the subject and title of another early work that isn't in this show) as classic sites of shame-filled gay encounters. The couple are shown in a traditional lovers' setting, alone and small and cosseted by British nature. The pictures also show the sweethearts' hands in pockets or on walking sticks but never on each other. Two gay men might surround themselves with the standard trappings of romantic love, but they couldn't declare the thing itself.

A big caption under one of the drawings presents the kind of bromide these artists love to proclaim: "We believe that love is the path for a better world of art in which good and bad give way for Gilbert and George to be." They use such safe-sounding platitudes as links to the mainstream world of Hallmark sentiment. In fact, however, there was no path to simple, unremarkable "being" that even art could open for Gilbert & George. The clear failure of their art to make them ordinary, despite its obvious yearnings toward conventionality, gets their gay predicament exactly right. The art of Gilbert & George has a reputation for being wild and avant-garde, but to me it mostly seems poignant.

The gridded photographs of Gilbert & George can make even the world of the corner pub, as mainstream as you get in Britain, feel fraught. In a 1973 piece called "Axe Bar," 24 black-and-white pictures present the couple drinking in a classic East End watering hole. But because so many of the pictures are badly blurred or taken at strange angles or with a wide-angle lens, they feel more like surveillance imagery than friendly snapshots. (There's no paranoia in that reading: One artist at the Whitney Biennial, in 2008, presented footage that was shot by the vice squad spying on a men's restroom in 1962.)

Even if you read the skew in those photos as more about inebriation than investigation, there's still a certain pathos in the work: a search for escape from the bounds of convention, even as the drinkers' tidy suits keep them wrapped in propriety. The methodical intoxication on view in "Gordon's Makes Us Drunk" -- shot to the music of Edward Elgar, mainstay of establishment Britishness -- gets us to the same place, faster.

The crucial breakthrough for the two art students came when they decided to put down their chisels and declare themselves, and everything about their peculiar life, the "sculptures" they would send into the world. As an early manifesto-cum-sales pitch put it, "Gilbert and George have a wide range of sculptures for you -- singing sculpture, interview sculpture, dancing sculpture, meal sculpture, walking sculpture." Their music-hall routine, that "Singing Sculpture," was one of the first works in their new art form. Its classic staging took place in 1969 in the shadows of a railway overpass in London (the footage in the show is of a later performance in a New York gallery) and consisted of the two artists lip-syncing a sappy classic from 1932, Bud Flanagan's "Underneath the Arches."

It's a tramp's song that wistfully proclaims the joys of an outdoor, outcast life:

The Ritz we never sigh for, The Carlton they can keep,

There's only one place that we know, and that is where we sleep. . . .

We don't envy others the comforts of a home,

For there's one place where we can rest,

When we've no wish to roam.

Underneath the arches, we dream our dreams away.

Underneath the arches, on cobblestones we lay.

This could be taken as a theme song for the best of Gilbert & George's art. There's a pretense to normalcy, even to contentment in it. But behind the happy song and dance -- beneath the contented gray flannel -- there's the reality of life "underneath the arches": a life of hurt and bafflement and even swallowed rage.

By the 1980s, when gay culture, like these artists themselves, finally had more or less entered the mainstream, that rage (and its flip side, exultation) could express itself directly. That's when the once-subtle grids of Gilbert & George went technicolor, and became filled with frank expressions of gay lust. Those are the images that fill some two-thirds of this show. (There are also some more recent grids that venture into issues such as religious fundamentalism and military aggression.) It's great to see how, thanks in part to artists such as Gilbert & George, the closet door has swung wide open. But this loving couple's most complex, compelling art echoed from behind that door, when it was closed.

"Gilbert & George" runs through Jan. 11 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, N.Y. Call 718-638-5000 or visit http://www.brooklynmuseum.org.