After seeing the kaleidoscopic yet enigmatic works of Gilbert & George at the de Young Museum, SF, I read some texts about them online. Despite their stated desire to make accessible art, ("'We want our art to speak across the barriers of knowledge directly to People about their Life and not about their knowledge of art. The 20th century has been cursed with an art that cannot be understood.") I needed some guidance to get into their personal language. So I looked 'em up on Wikipedia.
The work is stunning—light & bright—and huge (though somehow cramped in the de Young's halls), and amazing in both repetition and subject matter. Their slogan, Art for all, is sort of reversable: all is art, and this too holds true for them. Everything: themselves, their clothes, their neighbors, their shit and piss and plants and body parts—it's all worthy, all worthy subject matter. It's all up there framed within the stained-glass-window hallowed presentation which says, It's all good.
Of course, I can get behind this, for my slogan is Art Saves.
It does.
A cross of feces, a cross of wood. Same same.
I just wanted some more familiarity with them. Their lives laid bare, as it were, on the museum walls, wasn't enough. I wanted to know if "ginko" is British lingo like "pansy" is here. So I read around.
I learned that they are incredibly productive, have the most powerful graphics workstation computers in the UK; are very regular in their habits, eating in the same restaurants each day; are always seen together and always in form, in art. They are fixtures in their neighborhood, rarely travel, see movies or go to galleries. They tell the story how once on a visit to the coutryside, they came upon a young couple with a pram outside a lovely church. "Good morning!" they said to the couple. "Fuck off you weird looking prats!" came the reply.
They appear conservative, excentrically so, but are also always working that strange place in between irony and innocence, between what's genuine and contrived. Their personal and professional world turns things upside down and inside out. Obsessively so. That is their genius. They have entered the subjective universe that is of their own making and it is gloriously brilliant, self-reflecting, life affirming.
I never found out about the ginkos, but I did learn that their embrace of themselves, everyday, all the time, as living sculpture, was not inspired by Joseph Beuys, but by a visit to the Knock Shrine, County Mayo, Ireland where, in 1879 a number of people beheld an apparition of the Virgin Mary and Saints Joseph and John the Baptist. Jesus appeared to them as a little lamb standing on an altar. Gilbert & George have since been commissioned to produce a work of art for the site.
Shake your head and blink. What is and isn't real? What is and isn't art? What is and isn't worthy? A manifold mystery. Puts you on a wonder.
*pic of G&G strolling courtesy of Norf London Urbscape.
