Nothing goes together better than the renowned contemporary British art duo Gilbert & George. For over 40 years, since meeting as students at St. Martins School of Art in 1967, the pair have pushed questions of taste and conformity into the
Nothing goes together better than the renowned contemporary British art duo Gilbert & George. For over 40 years, since meeting as students at St. Martins School of Art in 1967, the pair have pushed questions of taste and conformity into the mainstream. Storming the art world in 1969 with The Singing Scultpure – standing together on a table, they danced and sang “Underneath The Arches” – Gilbert & George firmly established themselves at the forefront of contemporary art. Designating themselves as living sculptures, they have devoted their entire existence to art, broadening the definition of what art is. Repeatedly referring to their principal maxim “Art for All”, the duo’s art – whether performance or imagery – aims to be accessible to all.
Using their trademark format, the grid, Gilbert & George’s latest series of artworks The Urethra Postcard Pictures, sees a welcome return to postcard art nearly four decades since their last group of pictures made out of the medium. The uniformly formatted series, which mimics the sexual symbol used by the one time theosophist C.W. Leadbeater (1853-1934), exists as a group of 564 new and unseen Postcard Pictures. The subject of a world exhibition tour, this second volume is also magnificently packaged in a two-part set: The Complete Postcard Art of Gilbert & George. Designed by the artists and published by Prestel the set illustrates in colour all 1,004 new and vintage Postcard Pictures, most of which have not been previously catalogued or exhibited.
Continuing to do all their artwork themselves – unlike many artists of their eminence – Gilbert & George are still creating work as provoking and seductive as when they first started out. Here as part of the V&A’s In Conversation series between Gilbert & George and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artists exclusively share their next large-scale project with AnOther which follows on from their postcard, telephone box sex cards and flyer series.
Gilbert: We are very excited about our new series, The London Pictures. We are going to do more than 300 of these mosaics – massive pictures with 100 or 200 panels. For the past six years we have been stealing…
George: ...the posters outside newsagents where it says, “Woman Killed on Tube” or “Man Plunges from Building”…
Gilbert: Recently we counted how many we actually had, and we had managed to steal over 3,600 posters.
George: Individual thefts. And it’s very difficult because the newsagents don’t like you doing that; they try and stop you. So we have to distract them: Gilbert or I would go into the shop to buy a Mars bar. (We then ended up getting so many Mars bars, we moved on to Wrigley’s chewing gum.) We would go in and say, "Do you have the sugar free chewing gum…no, that one, it’s for a diabetic friend and they’re very particular." So whilst he’s looking, Gilbert, say, is stealing the poster from outside. On the rare occasion that Gilbert makes a noise with the tin holder of the poster, and the head of the shopkeeper turns towards the door, I would say, "that’s a remarkable hairstyle you have," – "oh well thank you very much," the shopkeeper would say – and the poster is gone.
Gilbert: It is an amazing subject because it is all real, it’s not fake, so we are able to create this amazing artwork with the most extraordinary subjects. Unbelievable.
George: And it is automatic because we always need one panel of our picture for the title and the date and our signature; so if we can find 15 posters, which in different ways say “Somebody Dead on the Tube”, “Child Dead on the Tube”, “Somebody Dead on the Tube" – then with 15, we can make a 15-part picture. We know exactly how big they are going to be now; we are in the middle of nearly finishing all the sketches. It's extraordinarily exciting to be doing them. It will be the biggest group of pictures we’ve ever done.
Gilbert: And it’s very exciting because we’re already setting up our shows in different locations. We realised that having a show in a place like a private gallery for one month means absolutely nothing: after the month, if you are successful, they sell them and they go to different collectors and if they are not successful they are left in the basement. So our new idea is to have 10-15 private shows first with The London Pictures (different shows in different places) and then we are going to set up amazing museum shows. Only after a while, after seeing the subject again and again and again in different positions, does it go into your brain and you are able to remember what they’re all about. That’s why we always liked big shows – but their impact has to be so big that you are able to remember something. If they don’t remember what it’s all about, then it’s no good.
Gilbert & George: The Urethra Postcard Art exhibition is currently touring worldwide. The Complete Postcard Art of Gilbert & George two volume-set, is published by Prestel and out now.
Text by Lucia Davies
