Gilbert & George

LIGHT HEADED

Photograph: ©Gilbert & George, courtesy Brooklyn Museum and the Tate gallery, London

Are you wondering how you can cope with the global economic meltdown? Take a cue from Gilbert & George, whose retrospective has just arrived at the Brooklyn Museum from the Tate Modern. In a video documenting a 1991 restaging of their seminal late-’60s performance, The Singing Sculpture, the pair at one point faces the camera to explain themselves and their art: “We believe our sculpture,” George intones, using the preferred description for their efforts, “is coming to terms with being miserable within oneself.”

In the world of Gilbert & George, to borrow from the title of their 1981 film, misery loves company—and given the current climate, this terrific, if chronologically confused, survey couldn’t have been better timed. From the earliest drawings and black-and-white photo-grids (in which the two, wearing their signature tweedy suits, stroll through the woods, drink in bars and strike desultory poses in empty rooms), to the vivid, stained-glass-like murals that mark their later work, the mood gyrates from elegiac to bleak to apocalyptic as the duo transforms the idiosyncrasies of British behavior into a metaphor for that calamity called the human condition. There’s no better illustration of this than the aforementioned piece, in which G&G, wearing metallic makeup, move robotically on a table to a scratchy recording of “Underneath the Arches.” The 1930s ditty, a Depression-era favorite in Britain, is a paean to being drunk and homeless.

Gilbert (born Gilbert Prousch in 1943 in Italy) and George (born George Passmore in 1942 in Devon, England) first met in 1967 while they were at London’s Saint Martin’s School of Art studying sculpture—hence, their insistence on the word to describe an oeuvre that encompasses performance, film, video, photography and drawing. Given their origins (one a foreigner, the other, a provincial) and their homosexuality (about which their work seems both candid and elusive), they were outsiders, emerging at a time when Pop and Minimal Art were giving way to Conceptualism, and economic good times in the U.K. were sliding into recession. The downturn wasn’t limited to England, and neither was the move toward dematerialized art: In Italy, there was arte povera; in the United States, earthworks and body art. But much of this output was either programmatic or formalist, while Gilbert & George alluded to national character and to feeling—even if the latter was often expressed as numbness. In short, they were identity artists before the fact.

More than just making art, Gilbert & George see themselves as an artwork. One never appears without the other or without the matching outfits that semaphore the repression of British public schools and counting houses alike. Yet they channel the conservative nature of English culture as much as they caricature it. At the beginning of the exhibit, a wall text authored by the pair proclaims: WE SAY THAT PUZZLING, OBSCURE AND FORM-OBSESSED ART IS DECADENT AND A CRUEL DENIAL OF THE LIFE OF PEOPLE. On this final point, Gilbert & George have been wry, if detached, observers. Early on, they moved to Spitalfields, a run-down neighborhood in London’s East End, and this environment—with its working-class pubs, graffiti-scrawled buildings, and especially its young, handsome men of color—became their source material. But there’s nothing political about G&G’s treatment of these subjects; rather, they’re presented as the sad, matter-of-fact reminders of life as a bad dream.

This mix of populism and pessimism began as a send-up of the socialist rhetoric that attended the Labour Party’s postwar heyday. But with the coming of Thatcherism and AIDS in the 1980s, and throughout the ’90s, Gilbert & George produced works that were increasingly voyeuristic and steeped in abjection. The street kids who first appeared in their pieces in the late ’70s became more idealized and evident objects of desire; meanwhile, the now middle-aged G&G began doffing their clothes, and close-ups of turds, semen and spittle appeared with greater frequency (a phase that’s downplayed in this iteration of the show). Suffused with intimations of mortality, these images suggest a perverse take on truth in materials. They are also a bridge to the pieces created after September 11, 2001. In a work like Base (2005), which features veritable pinwheels of crucifixes, the world filtering through the windows of G&G’s church of despair is one filled with terrorists, fundamentalists and the clatter of the Four Horsemen galloping down London’s high streets. As we grapple with our own End of Days, you could do worse than spend the day with Gilbert & George, and take heart in their message—that miserableness is next to godliness.