Men at work

They are the odd couple of the art world - two Morecombes, no Wise. After 30 years of shocking the establishment, their new exhibition New Horny Pictures is the riskiest show yet. Welcome to the extraordinary world of Gilbert and George. GILBERT and George and I are having our picture taken. These extraordinary men have an extraordinarily large social circle and like to have extraordinary photographs of all the people they meet. Extraordinary, as you will discover, is the favourite exclamation of the famous British art duo, who view the world with a curious mixture of childlike amazement and sly bemusement.

It's a hot day in Hoxton and every patch of grass is heaped high with near-naked sun junkies. However, in the offices of White Cube, the London gallery where Gilbert and George are exhibiting their New Horny Pictures, the pair are tricked out in their trademark matching suits and ties, looking as if they have just parachuted in from a Magritte painting.

Gilbert's tie is yellow with green leaves, George's is pink with the same pattern. They are sent over by an obsessive Italian fan. To decide who will wear which, George holds them behind his back and asks Gilbert to pick a hand, left or right. They never quarrel over the ties, because they never quarrel at all. They don't believe in it. You'll never see them gnashing their teeth; they always have sunshine in their smiles.

It's been said before, but Gilbert and George do look an awful lot like Morecambe and Wise. In truth, though, they are two Erics and no Ernie. Neither is the straight man.

Do they have surnames? They do. George Passmore and Gilbert Proesch. But the artists have been living without those - as well as the past lives and family histories which they signify - since they became Gilbert and George (or sometimes just G&G) in 1969.

That was the year in which these St Martin's students decided to be their art. They would be "living sculptures", wearing the same clothes, following a strict routine, merging into a single entity. Angry to have been excluded from an exhibition, they attended the private view and stood still in the middle of the room, their faces and hands coated in metallic paints. Encouraged by the reaction, they devised The Singing Sculpture. In various locations, they mimed to Flanagan and Allen's Underneath The Arches, rotating mechanically in their suits and face paints. This, remember, was the Sixties when such happenings were all the rage.

More than 30 years later, Gilbert and George are still at it. The double act is unchanged. "The first thing the art establishment said when we emerged as artists was, 'Oh, it won't last'," says George in his super-posh accent, the result of elocution lessons rather than a rich background. "Now they are all divorced 17 times but we are still here."

They live in the same 12-roomed Georgian house in the East End of London which they have shared since 1968. They have separate bathrooms so as not to row over toothbrushes, but whether they share a bed is unknown and - as they will never tell - is unlikely to ever be known by anyone except burglars and their Jamaican-born cleaner, Stainton Forrest.

"If anything ever happened to them," this trusted companion once said, "I would take out my eyes and give them to them." They inspire devotion like this but, over the years, many hateful things have been said about them too.

Cast an eye over old photographs of Gilbert and George. You'll notice that the context changes but they always look the same. Okay, so George had a bit more hair in the Seventies, but it's funny looking at these two dapper gents surrounded hippies. Whether snapped in Times Square or Tiananmen Square, they always look, well, square. The same deadpan expressions, the same three-button suits, the same concept gaining power with every year that passes. I half expect to see them popping up in archive news footage, perhaps standing quietly behind Neville Chamberlain as he waves his piece of paper.

What has changed is their international reputation. The two twentysomethings with a groovy gimmick have become, arguably, the best-known living British artists in the international arena. Their colossal and instantly recognisable pictures, which resemble profane stained glass, have been exhibited all over the world, including Moscow and Beijing, and they have huge retrospectives coming up in Greece, Portugal and France. This is what happens when you are your own hugely successful brand.

BACK in Hoxton, Gilbert and George are telling me about their current show, New Horny Pictures. George does most of the talking, all of the smoking and about half of the jokes. Gilbert, who still has a surprisingly strong Italian accent despite having moved to London in 1967, takes care of the chuckling, finishes some of George's sentences and seems perpetually awestruck by the odd path his life has taken. His left eyebrow arches like startled a cat.

In New Horny Pictures, they have clipped classified ads out of newspapers and magazines, magnified them enormously and arranged them into grids. As usual, the artists themselves appear in the pictures. The twist is that the classifieds are all for male prostitutes.

"There are even some Scottish ones," says Gilbert, for my benefit.

"Quite a lot of Scottish ones," adds George.

I squint at the scale model of the exhibition which is sitting on the table in between us. "Hot Scottish boy," I chirp. "I think I know him."

George grins gleefully at Gilbert. "He's already got his favourites!"

Like everything Gilbert and George do, New Horny Pictures sounds like a joke but has its serious side. "We think it is an amazing untold landscape," says Gilbert. "It's not the A-Z," says George. "It's not the underground map, but another map of the city."

A sexual map?

"Exactly!" they cry in unison. I feel pleased, as if I got an answer right in class. This is the sort of effect they can have on you. "And because they're based on advertisments from an enormous period of time, probably from up to 20 years ago, we must assume that many may be dead," says George. "One day they will all be dead and then it literally will be a memorial. We have immortalised people engaged in this sexual activity. It's extraordinary."

Gilbert and George have been hoarding these adverts at home for a long time. This is what they do - pay attention to the stuff no one else can bear to. Chewed gum, saliva, blood, urine, human excrement. They make art out of it. Sometimes the art is beautiful, which is hard to believe.

In a way, the New Horny Pictures are their riskiest yet. The adverts are real, the phone numbers are real, it's likely that some people are going to start getting unwelcome calls, which is surely a legal minefield. I ask G&G if they have ever called any of the numbers.

"Not telling!" says George. "We should say we've checked every one."

"Let's hope they all come to the party," says Gilbert, blithely.

"That would be lovely," says George.

It's almost unbelievably fitting that these supremely phlegmatic men live in Spitalfields. But, for all their studied nonchalance, they would, I think, relish some sort of legal challenge. They are relentless self-publicists and thrive on confrontation. In 1999, they exhibited their infamous Naked Shit Pictures in Belfast, incurring the wrath of the Reverend Ian Paisley, who said they had "tainted the sacred soil of Ulster with their filth".

Protesters converged on the Ormeau Baths gallery, singing hymns and hurling abuse at the artists as they went in. "Pickets stood outside the gallery shouting 'Sodom and Gomorrah, Sodom and Gomorrah'," remembers George with a sly glint. "I said, 'Where is this club?'"

I think if a crowd of people started shouting at me, I'd be quite upset. "Not us," says Gilbert. "It was quite amusing. I absolutely liked it!"

Of course, it doesn't take much to wind up the Reverend Ian Paisley, who has recently spoken out against the short-cut to sexual frenzy which is line-dancing. "It's about the only thing we agree with him on," smiles George.

G&G's relationship with organised religion is interesting. Raised as, respectively, a Catholic and a Methodist, they have often incorporated Christian symbolism into their work.

George's older brother, Alec Passmore, is Director of Ministries of the Prophetic Witness Movement. "I think it's involved with converting Jewish people to Christianity," says George.

When George talks about his brother, Gilbert laughs. They say they are interested in eliciting strong reactions to their work but, as people, the deepest emotion they seem willing to display is this kind of bland amusement. They even discuss the Brick Lane bomb - which exploded near their home and meant they couldn't leave the house for about six hours - with the same polite languor they use when telling me that urine examined under a microscope looks like "beautiful Chinese wallpaper".

I ask them what makes them angry. "Less and less," says Gilbert. "We don't want to be irritated by stuff any more."

"There are only two things we would like to get rid of in London," adds George. "Hanging flower baskets and CCTV in public lavatories." Okay then, what do they do for fun? "Very little," says Gilbert. "Chat up waiters," says George. "Very little," says Gilbert again, as if the possibilities of pleasure are falling away with every passing second.

Changing the subject, I ask why they left Anthony d'Offay, their dealer of 20 years, and signed up with Jay Jopling, who represents Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. When the art critic Matthew Collings asked them this same question they replied, "Because he's a c**t", but today they say that they felt the d'Offay gallery had become more interested in money than art.

Staggeringly, Gilbert has the cheek to add, "A change is always good." And this from a man who, until recently, had eaten breakfast and lunch at the same table in the same cafe at the same time for 30 years, only stopping when the place closed down.

They are excited about exhibiting at Jopling's White Cube gallery because he represents young artists and has a young staff. As they get older (Gilbert is 57, George 59), they seem obsessed with youth. They believe, probably quite correctly, that their work is more popular with young people than the middle-aged. "I think our art speaks to them," says George.

"Visual power, sexuality, drunkenness. This is what they are involved in," says Gilbert. "And our work has a certain beauty that they are searching for."

They also believe that they fit perfectly with the other White Cube artists ("Perfect! Most of the artists they have themselves in their work, no?"). Although, in a rather cruel joke on Tracey Emin, they chuckle that they have never made art about their abortions. "I haven't had one for a while," laughs George, B&H smoke spurting from his nostrils. "I've given them up."

Norman Rosenthal, who curated the notorious Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy, described Gilbert and George as a pair of John The Baptists, paving the way for the movement of Young British Artists. "That's quite amusing," says Gilbert, eyebrow going into orbit.

"It's true in some ways in that all those artists moved into within one street of us," says George. "It's extraordinary. When we look out of our window we can see the house of Tracey Emin, Mona Hatoum, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Chris Ofili. They are all within a hundred yards of us. Extraordinary."

One thing that always surprises me is that they give so much of themselves in their work, appearing naked or presenting magnified images of their own bodily fluids, but they are extremely reluctant to discuss their personal lives.

They will not, for example, explicitly say that they are homosexual. "We try not to accept the conventions of male, female, gay, straight," says George. "We think it's far more complex and elaborate." The most persistent rumour is that George was once married and has two children. They don't talk about this either. If you ask about sex they refer you to the art.

Interviewers have spent many fruitless hours jousting with them, trying to get them to say, "Yes we are gay, yes we sleep together", but, really, what does it matter? In a way, their story is much more interesting for the deliberate air of mystique they cultivate.

Their friend and biographer, the late Daniel Farson, the Boswell to their Janus-faced Johnson, called their relationship one of the most enduring love affairs of the 20th century, a description they are happy to endorse as "beautiful". I ask them what they love about each other. "I think we have a shared sense of purpose that sustains us, a will," says George. Gilbert puts it more simply: "We wouldn't be able to survive."

They really are an entertainingly odd couple with a rather warped view of the world. George, for instance, is very disapproving that Jamie Oliver appears in a programme called The Naked Chef but always keeps his clothes on. And they genuinely believe that their Naked Shit Pictures of 1995 created a fashion for male celebrities appearing in the altogether.

"On every television, in every magazine, every pop star, everybody has to do something naked," says Gilbert. "Okay, they hide their genitals or their bums but they have to run up and down naked."

"You can date it from our show," says George.

"Men. Not women," Gilbert adds.

"Women are always naked," George explains, helpfully.

Of course, G&G are celebrities in their own right. Not in a Robbie Williams or Jennifer Lopez kind of way, where everyone knows who they are, but they are certainly as famous as it is possible to get when you are an artist who isn't dead. A recent exhibition in Milton Keynes attracted 19,000 people and, in 1999, they appeared on the Graham Norton show, sharing air time with Adam Rickett and a video clip of a monkey having a pee.

For famous people they are shockingly accessible. Their address and phone number is listed in the Yellow Pages under "artists" but no one has ever got in touch that way. Obsessive fans have been known to come over from South America and spend a fruitless week in London trying to get their number when they could just have looked in the book.

They have always been upfront about their desire to be famous, partly because this was a very vulgar thing to say in the Seventies and it pleased them to go against the grain. However, for all their celebrity, they live very quiet lives, working 12-hour days, emerging from the studio for discreet dinners.

"We never go to restaurants where people are seen," says George. "All of these minimalist restaurants in London, these Conrans, we've never set foot in them. We go to a very ordinary small Kurdish restaurant where we've become such friends with the owner that he invited us to his son's circumcision party."

Did you go?

"Yes."

How was it?

"Extraordinary."

Ask a silly question ...

Gilbert and George prefer to involve themselves with the ordinary people of their multi-cultural manor than the air-kissy world of the arterati.

Since last winter they have been firm friends with a schizophrenic Bengali boy, who they found sleeping in the doorway of a nearby church. He now visits them every day, sitting in a rocking chair while they work. They say he is the most interesting person they have ever met. Remember these people knew Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon. The boy has a lot to keep his eye on. Gilbert and George are working harder than ever, faster and faster, keenly aware of their own mortality, determined that death will be the only thing that will stop them. "There will always be more pictures for us to make," says George. "We only make the pictures that are lying dormant within ourselves. And as we get older we change inside and there will always be more pictures to drag out."

They refuse to contemplate whether either would carry on without the other. "We never think of that," replies George, while Gilbert nods his assent. "People say, 'What would happen if one of you fell under a bus?' but the likelihood is that both of us would fall under the bloody bus."

Wouldn't that be typical? You wait ages for a snappy dressing, sexually ambiguous eccentric genius to come along and then two are knocked over at once Gilbert & George: New Horny Pictures is at White Cube, 48 Hoxton Square, London until July 15. Coinciding with The New Horny Pictures is an exhibition of early Gilbert and George film and video sculptures at The Lux Gallery, 2-4 Hoxton Square, until July 8

Copyright 2001
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