Gilbert & George

Working collaboratively for more than 40 years, Gilbert & George have consistently been at the forefront of British contemporary art. Starting out as "living sculpture" — making "Art for All" — they evolved into fearless "picture"-makers, willing to tackle a broad range of social subjects. With a traveling Tate Modern retrospective currently in its final presentation at the Brooklyn Museum, Gilbert & George recently sat down with Artkrush editor Paul Laster to discuss their working process and humanist values.

AK: How did you meet?

George: We met at Saint Martins School of Art in 1967. It had the most famous sculpture department in the world.

Gilbert: We met in a special course that didn't have anything to do with the official college. It was more about experimentation on the third floor.

AK: When did you start working together?

George: We exhibited together for our degree exhibition, except it wasn't an exhibition in a room.

Gilbert: We hired a small café nearby and made all the students and professors leave the school and go there. I put three objects on one table, and George put three objects on another table. We gave everyone free tea and biscuits, and that was the first time we made art together.

George: We wanted to take art out of the normal context of school, where a group of students and tutors went around and discussed each person's art in the same formal terms. No one ever mentioned content to me, or suggested that art could mean something — it only mattered if it was a "good piece."

Gilbert: In school, art has its own language, but outside it's totally different. We didn't know exactly what we were doing, but we were already exploring the idea of art in the world.

AK: How did you conceive the idea of becoming "living sculpture"?

George: We were made into living sculptures. Most of the artists that came out of St. Martins immediately walked into part-time teaching jobs, which they thought was essential in order to make art, because you can't make art if you don't have food. We could have never gotten a teaching position, especially as two people. And then other artists got grants for studio support or equipment from the Arts Council, but again, they wouldn't give that to two young men called Gilbert & George. We felt excluded.

Gilbert: Isolated.

George: Stranded, beached, left behind.

Gilbert: Every day, we had to try to find a way of succeeding, and since we didn't have a studio, we realized that walking had to be our art. So we started sending out cards describing the events, like, "Gilbert & George drinking tea."

George: They were very successful.

Gilbert: Our German gallerist, Konrad Fischer, gave us his mailing list, and overnight, we were internationally famous.

AK: Do you still consider your work in relation to sculpture?

Gilbert: In 1978, we started calling our artwork pictures; it was simpler. Calling them sculptures would be misleading for a lot of people.

George: It was good in the art world, because we were trained as sculptors. Everything we do even now still comes out of sculpture, but for the vast general public it would be too confusing.

Gilbert: It came out of living sculpture, the moment we made ourselves the subject of our art. We are still the center of it, but we are producing artwork that reflects our inner souls.

AK: How did photography enter your practice?

George: Photography has always been there. People in the art world are so fond of the charcoal-on-paper sculptures — they call them drawings — but those are based on photographic images.

Gilbert: We aren't unique in that way. In the last 100 years, nearly every artist has had a photograph in front of him.

George: Even before photography, artists made models of the scene they wanted, with little figures and two candles to get the lighting right.

Gilbert: A color photograph is not so unlike a Renaissance painting. If you look at a Titian, it looks like a modern color photograph.

AK: How has digital technology affected your way of working?

George: It's been an amazing revolution for us. It means we have a much wider vocabulary. It's much easier and quicker.

Gilbert: We can work sitting down now — we used to have to go up and down a ladder hundreds of times a day, deciding what areas we wanted to superimpose. On a computer, we're able to cut, manipulate, and add color in extraordinary ways.

George: But we're still using conventional negatives. We haven't changed over to digital photography, but maybe we will when it's really right.

Gilbert: Even though we only use 35mm negatives, they're still much better than digital. We have drum scanners, so the quality is very good. You can easily blow a negative up to five meters.

AK: Do you operate the computers yourself?

Gilbert: Oh, yes. We do have one assistant who does the scanning, and he has his own room.

George: We've always worked alone — except with the old system of making pictures, we used to hire a bunch of young people to help do the coloring because it was very laborious.

Gilbert: We would do the outline and mask it, and then they would fill it in. It's exactly how the computer masks it.

George: It's the same language.

Gilbert: But we've realized that many artists aren't very inventive using computers. We're much more inventive — we're able to think of stuff that we want to do, rather than just doing what the computer lets us do.

George: We wouldn't like to be baby artists leaving art school with a computer.

AK: How much of your work is inspired by living in London?

George: Well, not London, exactly. It has to be East London.

Gilbert: We're not uptown girls anymore!

George: East London is this amusing hub of activity. Sometimes when we walk, we switch off our visuals, so that we're just conscious of sound. We can walk for a mile and never hear an English person speaking. It's extraordinary. People from all over the world come to Brick Lane.

Gilbert: But it wasn't like that 40 years ago. It was totally Jewish.

George: It was Jewish nonstop.

Gilbert: And then some artists moved in. We were the first ones.

George: Then Somalis, briefly.

Gilbert: Then Bangladeshis.

AK: Do you think you could have made the same work living in a different city, such as New York?

Gilbert: We like New York, I must admit.

George: We always did.

Gilbert: It's fantastic. We remember New York from 1971, when we first showed at Sonnabend Gallery. It was extraordinary downtown, with the first galleries in SoHo. But it would be difficult for us to actually live and work here.

George: It would be difficult to imagine that.

Gilbert: We wouldn't have had quite the success. We'd have to deal with all the competition in American art.

George: It's never been about creativity for us in New York; it's always been about celebrating a new group of pictures. We've never made a picture here.

AK: Some artists make portraits of celebrities and socialites, while you seem more interested in street kids. What is it about the street that attracts you?

Gilbert: We're interested in being normal, and we want to make art about ordinary human beings — their happiness, or their unhappiness, or…

George: Their sexuality, all this stuff.

Gilbert: Problems with nationality.

George: That's why walking in New York is nice for us. Every morning, we walk up to Joe Jr.'s for breakfast, just to see the people sitting on the pavement or waiting to go to work. It's extraordinary. It's beautiful. We only see art-world people when we're celebrating our pictures. Day after day, the only people we see are our waiters.

AK: Why are sex and religion such great topics for art?

Gilbert: Well, both are talked about more now than ever before.

George: When we were children, sex and religion were not discussed. It was impolite.

Gilbert: But even now, still, all these churches are antihomosexual. Every one. What's going on?

George: We were amazed that an actress in Italy who made a joke about the pope — that when he goes to hell, he'll be pursued by two very active gay demons — was facing five years in prison. There's a law that protects the Catholic Church from criticism.

Gilbert: There shouldn't be. That's what we're fighting for: freedom. After so many years, we've liberated ourselves, and now we're going backwards again. That's what we don't like.

AK: Do you see yourselves as activists?

Gilbert: No, we're just campaigning for the nil.

George: We don't like divisions, sexual division being one. There was ignorant nil before, and that's when we were introduced as two young men, and people assumed we were brothers. Now we've got the informed nil — they know what we're doing, and they're being kind. All we need is kindness.

Gilbert: We're antireligion, though.

George: We're amazed that religious leaders show no sense of shame about the past, as if they did nothing. We recently read a new book about the Spanish Inquisition. It's shocking. The documentation is about which fingers they took off on Thursday and Friday and how they killed people with water and boiling oil. It's monstrous. They were all educated people at the time.

Gilbert: It's very interesting because we did this group of pictures that asked, Was Jesus Heterosexual? And even in England, religious people were furious.

George: Cross. All they had to say was, "Yes, he was."

Gilbert: I suppose we didn't pose the right question.

AK: Are there any taboos left to challenge?

Gilbert: I'm not so sure that we're interested in taboos. We're interested in friendship with human beings.

George: With viewers.

Gilbert: We always think we're here alone. There's no God, and so with only ourselves here, we have to accept each other.

George: Contrary to popular opinion, we're not actually out to confront viewers in that way. We never think that the artist should put something in front of you and then say, "Do you agree with this? If not, you're stupid." We're more subversive than that.

Gilbert: We use the word "fuck" because everyone uses it, and that language should be part of art.

AK: Have you ever depicted women in your work?

George: Not in a deliberate way — only if they appeared in a street scene or something.

Gilbert: It's the same way abstract artists don't paint women. And women have been in art for the last 2,000 years to titillate men. But feminists have criticized us for it.

George: We never left women out.

Gilbert: We started out with us as the subjects and then we wanted someone else.

George: We're not just reflecting life — we don't have views of supermarkets and highways, children and schools.

Gilbert: It's a certain vision that we're promoting.

George: But we know that we're doing it right, because our exhibitions are capable of bringing out the liberal from inside the bigot and the bigot from inside the liberal.

Gilbert: Men are more uncomfortable in front of some of our pictures.

George: In front of our nakedness. Women are much more relaxed with that.

Gilbert: Men are more frightened by our subject matter.

George: It's only during the period of our career that the male image has been represented as a sexual thing. When we were students, looking back, the only advertisements with men were men in evening dress, with a silver-topped cane and a carnation.

Gilbert: Now, every Dolce & Gabbana ad shows naked men. David Beckham even looks like a male porno star in the Armani ads.

George: A long time ago, people would ask us if the men in our pictures were rent boys, because how else could you get them? They wouldn't ask that today. In the late '70s, people asked us why we had black people in our pictures. We thought it was a very ugly question. But once it's past, it's difficult to remember that was the case.

Gilbert: Things are always changing.

AK: If they were still alive, would you rather go to church with Andy Warhol or to a bar with Francis Bacon?

Gilbert: We could have done both, but we didn't.

George: The choice is what we would have wanted to do.

George: I think we would to go out with Francis Bacon. We wouldn't go to church.

Gilbert: I hate church. I'm quite amazed that Andy would have gone to church. Crucifixion, resurrection — we believe in the erection!

AK: Do you think you'll ever be knighted?

Gilbert: No.

George: You should see our new pictures! Strangely, not knighted, but the Metropolitan University of London, which has many distinguished subjects, has asked that we become honorary professors of philosophy this year, and we were rather touched. All of our younger friends are very impressed by it, and we say, "If you want to know anything about philosophy, don't ask us."

AK: Do young artists still flock to you?

Gilbert: I think they are fascinated by us.

George: Young people in general. It's amazing how we increasingly have a very young following. A higher portion of our fan mail is from young people. We're very flattered, because normally an artist gets his gang, and he has to stay with it for the rest of his life. Ours is always changing.

Gilbert: We're outsiders, and always have been. But we like it that way because we want to create our own world.

Gilbert & George is on view at the Brooklyn Museum through January 11. A concurring exhibition, Notations: Gilbert and George, is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through November 2; and Creative Time presents a selection of the artists' videos on MTV's Time Square screen through November 14.