London Calling (56 page)

George Passmore was born in Plymouth, Devon, and grew up in Totnes. After a spell at Dartington Hall College of Art and the
Oxford School of Art, he arrived in London in 1965, starting at St Martin’s School of Art in 1966. He had grown up in poverty.
His mother had gone into service at the age of twelve and it had been a struggle for her to bring up her two boys alone.
Gilbert Proesch came from San Martin, in the Italian Dolomites north of Venice, where his mother was a cook and his father
a cobbler. He studied at the Wolkenstein School of Art and Hallein School of Art in Austria and the Akademie der Kunst in
Munich, before arriving in London in 1967 to attend St Martin’s. Gilbert and George first met on 25 September 1967 at the
school and became immediate friends. Gilbert: ‘It’s very simple. George was the only one who accepted my pidgin English.’
In a 2002 interview with the
Daily Telegraph
they claimed: ‘It was love at first sight.’
²
They don’t discuss their sex life, though George has described himself and Gilbert as ‘two poofs’.
³
In fact, when they met, George had been married to fellow student Patricia Stevens for three months (they married on 19 June
1967 at Stepney register office). Their daughter, Sunny, was born in May 1968 and their son, Rayne, in 1972, at which time
Patricia was still living with George; the names ‘Sun’ and ‘Rain’ suggest a greater acceptance of prevailing hippie philosophy
than Gilbert and George would later admit. The children grew up in a semi-detached house in Hackney, not far from Fournier
Street.

Together Gilbert and George explored London and in particular the East End. They investigated Hampstead and other outer suburbs
by taking buses to the end of the line and walking back; their own form of psychogeographical exploration. In sculpture class
they displayed their works together at the end of year show, mixing them up so that it was impossible to tell whose was whose.
They even made one object together, a portrait head, but they never collaborated in quite that way again.

Gilbert, talking to Wolf Jahn: ‘At the end of the year we posed with our sculptures, but we realised we didn’t need them.
That was when we realised that we didn’t believe in objects.’
⁴
Their own life became the artwork. They had been moving towards this in their various experiments, but the turning point
came one day when they walked out of the house on Fournier Street together and said: ‘We are the art.’ Gilbert told David
Sylvester: ‘That was before doing the Singing Sculpture. It was shortly after moving to Fournier Street that we decided we
were the object and the subject. And I think that was the biggest invention we ever did. After that, that was it. We made
a decision… we made ourselves the object.’
⁵
George:

In our little studio in Wilkes Street in Spitalfields, we played that old record ‘Underneath the Arches’. We did some moving
to it, and we thought it would be a very good sculpture to present. That, in a way, was the first real G&G piece. Because
it wasn’t a collaboration. We were on the table as a sculpture, a two-man sculpture.

They worked on it and for their graduation show the next year, 1969, Gilbert and George presented themselves as a ‘singing
sculpture’ and performed a six-minute version of Flanagan and Allen’s old vaudeville song ‘Underneath the Arches’ (1932),
which they sang while standing on a small office table with their faces painted gold. They moved with puppet-like jerks, one
carrying a walking cane and the other a folded glove, the classic accoutrements of vaudeville. The performance was accompanied
by a written dedication describing themselves as ‘the most intelligent, fascinating serious and beautiful art piece you have
ever seen.’ They set out their own rules, described as ‘The Laws of Sculptors’:

1. Always be smartly dressed, well groomed relaxed friendly polite and in complete control.
   
2. Make the world to believe in you and to pay heavily for this privilege.
   
3. Never worry assess discuss or criticise but remain quiet respectful and calm.
   
4. The lord chisels still, so don’t leave your
   bench for long.
   

Their intention was to dissolve the boundaries between art and life, to make every waking moment a ‘sculpture’ and to render
themselves an inseparable unit, rather as John Lennon and Yoko Ono were doing at that same time. At the time of long hair
and hippie attire, they chose the most conservative and conventional outfits, dressing in suits and ties, hair neatly trimmed
and wearing polished brown shoes. They made sure that there was no discernible separation between their art and their everyday
life, and their activities were accompanied by a series of poems and statements printed on their official headed paper bearing
their motto: ‘Art for All’.

The piece addressed many overlapping themes and shows the multi-faceted aspect of their work: the theme of the song is one
of poverty, homelessness and the resilience of the underclass; not a topic usually addressed by art students. The song was
always repeated, sometimes for eight hours at a stretch, no matter whether anyone was present in the gallery or not. This
mindless repetition of action refers directly to the experience of factory workers, sorting or making the same component on
an assembly line, all day, every day. The metallic paint on their faces suggested bronze, confirming the idea that they were
indeed sculptures and referencing bronze statues from classical times onwards. They were both country boys and this is a song
about London, their new home and ultimately their muse. It was an astonishing début.

One early examination of the difference between art and life was their
performance called
The Meal
of 14 May 1969 for which 1,000 people received invitations saying:

Isabella Beeton and Doreen Mariott will cook a meal for the two sculptors, Gilbert and George, and their guest, Mr. David
Hockney, the painter. Mr. Richard West will be their waiter. They will dine in Hellicars beautiful music room at ‘Ripley’,
Sunridge Avenue, Bromley, Kent. One hundred numbered and signed iridescent souvenir tickets are now available at three guineas
each. We do hope you are able to be present at this important art occasion.

Richard West was Lord Snowdon’s butler, so he knew the business. Isabella Beeton was apparently a distant relative of the
great Mrs Beeton, and Mrs Beeton’s original cookbook was used in the preparation of the meal for thirty guests. The meal lasted
for one hour and twenty minutes and was a great success. Hockney described Gilbert and George as ‘marvellous surrealists’
and said: ‘I think what they are doing is an extension of the idea that anyone can be an artist, that what they say or do
can be art. Conceptual art is ahead of its time, widening horizons.’
⁶

Seeking to reach ordinary people, at Christmas, just after they left St Martin’s, they approached the Tate Gallery and offered
to present a crib at the entrance, as the Tate did not have one. The RSPCA had already agreed to provide some sheep and a
donkey and Gilbert and George intended to stand as two living figures in the middle of the display, like Mary and Joseph.
George told David Sylvester that it would be ‘a fantastic living piece, with the straw on the ground and everything; we could
arrange a little star of Bethlehem. They wouldn’t do it.’
⁷
Drinking Sculpture
took them, and their audience, on a tour of East End pubs, and other works included picnics on the river bank and an elaborate
ninety-minute piece from 1975 called
The Red Sculpture
, in which the two artists, their faces and hands painted a brilliant red, moved slowly from one statuesque pose to another
in response to pre-taped commands issuing from a tape recorder.

Gilbert and George express one shared vision. They told Waldemar Januszczak: ‘Our joint image is the only thing we’re interested
in. It’s an amazing power. It becomes like a fortress, much bigger than one person.’
⁸
Gilbert told David Sylvester that they needed each other because they were not total. George added: ‘We don’t think we’re
two artists. We think we are an artist.’
⁹
To this end they invented a technical form incorporating photographs and, later, areas of colour, so that it became impossible
to distinguish between them; there were no brush strokes, no individual personal statements. In the early days, when they
were making charcoal drawings, it was
clear that Gilbert was far better at drawing but whether this had any effect on their decision to merge their work is not
known.

From early on they became chroniclers of London: in their huge pictures they flew over the city – in one case,
Here and There
(1989), riding on a manhole cover like a flying saucer or the Mekon – pointing out, often literally, the grand landscapes
of enormous office blocks in the financial centre, familiar landmarks: Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s, Eros in Piccadilly Circus,
as well as the tower-block-studded horizons of the inner suburbs and the throng of nameless workers filling the streets. Always
present in their pictures as observers they record the sexual and racist graffiti, the chewing gum, spit, the refuse, the
down-and-outs, the alcoholics, the mentally disturbed, street boys, the grey London streetscape. They made a whole series
of paintings from four-letter words found chalked on walls and pavements: the
Dirty Words
pictures of 1977. Theirs is not a romantic Canaletto view of London; their view is unromantic in the extreme:

We look at the raw material of life. We prefer to come out of the front door, its been raining, there’s a puddle there, there’s
a bit of vomit from a Chinese takeaway, there’s a pigeon eating it, there’s a cigarette end, and that’s all there is. And
then you know what it is.
¹⁰

In a 1987 interview George told Duncan Fallowell: ‘London is the only upto-date place in the world. London is raw, it’s animal.’
Gilbert added: ‘When we visit Europe, or New York, those places seem so provincial.’
¹¹

Sadly London was up to date in every respect, including the AIDS disaster. As usual their response was direct; they produced
an enormous amount of work, concerned with bodily excretions, semen, blood, sweat, piss, shit, but not in the celebratory
manner of Mark Boyle’s
Son et Lumière for Bodily Fluids and Functions
; Gilbert and George dealt directly with life and death, the essential systems of the body could also act as transmission
channels for a killer disease. As many of their friends died of AIDS, they became, in their words, ‘involved in all the blood
of all our friends. All our friends were dying and so we saw all this end of life in front of us, every single day, and I
think that had a big effect on us.’
¹²

From very early on, they evolved a daily routine which, though seen by many as part of their life-as-art activity, was also
designed to make life as unencumbered by time-wasting tasks as possible. They rose at 6.30am and went around the corner to
a café for breakfast; they had no kitchen of their own. They worked until 11 a.m., then returned to the café for an early
lunch. They worked all afternoon then had dinner at a local restaurant. Ideally there
would be no variation in their eating pattern, unless dining with friends or on business, but usually in restaurants and cafés
close by. In 2007 they were eating dinner at a Turkish restaurant in Hackney, where they would have the same dish every night
for three months then change. By eating out they saved time by not having to shop for food or spend time cooking. Shopping
time was further reduced by making an annual trip to a supermarket for hundreds of rolls of toilet paper, cleaning materials
and other household goods. They always wore the same conventional suits, which avoided time spent worrying about fashion or
clothes shopping. Gilbert: ‘You don’t change it, so you don’t have to think.’ George: ‘In the outside world it’s so practical.
You always get a table at restaurants. You’re never searched at airports. You’re accepted.’
¹³

Their work, however, has not been accepted. Enormous paintings of turds, piss, sperm and other human excreta, lovingly presented
almost as stained-glass church windows, meant that even in 2007, when the Tate could no longer put off giving them a retrospective,
they were unable to find a corporate sponsor. For some reason companies like British Telecom did not want to associate their
names with paintings called
Spunk Blood Piss Shit Piss
,
Our Spunk
,
Bloody Mooning
or
Shitty Naked Human World
, the last featuring giant turds arranged in the shape of a cross. Talking about these paintings in the Tate catalogue they
said: ‘Fundamentally, there’s something religious about the fact we’re made of shit. We consist of the stuff. It’s our nourishment,
it belongs to us, we’re part of it, and we show this in a positive light.’
¹⁴
Many people thought the pictures were just made to shock; it was a subject matter that even now is off limits. The same pictures
also show the artists themselves naked, and in
Cities Fairies
bending over to show their arses to the viewer. They show their human vulnerability, stripped of all artifice and pretence,
truly naked. As David Sylvester commented, many artists have depicted the human body as ‘nude’ but only Gilbert and George
have succeeded in portraying it as ‘naked’. It is this explicit candour that makes their art so important. It is not as if
they are making them for money. Gilbert told John Tusa: ‘Everybody likes them but no collectors actually want them on the
walls, it’s quite difficult to live with one of those pictures. But we don’t do them for that, we always want enough money
to do what we want, and nothing else.’
¹⁵
Nonetheless, it was twenty-five years before the Serpentine Gallery could bring itself to show the
Dirty Words
series of paintings, and the more scatological series are even now challenging to some museums.