The following programme contains strong language
and scenes of a sexual nature.
(PENSIVE MUSIC)
GEORGE: We are Gilbert and George.
We started with a very simple motto, "art for all."
Then we went on to have a what you would call a manifesto.
When somebody says manifesto we're already very alarmed
'cause we think that sounds like some revolutionary thing from Russia
and we didn't think and feel like that.
We just say it's a message from us
to the viewer that we believe in the art and the life of the artist.
GILBERT: When we made ourself the ten commandments for us
and the laws of the sculptors.
How to behave to become artist.
How to live and how to better ourself to be a more complex
human being.
GEORGE: "Art for all" one of our earliest slogans.
GILBERT: Art for all.
GEORGE: 1969 maybe even earlier.
People always ask how it was that we came to be two people and one artist
and how we decided that and we always say that we never decided it.
It was something that came over us.
It's something very mysterious to us to this day even.
GILBERT: A journey of art is long so we are walking again and again
and again and we are living it, this extraordinary life.
GEORGE: We like to think that everything every day
and every night is past, present and future all rolled into one.
GILBERT: Our art is not based on looking outside.
It's all looking inside yourself.
All that vision is inside you and not outside.
Outside will stay forever roughly the same,
but in the inner thought is full of contradiction,
full of complexity like we all are, human people.
(PENSIVE MUSIC)
GEORGE: Well a lot of people ask us
if the pictures are to do with our mortality.
Which we think is too early for us to be making pictures about that.
You need bones to live, to walk to work you need bones,
to go to the gymnasium, to go jogging you need bones.
It's a bit like, what was the Max Bygraves' song "You Need Hands."
Well you need bone for everything to live.
GILBERT: You know the meaning that is in every dictionary, hmm.
GEORGE: In the entertainment world corpsing crops up all the time.
People who are in the middle of a performance and suddenly
they can't think what to do next or somebody makes them gi-giggle.
It's called dying in America.
But, uh, corpsing is the English word for it.
GILBERT: But I mean we meant really like corpses.
We are not walking anymore so they can see the soles of our shoes.
GEORGE: We like the idea 'cause that's how we all traverse this world.
Whether walk in a prison cell or in a palace.
It-it is all the bottoms of the feet.
GILBERT: Not only that Dick Whittington, he came to London walking.
And that's why we have the soles gold.
GEORGE: We're doing it for Dick. (LAUGHS)
(PENSIVE MUSIC)
We are the artwork.
And we're there just as everybody's in a letter they write.
Doesn't matter whether you write to your mother or to your bank manager
you will always sign it yourself.
These pictures are, are letters or visual love letters from us
to the viewer.
How is the tea, Gilbert?
It's very nice. Would you like some cake?
Thank you. Yes.
GILBERT: The vision of our life is in front of them.
I think that's the most exciting thing from, that we ever did.
We invented that in 1968 or 69.
We became the art and we are able to tell the world how we behave,
how we are.
Drunk or not drunk. They don't know that.
(PENSIVE MUSIC)
The totality of their work when it- when it's seen as a-
as a journey through life will be well a remarkable portrait.
There's never been, um...
..a more complete documentation of a relationship.
A relationship between two men...
..ever in any art form at any time.
(SOLEMN MUSIC)
NARRATOR: Think of your first view of the Dolomites, the Italian Alps.
GILBERT: It's fantastic village where I come from in the Dolomites.
NARRATOR: Think of mountain highways and a little roadside church.
(BELL TOLLING)
GILBERT: When I was young I had the dream to be an artist
so I-I moved first to Austria.
Then to Germany.
Then I still felt, uh, it was not it.
So I moved to London.
And we met on the top floor of Saint Martins School of Art.
He took an interest in me. That's about it.
George was from Devon and he showed me London
and we wanted to be artists together.
NARRATOR: Devon and Cornwall are the two South Western counties of England...
GEORGE: It was just my mother and my brother.
We were bombed out of Plymouth in '42, so we ended up in Totnes.
I was interested in art from being a child and as a teenager
I bought a second-hand book of Van Gogh's letters.
And that convinced me entirely.
GILBERT: I mean, we were working class people.
Starting art with nothing.
GEORGE: At Saint Martins,
we were in what was called the advanced sculpture course.
GILBERT: And it was extraordinary.
They only believe in squares and triangles and lines.
GEORGE: Form, angle, a little colour.
GILBERT: And we rejected it in a big way.
Well, I'm now joining this to this, Charlie...
Hmm. ..in exactly in the position it's in.
NARRATOR: Anthony Caro, whose work in teaching had been very influential recently,
one of the first to introduce colour into his sculptures.
I think we believed that formalism was a bore.
No-not an intellectual activity.
We thought it was entirely unintellectual and unemotional.
Meaning was a dirty word.
Lot of sex, death, hope, everything was something wrong with that.
And that was a big inspiration to us.
We knew that the art that the students
and the teachers were creating, if you took it out of Saint Martins
onto the Charing Cross Road, it would have no meaning whatsoever.
Form is the servant of meaning we say.
Form must never be predominant.
We want a human person in front of you expressing himself being alive.
Being alive is part of the art of us.
We even went to see the head of the sculpture department
a year after we left.
The famous sculptor Anthony Caro, explained our new thoughts and
feelings about art and how it should be democratic and how we should try
to create an art which had meaning, uh, and a moral dimension.
And he listened very politely I must say.
And in the end he said, "Well, I hope very much that you won't
succeed, but I rather think you might."
(LAUGHTER)
'Cause he realised that we were threatening
the prominence of formalism.
We wanted to say something
not about art or shapes or design or form but about...
GILBERT: Humanity.
Death. Hope.
Life. Fear.
Sex. Money.
Race. Religion.
It was quite exciting
when Saint Martins School of Art in some ways chucked us out.
We still wanted to be artists.
But we were alone in the streets of London with nowhere to go.
(SIREN WAILS)
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
NARRATOR: London thou art the flower of cities all.
Gem of all joy, jasper of jocundity.
GEORGE: Out of all bad luck, always good luck, comes as we believe,
so that when we left college, most people would say that we
were down on our luck, 'cause we hadn't been the goody goody students
who would get a part time teaching job.
We hadn't been the goody goody students who had applied for a grant for a studio.
We had no money, we were very poor.
But that in a way was the best thing that ever happened to us.
GILBERT: Before we started to make art together,
we used to do a lot of walking.
GEORGE: We were walking the streets,
because we were fascinated
by the tube stations and the railways stations and the police stations.
And the palaces and the pool halls and the nightclubs and all
the amazing invention of the free world and the, of the western world.
GILBERT: I mean, the walk became a sculpture. It became the art.
It was a magic idea to become the object, the visual art.
GEORGE: In, in defiance of everything.Yes.
We decided we don't have to sculpt or paint to do art,
we just can be ourself and journey through life with the pilgrim's progress.
We are confronting drunkenness, we are confronting being too sexy,
we are confronting religion.
We are confronting politics. And we are still doing that.
GEORGE: I think it's probably true to say that it's something that came
over us as a whole idea and thought.
(PENSIVE MUSIC)
We felt the appearance of many artists at that time
and traditionally, historically, alienated huge sections of society.
We didn't want to be the freaky artists with beards
and strange clothes.
We felt we wanted to be, to be normal.
Are you OK? How are you?
Hello. Morning.
(PENSIVE MUSIC)
We tried to sell ourselves.
We went to the ICA (UNCLEAR).
We, we were going to see people
and so we felt we had to dress up.
Double pockets, double pockets, always so.
And lining inside the trousers? Yes, lining inside trousers, yes.
Very good.I don't know what to do with your pockets.
What on earth do you do, razor blades in the... (LAUGHS)
Not telling. (LAUGHS)
GEORGE: Applying for a job, you put on a collar and tie.
GILBERT: And that became our dress code.
I would call it Sunday best. Never identical.
They are identical.
But it was very important,
because we were trying to reach these people.
We started out by applying to every single gallery in London.
Not the good ones, but all of them
to ask if them if they would like to exhibit our art.
And all of them said no.
GILBERT: We'd just left Saint Martins School of Art.
And nobody would touch us in a million year.
GEORGE: We went to every single gallery even the ones we'd never
heard of just to say that we'd been to every gallery.
We presented an idea of our intentions for the future as artists.
And said, you know, we would like to offer an exhibition.
They all said no. And we felt enormously proud,
we thought we really are doing something amazing.
Yeah doing the right thing. Everybody says no.
We were offering them full of different ideas.
We went to the Tate and we said we would like to present
a living sculpture called a Christmas piece where we'd
already organised with the RSPCA to borrow animals.
And we, we would recreate the birth of Jesus in the entrance
of the Tate and we would stand there as two living figures.
It didn't occur to us that, that maybe wasn't very right,
we would be Mary and Joseph in a way.
So of course, uh, again they turned it down.
GILBERT: The only way to reach people was to do postal pieces.
We did a lot of different one, three or 400, uh, postal pieces.
And they all contacted us. They realised art was fee.
They didn't have to pay for it anymore.
It came through the door.
GEORGE: We realised what we wanted to do which was to have a speaking
art to speak directly to the viewer.
To make that human contact and they felt it in that way.
People wrote back and things which was extraordinary.
And then we created the magazine sculpture,
Gilbert the Shit and George the Cunt,
and we felt we should exhibit it somewhere in London before it was published.
We, we had no idea who would like to show it.
We went in to Robert Fraser Gallery and he came up with a-
Yes, we thought it was the longest yes in the world we'd ever heard.
Yessss.
It went on for 15 minutes. It felt it was extraordinary.
He agreed to show the magazine sculpture.
GILBERT: For only three hours.
GEORGE: It was the most famous gallery for pop artists.
(LAUGHTER)
It was, it wouldn't been a gallery for us anyway.
There was no gallery for us in London at that time.
It didn't, didn't exist.
We took the magazine sculpture under- underneath our arm to the gallery.
GILBERT: And that was it.
When we did Gilbert the Shit and George the Cunt,
it was the first time that we confronted our public and humiliated ourselves.
And we realised that is enormous freedom in that.
We are able to free ourself and nobody's able to...
They are not able to attack you after that.
After that, we were able to squeeze into a lot of different places.
But we didn't have a studio.
NARRATOR: Fournier Street.
Built by the Huguenots in 1724.
GILBERT: We first moved into Fournier Street, because it was cheap.
We were told it was the cheapest place in London.
And it was true you could hire any floor of any building.
Whether it was the basement or the attic or the first floor.
They were always £12 a month.
And we could just about afford that.
GILBERT: Not only that, the streets of London, East End of London,
it is yellow light, awesomely magic. (SUNDAY BELLS TOLLING)
And we started to love the street ourself,
because all this 18th century house
and there are some of the most beautiful houses in London probably.
JULIAN: Spitalfields, Shoreditch
was, when they first moved there in 1967,
really, really run-down poor area. I mean it was a slum.
Gilbert and George, they'd both come from working class backgrounds.
So they weren't fearful of living somewhere like that.
You know, as perhaps more middle-class artists probably
would've gone and lived in Chelsea or Kensington.
Gilbert and George were never interested in that.
You know they're just interested in real life.
(PENSIVE MUSIC)
(TRAFFIC AMBIENCE)
This area was derelict for a long time.
People wouldn't come here.
I mean, a lot of people, especially from the city,
they used to open my door and go "Ah."
You know, they really did.
But I didn't care.
You know, people used to say to me, "How do you live here?"
"What do you mean, 'How do I live here?' I love it."
And when I hear people say it was scary, it makes me quite angry.
Spitalfields was a fruit and veg market.
Then opposite, you had the flower market.
All the customers were lovely.
You never had to watch your back ever, ever, ever.
GEORGE: It was very interesting.
For 15 years all the journalists used to say,
"Why don't you move to a nicer part of London?"
And for the last 50 years, they're saying, "Oh it's become too trendy. Isn't it time you moved on?"
So they always wanted us to leave.
I mean, we always felt that it was dangerous, it was rough, it was romantic.
We used to take a taxi. Invariably, the taxi driver in the West End,
if we said we we're going Fournier Street, they would say,
"What do you wanna go there for, guv?"
When they did arrive, they would pull up outside number 12
and look around and say, "When's this lot coming down then?"
Not will it come down, when will it come down.
So it was an exciting part of London to be in.
I was born five minutes from here.
Loved it, loved, I had a lovely upbringing.
1979, my husband and brother came to me and said,
"We want a pub in Commercial Street."
I said, "Well don't look at me. I don't want a pub."
(LAUGHS) Anyway, they said, "Just come and see it."
So I came one lunchtime and I walked in the saloon bar
and fell immediately in love with it.
I didn't know if it was god made me love it, I don't know.
Been in here 45 year.
I knew Gilbert and George were artists, but I used to think
how cool they- They reminded me of my father, because my father
and most East Enders never went out with a whistle or flute.
They always had their suit, shirt and tie.
I love getting up in the morning.
I'm down here no later than six.
Open my doors, you know,
some mornings I have coffee with G&G.
They're so interesting. Even early in the morning.
I think Gilbert and George, although they're not East Enders,
they remind me of East Enders.
They've got that sa- same heart.
There's a photo behind the bar.
That might have been my 50th which was nearly 30 years ago.
One thing about 'em, they never let me down.
If I'm doing something special, they'll always turn up.
(SOLEMN MUSIC)
GEORGE: Well we liked the world.
It was a complete contrast to where we'd grown up.
We liked this dirty, urban, crazy world filled with danger.
(PENSIVE MUSIC)
GILBERT: In 1970, and 80,
all the tramps were walking up and down the street.
GEORGE: There were more tramps than non-tramps
and we felt they had a charm and they had a being.
It was just sort of community in a way these, these lost souls.
None of those people are alive anymore.
And they were replaced by a younger group of similarly
disenfranchised, one could say, and that's the drug addicts.
But they also have their own charm in, in a way.
And they're not, not entirely separate from us, either.
It feels a certain kinship with us.
A month or so ago, we were walking down Whitechapel,
and one was coming along the pavement towards us
looking very tattered and their trousers were torn.
There was some horrible brown blood or something come out of one ear.
And as he came slightly nearer to us he recognised us.
And said, commenting on our art,
he said, (WITH ACCENT) "I like the shit ones best."
We laughed and then we cried. Yeah, us both.
JAY: They work in, in Spitalfields based in Fournier Street.
Brick Lane is around the corner.
They very rarely stray from that environment and their-
of their immediate neighbourhood.
They are able to treat their daily walk as some
kind of pilgrimage to what is going on around them and it's out of the-
whether it's detritus on the streets or graffiti they see on the wall,
or the leaves of the trees around them
that they're able to make their pictures
and they absolutely treasure the rich complexity
of the area and its changing history over the years.
GILBERT: The Corpsing Picture came about because we were walking every
night towards dinner.
And what did we see every single day? Bones.
GEORGE: And we realised it was all because the young people who were heading
for Hoxton or Brick Lane in the evening don't want to have dinner.
They don't want to sit up like a silly grown up.
They hop from pub to club to friend's house.
And so they eat on the run.
Which means they leave bones behind.
But that's not why we made the pictures.
And then when they've all gone home and Brick Lane is closed down,
somebody comes into the district and that is the foxes.
Walking in from Essex. How long does it take 'em?
And they're coming in for the bones.
But that's not why we made the pictures.
And then the foxes have had their dinner
and they go home back to the country.
And the sun comes out
and suddenly huge flocks of seagulls fly in from the coast.
How long does it take 'em to fly in?
And they're coming in for the bones.
But that's not why we made the pictures.
You know, they could've been anywhere.
I mean, their work would've been different, actually,
and they probably would've been different
if they had been in a different neighbourhood of London.
Most of the images in their work are derived from things
that are, you know, in their street or around the corner.
GILBERT: Once we'd opened the door at 12 Fournier Street,
what is in front of us?
Oh, a dead bone on the street.
Oh, a dead leaf on the street. You know.
So it's already s- We don't have to think,
we just look and feel what could be part of our new vision.
The most exciting or second most exciting thing is life is
the creative process.
And that, that for us is extraordinarily thrilling,
slightly sexual, very intellectual, very mental as well.
We are quite excited because it feels really like we are dead
bodies in a basket and that's quite, uh, powerful in some way.
This, uh, going near to death.
With The Corpsing Pictures, a number of people found
that direct engagement with their own mortality quite disturbing,
not provocative, but disturbing.
And their work has often, um, been considered disturbing.
So, I don't think that's too different from other series
that they've made.
But it, it definitely shows that right up into the,
the most recent body of work they're still, um,
finding different ways to transport people.
GEORGE: We were walking the streets of London.
We were wandering near Euston station.
We found the little old shop selling
all of the things that people leave behind in the flat when they leave.
All the unwanted bits and pieces.
And we found a copy of a gramophone record with the title,
Underneath the Arches.
We didn't know what the song was, but we knew what the words meant.
Because we were living in the East End where people
were living underneath the arches.
Damaged people from the First World War, the Second World War.
People damaged by pre-decriminalisation sex laws.
The idea of a complicated extraordinary life
is part of how we make our pictures, how we create our pictures.
And we were amazed by the simplicity
and complicatedness of the song which was very simple.
The words were,
# The Ritz I never sigh for
# The Carlton they can keep
# There is only one place that I know
BOTH: # And that is where I sleep
# Underneath the arches
# I dream my dreams away
# Underneath the arches
# On cobblestone we lay
# Every night you'll find me
(FROM OLD FOOTAGE) # Tired out and worn
# Happy when the daylight
# Comes creeping... #
And there in the moment we thought we'd got it.
We'd got a key to something.
GILBERT: First we only did it for five minutes
then we realise that we could actually do it much longer, no?
To create a, a repetition and to make them to transfix the public
towards the sculpture, no?
We are not able to move, like in a trance.
(INDISTINCT SINGING)
GEORGE: I think people were, were more bemused than anything else.
Living sculptures actually occupy a unique place, uh, in our history
where real life and artistic form somehow converge perhaps into one.
They moved like automata.
They would do it all day and they would do it
whether there was anybody there or not.
I was so fascinated, I used to sneak up the stairs, creep up the stairs,
and look in, and they were indeed doing it to an empty gallery.
They were obsessive.
GILBERT: We did it for eight hours non-stop.
It was extraordinary mental piece of work.
We managed to remove us ourself from the public
by putting on the multi-coloured heads.
It is powders that you put on top of Vaseline, no?
You really become the visual art.
INTERVIEWER: Is every moment of your day art?
Are you sculpturing or sculpting continuously?
More or less, yes.Yes.
You don't take breaks for living at all?
No, the whole living is one bit sculpture.
# There's only one place that I know... #
GILBERT: We didn't need canvases. We didn't need metal.
It was the beginning of the realisation that everything
that come to us could be described of our vision of art.
And that was the biggest success.
BOTH: # Pavement is my pillow
I was very taken by the fact that artists could be the art.
And the very democratic way in which they engaged with their audience.
I found utterly radical.
GEORGE: We thought we were very, very sophisticated to have this
new belief in art having a meaning for people's lives.
Didn't matter where they live in the world, what their education
or religious background, that we can speak to people.
GILBERT: And we had to dry-clean our suits.
(LAUGHS) Because they became the objects.
Very, very slowly become, we became quite known
and was in a big article in the Sunday Times.
We met Konrad Fischer at the ICA. And he came out to us and said,
"You do something with me in Dusseldorf, huh?"
And he was, at the time, the most famous gallery for young artists.
In the world.
So we did the living sculpture in Dusseldorf.
Then later on, we were doing the singing sculpture in Brussels.
At the end of the evening, what we thought was a little old lady,
came up to us and said, "My name is Ileana Sonnabend and I'm opening
a gallery in New York and I want you to be the first exhibition."
And that was the most famous North American modern gallery
for our generation.
We took the singing sculpture to New York.
And that Saturday was the first time
it opened in the downtown disreputable district.
And all, all the people had walked down to this
amazing new gallery district.
Their first show in New York was a tremendous success.
There were people coming in and it was so crowded.
Uh... (LAUGHS) And um...
you know everybody was singing the song in the street even.
(LAUGHS)
GEORGE: Warhol was there. All of the American artists were very friendly.
All came up and invited us for lunch or for dinner or for drinks.
GILBERT: Rauschenberg actually cooked for us.
And he was a very good cook.
INTERVIEWER: Obviously repetition is key.GILBERT: Oh, yes.GEORGE: Yes.
Are you aware of communication between yourselves
and the onlookers?Oh, yes.
Oh yes. Uh, quite a lot of communication.
(LAUGHS)A lot- (LAUGHS)
Konrad Fischer said, do something to leave behind in my art gallery
because the living sculpture you couldn't leave behind.
So we started to do these big drawings.
We tried to make the drawings like they already existed, huh.
They looked like 200 to 300 years old, no.
But still us in it.
The first sculpture we did was called, "Walking, Viewing, Relaxing."
And that was because we knew how to walk,
we knew how to view and we knew how to relax.
Yeah, so we put up these three drawings in a gallery
and at the end of the evening Konrad Fischer said to us, "I've sold them all.
£1,000."
We, we only set the sum of £1,000,
'cause it was the largest sum we could think of.(LAUGHS)
Because, obviously, nobody's going to buy it,
so it might as well have a grand price, but he did sell it. Extraordinary.
That's it, and for the first time in our life we had money.
(GLASSES CLINKING)
Then we began the drinking sculptures immediately.Day and night.
(SLURRING) This is a lot of bloody bollocks. (LAUGHS)
(SLURRING) He's just a silly old queen.
Everything was going on at the same time.
We had a show in New York.
In Tokyo, Germany.
Italy, Brussel.
So we were global artists.
We took over the whole Hayward Gallery.
I don't know how happy the other artists were, but anyway.
There were two huge charcoal-on-paper sculptures,
the showpiece one and the showpiece two.
We had to borrow a studio somewhere to do them, I think.
They were an enormous task to do. It was quite exciting.
We managed to create an amazing atmosphere and was in the jungle.
We never wanted to go near the other artists.
We felt they, they did a different kind of art,
so we kept ourself to ourself.
And I think that was the success. Yes.
So we didn't feel the nagging that was going around us.
NARRATOR: George and Gilbert or Gilbert and George.
Their presence attracts large crowds to the art gallery of New South Wales.
GILBERT: We were taken up by a lot of these galleries.
We thought we are it. We are doing whatever we want
because our life was the most important part of our art, no.
We are speaking different than the other artists.
They tried to claim us, but we are outsiders.
GEORGE: We still feel that every day.
We feel never part of the world out there.
We made ourself different.
Artists have to be outsiders.
Gilbert and George have been incredibly
conscious of trying to maintain that position.
It's about them, you know, and their vision.
It's almost kind of monk-like, I always think,
just cutting yourself off really from all of that
kind of rubbish that we have to do in our lives. (LAUGHS)
(PENSIVE MUSIC)
(TRAFFIC AMBIENCE)
(CHILDREN CHATTERING)
GEORGE: I think becoming artists in London we felt we had to get rid
of a lot of things and those things were mostly to do with nature.
(BIRDS CHIRPING)
As we're both country bumpkins, we only knew how to express
ourselves through branches and roots and trees and landscapes.
And we wanted to lose all of that.
And we were very nervous that people loved the charcoal-on-paper
sculptures for what they were physically.
They adore this big sheets of crinkly paper.
And we felt that they weren't listening or looking to see
what the art works were actually saying to them.
GILBERT: We wanted to go away from art made with a pencil or a brush.
We wanted to get ready for our first titled pictures and then the dirty
words pictures where we would lose all trace of contact with nature.
We are interested a way of making art that is only
the power of the image is important, not the material.
The material is cheap only, the message is important.
Even how to make art was different.
Nobody did photographic images to make them speak like modern art.
They did all painting, express themselves with paint
and we never wanted that.
We thought, we are able to speak much better with this new form of image.
Gilbert and George use photography
because they'd feel there's no sort of moral superiority
in oil on canvas and that, if you like, the most efficient way
of making pictures, depicting the world, is a photograph.
Of course, uh, photography does this incredibly well and they,
if you like, use photography on a very, very grand scale
to make great paintings.
GEORGE: We always used the term "negative"
describing the base of our pictures, because we don't take photographs, we take a negative.
When you press the button on the camera, you are creating a negative.
We don't know what we're doing when we start making our pictures.
We don't even want to know.
We don't have an idea what to do.
We only have some kind of dream that is taking over.
We believe in other forces outside of ourselves.
And a force of culture within the person of, of all the books
we've read or haven't read, all the movies we've seen or haven't seen.
All of life's experience which we have or not experienced.
And they have to play into the moment when we make that picture.
But the Dirty Words, we were able to do a different kind of art.
But everything was there ready for those kind of pictures.
(BROODING SYNTHETIC MUSIC)
We don't look for it, it's just in front of us.
Every subject. We never search for it, it's just there.
Queer, shit, cunt. Bastard, cunt.
The dirty words, if you look back,
they create this extraordinary feeling of the anarchy that was
going on in England.
And this aggression that was inside a lot of people.
And we didn't write those words on the walls.
We don't swear.
And, and so we were able to create this, uh, subconscious
landscape that is very, very, very powerful and is of that time.
We just went all over finding all the single words
that led the way into the rest of the subject matter.
And we saw these big parties going on at Notting Hill Carnival.
We came back and created, uh, Dirty Word.
(PENSIVE MUSIC)
Amazing to see it after all this time.
That's Commercial Street there. Near the top of Fournier Street.
It's the gents lavatories there.
It's very good, because we created this immediate atmosphere, no?
This gloomy atmosphere.
At that time, they were done faster than now.
The new pieces are more complex to make.
I remember when we created the Dirty Words pictures,
all of our friends and supporters thought that we'd gone over the top.
That we were being childish.
Why would you make works, works of art with just dirty words in.
And then the years rolled on and we had the idea to-
We showed them all together in the Serpentine Gallery.
27 pictures.
All together for the first time.
Many of the people who had been against the pictures were there
saying, "It's marvellous.
Absolutely won- It's extraordinary. Wonderful."
I said, "But don't you remember you were a little bit
suspicious of-" "Oh, no, no, we've always loved them."
Which was very good, 'cause it proves what we always believed,
that the pictures stay the same
and the world changes to accommodate them.
I think we used the word "queer" for the Dirty Words pictures,
because it was one of the words you can find written on walls.
It was just another of those words.
We never felt the divisionism of that time where people
thought of gay and straight.
We just thought life is complicated and marvellous
and you don't have to settle down to one particular ideology in that way.
GILBERT: It was provocative.
And we wanted to bring it forward, open it up in front of people
and make it actually an artwork out of it.
Provocative yes, but it's also true that people often tell us
about how important a picture from that time was for them
for some personal reason.
So w-we had all this critics and all the people against us.
They wouldn't go near our art.
Mostly here in England.
Cunt and queer.
These were words that were completely taboo
and still are to some extent.
So the Dirty Words pictures were incredibly controversial,
and the art world, the art critics
were really hostile to Gilbert and George.
(PENSIVE MUSIC)
GILBERT: In the end we managed to succeed.
GEORGE: We've had a lot of help from our enemies.
They're still around.
Intolerance towards art and artists and writers and thinkers
and musicians and poets has always been there, yeah.
If you try to write an unusual poem, you'll find
people have a problem with it immediately. Immediately.
The whole history of culture is written with opposition.
There were quite a lot of people against us when we did all this art.
How many great books took three years to get it through to the publishers?
They were never quite sure of it.
Some of the greatest books of all time.
They were all critical in some way, because it was something new.
We are doing an art that visually how it looked like and what we're
saying the art is part of us being human.
We always believed that art or culture is thinking about what
we're going to do with the rest of our lives.
People read books, listen to music,
read poetry to decide how tomorrow will be.
And we think that our form is culture.
The great force of culture of the free world.
And they are going into our exhibitions to look what
they feel, uh, in front of one of our pictures.
Are thy pro, are they against, do they leave, don't they leave?
But any work it is a revolution in the- in art, in some way.
Even if they say, "What the hell am I supposed to think?"
That's already a very good start.
Their exhibitions, I mean, it's like breath-taking.
My husband didn't like going to these exhibitions
and I took him once to the Tate.
He went, "They're geniuses.
I'm gonna come more often with ya."
I mean, it brought him into art.
Gilbert and George, they're like ordinary people. But they're not.
GEORGE: We wrote this text.
We want our art to bring out the bigot from inside the liberal
and conversely, to bring out the liberal from inside the bigot.
GILBERT: We didn't go in the city to take images.
We did our images here around Brick Lane.
GEORGE: I think we just wanted young people in the pictures.
They used to walk up and down Fournier Street,
so we just went out and asked them
if they would like to be photographed.
We weren't thinking politically or do with pop music or culture.
Not at all. Just other young people.
We had a problem because of the so-called liberal left,
were quite anti-us. I don't know why.
When they wrote in the newspapers,
said this was a racist picture we had to telephone in to say,
"Did you realise that the person in the middle is obviously
an Asian person with long hair and bell-bottomed trousers?"
We said, "Would you mind getting a copy of it and would you look?
I'll hang on the line."
They were extremely embarrassed and they just said one of them
was an Asian, another one was quite obviously a tramp, yeah?
One maybe you could say was a skinhead, just.
They complaining like we called all these ordinary people "Four Knights"
and they were all anti that.
I have no idea why, because they were just lower class boys.
They look aggressive, no, because they are black and white and red.
They are forceful images
of living experiences that we had around here.
We think the misunderstand is a problem of class.
Because there were these middle class people writing reviews
in posh newspapers saying why are Gilbert and George using these yobs,
these young East End thugs?
Well, we weren't using yobs or East End thugs.
We were using human persons.
We don't believe that every person
who doesn't have such a good education as that reviewer
should immediately be branded as something inferior.
The liberal establishment if you like of the art world,
uh, just found them too much.
They weren't acceptable and I think that was, um,
a challenge for Gilbert and George.
But also they recognised the importance of breaking down
this very stifling, cliquey, nepotistic world
of art criticism and the art world.
(COUNTDOWN BEEPING)
We had to find our own visual language and that has evolved
together with the meanings as our concerns change and evolve.
So really, our pictures as a whole are not a stylistic development,
they're a human development and evolution of a life.
You can imagine at that time that any art that addressed
the vast general public was regarded as an embarrassment almost.
It had to be just for the elite few.
We are trying to make art that we can take out in the street
not for the specialised people, for every taxi driver, for, uh,
every drug addict.
The process of making them was, yeah, immensely complicated.
It was all hand done.
Gilbert and George were very clever in sort of developing this
way of working where everything is cut into these manageable squares.
GEORGE: It's a kind of discipline.
We can't compose the picture entirely as we want,
because of the grids and, and we rather like that.
GILBERT: And it is our signature in some way.
People can realise it's one of our pictures even a mile away
without seeing the subject.
We're not trained as picture makers,
so we started it with just black and white,
because the negative is black and white.
We had to teach ourself how to make them.
There was no system out there.
So we invented ways of making art.
First we take images.
For three or four months, we take images that speak to us
and our time, hmm?
And then we're making a composition
and a design how the picture should be.
And they're just layers.
When we were actually making the pictures,
all of the panels were blank.
We just put one image on top of each other until it is finished, no?
So having shot the first image in
and actually printed that on to it although we can't see it,
the paper will still be white.
We have to make a positive image of that figure to put over it
in order to expose the next subject next to it.
We had to project it on the wall.
All in bits, one, two, three, four, five.
Like 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 layers on top of each other.
We were like one year in the darkroom day and night.
It was very, very complicated.
Yes, we had to be very straight. (LAUGHS)
You had to be, you know, top and bottom and left and right.
And be very strict.
And after even the colouration was all done separate, no?
But the end result was always the most important part of it.
We start with the palest colour first.
Yes, and so what is not going to have that colour
is going to be protected with this gum that we are painting on.
So the main figure could be flesh colour and this would remain white.
We go through all the colours and one day they're all finished.
Unlike children or artists or amateur painters,
we didn't start with a box of crayons or coloured pencils.
We didn't have any colour. We had a black-
Black and white. Black and white.
Yeah, and it took us four years to find red.
Because it felt that it was connected with anger,
to do with love, to do with blood, to do with danger,
to do with communism, to do with fear.
And we felt we could use red in different ways
to add to the black and white.
In 1980, we started to have these four, five different colours.
Now blue, yellow and green.
Our colours are based on the meanings,
like we always used to say the yellow had a sophistication.
And like red is anger more and blue is more,
I don't know like, eternity.
We had this amazing piece in the Tate Britain.
Drunk with God.
And not a lot of artists have done pictures on the subject of God, have they?
We like to include religion in the pictures and church and faith.
Not to be the superior artists who don't bother with that.
Even when I've been running away from religion for five years.
(LAUGHS)
I mean, I was brought up a Catholic, no?
And it took me a long time to get rid of it.
Art school did a good job for me. (LAUGHS)
To get rid of that.
I like to be free.
We just didn't want to be the sophisticated atheist common
blind modern artist.
It'd be silly to pretend that there's no such thing as god
and no such thing as an afterlife
when there are so many people talking about it
and writing books and movies and poems about it.
It would be daft to ignore that.
All the church are standing in front of you every single day
if you like it or not, hmm?
We all come out of an amazing tradition.
We would say ourselves that we're probably
Greco Romano Judeo Christian,
spiritualistic, voodoo secularists roughly speaking.
But that's all part of the amazing group of people and feelings.
I see them as being in a tradition of art which
deals with important human concerns.
It's disturbing.
And I happen to hold the view that one of the functions of art
is to disturb.
Certainly, I think their art touches often on deep psychological elements.
Human beings are religious creatures.
They have always invented religions for themselves.
They need to worship something. It's very fundamental.
And if an artist can successfully connect his art to
this religious impulse, then he makes his art more powerful.
GEORGE: We all said the new world was not created by the policemen,
it wasn't created by the vicar,
it was created by the music and the novels
and the pictures and the theatre and the ballet and the opera.
They made us safe and free.
We wouldn't say that our art is our religion,
because we believe that religion is the enemy.
The vicar has been the enemy.
Art has been uninvolved in, uh, depicting God for 1,000 years.
Collaborators...Yes. ..we call them.
(RHYTHMIC BEATS)
When we did the banners, uh, one of them said ban religion.
Then there was a mysterious knock at our front door.
And there was an elderly clergyman and he said,
"I'm awfully sorry to trouble you.
I don't want to disturb you or intrude in any way.
I just want to tell you I saw that thing you, you- ban religion, is it?
I think it's marvellous, absolutely marvellous."
We thanked him and we said perhaps he could tell us a little why he was so pleased for it.
He said, "Oh it's really simple," he said.
"I have my congregation, it's nearly 40 years now.
All very nice people.
The thing is they come to church on Sunday 'cause they're all religious
and I don't really want them to be religious.
I want them to be good."
(PENSIVE MUSIC)
(TRAFFIC AMBIENCE)
(SIREN WAILS)
You knew everyone in Brick Lane.
Brick Lane was all Indians, you knew everyone down there.
I was going to get my husband's curry. I don't eat curry.
And, you know, I used to sit on the chair
and I'd have a glass of champagne.
Eat a whole box of After Eights while I was waiting for Den's curry.
GEORGE: When we moved there first, it was Yiddish speaking.
Some Polish speaking, Russian speaking.
Then it became Maltese,
then it became Somali, then the Bangladeshi and now it's city boys.
We've seen them, the synagogue turn into a mosque.
We've seen the Jewish off licence turn into a Hindi music centre.
We even see the gents public lavatories on Whitechapel
turn into an Indian restaurant.
Some young, young friends were recommending it to us.
They said it's very good food and the service is fantastic.
And it's eat in or take away. I said it always was. (LAUGHTER)
(DISCO MUSIC)
It was exciting time to be in London
and to be gay in London in the early 1980s.
There was a, you know,
a real sense that there were you know there was a kind of movement
happening and things were opening up.
It was also a very, very small world.
Everybody kind of knew each other.
David Robilliard was this, uh,
amazing kind of, um, hyper poet.
I am angry.
David was in our film, The World With Gilbert And George.
I am angry.
David says, "I am angry, I am angry."I am angry.
We told him he must smile at the same time.
I am angry.
One night in the London Apprentice he said to me,
"Oh, would you like to do some modelling
for these artists, Gilbert and George?"
Who I didn't know a great deal about.
I did, had heard of them.
Um, but I didn't know much about them.
So I thought, well, yeah sure.
I was a student at the time and I think, you know,
it was £20 was being offered.
Gilbert and George were doing these huge big pictures with
maybe 15, 20 young men.
So, um, yeah, they needed lots of people to come and model for them.
So they had quite a system going, you know.
We wanted to fill the picture with young people.
So we put one, two, three, four, five, six, seven in the picture
and we thought that's not enough.
We want some more, if we have more in front,
then we'll hide them, so we'll have them kneeling down.
And they can still see.
That wasn't enough so we put one, two, three, four, five,
six in the sky.
So it's loaded down with youth and hope.
I went into the studio at the back of Gilbert and George's house
and I met them.
Then they took lots of photos and we chatted.
I was a film student just graduating, I think,
from the Royal College of Art
and, uh, while they were taking pictures,
just sort of said to them, "Well, seeing as you've photographed me,
how about I film you?"
After I'd done the modelling, there was an opening of a-
of the exhibition and there was a huge great big picture entitled
"See", which, um, I was really quite sort of overwhelmed by.
Gilbert and George lying at my feet
and these two big eyes and being called See
seemed so kind of appropriate
seeing as I had by that point already embarked on
potentially making a film about them.
But I never had a kind of end date or a, you know,
it wasn't a sort of commissioned film or anything.
So, I was just scrabbling together to get whatever money I could
with my little camera (LAUGHS) to film what I could, you know.
And it just went on like that for 17 years.
I am Gilbert.
And I am George.
We are...
Gilbert.And George.
I was just very happy to listen to them, really.
In a way, I didn't really want the film to come to an end, actually. (LAUGHS)
GILBERT: And then AIDS came along.
NARRATOR: AIDS is new, and at the present rate of progress,
there are ten times as many men with AIDS every two years.
GILBERT: A lot of our friends died.
GEORGE: We were surrounded by young, younger friends
who were diagnosed with AIDS.
David, David Robilliard...
..and Andrew Heard,
who was an artist just started to make his own pictures.
GEORGE: When I filmed "The World of Gilbert and George,"
Andrew says repeatedly, "I am a young man, I am a young man."
I am a young man.
And of course he always was a young man, he never will be anything else.
So many in New York died, so many people in Europe.
Was a, a huge nightmare, and a living nightmare.
They were there and they were not there.
Gilbert and George wanted to do their bit
in terms of raising money to help people.
So they did the For AIDS show in 1989
where all the proceeds went to an AIDS charity.
It was quite a big exhibition, big show.
GILBERT: We had this idea maybe we could make a group of pictures.
GEORGE: Something.
Something towards trying to find a cure.
And we even arranged a big dinner and the whole art world...
GEORGE: Came in from all, all over the world for it.
GILBERT: In 1975 to 1980, 85, we did many pieces to do with death.
Death, Hope, Life, Fear and Death Phase and Body Life.
Dead Heads. Dead Head, Dead Bored.
But when they started to die, we stopped.
We never mentioned that word again, in fact.
I think it is very, very clear in our pictures without having
to be spelt out as it used to be.
We think even the New Horny pictures we did
are like huge Lutyen cemeteries on the Somme or something.
All of those boys advertising the magazines.
It is like tombstones, the age and there were a little story what they did.
One day all of them will be dead and then it will be like a huge memorial to those people.
GEORGE: A lot of people think that we create an art
in the East End of London
and maybe it's a little bit to do with the East End of London
or we're artists like we are, because of the East End of London.
But when we wake up in the morning,
we always feel we wake up in the world.
I never feel we wake up in Spitalfields or wake up in Fournier Street.
We always feel that we're in the world every single moment.
We get up in the mornings and buy a newspaper.
And before going for dinner, we watch the television news.
And we have a very clear feeling
of the world turning beneath our feet around.
And the the pain with which it turns
and the joy with which it turns as well.
And all, all of that is what we're thinking, feeling, hoping,
dreading, loving about.
They were organising a big exhibition in Moscow.
It was a real coup to get this agreed by the Russian authorities
and to have got the main kind of art gallery in Moscow
to host the exhibition.
The motto was always, "art for all,"
so we thought let's try out Moscow, test our theory.
We spent nearly all our money doing it.
It was a real adventure to drop this big shows
in the middle of a communist country, hmm?
Russia was nearly totally collapsing,
the old system was collapsing, so they were very poor.
We had to take everything to Russia.
The nails, the food, the champagne for the party.
And the paint for the walls and was extraordinary.
The British consul tried to stop the exhibition
and I think they had other ideas, other abstract more middle
class ideas of how Britain should be represented.
They were just really wanting to take their work to this whole
new audience,
who had hardly seen contemporary Western art,
let alone Gilbert and George's work.
Russia was amazing success.
You don't have to be an art expert to see our pictures.
We want them just to be able to feel them,
to feel the emotion of that picture and that's it.
From this experience we realised that we can go
anywhere in the world.
And preach our idea of art.
I said to Gilbert and George,
you know where would you like to go next?
China, it has to be China.
The totally unknown country that must be a dream.
When we went to Beijing they already had people who copied us, no,
doing living sculptures all over the place.
Young people coming up to us
with blood running down their heads saying, "I am living sculpture."
Hand in hand on the Great Wall. It's amazing.
(LAUGHS)
They made us walk up the steps of the Great Wall of China.
Oops. (LAUGHS)
(LAUGHING)
You want to do it. It's the feeling of skiing.
We, as unhappy artists, are very happy to be able to hold
an exhibition of our pictures in China.
Our art fights for love and tolerance
and in universal elaboration of the individual.
In Beijing, when Gilbert and George arrived
they get mobbed by people wanting, uh, their autographs.
Even to the case where they have to call in two security art police to protect them.
GEORGE: We were literally mobbed. We had to be rescued from the crowd.
GILBERT: Because they never saw something like that before.
They have developed a poetry, a visual language which can
speak across cultures, can speak to anybody.
(IN CHINESE)
Say "when".
GILBERT: China was in some way more liberal, more open and more modern.
It took an enormous amount of money to put on these shows
which wasn't paid for by the British government or the Chinese government
or the Arts Council.
It was hundreds of thousands of pounds to ship all the work
out there, ship all the catalogues of the show to sell very cheaply,
so that ordinary Chinese people could afford to buy a catalogue.
A catalogue is ten yuan, it was equivalent to a pound
and it probably cost you know eight times that much to print.
GILBERT: Our art is human.
It speaks to people, it's not abstract,
it's a humanity inside our art in a big way.
INTERVIEWER: So does the viewer complete the artwork?
Yes I think that's very important. (TALKING OVER EACH OTHER)
GEORGE: We all said that our definition was
the friendship that is formed between the viewer and the art.
Amongst the naked shit pictures,
the most recent group of pictures we made there's one called
Bumholes which is a portrait of ourselves we've taken from the back.
And that's the favourite picture of ladies.All the ladies
Isn't that interesting? It's because they feel-
Enormous support for that picture from ladies.
And, uh, they told us b- why because they,
they feel vulnerable like we feel vulnerable.
GEORGE: For many, many years, we've always responded to people who
say that we set out to shock.
We always said we never wanted to shock.
As artists, our job is to de-shock.
I think we've de-shocked a lot.
GILBERT: Like nakedness. Why is it shocking?
When you did the Naked Shit pictures,
when you appeared in them naked, was that difficult to do?
Of course. The same as it would be for anybody else.
Yes, it was quite difficult.
Try it. (LAUGHS)
Everyone knows how vulnerable life is,
how delicate everything is.
And a lot of people saw it in that way.
For them to expose themselves, and really to kind of be their age
and to show their bodies, it's something actually quite tender.
And I expected it to be more brutal.
MAN: David Sylvester, I think, regarded rightly as the greatest
of the art critics, he once said, most artists this century
have tried to do naked and have only succeeded in doing nude.
Gilbert and George have done naked.
GEORGE: Yes it was very perceptive of David.
'Cause very few people realised it, and I think we did an art
that the viewer felt they could trust us, that we
weren't looking down at the viewer, that it was an experience together.
They've always wanted to challenge people, they want people to think.
They like to sort of push things,
and poke and prod.
But not to the point where people will turn away.
Or be terribly offended, so that they just won't engage.
Because obviously that was- it would be self-defeating.
GEORGE: It was in the South London gallery.
It wasn't in the Hayward, it wasn't in the Serpentine,
it wasn't in the Tate.
It was a gallery that had two or three visitors a day
until the Naked Shit pictures arrived.
GILBERT: It was like, 1,000 people a day.
Can you imagine getting 1,000 people a day down there?
Out of the blue?
The Naked Shit pictures,
if they were shown today, would still create quite a stir.
They're tackling an aspect of life which is very rarely tackled.
Notin a crude way, in a very delicate way.
We think they're extraordinary pictures.
It's just classic Gilbert and George really just stick them up there,
huge larger than life turds.
And, um, make them into somehow these beautiful things.
You know, um... (LAUGHS)
GEORGE: We think that the subject matter that we took,
we were able to go deeper inside a humanistic idea.
We can become closer to the viewer on different levels.
He or she will be shitting at some point during that day.
They will be going to the lavatory.
They will be conscious of illness, they will be conscious of blood.
Everyone is.
Everyone sees it in the newspapers in their life,
in their bedrooms, in their bathrooms, and we can get closer
to the person on a human level by extending the range of contact.
Yes, and we did do it before in...Always.
In '75, we did, uh, this piece called "Coming"
and we did this piece called "Shitted" and a lot of other pieces.
But I think this time we were able to make some visually
very beautiful, and even through the blood piece that we did in the
Four Eight's piece, we realised that all this fluid
that are part of us, no, if you start to look through them,
you see the most beautiful- the most beautiful life is in front of you.
This is the formula for shit brown that we made in '74...
Yes, it took us one day to-
One whole day to get the right- The right colour.
We used to call it George Michael shit, no?
George Michael's arse brown, we called it.
Glistening highlights.
Part of their, their thing really is bringing out these things that-
that nobody el- nobody looks at, the stuff that's ignored or forgotten or despised.
And they sort of bring these things to the fore
and put them on these huge grand beautiful amazing colourful pictures
and they somehow transform this detritus of society into
being kind of amazing beautiful sayings.
There's something very magical in that process.
GEORGE: Blood, tears, spunk, piss. GILBERT: Yeah.
We used to take images of the drops of rain on the cars
outside our house on Fournier Street 'cause you could see
the world in every single drop if you look very closely.
And then we thought we should take some images of that same
rainwater to see if there's anything in there with the microscope.
Which lens is that on now? Number two. Let's try number three.
And then there's nothing in there of course.
So we thought we would try piss.
Which is as blank as rainwater here.
But just before we ended,
we switched the microscope off, 'cause it has an electrical thing.
We shouldn't leave it on, so we went down to switch it off and to see
whether it was still on, we looked through the lens
and there as a magical crazy garden...
..in the piss.
And we found out every single drop of piss was different.
Every day it was different.
There was a whole crazy w- world of shapes and things.
It crystallised itself into an amazing world.
And we were so very fascinated by that.
Like the ones on the, on the cards outside showed the church
and the streets, this showed another world.
Yeah.
Then we started to try it with blood, tears, spunk, piss.
Yeah.
Sweat, and we were very excited to find they all had shapes,
shapes and meanings and content.
I think we took four months, no, we were just doing that.
Nonstop every single day. Mad about it.
Yes. And then we did all the, the pictures.
"Blood, Tears, Spunk, Piss" is one of the big quadropart of the pictures.
Can you imagine the galleries?
Behind it they were all terrified, no?
Now remember Ileana Sonnabend looked at it,
"Oh, my God, what are they coming with now?"
Not entirely relaxed about everything.Yeah.
Something that Gilbert and George said to me
is about the microcosm and the macrocosm.
You know, the tiny little thing that happens, you know,
is symbolic of the much bigger thing.
So these tiny kind of microscopic cells that they were looking at can
give meaning to, you know, much bigger sort of global things.
GEORGE: To make a picture which actually speaks like personal things
there is a human cost for the artist.
The artist has to be damaged in some way.
Uh, little brain damage or a little emotionally damaged,
but there is a cost.
The greatest arrangement on the planet is two people.
GILBERT: Can you imagine being alone in the studio?
We've done pictures which would be too scary for one person to do.
We are always making a difficult art that is very personal in some way.
That's why a lot of collectors have big problem to buy it,
because it's too personal and too difficult.
But it's a journey that is our personal journey.
Our art is always- has always been very personal.
We think that we developed a way of making pictures that needs
two people, really.Oh, yes.
It'd be very difficult for a person to make pictures like this.
Both, both from the physical point of view,
even from the emotional point of view, it'd be very difficult.
We don't argue, but even if we did, we wouldn't tell you about it.
We do know that we would, if we would start to argue
everything would fall apart very fast.
Because it's based on accepting the two.
The view of two people together. If not you are finished immediately.
We don't trust the idea of a happy artist.
No- nobody would really trust the idea of that.
As an artist who likes life and likes art
and likes being artistic and has artistic friends.
We celebrate life but we like to be able to realise that there's
nothing in the world that is not also inside of you or us or anybody.
Any horror in the world, we're also capable of.
But I do believe that we went through unbelievable difficult pain.
That's why we are not able to remember anything.
We are able to remember very, very little because it feels like
an enormous mad cloud of- full of dark and all crazy stuff.
GILBERT: It feels we are not aware of this mad schizophrenia that
went on for 40 years now.
It's extraordinary. I really believe never conscious.
GEORGE: We've always created pictures which are slightly self-destructive
we would say.
That we believe in being disturbed.
We always said 10, 20 years ago that we were the most disturbed people we ever met.
Always next day maybe it's going to be a better day.
That's what we were always, our motto is always next day.
INTERVIEWER: You've now shown in most, if not all the major museums
in the world, and you're representing, at the moment,
Britain in the pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Does that mean, in a way, you've become pillars of the establishment?
GILBERT: We never feel we are accepted. Never get that.
We know we are not.
That's why we are fighting every single day, every hour
towards acceptance.
What's your biggest hope?
We hope for better recognition.
Well, if the Venice Biennale isn't recognition, I don't know what is.
GEORGE: I think there's a huge division between the establishment
and the art profession and the vast general public in the world.
I think we're much more accepted in the vast general public,
even now the show in Venice is on.
I'm sure the knives will be out in the press for certain, for certain.
We know which newspapers will be completely against.
English artists have to be Tate Britain
and modern artists are at Tate Modern.
40 years, we have been campaigning to be international modern artist.
We don't have to be provincial artist going down to Tate Britain.
This is the first exhibition to occupy the whole of level four,
and of course it's the first exhibition ever
at Tate Modern of a British artist.
(TRAFFIC AMBIENCE)
When we started the new way of making pictures was in 2000
when we started to use computers.
For years, young people had been coming to our openings or
exhibitions saying, "What computer are you using?"
They assume we were using one already.
We did it manually, layers after layers.
So it was a seamless move over to the new technique.
It was almost like, you know, photoshop had been
sort of designed around what they had been doing previously.
It was very natural for them.
This is our favourite title, "Bed Wetting".
In folklore, the children are told not to touch dandelions,
because they would become bedwetting, yeah.
Some people think we must miss the romance of the dark room
and the chemicals and the smells.
We say not at all.
The only thing we miss is a rubber glove.
(LAUGHS)
They haven't wavered from, um,
the formal aspects of their style of picture making and that's
been a key to their success over the course of the last nearly 60 years.
I think the audience for art is,
is the biggest change that we feel every day.
Never did so many people know about art and artists as now.
It is extraordinary over the last 50 years.
Everybody knows what an artist is, who an artist is.
The life of an artist is very important to lots and lots of people.
We always feel we want our picture to be seen.
We were looking for finding a space where
we could make a kind of gallery.
This place came available and we bought it.
We were very pleased.
The luck of the world to, to find somewhere so near to where we live.
Wherever we walk, in London or Paris, always a young person stops us
and says, "I love your art."
And we say, "Which exhibition?" "Oh, I've never seen an exhibition."
They've always seen a catalogue or a book or a television programme
or something else, so the idea that you can be in front of the picture
is very, very important.
People come from different countries, travel over to see it
from different walks of life.
It is very much an artform experience.
And it works, it works very, very well.
We're very, very pleased.
It's very nice and it's off Brick Lane, it's on a cobbled street.
Then a little entrance through into the gallery.
So they can walk in. Then, "Wow."
We can show groups of pictures.
One group, two groups or three groups.Room for three group.
And it is, it's not overwhelming.
The legacy is secure and rightly positioned
in the very geography where so much of their art making has taken place
and so much of the work has been drawn from inspiration.
It's lucky for all of us, it's incredible.
People that don't know I'm friendly with 'em.
They come in here and they go, "Oh aren't you lucky.
You live near Gilbert and George.
Look at their centre that we've just been."
It really is incredible.
GEORGE: I think we're enjoying the success.
GILBERT: I think seeing people going in and out of the foundation
is success for us.
Because, uh, we can see they want to see our art.
They want see our vision.
We started to see all these leaf that could be human in some way, no?
And making into a jungle of paradise.
The paradisical pictures are dealing with paradise,
or maybe paradise on earth.
AUTOMATED VOICE: 'Doors opening.'
It's perhaps not surprising that people of their age are going to
think about their own mortality
and, uh, what happens after they leave this world.
We rather think that the pictures are not, you know, imaginary picture
of paradise, 'cause we're not such damned fools to think
there is such a place, but rather we're very conscious.
Every day, people talking about the afterlife and the other world.
The promising of a ever-lasting life to everyone.
So the pictures are about what people have said and thought
and continue to think about the next world rather than
an actual, imaginary, damn silly place.
We do believe in the afterlife, in that you can walk anywhere in
the world and stop a complete stranger in the street
and say, "Vincent Van Gogh."
Whether they've seen a show,
or seen a book or not, something will come into their mind.
If you say, "Charles Dickens. Elvis Presley."
And that is the force of culture. The greatest living force ever.
What is exciting is that we are here.
But to go over 80 and we're still able to make our art,
our vision is still there.
We never lost our vision because the vision was based on us,
our journeys through life.
This amazing journey of us is like pilgrim's progress.
Confronting life, no?
Confronting life every day.
It is amazing life experience that we have together.
And we were able to describe it through our art.
We always want to be positive in making it.
It's very important to us that we are living it
and the force of making it, because life after all,
there is nothing better than being alive.
I don't know how it is being dead, but anyways.
Being alive, it's extraordinary for us.
Our earliest ambition was to win and be loved
and it's probably still true.
We didn't care what they said about us.
OK, we disliked it, but we went on to do exactly what we wanted.
We still feel separate from normal life.
I think, in the end, it was very simple.
We did our art and that was it.
GEORGE: Oh art, what are you?
You are so strong and powerful, so beautiful and moving.
You make us walk around and around, pacing the city at all hours.
In and out of our art for all room.
We really do love you and we really do hate you.
Why do you have so many faces and voices?
You make us thirst for you
and then to run from you,
escaping completely into a normal life.
Getting up, having breakfast, going to the workshop
and being sure of putting our mind
and energy into the making of a door or maybe a simple table and chair.
The whole life would surely be so easeful,
so drunk with the normality of work.
And yet, art, there is not going back.
All roads go only on and on.
We're happy for the good times that you give us
and we work and wait only for these titbits from your table.
If you only knew how much these mean to us,
transporting us from the depths of tragedy and black despair
to a beautiful life of happiness, taking us where the good times are.
One day we thought we saw you, art.
It was in a crowded street.
You were dressed in a light brown suit, white shirt
and a curious blue tie.
You looked very smart,
but there was about your dress a curious wornness and dryness.
You were walking alone, light of step and in a very controlled sense.
We were fascinated by the lightness of your face,
your almost colourless eyes and your dusty blond hair.
We approach you nervously.
And then, just as we neared you, you went out of sight for a second.
And then we could not find you again.
We felt sad and unlucky. At the same time, happy and hopeful
to have seen your reality.
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