One highlight of my east coast tour was a visit to the Brooklyn Museum expressly to see the Gilbert & George exhibit.
Jeffrey Yamaguchi of 52 Projects has some great pictures from Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum. Additionally, on the Brooklyn Museum's website there is a video of Tim Marlow interviewing Gilbert & George at Target First Saturday on October 4, 2008. There is also a video of a conversation with the artists Gilbert & George and Brooklyn Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman at the Members Preview and Reception held on October 2, 2008.
To the extent I knew anything about Gilbert & George before walking into this exhibit, I thought of them as well-dressed performance artists. They call themselves living sculptures. In the center of the first room of the exhibition display cases house ephemera from their early, what I'll call performance pieces. At the beginning and in the middle of the exhibition there are videos of their singing sculptures and other performances. So to some extent, they are performance artists.
Gilbert & George designed the installation at the Brooklyn Museum, responding to the architectural layout of the galleries. The presentation in not chronological. Often their series are designed around the space that they will be first exhibited. Here the series are, for the most part, not shown together. So what is the governing principle behind the design of the installation? While I navigated the first room, before I had even read that the artists had designed the installation, I suspected that the design was intended to guide the viewer around in a very specific pattern. Around the outside walls was the series The Nature of Our Looking. Around the interior walls were a number of postcard collages. In the center was a circle of display cases. The labels on the ephemera in the display cases were not in standard museum order - left to right, all facing the same side of the case, as close to the object it described as possible, as close to the edge of the case as possible. Instead the arrangement of the labels and the narrative of the labels - there was always a clear starting point - forced the viewer to move around the cases is a specific direction which varied for each case. Once I recognized this, I started to wonder if the objects in the case were the art at all, or if the dance of viewer around the cases was the art. In their interview with Tim Marlow they confirmed my suspicions. In designing the installation they were concerned with how the viewer comes into the room and how they move through. They intended to guide the viewer through.
Having been exposed to Andy Warhol's work in film school, I questioned whether their manifesto-like declarations about art, that art should be democratic, have subject matter, meaning, have a moral character and the idea of "Art for All," are sincere. To illustrate their idea of Art for All, they described coming into a gallery the day after their exhibition opened only to find the gallery owner looking quite unwell. When asked why the long face he replied that the woman who comes to clean the gallery loved their exhibition.
Can two people who describe themselves not as a collaboration, but as one artist be serious? Can an artist who describes everything they do as sculpture when nothing they do fits within the traditional definition of sculpture be anything but ironic? When asked at the Members Preview and Reception held on October 2, 2008, whether they were influenced by Andy Warhol they responded,
Andy Warhol and Pop Art in general was a celebration of consumerism. We want to be a celebration of humanism.
They're images appear in almost every piece of photographic work. But they insist that the works are not self-portraits. Rather, to paraphrase their interview with Tim Marlow, they are visual letters to the viewer - Gilbert & George speaking to the viewer. They are the subject of all of their thoughts. They take what is in their brains and show it on the wall.
We have no plan when we go to the studio in the morning. However we are that day, that is how the pictures will be. Ours are all coming from the inside. We're always looking for the moral dimension of the subject matter. It has to have a human moral issue.They strive for human, moral subject matter in response to the abstraction that was prevalent in the art world when they began in 1968 and is still going strong today. Like my friend Mary, they're not into Rothko, what Mary calls my stripes.
But Gilbert & George are not without formal structures. Their largest, both figuratively and literally, contribution to the art world is multiple series of large scale photographic works. The vast majority of their works consist of photographs in thin black frames tiled next to other photographs in thin black frames. This results in the appearance of a black grid. Gilbert & George explain this structure as purely the result of their means of production. They started in a small studio with no money. The only way they could make larger works was to make a big picture out of small fragments. Also that was the only way they could transport such large works. But once the grid came into being it came to control the composition slightly.
That slight discipline gives us a good way to make a controlled design.Their works are almost uniformly based on symmetry and reflections. When they say the grid came to control the composition slightly, I feel they must be making a radical understatement. Between the ability to print multiple images inherent in the photographic or computer graphic media and the repetitive structure of the grid, their pictures have very quilt-like qualities.
I saw Gilbert & George after I saw the Panza Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum. Both address the idea of collecting the uncollectable. In the first room of the Gilbert & George exhibit the display cases full of ephemera from their early performance work reminded me of Hamish Fulton's works in the Panza Collection. Hamish Fulton makes treks through rural spaces. These walks are the art. The photographs with printed texts are artifacts of the walks. Similarly, the invitation to Gilbert & George's dinner is not the art. The dinner is the art. But what we have left after the dinner is this collection of invitations and menus. How is that any less abstract than Frank Stella's stripes? How is that any more accessible to all?
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