Gilbert & George are conceptual art pioneers, they invented the idea of being 'living sculptures', they brought a punk spirit to the stuffy art world, and they made for great television. In many respects they're legends.
But also .... Gilbert & George have been coasting for a very long time now. They've not made any significantly interesting work for decades. Their art, quite bluntly, has become really fucking boring. A realisation hit me halfway round their current, and free, exhibition at the White Cube in Mason's Yard and that realisation was that Gilbert & George don't really make art. They make money.
THE CORPSING PICTURES (capitals the galleries own, titles and years works made included, helpfully, on the art itself) are supposed to be, according to Michael Bracewell - yeah that guy, "the most profoundly personal and confronational pictures they have ever created". Hmmm.
What a load of bollocks. Apparently we, the viewers, are supposed to be shocked at the word 'corpse', in its gerund form, being included in the show titles. As if they're the only artists in history who have ever alluded to death before. Go to the National Gallery. There's death everywhere. Artists are completely obsessed with death. From the skull in Holbein's Ambassadors and Jacques-Louis David's Death of Marat to Damien Hirst's pickled sharks and Millais' Ophelia.
Bracewell's claim that these works are filled with pathos, poignancy, and "sepulchral eeriness" simply don't ring true. These are pictures of two, presumably, very wealthy artists taking the piss and getting paid for it. 'Will this do?' ask Gilbert & George and the art world, hopelessly under their spell, says it will. They lap it up. Gilbert & George are using up valuable gallery space that would be better given to less celebrated, and presumably poorer, artists.
Let's look at the works on show. They're all pretty much variations on the same theme. With titles like BONE, TIME BONE, SLEEP OVER, T-BONE, AITCH, and BEANO they show the artists, in their natty suits, looking out at us (sometimes blankly, sometimes half-asleep, sometimes as if they've been rudely interrupted or perhaps even goosed) from a world of bones and ropes.
Bones like you might find in a graveyard. Which is where we keep corpses. Do you get it? Of course you do. It's not exactly the most elegant of concepts. As you wander round the two large rooms looking at these enormous images you start to wonder why Gilbert & George are still churning this shit out after so many years.
You soon find an answer. There's a small room off to the side in which some smaller works (BETWEEN, CRUCIFICTION, and SOLES among others) are available to purchase. The cheapest ones available will set you back £1,500. Which isn't THAT much for an artwork but is an awful lot for an artwork that is rubbish. You'd never want to hang it up, you'd never want to look at it, and you'd never want to show it to anyone.
The only two reasons I can think of that anyone would ever buy one of these works is (1) to show off and (2) as an investment. Sadly, I think the second of those reasons is by far the more likely. What a sad state of affairs. That Gilbert & George, who set out to (and once did) shock the art establishment are now so thoroughly part of it that they're willing to shill for the wealthiest elements of that very same establishment.
My advice:- don't invest your money in artworks by Gilbert & George and don't invest your time in visiting this absolutely worthless (in art terms, not financial ones) exhibition. I make no bones about that.
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