Gilbert & George present 'Beard Pictures' and 'Fuckosophy'

This year Gilbert & George, the art world’s best known and longest running double act, celebrate half a century of living and working together as “Living Sculptures”. To mark the anniversary, the besuited pair are putting on a show at White Cube Bermondsey; there are also seven other new G&G exhibitions taking place in New York, Paris, Brussels, Naples and – in January – Athens.

Each exhibition presents a different version of ‘The Beard Pictures,’ a new series of their trademark multi-panelled ‘photopieces’ which feature the normally clean-shaven artists as extravagantly bearded red-faced homunculi, inhabiting a bleak fenced-in world of barbed wire and concrete.

Often the mask-like beards and moustaches are made from leaves or barbed wire, as well as a bizarre range of other materials, including beer froth and even rabbits with forked tongues. On occasions, these appendages assume a life of their own, forming exuberant shapes and covering not only the duo’s lower faces but their entire bodies.

“We see it as an exploration of our modern times,” says George. “You switch on the news and you see barbed wire and bearded people.”  

“Now we are seeing the whole world through a beard,” continues Gilbert. “Good beards and bad beards, religious beards and non-religious beards. If you are Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, you are not allowed to cut the beard, and that interests us because they are all fencing each other off.”

“The most famous beard in the world? Jesus!” exclaims George, in his plummy vicar’s voice, adding that, “we have also have a Fuck off Hipsters Beard Picture.”

We are sitting in their studio, a former factory which links the two Huguenot houses in Fournier Street in Spitalfields, east London where they have lived since the late 1960s. Between cups of instant coffee I’m given a sneak preview of The Fuckosophy, an epic text work which G&G are also exclusively unveiling at White Cube.  

This consists of neat rows of more than 5,000 statements, slogans and mottos incorporating different uses and versions of the F-word which they describe as “the real thing that’s inside everybody’s heads”.

“We all know what philosophy is, we might even have a book or two, but this you can understand,” declares George. Now they are working on The Godology which uses the word ‘God’ in a similar way. “The God News, God goes away, please stand for God; God Stinks, God licked me, God’s a sissy,” intones George, reading from a list pulled from his top pocket. “Ban religion is our motto!” pipes up Gilbert.

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While they claim that they “never set out to shock”, to call Gilbert & George provocateurs would be something of an understatement. Their first fully collaborative artwork in 1969 featured the smiling young artists, who had met in the sculpture department of  St Martin’s school of art two years before, with paper letters spelling out ‘George the Cunt’ and ‘Gilbert the Shit’ pinned to their fronts.

Since, from photopieces such as ‘Paki’ (1978) where they stand on either side of a young Asian man; through a multitude of works with titles like ‘Sperm Eaters, Friendship Pissing’ and ‘Holy Cock’ to the anus-baring and monumental cruciform turds of their ‘Naked Shit Pictures’, their work has played with and off taboos of fine art and society in general.

Conventionally clad exhibitionists, globalist supporters of Brexit, Royalty-loving traditionalists who reject religion: over the past half-century they have become even more adept at presenting a constantly moving target.

Despite the fact that they are the only living artists to have filled an entire floor of Tate Modern for their major retrospective in 2007, Gilbert and George dismiss the gallery as “a sausage machine”. They especially bemoan the fact that although their work is in Tate’s collection, it is not on permanent display.

“When we were students the Tate always had at least one work of every living artist on show. But they’ve stopped doing that now,” says George. “If somebody arrives from Venezuela this morning and wants to see a work of ours, there won’t be one at the Tate.”

To rectify this situation they are in the process of converting an 18th century former brewery a few streets away from their house and studio into a foundation, funded by them and devoted to their work.

Gilbert’s architect nephew is in charge of the conversion and it should open within the next two years. “We have trustees and it is a registered charity. It will be G&G forever, like we all want of course!”       

Gilbert & George: The Beard Pictures and Fuckosophy are at White Cube Bermondsey from 22 November – 28 January; whitecube.com

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