For a time people were worried that Gilbert & George might be fascists, because they wore their matching suits like a uniform and let themselves be filmed walking around the East End like robots. And their pictures were bold and orderly. And they did some pictures with skinheads in [sic].
Clever readers will note that this doesn’t really make them fascists, however. Gilbert & George clearly adore living in their very multicultural corner of the East End of London; they love the diversity. That’s not very fascist. They have a “deviant” sexuality and donate money to AIDS/HIV+ charities. That’s not very fascist either.
So we can forget about that worry. Even if they are a bit tory in some ways, they are not tory in the nasty prejudiced sense. In fact they say nice inclusive things about society which make them sound more like hippies than fascists. Even the tory things, like saying they liked Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, are probably just done for amusing outrage purposes. They don’t like pompous liberals, or elitism, and react against that. And they have a fear that socialism isn’t good for art. But they are not tories really — look, in The Words of Gilbert & George we can even find Gilbert insisting “I’m not a tory” (p.233). Gilbert & George want to be ‘normal’ in one sense — partly in order to get attention from people who wouldn’t be interested in conspicuously ‘wacky’ artists — but then be subversive from within that position.
In Daniel Farson’s Gilbert & George: A Portrait (1999), we find the artists — in their conversations with the author — quite unphased by deviance (and even crime), and mixing delightedly with people of all nationalities. Quite the opposite of Thatcher.
They’re not even really posh. They come from extremely modest backgrounds. Their acquired poshness is just part of their surreal art pose. And why not.
So now we can consider their art with a clearish conscience.
Gilbert & George Page at ‘Some Things About Art & Cities’
