David Misselbrook is a retired academic GP
I was at the South Bank, catching up with an old colleague over a very pleasant late lunch. I had an hour to spare before my early evening meeting, so I wandered into the Gilbert and George exhibition at the Haywood Gallery.
I have never quite been able to appreciate Gilbert and George’s art. I’m never quite sure if they are being serious – whatever that might mean in today’s art world. But if as doctors we want to understand our patients then I guess we should never turn down any opportunity to understand the world, especially parts less known to us. Although I confess that Gilbert and George always remind me of Morecombe and Wise, perhaps partly because I wonder whether their work is some sort of long running comedy performance.
Well, if, as Picasso claimed, “all art is subversive,” then this exhibition helped me to understand their socially conscious, questioning and campaigning assault on our assumptions.
Their self-declared targets are sex, money, race and religion. So what has changed? According to Gilbert and George, everything and nothing. We are still in unquiet waters, just different tides.
Their work emerged during the last decades of the 20th century. A time when being gay was scarred by social exclusion and mistrust, and then the scourge of AIDS. This exhibition charts their transition into the 21st century, where being gay is as remarkable as not wearing a tie, same sex marriage is at last normal and HIV is yet another chronic condition to be managed.
Their self-declared targets are sex, money, race and religion. So what has changed? According to Gilbert and George, everything and nothing. We are still in unquiet waters, just different tides. They still find plenty to campaign about. I particularly loved their work reflecting on ever greater state incursion into the private space, carrying the slogan “Our grandparents didn’t vote for fascists ….. THEY SHOT THEM!”
Their work is huge, colourful, luminous and playful – always including images of themselves (Morecombe and Wise in bright suits). It does make me wonder, yet again, “but is it art”? But they give a big clue to their work via a quote, printed on the gallery wall, “We want our art to bring out the bigot from inside the liberal and conversely to bring out the liberal from inside the bigot.” Surely this is an intelligent and worthwhile goal.
So I’m still not quite sure how to define art.
This question, and their method, was reinforced as I then walked across Waterloo bridge, looking with new eyes at the work of an unusually hard working and persistent graffiti “artist”. Why did I pay £20 to enter the Hayward Gallery and yet see this graffiti as “illegitimate” art?
But art is part of our social and political dialectic – art can change things. As I walked on, now suitably reflective, I wondered whether I would find “Bomber Harris’” statue in the Strand in full stiff upper lip mode, or whether it would be yet again clothed in red paint. He was OK this time. Plenty of surveillance cameras I expect.
So I’m still not quite sure how to define art. Gilbert and George defined it as whatever is produced by an artist and have taken that somewhat literally – but you can google that for yourselves. Certainly, Gilbert and George are effective in selling a brand, but the same could be said of Caravaggio. I suspect the definition of art is a language problem, not a problem of realist ontology.
I reckon Gilbert and George’s work is well worth seeing if you find yourself on the South Bank with £20 to spare.
Featured exhibition: Gilbert and George: 21st Century Pictures is on at the Hayward Gallery, the Southbank Centre, now until 11th Jan 2026.
Featured Image: Gilbert & George, FUNKY, 2020. 302 x 444 cm. © Gilbert & George. Image courtesy of the artists and White Cube.
