Gilbert & George: Major Exhibition, Tate Modern (From The Oxford Times)

Gilbert & George: Major Exhibition, Tate Modern

10:08am Thursday 1st March 2007

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'Your way is as hard as we are blood-hard with rigid-brained resolution." This quote from Gilbert & George, who star in their own feature-length movie, The World of Gilbert and George, is one which aptly encapsulates the colliding energies of quotidian ambition and East End lacklustre that permeate the work of this artist duo on display at the Tate Modern. The 'you' to whom Gilbert & George refer here is a no-one in particular' and an everyone'; an entirely impersonal subject that embodies the landscape of each piece's confrontation.

The retrospective progresses chronologically around one entire floor of the Tate. At the start, we bear witness to the shy boys out at play in their English garden: The Nature of Our Looking, 1970. Considered by the artists as a paper sculpture, this piece, akin to the other charcoal on paper works in the first room, creates a preamble of tension within and around the picture frame that has now become their signature motif.

Their romantic poses, distant gazes, as well as the captions within the drawings, gather a sense of desperation from the physical and material limits of the page where the landscape falls off or fades out. The fake aged' quality of the paper and the rife pun exerted through the grid-crossed folds that these drawings be read as maps, are at the same time, paradoxically, anti-framing devices that serve to open their sculptures out into the democratic space of the viewer.

The space of the viewer throughout the exhibition - though an open, highly associative arena of interpretation - is certainly not a comfortable position. To watch their feature-length film, The World of Gilbert and George, from start to finish, inside the café, which is included as part of the exhibition space on the fourth floor, is at the same time both a casual and momentous event.

The feeding of the tramp' sequence is tapered by the viewer's polite, seated patience at the café table, while the scene in which Gilbert & George dance to the pop hit, Bend It, offers a light-hearted break and momentarily closed door on the politics of East end city life that is the contextual framework of the film.

From their dancing to their annotated monotone proclamations of the words "Tired. Station. Depressed. Pub. Waiting . . ." across circling video footage of an urban 1980s London, Gilbert & George are firmly in control of themselves and of the video frame. In their own words: "It was vital that we remain in control . . . otherwise we would have been lost." This major retrospective enables an overview of the work of a pair of artists whose oeuvre and maxim is about confronting modern British life that recoils at such a self-conscious frame. Gilbert & George are living sculptures' about Sex, Money, Religion, Race, Englishness and Terror.

The World of Gilbert and George DVD is also available at www.tate.org.uk/shop/gilbertgeorge.htm Gilbert & George: Major Exhibition continues until May 7 at Tate Britain, Bankside, London SE1. The gallery is open Sun-Thurs from 10am-6pm' Friday and Saturday 10am-10pm.

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