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Gilbert & George A Portrait
Daniel Farson
HarperCollins paperback, 240 pages, £7.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (2000)

Gilbert & George. (They force us to think about them that way; genetically divided Siamese twins.) Artists? Gay provocateurs? (Queer provocateurs?) Living Dada-ist gag? Day-Glo charlatans? Fascists? All of it? None?

For what it’s worth, I’m sure some of it’s true. (Equally, for what it’s worth, I find their work thin, obvious, silly.) There is something both funny and sinister about their identical three-button wool suits, though. In their willingness to appear in public both as country squires and pornographically naked in their huge stained-glass art, surrounded by monumental turds squeezed from their own exposed backsides. The Naked Shit Pictures they called them. Sunday Times critic Waldemar Januszczak wrote: ‘They’re rubbish, they’re the worst side of it all, sensationalist attention-seekers. They’ve gone down the Madonna road: take all your clothes off, show what you’ve got and leave yourself nowhere else to go. It’s puerile.’

Daniel Farson’s book is very much a portrait, less than a biography. He died before the material - based around epic interviews with the pair at his Devon home – was assembled. He clearly liked the artists, attending the openings of various shows in Moscow, Beijing, New York and Paris. He was – as much, one senses, as anyone can be – their friend. Which is perhaps why he doesn’t push it when they pull the shutters down. Talk of George’s marriage, for example, brings the artist to the point of outrage. Gilbert & George are, after all, quite possibly the only gay men ever to be ‘in-ed’ by the national press.

Are they fascists, as the lazy critical line has it? No, says Farson, far from it. They are remarkably tolerant. Are they the button-down John Majors of British art? An old drunk and disorderly charge suggests otherwise. Are they actually any good? The book’s copious colour illustrations are there to let you decide that one. The remainder, meanwhile, remains fascinating.