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Gilbert and George: We like to be weird and normal at the same time

In a dilapidated old arsenal on the industrial edge of Brussels, Gilbert and George are singing the music hall song that made them famous. Their audience seem a bit bemused, and who on earth can blame them? “Underneath the Arches” is as British as warm beer or test match cricket, and equally incomprehensible to European punters. First performed by a very different duo, Flanagan and Allen, way back in the 1930s, it was already a golden oldie when Gilbert and George started singing it in art galleries 50 years ago.

Half a century later, it’s become the theme tune for their lifelong career as Living Sculptures. No wonder these continental liggers are nonplussed. To anyone who isn’t steeped in British culture, with its weird passion for nostalgia, Gilbert and George must seem very odd indeed. “We never wanted to be weird because all artists like the idea of being weird, and we never wanted to be normal because everybody’s normal,” says George, by way of explanation. “We like to be weird and normal at the same time.”

Gilbert and George are here in Brussels to open Brafa, one of Europe’s most prestigious art fairs. Each year, a famous artist is invited to be Brafa’s guest of honour. Last year, it was Christo. This year, it’s Gilbert and George. Their big bold artworks are scattered around this huge hall, an incongruous contrast to the antique paintings that surround them.

This juxtaposition is surreal – and here in the Belgian capital, the city of Magritte, that’s really rather fitting. For Brexit-obsessed Britons, Brussels may be synonymous with the European Union, but for Europeans it’s always been synonymous with surrealism – and what could possibly be more surreal than Gilbert and George?

Despite their matching suits, and shirts and ties, they’re easy to tell apart. George looks like Eric Morecambe. Gilbert looks like Ernie Wise. However, unlike Eric and Ernie, they’re more than just a double act. They live together, they work together, they always appear in public together. This has been their way of life since they met, in London, in 1967, at St Martin’s School of Art (now Central Saint Martins). Their artworks are striking, and often bizarrely beautiful, but they’re a sideshow compared to their greatest work of art: themselves.

Are they homosexual? Everyone assumes so, but no one seems to know for sure, and their public life is far more intriguing than whatever they might get up to in private. Young men feature prominently in their work, women are conspicuous by their absence, but you wouldn’t call these pictures homoerotic. Indeed, there’s something strangely sexless about them, like artworks from another planet.

Their Dirty Words and Naked Shit pictures caused a predictable furore (the titles are self-explanatory) but most of their work isn’t overtly controversial. The most radical thing about them isn’t their art, but the way they’ve merged their individual identities into one.

They’re reluctant to discuss the details of their lives before they met, but their backgrounds are fascinating. When pressed, they stress the similarities – they were both war babies from provincial, lower-class, unartistic families – but the differences are far more notable, and the most notable difference is that one half of this very British duo wasn’t originally British at all.

Gilbert Prousch was born in a small village in the Italian Dolomites in 1943. His father was a shoemaker, like his grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great grandfather before him, but after the war mass-produced shoes became much cheaper and so Gilbert’s father struggled to make a living. Inspired by Michaelangelo, Gilbert studied art in Salzburg and then in Munich, where he heard about St Martin’s. He travelled to London and wangled a place on its internationally renowned advanced sculpture course. He didn’t speak a word of English. He still speaks with a strong Italian accent today.

George Passmore, conversely, speaks like a BBC newsreader from the 1950s. He was born in Devon in 1942. His father left home soon after George was born, possibly before. His mother was uninhibited, and George had a succession of “uncles”, which must have exposed him to gossip in postwar Totnes. At state school he showed a talent for art, which eventually won him a place at Dartington Hall, a private school renowned for its progressive attitudes. Inspired by Van Gogh’s letters, he went on to art school, and ended up at St Martin’s, on the advanced sculpture course, with Gilbert Prousch.

“George took an interest in me,” says Gilbert. They became friends – and then lovers? Last time I met them, in their home in London, I asked them if it was love at first sight. “No,” said George. He described their relationship as something that happened gradually, “like an atmosphere or a cloud”. Do they ever wonder what might have happened if they’d never met? The idea clearly seems inconceivable to them. They believe they were destined to be together. “It was fate,” says Gilbert.

The sculpture course at St Martin’s was (in)famously laissez-faire. Students could do whatever they wanted, which suited Gilbert and George just fine. “St Martin’s was the best art school in the world,” says Gilbert. “This was a school that said to an artist, ‘Anything goes. You are free to think in different ways.’ No other art school did that.” His art training in Munich had been traditional and academic. “St Martin’s was different – anything could be art.”

Their fellow students included Barry Flanagan, Bruce McLean and, most notably, Richard Long, who turned walking into an artform. Gilbert and George went even further. They turned their lives together into a perpetual, seamless artwork. As Gilbert says, “We were the centre of our art.”

While Long set off into the wilderness, Gilbert and George wandered around London’s East End. It was here, in a Dickensian junk shop, that they found an old record of “Underneath the Arches”, and came up with the idea of singing along to it, for hours and hours on end. They called this artwork The Singing Sculpture. “We felt we were doing something different,” says Gilbert. Like all the best ideas, it was both in keeping with, yet contrary to, the spirit of the times. Conceptual art was all the rage, but most of it was terribly earnest. Their Singing Sculpture was full of fun.

Topping the bill at Brafa, one of Europe’s most prestigious art fairs (Fabrice Debatty)
Topping the bill at Brafa, one of Europe’s most prestigious art fairs (Fabrice Debatty)

“For the artists who were showing in those galleries, colour was taboo, figuration was taboo, sex was taboo, feeling was taboo – and these were all of the things we were interested in,” says George. Other artists got drunk in the evening, then went back into the studio in the morning to make sombre, sober art. Gilbert and George turned their drunken revels into art.

They couldn’t get any public subsidy, and they had no family money to support them. Looking back, they now believe this gave them an advantage. “We could feel more free – we didn’t have to fit in in any way,” says George. “Middle-class people are more constrained.”

They got their big break at a group show in London called When Attitudes Become Form. When the curator declined to include their work they gatecrashed the private view, and stole the show with their Living Sculptures, standing in the middle of the gallery like showroom dummies. Konrad Fischer saw them at this show, and asked them to perform in Düsseldorf. In Düsseldorf they were seen by Illeana Sonnabend, who invited them to New York. Fischer and Sonnabend were two of the world’s most influential art dealers. Gilbert and George had arrived.

Double act: Gilbert and George (Julian Cottrell)
Double act: Gilbert and George (Julian Cottrell)

Around the same time they moved into a Georgian townhouse in Fournier Street, in London’s Spitalfields. They’ve lived there ever since. It was a poor area when they moved in. It’s got a lot smarter since, but it’s still a tough old place. The tramps that used to live there have been replaced by drug addicts, but they don’t mind this shifting cityscape – they embrace it. “We are very optimistic people,” says George. “We are never against anything.”

Like a lot of their boldest statements, this is only partly true. They were certainly against the artistic orthodoxy of the 1960s and 1970s. In their suits and ties and starched white shirts they stood out a mile. “To be an artist you had to be critical. You had to be against the bomb, or against America, or against the Conservatives or against Labour,” says George. “We thought, ‘How marvellous it would be if we didn’t have to be Anti!’” It’s a philosophy they maintain when people bring petitions to their front door. “If it’s for something, we sign it. If it’s against something, we don’t sign it. We must have signed for some horrible things, but at least we were for.”

Living in Spitalfields has been absolutely central to their art. “We really believe that Fournier Street is the centre of the world for us,” Gilbert tells me. “It’s an amazing mixture of different kinds of people.” Spitalfields has long been a refuge for arriving immigrants: Huguenots, Jews, Sikhs, Muslims… “The East End of London is a mixture of so many countries, a mixture of so many different people.” This is just the way they like it. “You face the modern world whenever you step out of the front door,” says George.

They’ve exhibited all around the world, but though their pictures attract a lot of interest, wherever they go the main attraction is always Gilbert and George. It’s the same story here in Brussels. It’s like attending a press conference with Quentin Crisp and Oscar Wilde. Sure, it’s the same show every time, more or less, endless variations on a single theme, but it’s still more entertaining and enlightening than talking to any other artists I can think of.

Inside the exhibition, ‘it’s like attending a press conference with Quentin Crisp and Oscar Wilde’ (Fabrice Debatty)
Inside the exhibition, ‘it’s like attending a press conference with Quentin Crisp and Oscar Wilde’ (Fabrice Debatty)

They set off for a walk around Brafa, followed by a swarm of hacks. “Our motto is ban religion,” says Gilbert, as they pause for photos in front of one of their monumental pictures. Religion loomed large in both their childhoods: Gilbert was raised a Catholic; George’s brother became a vicar. Their artworks are oddly reminiscent of stained glass windows, but they’re both devout atheists. “We don’t believe in God,” says Gilbert. “All the gods are manmade. We are in charge of what we are doing in this world.”

“We’ve always firmly believed that the national galleries of the world should remove all of the Christian art and hand it back to the Church,” says George. “They can look after the insurance and maintenance and conservation, and give over the national museums to humanist art, not Judeo-Christian voodoo.” George tells a story about an elderly vicar who knocked on their front door. “I thought it was marvellous that you said Ban Religion,” he told them. “My congregation come to church every week, and they’re all very religious. But I don’t want them to be religious. I want them to be good.”

Teacher Straight (2011), courtesy of Gilbert andGeorge, White Cube and Albert Baronian
Teacher Straight (2011), courtesy of Gilbert andGeorge, White Cube and Albert Baronian

“We believe in the enlightenment, when people became human for their own sake,” adds Gilbert. “They didn’t need God anymore to make themselves human.” Their heroes are Charles Darwin and Alan Turing.

We stop in front of a montage they made from tabloid posters, which they stole from outside newsagents. “It’s not a very easy thing to do because the shopkeepers don’t like you to do that, so one of us would go into the shop to distract the shopkeeper while the other stole the poster,” confesses George. “After three and a half years we ended up with more than 3,700 posters, and then we divided them into subjects – the ones which said Rape, the ones that said Murder, the ones that said Mugged, and ended up with a very big group of pictures.” They only got caught once. “We were very polite and gave it back to the shop, but we went the next night and stole it again.”

Despite these rebellious attitudes, they’re reassuringly old-fashioned. They don’t use the internet, or mobile phones. The only time they use the telephone is to book a table at the local restaurant where they’ve eaten for the past 20 years. After 50 years in the spotlight, they still maintain they’re outside the art establishment.

Maybe they were, once upon a time (when they met, in 1967, homosexuality had only just been decriminalised) but that time has long since passed. Today they’re Royal Academicians who’ve exhibited in virtually every major gallery across the globe. If they were ever anti-establishment, the establishment has long since absorbed them. Yet for all their success there’s still something discreetly anarchic about them, a hint of danger behind their impeccable manners and immaculately tailored suits.

They’re now lionised by the art world, but they don’t like hobnobbing with other artists. “We had friends in London, Paris, Germany, New York, a huge group of friends – drinking, celebrating, parties – and then one day we cut it off, we stopped,” says George. “We realised it was all to do with gossip and business – the nightmare of a world that has nothing to do with being an artist.” “We wanted to be free of gossiping,” says Gilbert. “We have friends, but we don’t want artist friends.” Though the art world has appropriated them, and sanctified them, they’re still outsiders at heart.

So what advice would they give to an aspiring young artist starting out today? “Tomorrow morning, when you wake up, sit on the edge of your bed, keep your eyes closed, and don’t open them and stand up until you have decided, ‘What do I want to say to the world today?’” says George. Gilbert’s advice is a lot more succinct: “Fuck the teachers.”