Shock and awe at Tate Modern
When I was 16 and just getting to grips with my History of Art ‘A’ level, we had a class trip to the 1987 Gilbert and George exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.
I remember the repetitive presence of two odd-looking men in suits set in brightly coloured stained-glass windows amongst representations of crosses, young men and plenty of vulgarity. All great fun for a group of sixth formers, but as a Christian I felt angry and sad because I thought that their representations of crucifixes and other religious symbols were treated with the same level of importance as swear words and images of human excrement.
Rebels against God
20 years later, they’ve done a load more of the same sort of thing. Messing around with the idea of Christ and the Cross may reflect their self-professed rebellion against God, but they are dealing lightly with the source of a salvation that they recognise is needed by humanity. In line with a Christian understanding of human nature, George has said, ‘we celebrate life but we like to be able to realise that there’s nothing in the world that is not also inside you or us or anybody. Anything, any horror in the world, we’re also capable of…’ ‘No one is righteous’, says Romans 3.23, ‘not even one’. The difference is that Gilbert and George seem to be the arbitrators of what is a ‘horror’. ‘Art has always been part of finding out what is good and what is bad’, they say. ‘We confront the viewer with our own kind of morality.’ Their pictures ‘Finding God’ and ‘Life without End’ are inescapably homoerotic and reveal their deep faith in man rather than the divine.
