Mart Engelen: What was the main inspiration behind the exhibition we see here today in Paris?
Gilbert & George: We wanted to find a new way to celebrate the lives and deaths of a lot of people. You can’t do that with your imagination. With this collection of posters which we stole over six years we can address those subjects. We did 292 pictures and this is our fifth show; we are going to do ten or twelve shows. But we really want to create a spirit that lives on, at least for a while.
ME: When I look at it, I see a very big collage of many frames with text but the basic image is of you both with text you have manipulated.
G&G: They are not manipulated. It is very simple because the grid system is based on what we always use. When we started out with our art in 1971, we did not know how to make big pictures with these negatives, so we had to find a structure that would work. At that time, nobody did a big artwork like a big picture with negatives and so we invented this new language: we were used to taking a lot of different images and started to put some of them together in a rectangle. The rectangle can protect the image; transport the image. We can build them up like a house. You can make one that is 20 or 30 meters long.
ME: How do you regard today’s phenomenon of social media in relation to art?
G&G: We think that these posters that we stole and use in the pictures exist on many levels. The first level is that they are there to sell newspapers. The second level is very interesting: the human disaster and drama when a member of your family is raped or murdered or killed in the underground and so on. It is a tragedy which is very extensive. It extends to all the other people in the flats where you live, somebody has to tell the school, maybe inform the relatives in Australia. So it is an enormous tragedy which will last for generations. But the
posters are only there for a day or a week. We like to think that we are fixing these emotions forever.
ME: Is this also a kind of protest for you?
G&G: No. We are only for things. We are never against things. We’ve never marched about anything. When people knock at the door and ask us to sign a petition against: we say no, no. If they come for: we sign. We don’t even look to see what it’s about (laughs). We must have signed some terrible things. About the posters, we like it very much. What it is, it is. They are real posters, they are not distorted. We managed to create this atmosphere behind it; it is like a dream-like, ghost-like London by night. The kind of journalistic images we took, we never wanted to do a good image; we call it like a spirit of London. There are many layers. All the big cities like London, New York, Paris, Moscow, Johannesburg have these disasters. Only God’s nature is clean. We say this world we show in these pictures is as far as we got in our civilisation. We are
all responsible in our own small way. Sex, religion, fate, unhappiness. Can we change it, can we make it better? Maybe. We’ve all made it better from when we are children. The western world was a very different place in 1970 to what it is now. We think that all the artists, writers, singers and pop stars have made that change. Not so much the police station, not so much the courts. In general, artists are freezing life. We hope that we are not only showing life, we hope we are forming our tomorrows. That the people who see these pictures will be a little bit different than the people who didn’t.
ME: I think you put it very well, it is not freezing, it is the more you go on, you…
G&G: We always call it MORAL DIMENSION. All our art has all to do with ‘What are we doing here? What is better today?’ What’s good and what’s bad is changing non-stop. We create our own morality. That has nothing to do with religion. Trying to be human together.
ME: Are you also aesthetically involved in the typography in these works?
G&G: No. They are all the original posters. We remove the white from the paper and put our pictures behind.
ME: So, no change to the typography?
G&G: No. That wouldn’t be Christian (laughs). But the titles like ‘Rape’ or ‘Murder’ are all in red and centred. It’s quite extraordinary because it becomes like a musical chord. Murder, murder, murder.
ME: And why do we see the queen on the right?
G&G: Oh, that is very important. We felt that we wanted something of authority to preside over them, beyond ourselves. Nation, you can say, the western world, modern democracy. The head of state that never goes to prison. That will always be there. The queen is fantastic because everybody in the world is a little bit with the queen, isn’t it? It also gives an edgy feeling that you have the queen and murder there in this artwork. We have always used the queen as a symbol of the establishment since we started our work in 1969. We are not anti-establishment. Most artists are anti-establishment. They have a problem with the army, they have a problem with America, Mr Bush. We don’t. We like to say: we accept things as they are and move forward. We don’t like to have an opinion about things we can’t affect.
ME: I read somewhere that you were proud of your working-class background. Can you fill me in on this?
G&G: Poor boys are doing good!!
ME: You both have a working-class background?
G&G: Yes. Of course. It’s very interesting for us because we’ve seen the generations that came after us and they are very different because they weren’t war babies. We were war babies. When we were seven or eight years old everything was damaged; there were people in my small home town with an eye missing, or a leg. Buildings, families were damaged. Extraordinary.
ME: How do you look at art in general these days?
G&G: For art in general, we put up what we call blinkers. We don’t want to know exactly. We don’t want to talk too much about other artists.
ME: Let’s not talk about other artists but much more about the business of art.
G&G: That’s very simple. When we were baby artists, a gallery meant a man, a desk and a telephone. That was it. But it’s an enormous world activity now. More people go to more exhibitions than ever before. And that’s fantastic. It’s a better diet for people. Everybody used to talk about murder, boxing or crime. But for us art means asking questions.