Exhibitions 1

Gilbert & George: The Dirty Words Pictures, 1977 (Serpentine Gallery, till 1 September)

Grim outlook

Martin Gayford

Afew years ago, during an interview, George of Gilbert & George told me the following story. When he was a student, soon after he came to London, he walked over to the Hawksmoor church of St Anne's, Limehouse. 'And there was a man standing at the railings, looking into the cemetery. I went over to see what he was looking at, and it was Francis Bacon, just staring into the bloody dead-body yard.'

It is an anecdote that suggests something of the fundamental grimness of outlook in the work of Gilbert & George, and also their Peter Ackroyd-like sense of London as a vast and complex urban mass. Both factors are present in The Dirty Words Pictures, 1977 now on view at the Serpentine Gallery (sponsored very suitably by fcuk).

G&G live in one of the most richly, even gamily, flavoured corners of London — in Spitalfields, with the spire of another Hawksmoor church, Christchurch, rising into the sky above them. All around are 18th-century houses, alcoholic dossers, the new gleaming wealth of the city and the Bangladeshi community of Brick Lane. But, in a sense — as G&G would be the first to point out — Spitalfields could be representative of anywhere in the modern world, with its mixture of races, of old and new, and of extremes of wealth and poverty. In the Seventies, this area was much more run down than it is today; it was around here that G&G found and photographed the graffiti that are placed like headings at the top of each picture. Not all of them are obscene — as the term 'dirty words' might suggest — but all of them are angry and terse: smash, scum, angry, bent, queer, suck. They are just the kind of sight, scrawled all over modern cities, that most of us avoid looking at too hard.

These expletives — coarse in themselves and crudely daubed — stand above the other images; George is quoted as saying in the catalogue, 'like the gates of hell' — presumably he means the ones in Dante, with 'abandon hope all who enter here' inscribed upon them. Below are the inhabitants of the inferno of modern London: immigrants, the homeless, policemen, G&G themselves, the buildings of the City and Westminster — all seen and photographed during walks around the metropolis.

A lot of Gilbert & George's work comes from walking around, being, as they initially claimed to be. 'living sculptures'. That, of course, was how they first made their names, miming to Flanagan and Allen's 'Underneath The Arches'. In a way they've carried on being performance artists. They themselves figure in almost every picture they make, so that the pictures themselves turn into static performances, G&G showing you their world. In the 'Dirty Words' series, they feature as shadowy and melancholic observers.

In comparison with the brightly coloured, stained-glass effect of the work Gilbert & George produced later on, this is very sombre stuff — all in black and white, with only red sparingly used for contrast. And in comparison with the complex techniques of their later work — which involve the cutting, collaging, pasting and rephotographing of images — The Dirty Words Pictures are made up of square panels arranged in a grid, but with just one photo graph per panel. The effect is quite like a series of stills from a documentary, set out in a chessboard pattern.

These feel like very serious works of art, but I know that in many quarters Gilbert & George don't have the reputation of being very serious about anything; on the contrary they are thought of as frivolous poseurs. Many might class these pictures with that comic song about rude words (chorus, 'Pee, pooh, bottom, bum').

This reaction is not the result of their homosexuality — a disposition now unquestioningly accepted in many eminent figures. It is because, like Oscar Wilde — a G&G hero — they seem to do two things always irritating to the British public: they dress up and they show off.

A lot of the trouble G&G have got into over the years stems from their behaving like Continental artists in Britain (Gilbert in fact is not English by birth; he comes from a tiny community in the Dolomites, speakers of the Ladino language). Their trademark suits for example — which have had a noticeable effect on male fashion over the years — are just one example of the self-allocated uniforms that many artists chose to wear in the 1960s and 1970s.

In Germany, Joseph Beuys's invariable attire of felt hat, American fisherman's jacket, English shirt and Levis help to make him a venerated national figure. In Britain, G&G's suits have encouraged their execration. In fact, many of their interests are quite conventional, in modern-art terms.

Graffiti, for example, have been of great interest to Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet, among many painters. The photograph of a peeling wall beneath G&G's 'Smash' is so much like the photograph the Parisian photographer Brassai took of a peeling wall in the Sixties that I checked to see if they had actually used the Brassai (they hadn't).

But instead of leading a quiet life in the ghetto of the avant-garde, where nobody would pay much attention to graffiti and dirty words, G&G have forced themselves on the attention of the general public. They don't want to be ignored, they want to change the way people think, to break down taboos. One of their perennial tactics is to associate themselves with the unacceptable: outcasts, rude words, bodily functions.

Quite a few people conclude that they themselves are unacceptable, but I suspect G&G half like the reaction they get. It is better than being tamely accepted. Nonetheless, it is surely time to recognise G&G as national figures rather than artworld pranksters. Sir Gilbert & Sir George might be going a bit far. But how about the Venice Biennale? Rumour has it that they were considered as the British representatives for the last one by the relevant British Council committee, but timidly turned down. They should be adopted instead for 2003. They'd certainly give La Serenissima an entirely new look.