Exhibitions 1

Gilbert & George (Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes, till 6 January)

Excelling at squalor

Martin Gayford At the risk of seeming obsessed with the subject, I offer another thought inspired by Tracey Emin's bed, It's not that it strikes me as a successful work of art, simply that — especially in conjunction with the Bloomsberries down the hall at the Tate — it is, shall we say, suggestive.

What it suggests is a tradition, an alter- native to the often touted English lines of romanticism, ruralism and Turnerian mist- iness, an omission from the celebrated cat- egories in Pevsner's The Englishness of English Art namely, squalor. Yet seedi- ness, seaminess, nastiness are all qualities at which English artists have excelled at evoking, from the days of Hogarth and Gillray to those of Francis Bacon and, well, that bed (which, as was reported in the press, became rather nifty as the exhi- bition wore on and was, apparently to the dismay of the artist, doused in disinfec- tant). Indeed, it is often only those artists who go in for squalor who are noticed abroad — unlike our native imitators of Matissean colour or classical form. Squalor, you might say, is a department in which we Brits excel. Another artistic case in point is that of Gilbert & George, who — specialists at turning up in unexpected places — are cur- rently holding a major exhibition in Milton Keynes. The mere mention of the name Milton Keynes, they announce, brings a smile of enthusiasm to the faces of our younger friends.

G&G have, of course, always concentrat- ed on aspects of life that the genteel fmd yukky — swear-words, excretion — the kind of thing that the poet Kathleen Raine once, while talking about Francis Bacon, described as the armpits of existence. For less robust sensibilities, though, this new work is not so extreme in yuldciness as some they have produced in the last few years, the cringe factor is still fairly high. Various pictures feature dead flies, obscene graffiti, sweat, bits of gum stuck to the pavement, the nakedness of middle- aged men — that is, themselves; all items from which the well-brought-up eye is like- ly to flinch.

Why do they do it? The hostile answer is that they do it to draw attention to them- selves or out of infantile naughtiness. And it is true that they attract a great deal of publicity, much of it unfavourable, by thus associating themselves with embarrassing things which it has been tacitly agreed to ignore. In the eyes of their detractors this drawing attention to themselves is itself a crime; indeed one of the primordial English sins, also committed by such G&G heroes as Oscar Wilde. Their combination of showing off and being embarrassing often produces a mixed reaction of mock- ery and anger (not an uncommon Anglo- Saxon aesthetic response ).

Obviously, from the G&G point of view, it is different. The object of forcing all these horrible sights on our attention is to conquer our and their repugnance. Indeed,

'Spell of Sweating', 1998, by Gilben & George

as George puts it, to show their beauty. In religious terms, they are out to redeem the yukky (that is probably why they find them- selves arguing with the religious; recently they were to be heard debating morality with a Northern Irish clergyman).

This is not so different from what Stanley Spencer was up to when he painted the loves of the elderly and the odd-looking, and the unideal, naked, middle-aged bodies of himself and his mistress. Or what Fran- cis Bacon was doing when he painted his naked lover vomiting into a basin and dying on a lavatory (and of course Spencer and Bacon attracted a good deal of hostility and repugnance in their time).

But Gilbert & George make it that much harder by presenting their uncomfortable images photographically, on the scale of posters and with the presentational pizzazz of advertising. They are simultaneously pushing their vision of things — and them- selves — at you and making it hard to look. Or, as they put it, opening the door in wel- come and at the same time squeezing the guests' fingers.

In this new work there are a couple of new and, on the face of it, unexpected sources of imagery: money and the London street map, the A to Z. I'm not quite sure what the money is doing in Gilbert & George's world. Most people find it quite a pleasant sight — although clusters of pound coins fit easily with the cellular imagery G&G produce by drying bodily fluids and photographing the result through a microscope (another tri- umphantly disgusting yet oddly beautiful sight). Both can be seen together in 'Money Sweat'.

The A to Z, on the other hand, is a clas- sic bit of G&G material. London, particu- larly its streets, human flotsam, pavements and gutters, has long been the source of many of the photographs which they incor- porate in finished pictures. They live, famously, in Fournier Street, Spitalfields, in the shadow of Hawksmoor's sinister and splendid Christchurch. In a number of these new pictures, including several of the best, they stand against a background of vignettes from the map, picked out as if with a magnifying glass.

In 'Sex City', each circle contains a thor- oughfare named with Chaucerian blunt- ness: Cocksure Street, Mincing Lane, Homey Lane. In a way these are school- boyish puns, but they also serve to suggest a hidden, subversive, eternal aspect of the city. In 'Naked Cemetery', they stand nude in front of an array of the places Streatham Cemetery, St Marylebone Cemetery — where they, and all of us, are headed.

There is something provocatively absurd about G&G in their Everyman suits and ties, like some comedy duo; or even in their birthday suits, with George punctiliously continuing to wear his glasses. But there is also, if you are converted to their point of view, as I am myself, something grand, sombre and truthful about it, a modern-day equivalent to the dance of death which was also a little absurd and horribly true. It fits with Hawksmoor, and Hogarth, as well as Spencer and Bacon, in all of whom there is an element of the comic and the grim.

Some people will not see that at all they will be enraged and disgusted. But that is part of the project, the one reaction Gilbert & George don't want is indiffer- ence (though doubtless they would prefer conversion to execration). And outside Britain — where Gilbert & George are widely seen as major modern artists — it is just those aspects of them and their work that English people fmd aggravating which are seen as typically English. There may well be a connection between those two facts.