Gilbert & George at White [Cube.sup.2] - London - Brief Article

This striking exhibition of recent large-scale photo works by Gilbert & George was a surprising departure for the veteran U.K. conceptualists. The show, titled "New Horny Pictures," featured 15 multipanel pieces made of self-portrait images and separate panels of text in blocky black typeface, which are blow-ups' of personal ads in gay newspapers. Each element has a background of searing red or yellow. In keeping with the artists' usual practice, the photos are framed in black and arranged in grids. The good news is that in the new self-portraits, they have put their clothes back on after flaunting their less-than-sinuous nude bodies in many works of the past decade. Once again they don their trademark gray business suits, like those worn by typical English gentlemen. And, in another welcome departure from their previous exhibitions, there's not a single turd or a drop of body fluid to be found anywhere in these images.

That is not to say, however, that the team has altogether cleaned up their act. Based on the content of the text panels, one can imagine this out and aging gay duo scanning the personal ads in local gay papers trying to find hot young dates. A panel in a four-section work, Tom, for instance, reads, "Let me be your fantasy--leather, military, dominate type, Tom 30." Part of the pleasure of the show was reading the trumped-up claims that some men have made for themselves in the ads. In West End, a young man from Leicester Square calls himself "The best, well-equipped 24 y.o., straight acting, a genuine, muscular physique, smooth, tanned and always hard," and includes his phone number. An abutting panel shows a three-quarter-length self-portrait in which the artists stand face forward with deadpan expressions on their faces like the dour couple in Grant Wood's American Gothic.

In one sense, the show was an acerbic examination of narcissism. But it operated successfully on a variety of levels, one of which is self-referential. The limited palette and plain lettering of the new pieces hark back to Gilbert & George's simple interplay of text and image in mid-1970s works, such as Bloody Life or Bad Thoughts (both 1975). But the key place the new work seems to hold in their oeuvre will likely not be fully evident until the upcoming Gilbert & George retrospective, which arrives at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in early 2003.

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