Gilbert & George.

Brooklyn Museum | New York, New York

Gilbert & George's traveling retrospective, organized by the Tate Modern in London, is a fitting testament to one of the most endearing couples in contemporary art. The exhibition at Brooklyn Museum, its final venue (through January 11), spans the four-decade-long partnership of this eccentric pair, whose sprightly, often risque work continues to raise eyebrows rather than receive just recognition for its subtle critique of race and power relations and the shifting fortunes of their East End neighborhood. The exhibits on display run the gamut from the early self-published artist books and cheeky mail art to the dramatic, large-scale hand-dyed photograms the duo are perhaps best known for today.

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Gilbert Proesch (born 1943 in northern Italy) and George Passmore (born 1942 in Devon, England) met while sculpture students at St. Martin's School of Art in London. There, the two developed a close friendship (despite persistent rumors of a romantic involvement, they have steadfastly refused to discuss it in public). The aesthetic that emerged was partly based on an opposition to the narrow formalism taught by the school faculty, in particular Clement Greenberg's comrade in arms, the sculptor Anthony Caro. Gilbert & George soon identified themselves as "living sculpture," thereby declaring their art and daily life synonymous. A seminal 1969 performance, The Singing Sculpture, can be viewed on video in the show. Short, dark-haired Gilbert and tall, lanky bespectacled George wear matching ill-fitted suits (a trademark) and sing from atop a table "Underneath the Arches," an old vaudevillian standard, while enacting stiff choreographed movements. Performed in marathon sessions that could run as long as eight hours, the piece was an early sensational demonstration of Gilbert & George's devotion to their craft. By 1975, the duo had begun to experiment with large-format, gridded "photopieces," into which they inserted their likenesses amidst a forest of signs and repeating motifs. Flowers, idealized youth, and Christian symbolism loomed large as the artists set about to establish their reputations, whereas feces and bodily fluids begin to dominate from the late 1980s onwards, in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. These mullioned, stained-glass colorized pictures continue to be the artists' favored means of expression.

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Not surprisingly, Gilbert & George's work tends to come across as one-note when amassed and subjected to such concentrated viewing. Their persistent presence suggests two aesthetes whose radical self-idolatry in both art and life gives them license to point fingers--as in Death Hope Life Fear (1984) and Apostasia (2004)--at very complex social issues, rather than stoop to the inevitable attempts at protest. Often appearing with mouths agape, their self-portraits blur ambiguously into each other, as in the two mute talking heads, making their blather seem even more vacuous and removed. But by refusing one kind of "decadent art" (a term they used in 1986 to describe formal art), Gilbert & George have only substituted another, more excessive kind, one steeped in Hogarthian moralizing. Despite everything, their numerous statements, the aforequoted What Our Art Means in particular, read as parodies of the traditional comic history painters. Gilbert & George profess to be seeking an "art for all" by "crossing barriers of knowledge" and inventing "a new visual language," but it is difficult to distinguish here between romantic naivety and ironic affectation.

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The sweetest irony of all derives from this retrospective's thematic rather than chronological arrangement (under the express direction of the artists themselves), which allows for previously unnoticed dialogues to emerge in the crossfire between randomly placed items. The duo's self-conscious sounding off is thus brought to the fore, heightening the artificiality of their conceit. Strains of "Pomp and Circumstance," from the audio track for Gordon's Makes Us Drunk (1972), float through one small room as viewers stand before the artists' sentimental We Met in London Last Year (1969), describing how the pair "began to dream of a world of beauty and happiness, of great riches and pleasures ... a newer better world." It's a pretty speech, but also uproarious when taken as a drunken rant. This air of tipsy refinement pervades Coronation Cross (1981), a small cruciform photopiece portraying Gothic arches and portraits of Queen Elizabeth II. It is altogether a formally and conceptually germane comment on iconic status, although Gilbert & George clearly had or have similar aspirations.

What is often ignored is the duo's visible aging, which their work documents in gritty detail. Recently they have addressed the ravages of time by dividing up and mirroring their bodies along a central axis, creating strangely symmetrical figures that seem even further removed from the imagery surrounding them. The effect is at once decorative and surgical, striking a perhaps belated pose against the fickle finger of fame.