Gilbert & George

"THE LAWS OF SCULPTORS"

"We think of our art as just pictures, not as photographs. We are using photography, not being photographers."

"To create, you must empty yourself of every artistic thought."

"Really creative thinking does not occur with regard to problems."

"If you are submerged in normal life, then your view will be normal. So we have to keep separate from normal life in order to be able to say something that is not known. People come to art for something that they don’t understand, that’s not in their life already."

"It is important to us to publish our art in books and catalogues, so as many people as possible are able to see it, but we also want them to see the real pieces. We like it very much when the pictures take over. When they’re bigger than the viewer. You go to a museum to look at a picture, but we like it when the picture looks at you."

"George: One man naked is a male study; more than one, well... that's quite serious - two men naked are more naked than one."

"George: We say that how we are that day made us do that picture and we have to respect that. If you have another thought, that's another picture; it would be another one."

"We like to think that we’re forming our tomorrows, that we’re making pictures that don’t exist in reality, that maybe tomorrow will be a little bit more like our pictures than it would otherwise."

"We want our Art to bring out the from inside the Liberal and conversely to bring out the Liberal from inside the Bigot."

"People used to refer to our art as "gay art"—though they never said the "gay art of Leonardo or Michelangelo." Much of our content used to be taboo and isn't considered that anymore, not just in the obvious ways of sexuality or bodies. The art world has moved to the point that Gilbert & George isn't on the radical edge anymore."

"But we don't want to think. It's exhausting enough without that. We didn't think when we did the Ginkgo Pictures, at all. Afterwards we found out all this stuff about them."

"We don't want to know what we are doing. It's much better not to know. You have to express yourselves, once you've finished a group of works you have to start all over again. It's extraordinary stuff - what an artist has to do. You finish a big group of works, then the next day you have to begin again. Forty years we've been doing that."

"A clergyman once said to us, "Jealousy is a bad thing. But I must confess that I am sometimes jealous of the artist because the artist is closer to creation.""

"SM: Let’s start with a trivial question: why Gilbert and George and not George and Gilbert?"

"SM: You’ve always put yourselves in the center of your work and there’s a strong performance element in your practice. Has it changed throughout the years?"

"If a performance artist started going on about England and our culture like that-in fact that's happened to Gilbert and George, they are about the only ones I know that have done anything of this sort. It seems to me that both yourself and other artists can talk about flags and America and all this… you can play with these ideas, you may not believe in it, that you can play such a close game with them without anyone being offended."

"THE SINGING SCULPTURE brought Gilbert & George their first taste of fame in 1969. The piece consists of the artists performing a 1930s music hall song called "Underneath the Arches". Gilbert & George would stand on a table and sing along to a record of the old song, wearing tweed suits, with their faces painted bronze, and using a glove and a plastic walking stick as props. The song’s lyrics tell about the life of a tramp in London whose home is outdoors underneath the arches of a bridge. Gilbert & George first performed the piece under a bridge in London, and were soon invited to perform it in many European cities where it was always received as a sensation."