Review of reviews: Art

Gilbert and George

de Young Museum, San Francisco

Through May 18

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The artists known as Gilbert and George have been working as a “sort of syndicate” since 1969, said Kenneth Baker in the San Francisco Chronicle. Over the years, the two mischievous British artists have gained renown for their performances, photography, and “huge, garish recent pieces composed of modular squares of imagery.” Their cheeky art-world wit, learned from Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, is on ample display in the 50 works in the de Young museum’s retrospective. But so is a serious desire to push the limits of polite society with sexual imagery. We see Gilbert and George themselves naked in S-Naked Human World (1994) and other works. “Elsewhere, they smuggle unseemly images before the viewer unannounced,” as in Twenty Eight Streets (2003), whose abstract forms are actually photographically magnified pubic lice.

The show sure “is a visual knockout,” said Stephen West in Bloomberg.com. But these works, though drawn from a period of more than 30 years, exhibit a certain sameness. “Most are meditations on sex, death, race, religion, bare bottoms, and human excrement.” Gilbert and George have created many fascinating but facile images along the lines of 1982’s Finding God, which “combines several of their favorite images”—including a nude young man and the two artists themselves, who are “primly outfitted in suits and ties.” The disembodied head of a dreadlocked black man and large dark cross complete the odd juxtaposition of images. “It’s hard to say what the picture means, but it sure makes a splash.” Visitors to the de Young should enjoy tracing the artists’ changing styles. But they won’t find broader themes emerging. The pair’s collected works “suggest a great need to appear shocking,” but little more.