The Liturgie of Sex

exhibited by Gilbert & George in Munich, Haus der Kunst.

A picture named "cunt" in the great retrospective of Gilbert & George's work of the last fourty years, isn't too handily presented as a simple impression of cityness.

"The great exhibition" shows the work of the last fourty years.

Already some "Kids please stay outside !" - signs at the entrance with intelligible warnings against the real subjects sex and critic of religion confess, that the wallfilling, overdimensional research of G. & G. celebrate an overflowing sexlife, as horrible, beautiful, disgusting or necessary it ever may be. Such, the yellow, black, white and red pictures of the 80ies like "Hellish", "Black Church Face" or "Stream" show G. & G. in a soul protecting gesture not only with soft emotions for the suffer and joy of the subculture young men of the East Side but quite explicitly with hursh irony. You shouldn't trust them too much, neither the young men nor their artificial protectors showing themselves as "poor sinners".

Strolling along through this strange hall in a throughout sexualized world, completely offering itself to the obscene and the overpouring laughter of sexual irony, you'll see the artists's works of the time between 1982 and 2005.

You'll see photographies with the ornamental structure of church windows, transformed into sexual motives. Other important themes are war and terror, met en scene with huge portrait photos and headlines, with far more details than the earlier works, that have usually just one centered motive. Some of the newer ones, like "Thirst", test the aesthetics of comic strip and graffiti, sometimes with motives provocing sickness.

Completely different are the photoplates of the 70ties, in a pale gray-brown, contemplating dissolution, dust and traditional city-views. In a way they show, that G. & G. missed the courages and unrestrainedness of the 80ties.

The huge formatted "coal drawings" - they seem to be painted on burned paper with some black ink - show an eternal flow of narrations, but Gilbert and George brave and dreamly leant against a tree, in different posings. The written text on the painting is in no relation with the pictures themselves.

These series haven't been continued later, because the people liked them too much, like G. & G. tell us.

Later, in works that are in their colours quite similar to earlier ones, like for instance, "Gum City", G. & G. handle in a concentrated and uncomplicated way sexual and body concerned details. Body fluids and their microscopic structures are shown in "Blood", "Tears", "Spunk", "Piss" and "Our Spunk", and although not everything of these is sexual, they are not too pleasurable to handle with (outside the body). Now in G. & G. photographic walls, it is streched along the walls in pictures of such brutal colours, that not any eye will stay unconcerned. In contrast to the very small glassplate of the biologist, G. &. G. offer the visitors to look at these fluids in formats of up to 2,5 m x 6 m.

Some years later the ornamental partiality gives room to a narrative density of allusions and sexual motives. Especially "Gum City" has with its coloured takes of used and reordered gums the trails of "Blood, Tears, Spunk, Piss" - in the motive of body-fluids - but additionally the motives of the earlier city-pictures, as a cityplan covers the whole of "Gum City". Looking at this, we notice quite unsurprising remarks like "Grove", "Red", "Old", "Great" - what may be read as a kind of classification in the whole concept of "Gum City", an ironical documentation.

After the monumental plates about war, sex and religion the visitor is calmed down with the especially argumentative slogan "God loves fucking! Enjoy. Was Jesus heterosexual?". The G.-G.-remade sculptures of Jesus at the cross in this work from 2005 are strangely deformed in the region of the hip. The forms even invite us to think at matriachal religions. Well...a heavy joke or a serious proposal? There seems to be no other way than to roll back the motives to the discourses they come from, as such, on law, religion and medicine, and, for instance, the individuality of believe, the codification and transformation of individual emotions in the orthodox forms of religion like catholocism. G. & G. create themselves a very own and private system of religion, especially rich in its motives of the catholic liturgie and properly equipped with its own catechism. This, completely different from catholic systems of believe like we know them generally, but in an obvious way fitted into the personal and individual needs of Gilbert & George and their magnets of emotions and thoughts. It's all like a huge church, then. As such, you'll become one of the G.-G. religion's liturgical assistants, in their sexualized church, that can be visited until the 09.th september 2007 at the "Haus der Kunst" in Munich.

Haus der Kunst

Prinzregentenstr. 1

D-80538 München

Tel. 089 21127-115

Fax 089 21127-157

report by Dr. U.

Read this article in german on www.kunst-spektrum.de

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