I.In the world of physics, the quanta reflect the black and romantic double principle of art: if you change the electrical charge of one of the twin quanta, it instantly changes in the other, even if it were in a different planetary system. So it may well be that the moment George Passmore, born in Plymouth in 1942, from the British artist duo “Gilbert and George” blows out his eighty candles on the cake, the age of his partner Gilbert simultaneously changes to eighty, although the Born in South Tyrol, they will not celebrate their birthday until September next year.
Then atomos“Indivisible” have both been since the beginning of their amazing careers in the sixties – the bourgeois surnames Passmore and Prousch were replaced by the alliterating first names, and there has been no distinctive clothing since then due to the artist uniform of fine tweed. You’ve lived and loved in the same artist’s studio in London for over sixty years (even though the two didn’t officially get married until 2008), while they were still studying they formed a “singing sculpture”, people got drunk together without restraint and refined it into video art (still the only one “Dinner for one” alternative “Gordon’s makes us drunk”), the opulence of the photographic tableaus, which are reminiscent of Victorian glass windows, are made hand in hand so that no specific handwriting would be recognizable – in other words, Gilbert & George are basically not a duo , rather platonic spherical people who complement each other perfectly and no leaf fits between their statements.
The artistic expressions of the duo divided the public all the more: From the beginning, special numbers of faeces and genitals appear on the sacred and dignified-looking slide glass windows, the Augustinian “inter faeces et urinam” is overcrowded; Sexual abuse, especially by the clergy, the favorite enemy, is impaled larger than life, as are social grievances and the arms trade. Everything, however, in an artistic form, in orderly picture grids and often mirrored in the central axis like a Rorschach test to test one’s own perception and posture. Started at the same time as Monty Python – the other anarchists in Tweed – Gilbert and George began what could be called a “conservative revolution,” a very British paradox. This is never predictable, at most in the always radical advocacy of unhindered individual development. Most recently, the two even defended Boris Johnson, hopefully once again as a provocation.
As early as 2020, both of them argued about the inevitable eighth decade of life with the monumental tableau “Priority Seat”, on which they ironically portray themselves in a London bus stop as old white men who literally spread themselves out in the so-called priority seats with “limited mobility” on display by lying down cheekily lengthways in their distinguished clothes and thus usurping twice as much space for themselves. Two wolves in fine sheepskin fur – unpredictable to this day. Today George – and probably Gilbert too – is celebrating his eightieth birthday.
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