Vicky CosstickFor fifty extraordinary years Gilbert & George have been devoted to being a living sculpture – two people, one artist – walking the streets of London’s East End, recording what they see and their own presence within it. Their half century together is celebrated at the MAC, Belfast, with SCAPEGOATING, an exhibition of pictures made in 2013 that has been shown so far in London, Paris, Berlin, and Budapest.
Context is everything – the context in which the pictures are conceived and made, and the context in which they are shown. ‘Islamophobia’ (2013) suggests a manifesto for the work – the Woolwich murder that year of fusilier Lee Rigby. Gilbert & George’s skeletal forms dance across a Workers’ Party poster which asks: “How can we fight islamophobia and scapegoating?” crossed by a sinister chain of drug ’empties’. The artists believe that what is intensely local is also universal. Each city where the exhibition has been shown, and Belfast itself of course, has its own particular hidden story of drugs, conflict, poverty, division and diversity, prejudice and fragmentation and so the pictures will resonate differently and specifically wherever they are shown.
AHEM (2013)
In his introduction to the catalogue, MAC curator Hugh Mulholland states that “we introduce THE SCAPEGOATING PICTURES to Northern Ireland, which remains a divided and fractured society at times unable to confront uncomfortable truths.”
Several of the larger than life images feature Muslim women, at the same time both secretive and highly noticeable, dressed in burqas, mirror-imaged so they take on a menacing, crow-like appearance, their eyes sometimes fearful, sometimes challenging. They stride through the streets wearing flip-flops, carrying handbags, clutching children, flanked ceremonially by Gilbert & George. Other images show Asian men, men in hats or hoodies and white van men against a dilapidated background of walls, graffiti and street signs which locate the images in time and place. The canvasses are littered with hugely magnified bomb-bullet nitrous oxide canisters and in the midst of this the artists are at the same time part of and apart from it, becoming robotic, fractured, electric and depersonalised. The masks they wear hint at their own concealed identities – who are Gilbert & George, really, behind the meticulous performance?
The eponymous triptych, ‘Scapegoating’ fills the largest wall of the gallery and cleverly shocks and confronts the viewer with Gilbert & George’s central belief that what is truly to blame is institutionalised religion and fundamentalism, with its history of child abuse and hypocritical hostility to homosexuality. “So much of religion is based on intolerance”, they say in the short but enlightening video made for the Belfast exhibition.
Gilbert & George are committed to an “emotional, human art”. As they sit watching people go past the window of their shared ceremonial home and studio, they see that “every single person is amazing in some way or another”; “whatever is happening outside our front door is happening in the whole world”. Their work fulfils its moral ambition to help us to see and to engage with what is invisible, absurd and truly fundamental in our surroundings. “We want to be in the thick of it,” they say, “We want to be part of the change.”
Art can take the familiar and banal, those things that we no longer really see, and make them literally larger than life. What would Gilbert & George see if they were to walk the streets of Belfast? Prescription pills, “paramilitary” thugs and peacewalls? What needs to change, and who is really to blame? SCAPEGOATING invites engagement, conversation, debate and reflection – helped greatly by knowledgeable and enthusiastic gallery attendants, a vast improvement on the ubiquitous ‘audioguide’. And they don’t mind if you take photos. Get a group together, and go see it.
