British artists Gilbert and George have never shied away from looking the brutal truths of life directly in the eye, and their latest collection in Hong Kong, is no different.
It seems very, very difficult. Regulation is going to interfere with a lot of freedoms if we’re not careful
London Pictures is a disturbing examination of sex, violence, power and death through the medium of Britain’s tabloid billboards, collected over six years from newsstands near the artists’ home in East London.
From the shocking (Suicide Gang’s Terror War on Britain) to the banal (Cat Is Killed In Park Dog Attack) and the bizarre (Big Bummed Burglar Banged Up), the headlines are a morbid narrative on society’s grim obsessions.
But the artists – Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore – are the first to defend the tabloids from calls for greater regulation in light of the hacking scandal that has gripped the News of the World and the Sun, despite saying they were bugged.
“It seems very, very difficult. Regulation is going to interfere with a lot of freedoms if we’re not careful,” George said in an interview at Hong Kong’s White Cube surrounded by panels of tabloid headlines laid over photographic images of the artists themselves.
“As least rules as possible is the best, we think. We don’t need ideas. Writers and artists and poets and musicians have the ideas. Governments shouldn’t have brainwaves for us.”
Both artists agree that until the scandal over Milly Dowler, a young murder victim whose voicemail was allegedly hacked by the media, no one would have been shocked to hear that journalists eavesdropped on private conversations.
“We never thought there was anything wrong with that,” Gilbert says, wearing the tweed suit and tie that have become the artists’ trademark.
“They were always trying to snoop on us for many, many years but in some way we accepted that, and we still accept that. I think it’s a kind of freedom that has to be there... We were bugged, we know that.”
Ms Dowler’s name appears in London Pictures, but hers is just one of the countless personal tragedies the work forces the viewer to confront.
“It’s a very simple poster just for one day, but it’s a nightmare of everlasting consequences for the people (behind the headlines) and the people around them,” George explains.
He says the artists “began to feel almost ill” as they assembled more than 3,700 billboard posters into groups according to their often gruesome subjects – murder, rape, suicide, money, killing, knife and so on.
“It made us think, is this the world we live in? How responsible are we? We began to think, is this the price of freedom, is this the price of democracy?” he says.
Gilbert points out the artists’ ghost-like presence in the pictures. They became “very involved” in spiritualism during the creative process after watching a movie about Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the hero of the Battle of Britain who claimed to communicate with the ghosts of dead airmen.
“In some strange way we still think that we are in conversation with Dickens, or we are still in some way in touch with Shakespeare, and we would like the figures in these pictures to be like that,” George says.