CONTEMPORARY ART

Suit form to function

CONTEMPORARYARTISTSWHO

DRESSUNUSUALLYAREDRAWING

ONATRADITIONOFDANDYISM

THATISATLEAST 150 YEARSOLD .

Oscar Wilde once remarked that ‘one should either be a work of art or wear a work of art’. Gilbert & George, of course, follow both pieces of advice. Famously, they first came to prominence painted bronze and miming to an old recording of ‘Underneath the Arches’, and hence were not only animate art, but the world’s first ‘singing sculptures’. But in a sense they also wear works of art, or a least their neatly buttoned suits and ties have been a crucial aspect of their selfpresentation for the past 40 years. Their recent show at White Cube, London, ‘Sonofagod Pictures’, stirred up some controversy because of its allegedly antireligious theme. But the works on display (such as Fig. 2) – like almost all of G&G’s work – brought to attention a neglected topic: artists’ clothes. In the case of Gilbert & George, their get-up has always been the same: shirts, ties and tailored, threebuttoned suits. It is a style that has remained absolutely unchanging as the tide of male fashion has ebbed and flowed. In the early 90s they looked almost normal; at that time commercial suit-makers such as Comme Des Garçons appeared to imitate G&G. Then, it was hard to imagine how outlandish they must have seemed in the late 60s and 70s. ‘We have all these photographs of artists from 1971-74’, Gilbert recalls, ‘at parties, all drunk and we always looked the same. The others look like hippies, with beards, flared jackets.’ In fashion terms, Gilbert points out, their clothes are like the stopped clock which is correct twice a day. But of course, the point is not to fit in but to stand out. The objective of Gilbert & George’s clothes is to make the wearers distinctive and different. Since they almost always appear in their own works – generally clothed – it is an important strategy.

1 Portrait of the artist as a shaman – with a uniform to match: Output 32 by Joseph Beuys ( 1921-86 ), 1972-78 . Gelatin silver photograph. © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia/ Bridgeman Art Library/

DACS 2006

And as is often the case with their intentions, the effect is complicated, even contradictory. On the one hand, George insists, the suits are part of their aim of being just like everyday country folk. ‘We knew that a lot of art and sculpture offends ordinary people, and ours tends not to do that.’ A suit would be standard formal male wear both in Alpine Italy and Totnes, Devon, when Gilbert & George were respectively growing up. But just as it’s not quite true that their work does not give offence, it is also the case that the suits have played an important part in making them appear alien and slightly alarming.

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Gilbert & George’s suits go back to the beginning of their partnership, forged at St Martin’s School of Art, London, in the mid 60s. According to Gilbert, then recently arrived from the Dolomites, via Munich, ‘George used to have a black suit he always wore at art school. He was a dandy a little, already’. Richard Long, a fellow student, concurs. ‘In my first week at St Martin’s George was the chap on the next desk to me. He was already a pure, eccentric, fully-formed artist-psychopath. It must have been like going to college with Oscar Wilde. You knew his life would be made into his work.’ The reference to Wilde is not accidental. He belongs in G&G’s private pantheon of predecessors, together with Van Gogh and Samuel Palmer. ‘We only like the mad artists’, as they put it. The question of artists’ clothes considered as an individual uniform denoting a separate caste, goes back to the Wildean era of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Wilde’s mentor in many matters of dress and wit – James McNeill Whistler – was among the earliest artists deliberately to make themselves into public figures in this way. Whistler’s clothes were not quite as unvarying as G&G’s, and he depicted himself far more rarely. But his appearance – the monocle, lock of white hair, and cane – were just as crucial to his act as his killer wit, butterfly signature and extravagant opinions. It did not escape his contemporaries that Whistler’s behaviour and appearance were carefully crafted; that he was, in Wilde’s phrase, ‘a work of art’. Not all of his contemporaries liked it, just as many are infuriated still by G&G. ‘The artist’s eccentricity’, observed The Graphicof Whistler as early as 1872, ‘is somewhat too premeditated and self-conscious’. That, however, was precisely what made him a prime example of a new phenomenon of the nineteenth century: an artist who set out to act and look like a member of an esoteric calling. The history of artists’ self-presentation is of course a long and complex one: as long as that of the self portrait. Dürer painted himself as a gentleman, Rubens and Titian as aristocrats, Rembrandt in a bewildering range of roles – successful young fellow, laughing philosopher, ageing drinker. Many depicted themselves as makers of painting, at their easels, brushes in hand. The notion of artists as an antibourgeois group of their own – Bohemians – was well established by the mid-nineteenth century. But the artist as an outsider, cast in a role entirely selfdevised, was different. It was a development of the nineteenth-century literary cult of dandyism. Whistler could be described as a painter-dandy. But the notion quickly took on much stranger forms in the visual arts. Gauguin – about whom I write elsewhere in this issue – was fond of scripting far-fetched

2 Crosswise by Gilbert & George, 2005 , in which the artists’ suits are, as usual, visible. Four-panel piece, 151 x 127 cm. © The artists, courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube

characterisations for himself. In the late 1880s, this ex-financial services salesman went around dressed up as a Breton fisherman in folk-knitted jersey, beret and clogs (he seems to have adopted this guise from the novels of Pierre Loti). Back in Paris from Tahiti a few years later, he wore a fur hat, self-devised cloak, and exotically-carved walking stick. To see him, recalled Ambroise Vollard, ‘one would have taken Gauguin for some Oriental Prince’. The most prominent post-war artist’s uniform was that of Joseph Beuys, consisting of felt hat – which he needed to keep his head warm because of a war wound – plus American fisherman’s jacket, Levis and English shirt (Fig. 1). Vaguely alternative, and yet – because of the hat – subtly odd, this made Beuys immediately recognisable, a crucial factor since his art turned on the conception of the artist as a shaman, and also often on his own presence in performances. Alistair Mackintosh, visual arts officer at the Scottish Arts Council, described encountering Beuys at the 1970 Edinburgh Festival: ‘He was recognisable from 50 yards, rather in the same way that one recognises the Mona Lisafrom reproductions.’ That was no doubt exactly the effect intended.

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