It is more than 30 years since two art students met, became friends and decided to become one. The contentious British art phenomenon known as Gilbert & George agree they could not have arrived at their style of artistic expression individually.
"Never" says Gilbert, "we couldn't have done it alone. We have developed a way of making pictures that needs two people." George is quite matter of fact about it: "We both always knew we would be artists and when we met it was obvious we would work together. We always wanted to do pictures no one else would do."
In print, their statements invariably sound more bombastic than when delivered in their polite, reasoned tones. Initially they evoke memories of Morecombe and Wise, but as they speak it becomes obvious that there is no straight man; the pair think and articulate their art with one voice; there is no private competition going on.
On the morning after their opening in Belfast, the couple arrive back into the Ormeau Baths Gallery, having taken another stroll around the city, still intent on finding out the name of the architect responsible for the City Hall. The ostentatious, Renaissance-style building with its brooding, quasi-palatial presence dominates Donegall Square, apparently symbolising the city's former Edwardian wealth and self-confidence. George is fascinated by it.
"We love architecture," he says, and he is "amazed that no one we've met seems to know who designed it". (The work of Sir Brumwell Thomas, it was built between 1902 and 1906.) And while it may be too familiar a sight to warrant a second glance from the citizens of Belfast, Gilbert & George, on walkabout wearing specially tailored pale overcoats, turn heads. Dressed in their trademark, matching, single-breasted, three-button suits complete with trouser cuffs and pattern ties, these po-faced Edwardian gents who can assume an automaton's persona at will, look like a pair of Magritte's businessmen who, having fallen from the sky, have come to life.
Their work is radical, brash, outrageous, bluntly sexual and executed by camera rather than conventional paint and brush. It is also deliberately intended to shock and extract extreme reactions from joyful engagement to revulsion; you either like it or you don't. Titles such as Eight Shits, Blood and Piss, Lavatory and Piss on US are no more graphic than the works themselves.
No, they don't do commissions. But there is something democratic about their ability to offend. Still, even if garishly coloured, photo montage with a stark moral message is not to your liking, it is difficult not to wonder at the technical skill lurking behind the images which are worked on photographic paper using a range of photographic devices. Gilbert and George, self-confessed mavericks revelling in the role, consider that they are involved in an ongoing battle: "We are fighting and we are winning," says Gilbert. It is them against most of the critics and often fellow artists. Long ago, as art students, they rejected the elitism of their teachers and fellow students. "We couldn't stand the way the art community saw the public as stupid," explains George. "We make our art for the people. We are interested in the viewer. We like when ordinary people who don't see the point in art come up to us and say `I like your pictures'." And they do.
The pair are old world in manner and have perfected an air of genteel defiance alongside their cultivated strangeness. They are also odd; their gestures, particularly the stiff, curiously dandified movements of George, set them apart. Not quite eccentrics, they are polite exhibitionists who are deadly serious, patient and sincere, yet there is the faintest hint that they are as highly amused by themselves as well as by the rest of us. Timing is central; their movements and expressions in life are as carefully stage managed as the deadpan poses they adopt in their pictures.
As a couple they are unusually egalitarian and share the talking, they answer questions in turn. At this stage they are probably capable of reading each other's minds. It is interesting that this most British partnership is composed of an Englishman from Devon and an Italian from a small village, San Martino, in the Dolomite region, which is near the Austrian border and culturally quite separate from the rest of Italy.
"I love Italy," says Gilbert whose first language is Ladino. "But I don't see myself as Italian." His world is that described in Magris's new book Microcosms.
George is fastidious, precise, always looks slightly wounded, possibly due to his eyes being magnified behind strong lenses, and acts like the clergyman his only sibling became. George personifies the role of artist as a well-mannered obsessive. He also sounds like Prince Charles. But George was not born into privilege. His early life was hard. "Not awful, but we were very poor. I was always aware that everything was shabby, second-hand and broken."
Born in Plymouth in January 1942, he was raised by his mother - his father having left home shortly after his return from the war because of rumours surrounding his wife's behaviour in his absence. George had no memory of his father but did track him down when he was 21. The reunion was not happy.
George's childhood home in Totnes where his by then divorced mother worked as a waitress, among other jobs, consisted of three rooms, the third used only for housing the chamber pot. By 15 he had left school, was working and already painting. Within a year he had begun attending night classes in painting and pottery at Dartington Hall, a progressive, and therefore scandalous, co-educational school which Lucien Freud had attended in 1937. Having impressed his teacher, George was given a full-time place.
From there it was assumed he would win a place at the Bath Academy of Art. He was rejected. This failure made him decide to leave Devon, and he hitched to London. A series of chance meetings eventually led him in 1965 to St Martin's School of Art, where he began studying in the famous sculpture department.
Life had been very different, and kinder, to the young Gilbert. Equally surefooted and as clever as George, he is more languid, possibly more confident and not as obviously driven. Born in September 1943 into a family of shoemakers with some artistic tendencies, Gilbert did not have to struggle quite as hard. One of his uncles painted and, at 14, Gilbert was sent to an art school which concentrated on wood carving. He spent six years at the Munich Academy of Art, excelling at painting and sculpture. "I was a superstar." But he became restless.
"I wanted to go to England. St Martin's was famous. It was the place to be. German was old fashioned. Art was happening in London. So I went" - without any English. "I was the lost boy from abroad and George took pity on me. He was very kind. We spoke in sign language."
Their relationship has been described by their friend, the late Daniel Farson, as "an epic love story". Is it? Or is it an unusually intuitive artistic partnership?
"Both," says Gilbert, "love at first sight, but a partnership."
The men are very different - the Englishman who appears to have created himself and the European who sounds as German as he does Italian but who displays a playfulness which tempers the forcefulness of his comments. Gilbert's humour is more natural, earthy and quick, whereas George's remains that of a nervy, if clever, boy determined to justify his self-belief. Gilbert sees his partner rather differently.
"George is the most amusing person I know," he says solidly and urges him to to tell this or that funny story. George certainly enjoys reciting these gags but much of his humour is channelled into his survival of hurts and slights. "We like the suffering artists: Rembrandt, Van Gogh," both of whom they admire, and George mentions he recently discovered that Van Gogh killed himself on a dung heap and nods at both the horror and self-hatred of it.
Early in their joint career, Gilbert & George set out to make themselves their art, offering their bodies as living sculpture. "The artists become the art," they chorus. Formality is their medium, as it is the most effective way of showcasing their extremes. If they were to dig the garden they would do so in shirt and tie - not that they garden; they don't cook or shop either. Art is their life and their lives, or at least the joint presence which they share, is an act of art. Sex, money, race and religion are their themes, while fear, apprehension and humiliation are their abiding moods.
"We humiliate ourselves first," stresses George, "so we beat our critics to it." They say they are unhappy artists. This may be so, and as commentators on society, no one could accuse them of being optimistic, but in person they exist in a near constant state of studied winsome melancholia. "Would you trust a happy artist?" asks George.
So two middle-aged men sit in one of the two upstairs galleries of the four in a cleverly restored building which was formerly a Victorian baths, on chairs brought up from the office below. They are surrounded by large pictures, most of which feature them naked and in varying poses of fear and bewilderment, underlining the vulnerability of human life as they see it.
"There is something doubly vulnerable about wearing a watch when you are naked," muses George. Once so avant-garde, it is now 13 years since they won Britain's most controversial art award, the Turner Prize, so surely they are now more establishment than renegade? Both appear shocked.
"Never" says Gilbert. "We are outsiders; they (they critics) hate us," stresses George. "We are on the edge, we always have been. There are those who see us as evil. It's quite dreadful really."
At the opening the previous night, the gallery was picketed by the Free Presbyterian Church. While more than 800 viewers, wine glasses in hand, explore the gallery's superb space, participating in what is clearly a major cultural event over which Gilbert & George preside, as ever mixing with their public.
The picketers stand outside in a strong breeze, a minister engaged in a debate with a woman wearing a red cowboy hat who says she is an artist. The dialogue is being staged for an anxious man holding a BBC microphone. Asked if he has seen the pictures, the irate minister replies he had looked at the invitation. "That was enough," and he outlines his objection to naked bodies, urine, excrement and sperm as art. The two speakers slug it out, he denouncing the exploitation of bodily fluids, never mind the naked male bodies, she asking did he disapprove of 500 years of art history?
Passing art students snigger. A man remarks: "I'd rather look at naked women than a couple of men but here goes." A young girl leaves the building, nods to a woman arriving and remarks to the youth with her: "I know they're famous and I'm not so well up on art and the like, but Jesus, they're daft, ugly pictures, I'd not want any at home."
Inside the gallery, the artists are being asked whose urine samples appears in the pictures, Gilbert's or George's? George impassive as a newsreader confirms both, while there is a third source which is a combination of the two sources. A doctor quizzes them about their use of magnified blood, urine, human waste and sperm samples. The artists calmly describe the "incredible beauty of these everyday things which are part of all of us". Not for the first time, and definitely not for the last, George enthuses about discovering that sperm when viewed under a microscope, "looks like the planet Earth from outer space", while blood assumes the guise of medieval stained-glass and "every piss turns into a beautiful flower".
The work is sexual without being gay, and they appear as naked rather than as nude. It is an interesting distinction. And the couple stress their work "does not show violence, they do not show or suggest any sexual act, they exploit no one".
"Our art is difficult, extreme. We always want to take it to the edge," says Gilbert helpfully, "but we don't want to frighten the people." George agrees: "We don't want to alienate." But they are formidable. Stressing their wish to be able to transfer the image directly on to the wall, they are impatient with the process and, as Gilbert says, "our interest is in the result, not in the making".
"We never want to be influenced. We only look with one eye," says Gilbert demonstrating by covering up one side of his face and smiling. They have no interest in the arts. How about music? "No," says Gilbert flatly. Cinema was once a major interest. There was a time when they went up to four times a day. They both laugh at the memory. "But then one day," says Gilbert, "it was in 1979, we went no more. Now I swim." It is one of the rare times either uses the pronoun "I".
They live in the East End. "Once you couldn't get a taxi. Now all the baby artists are coming to live here." Their house in Fournier Street was built by the Huguenots in 1724. "It took two years to restore," says George. "It's full of wonderful things. We have some important collections. It's more like a museum, we don't cook or anything. We have pottery, glassware, fabric and furniture."
At the mention of the Irish architect and furniture designer Eileen Grey, they both nod and George says: "We had thought about buying one of her chairs, but we have a cut-off point. Nothing over 1900."
No, they have not made a fortune out of their art, although they have had huge successes in China and Paris. "The Americans, the Italians and the Germans like us as well - although the Germans are more interested in the technique than the ideas," says George. And the couple have often sponsored their own catalogues to reduce the cost to the public. "Catalogues are very important; they last much longer than exhibitions."
Nor do they argue. "If we started to argue . . . " Gilbert shrugs and continues, "things would fall apart very fast." They have never taught, but do believe in art schools, "as places in which people can be different, even if they go on to do other things," says George.
At present they are working on a huge picture entitled 1999. They see their work as ongoing and in fairness to them they have always managed to do something different, ever delving into their collective store of bizarrely logical images. Their response to society is inexhaustible and, if powerfully urban, is more universal than British. At 56 and 57 respectively, they seem older than their years, but then they have never looked young. George says: "We don't feel old; we have never concealed our ages. They are stated on everything, every publication."
It is true. They are open about everything, the insides of their bodies as well as the exterior. About the only thing we don't have is their last names. Their work is physical and, as we know, a two-man collaboration. How long will they continue working?
"We will go on making pictures until one day there will be the last Gilbert & George picture," replies George, "and then it will be over, the story will have been told."
Gilbert & George's Recent Pictures continues at the Ormeau Art Gallery, Belfast until January 15th, 2000
