One strong element of G&G’s work evident in the Milwaukee Art Museum’s current exhibition is their use of the mirror image. This has existed in their work at least since the nineteen-eighties, beginning perhaps with their own repeated and similar gestures, and then becoming a photographic device to create strange plant-forms and monstrous faces. More recently, they have divided and duplicated their own bodies and faces to create weird symmetrical creatures, sometimes with three eyes, two sets of shoulders and four hands. These enantiomorphic beings, recognizably George and obviously Gilbert, but strangely removed and other worldly, sometimes appear pumped-up and broad-chested, at other times slender as stiletto blades. They seem to have arrived with the new century, and occur across many topics from the Hooligan Pictures to the Ginko series, and they make such recent pictures as Bombs and Bombers even more disturbing than they already might be. This is equally true of those 2005 works in which the Crucifix – here a natural visual opportunity – is also distorted through symmetrical mirroring.
With G&G, of course, the reasons for this splitting and doubling may remain for ever a mystery. It could be something as simple as a newly-discovered technique, or as deep as an existential identity crisis. It might extend the double-vision of their heavy-drinking days and mark a fresh phase of their ongoing relationship with each other, or it might be their response to genetic science.
Whether it re-presents the natural symmetry of the human form, the simple mirror of the G and the G, or is some kind of comment on our inability to see ourselves as others see us, I believe these latest works re-invigorate and complicate the fascinating world that Gilbert & George create: anyone got any ideas on what it might mean?

In a recent talk on ‘Scandal and Art’ at the Milwaukee Art Museum I described Gilbert & George as heroes of the genre – if scandal can be called a genre.
From early in their career, their work was regarded as too ‘strong’ for some tastes. The ‘Magazine Sculpture’ was censored by Studio International in 1970, despite their sunny smiles, presumably because of the outrageous epithets attached to their elegant clothing.
Through the nineteen-eighties and ‘nineties, a number of American artists were indicted, harassed, or excoriated over the nature of their work, and curators were chastised for exhibiting them.
Robert Mapplethorpe’s overt representations of homosexuality caused immense problems for curator Dennis Barrie at the Corcoran Gallery; Andres Serrano’s ambiguous photographs were described as ‘blasphemy’ by one US Senator, and torn up by another; Jock Sturges had his work and equipment confiscated for months by the FBI, on allegations of creating child pornography. These are just a few of the many victims of the so-called ‘culture wars’ of the period.
Yet the current exhibition shows clearly that G&G had, often years before, created shocking works involving bodily fluids, graphic sexual desires, and very young-looking men; as well as evoking God and crucifixion.
How did they manage to escape the trials and tribulations suffered by others?