When I was nine years old, my parents brought me to see Rosc ′84, one of a series of international art showcases hosted in Dublin between 1967 and 1988 roughly every four years. Alongside contributions by Joseph Beuys, Richard Sera and Bruce Nauman, I first encountered a dazzling multi-panelled artwork by Gilbert & George, which took up an entire wall of the Guinness Storehouse.
This gigantic piece, provocatively entitled Drunk with God, initiated a lifelong fascination with the London-based collaborative art duo, who inspired Kraftwerk’s besuited image and often portrayed nudity, faeces and urine in their frequently controversial pictures.
Despite my enthusiasm for their colourful creations, I’ve always understood why some people react to their work with complete bafflement, or even hostility. Much of what has been written about Gilbert & George to date is misrepresentative and dreadfully dry, with the honourable exception of the writer, novelist and cultural critic Michael Bracewell, who pens the majority of their catalogue essays and wrote This is Gilbert & George, which commemorated half a century of their creative partnership in 2017.
Gilbert & George and the Communists is the second book by the British art dealer, curator, and gallery owner James Birch, following his 2022 debut, Bacon Goes to Moscow, which documented his successful crusade to exhibit Francis Bacon’s paintings in Russia, which was also adapted into a BBC radio play, with Timothy Spall playing Bacon.
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While Bacon was one of the largest personalities in 20th-century art, Gilbert & George are more in the vein of classic comedy double acts such as Morecambe and Wise or Laurel and Hardy, providing copious raw material to lend plenty of sparkle to Birch’s recollections. However, he can be serious when required, such as when recounting their efforts to raise money and awareness for Aids charities in the 1980s, a cause close to their broken hearts as the disease wiped out so many of their friends and contemporaries. This activism was largely ignored at the time.
[ Gilbert & George: A strange reunion with their younger selvesOpens in new window ]
Birch injects a welcome dose of swashbuckling rock’n’roll spirit and Hollywood glamour into a book about the visual art industry that pivots into a masterclass in telling anecdotes, as Birch and co-writer, Michael Hodges, author of AK47: the Story of the People’s Gun, pepper the text with surreal cameos from the likes of Timothy Dalton and Steven Spielberg, all segueing seamlessly into a riotous and rollicking read.
