The Pursuit of Art by Martin Gayford

Author:Martin Gayford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 2019-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Invitation card and envelope for the opening of Gilbert & George’s exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Beijing, 1993

Later, when I met them, it turned out that G&G had also thought of China as distant and forbidding. That in fact was why they had instantly proposed Beijing as the location for the exhibition to follow one they had held in Moscow in 1990. But, George explained, ‘I don’t think we meant it, really. It was just appealingly outrageous.’

‘It seemed like an impossibility’, Gilbert put in. So they handed James Birch, the organizer of the Moscow show, a pile of catalogues and said, ‘Give them to the Chinese government’, thinking that would be the end of it. But the People’s Republic came back quickly, saying they’d like to have an exhibition in three months.

To me, at that time, G&G seemed almost as remote and mysterious as China. Although I had been writing as an art critic for some time, there were zones of the avant-garde that were still terra incognita. The contemporary art that I championed was the painting that had flourished during the 1980s. With their (allegedly) fused personality – two men, but one artist – their disconcertingly conventional suits resembling those of Thompson and Thomson in Tintin, and their belief that they constitute living sculpture, Gilbert & George were inscrutable to me. But that was about as far as the connection with China went. Otherwise, you might have supposed, Gilbert & George and Beijing scarcely fitted into the same universe.

That of course was why Nigel scented a story. The whole notion was delightfully piquant, even bizarre, which meant what an editor is always looking for: readable. It was obvious from the moment that Nigel opened his mouth that I was bound to say yes to his proposal. Here was an opportunity to step into the unknown – in fact, two different sorts of unknown – but I did so with some trepidation. I had absolutely no idea what it was all going to be like.

My flight out was a long one, involving a change at Frankfurt where the heavy, old-fashioned cassette recorder I was taking to record G&G caused some suspicion at security. All through the night I was woken up at intervals because – a detail that dates this story – I had accepted a seat in the smoking section. A relatively recent non-smoker, I thought it would not make much difference. The result, however, was that periodically smokers came back to have a cigarette, sitting in the empty seat next to mine – and every one of them felt it would be polite to have a conversation while they did so.

In the intervals between chatting and looking out of the window, I read Daniel Farson’s book about accompanying G&G to Moscow, an excursion during which heroic quantities of vodka had been consumed. It sounded very jolly, and so did the artists, despite their slightly menacing demeanour. But I was not quite ready to lower my critical guard.

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