14 January – 19 February
Whtie Cube (Mason’s Yard), 25-26 Mason’s Yard, London, SW1Y 6BU
Opening times: Tuesday to Saturday 10am – 6pm
It has been twenty years since Gilbert & George last exhibited postcards and forty years since they first worked in the medium. In this show the pair return to the medium, and rework their familiar preoccupation with the underbelly of contemporary society, using the finite space of the postcard to celebrate the degenerate, discarded, grotesque with an extraordinary freshness.
This is a big project, totalling 564 postcard pictures, of which the White Cube displays 155. Each piece is composed of individual postcards, arranged in an angular representation of the sign for the urethra. The pictures are composed of traditional picture postcards, telephone box cards and flyers, which deliver familiar iconography in a somewhat unfamiliar way. Gilbert & George have made a career out of interrogating and exposing modern society: overt sexuality, delicate homoeroticism, bodily fluids and the glamour of East End ruffians is tempered by a plethora of Union Jacks, flowers, Christian symbolism, nods to the monarchy and a wistful sense of British tradition. These are all present in The Urethra Postcard Art, but on a scale much smaller, more concise and more intimate than the large photoworks that Gilbert & George are famous for.
The thing that is so encouraging about this duo is that they are not afraid to buck the anti-establishment trend so prevelant in the artworld, and they do it with such seriousness. The Urethra Postcard Art is serious in both its celebration of British life and in its presentation of sexual deviance. So we get Big Ben, London buses, Union Jacks alongside toned male torsos, offers of clandestine meetings and promises of sensual massage. It is serious in the sense that Gilbert & George genuinely accept and delight in these things as real components of society.
So many images of London make you wonder why anyone would want these banal, mass-produced images of a world that is better in reality. London in all its glory becomes a caricature, a theme park for tourists that hardly consists of more than these iconic images. It then becomes funny to think of the tourists sticking to the beaten track, searching for history The relentless barrage of nudity, phone numbers and offers of everything from massage to sex and master/slave role-play makes any eroticism they might have had dissolve. Presented here in such vast quantities, you begin to view these services as facts of modern life that, despite their abundance, you have no use for. Rather than disgust or confusion, these cards begin to elicit a smile, even sometimes sympathy for the desperate people whose phone numbers are given with such hope.
Gilbert & George use the stable form of the postcard, presented in regular formations, to set the picture postcard and the telephone box card on an even plane. The difference between the simple delight in the sites/sights? of the city and the forbidden temptations of deviance disappears, and it becomes rather funny that we should make such a big deal out of either. Here they are presented by the artists as facts of modern life, where is there no distinction of value between them, making a joke of the notion that we should think any differently. A further joke is the sign of the urethra itself: postcards meticulously arranged in the form of something sexual and normally private, whose conventional sign of a circle with a dot in the middle is used as a signature by the theosophist CW Leadbetter and by the Scouts as the sign to mean ‘go home’.
The Urethra Postcard Art is a pithy, nostalgic, funny, sad, confrontational, unsettling insight into a society in denial of its own complexities. Through them, Gilbert & George demonstrate how a city, a life, a mind can be distilled into a brief, ephemeral message on a card and distributed for all to see. In scrutinising these postcards, exaltations, experiences, desires and failings of individuals, we are being offered the chance to look carefully at our own position in society. Despite their immediate differences, what connects these cards is that they speak of desire – a deep, insatiable desire – for adventure in far off places, success in business, companionship against loneliness, gratification of sordid urges. All the rot of human desire is here, and Gilbert & George seem to be saying it’s ok; inviting us to consider what we truly desire and how we would represent it on a mere postcard.
