Andrew Graham-Dixon sees Gilbert and George make an exhibition of themselves at the Hayward Gallery
GILBERT sticks his tongue out in dis-gust, George licks his lips with relish. Gilbert's face is blue and his suit is green, George's face is green and his suit is blue. Behind them gigantic or¬ange turds float in space. Shitted (1983) is archetypal Gilbert and George: eye-catching, psychedelic, large scale, de-lightedly obscene and thoroughly mysti-fying.
Robert Crumb, the funniest Ameri¬can cartoonist of the psychedelic Sixties, invented a character called Mr Natural. "Mr Natural, wh- wh- what does it all mean?" hippies would ask Crumb's grcybcarded parody of a guru — "Don't mean shee-it" was the invariable reply, which is more or less what Gilbert and George's critics have been saying about their work for years.
Not that everybody sees it that way. Last year Gilbert and George won the Turner Prize, awarded annually by the Trustees of the Tate "for services to British art". On Wednesday a massive retrospective of their art in the Eighties opened at the Hayward Gallery. The work, hung wall-to-wall over what seems like acres, has undeniable impact. All those massive, gridded photo-pieces, glowing with garish colour like so much stained glass, turn the usually claustro-phobic Hayward into a profane, light-filled cathedral.
Drunk with God is a forty-footer that runs along one wall of the opening room in the show, a characteristic mess of mo-tifs that invite symbolic interpretation but which also, characteristically, resist logical resolution. Gangs of diconsolate adolescents stand in queues or go on the march clutching wooden staves; three fingers of a massive hand reach down into the painting at one corner; long dribbles of blood drip into it at another; all this is mixed with a host of miscella-neous objects that include a slice of lemon, a...
