The pair are living sculptures. They've dedicated their whole lives to being a performance.
They're best recognised for their smart attire - suits, hats and tweed
When being photographed they strike the same poses - 'George's eyes chill into a thousand-yard stare; Gilbert's expression mutates into that of an angry bulldog, undone by a comically raised right eyebrow'
‘Our subject matter is the world. It is pain. Pain. Just to hear the world turning is pain, isn’t it? Totally, every day, every second. Our inspiration is all those people alive today on the planet, the desert, the jungle, the cities. We are interested in the human person, the complexity of life.' Gilbert & George
'Why do they dress so smartly? "We used to say because we never wanted to be the artists their mothers would be ashamed of, but it didn't work out quite like that."
Are their mothers ashamed of them? "No, they're very proud." says George, quickly. "We don't alienate anyone. The suits are very good because they are odd. We always get a table at a restaurant anywhere in the world. We're never searched at airports. Even boys on bicycles with crazy dyed hair will screech to a halt and say, "Great suits, guys!' They enable us to get away with a lot."'
The suits they wear and their presentation of their bodies is one of the main recognisable and defining features of the pair.
NIKKI S. LEE - Punk Project Series
Nikki Lee is a performance artist come photographer.
The punk project is a series of photographs of Lee in disguise, becoming different members of communities. She addresses identity and 'place'. Who we are who we surround ourselves with, and how that is perceived by others. She transforms herself and places herself within the image, performing identity.
The photographs are capturing 'non-moments' – a snapshot that might trigger a time and place in personal memory for the participants or their circle of friends, but for those outside of this circle, the picture is a just snapshot.
"Her images dig deep into the construction of community and ego, of social roles and what it means to be self-defined and/or categorized by someone else. She ultimately asks, are personal identity and communal identity fluid?"
The Senior Project (14) 1999
The Drag Queen Project (2) 1997
The act of questioning what the photo is about is the key thing here. You don't realise Lee is pretending, you assume she is just part of the photo and you wonder what the fuss about and what makes this art. It's only when you see the series together and recognise the same face camouflaging so well into each of the backgrounds, that you can appreciate the art.
I like the accessibility of Lee's art. A lot of people are skeptical about performance art. Here, the whole act of researching, transforming and becoming is condensed into one portrait. The audience is likely familiar with the other subject matters, and how they act, so we begin thinking about how she would have been acting to fit in, or at least I do.
Lee has used clothes and makeup to transform herself into each character and social group. But what is the difference between what she does, and what we each do everyday in the morning. We assign ourselves our specific group of society, and dress to fit that stereotype.
"It is not the case that an individual is first a skinhead and then wears all the gear, but that the gear constitutes the individual as a skinhead. It is the social interacting, by means of the clothing, that produces the individual as a member of the group rather than vice-versa, that one is member of the group and then interacts socially" [p.32 Fashion as Communication]
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