Gilbert & George: Scapegoating Pictures for London, White Cube - exhibition review
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Gilbert and George always mine the minutiae of contemporary London life. The latest images infesting their vast photographic montages — some 60 of which cram White Cube’s walls — are the small metal canisters known as whippets, containing nitrous oxide, the "hippy crack" that young people use to get high in the streets around the duo’s East End home.
They’ve included them in a dizzying variety of ways: hugely expanded or in teeming clusters and orderly grids. In Body Poppers, the pair are comedy skeletons with canisters for torsos, donning gimpy masks, another frequent symbol in the new works.
Another aspect of the Scapegoating Pictures is more troubling. The pair have never left us in any doubt about their atheism — they want to ban religion because they think it segregates people and causes them unhappiness. They’ve often made art about it: their 2005 Sonofagod pictures took on Christianity, now it’s Islam, little surprise since the Muslim population around them in Tower Hamlets has massively increased.
Images of Muslim women are particularly prominent, invariably dressed in niqabs, often distorted by mirroring and doubling, and, of course, surrounded by the whippets.
The problem is Gilbert and George refer to the canisters as bombs, due to their shape. And their presence, according to the gallery, “pervades the mood of the Scapegoating Pictures to infer terrorism, warfare …”. The artists often present themselves as having been blown to pieces.
You could argue that Gilbert and George are reflecting paranoia about Islam here. But in the context of their anti-religion stance and comments on the unfriendliness of Muslims around them, this repeated connection between Muslim people and bombs is at best crass, at worst Islamophobic.
Until Sept 28 (020 7930 5373, whitecube.com)
