In person, Gilbert and George are remarkable in their ordinariness. Exceedingly polite and impeccably dressed, they look like English country gentlemen rather than two of world’s most provocative artists. That is until you actually enter the Herbst Galleries at San Francisco’s de Young Museum and start looking around. The two artists are my tour guides and as we move through the exhibit, their first major retrospective in 25 years, they explain their evolution. George points out one massive piece called “Twenty Eight Streets”

George asks, “Do you know what these are?”

“Bugs of some sort,” I answer, knowing full well that I’m being set up.

George continues deadpan, “They are pubic lice.”

I could have dropped it there, but for some unknown reason I felt the need to continue. “Hmmm, where exactly does one get pubic lice to photograph?” I ask.

“Well, my dear, exactly where you would expect to find it,” he says in his perfectly proper English accent. Yep, that’s a visual I probably could have done without, but Gilbert and George are not about making anyone feel comfortable.

The two met at London’s St. Martin’s School of Art in 1967, and decided from then on they would work as one artist and it’s been that way for the last thirty years. They start by taking photographs within about a one-mile radius of their West London home. They are often gritty street scenes or portraits of disenfranchised youth or street people and other lost souls. They snap away without any real thought as to the final product. They also take plenty of pictures of themselves – dressed and undressed, as well as various bodily fluids and waste. All the photographs are transferred to contact sheets and lately the computer where the two artists can look at them collectively. Those photographs form the basis of most of their work, which looks to address basic human conditions, needs or emotions: death, hope, fear, religion, sex, money and race.

Gilbert and George create their massive installation pieces; they call them sculpture, completely in the privacy of their studio. Photographs, sometimes manipulated in the computer, are arranged together to form large multi-paneled mural-sized pieces. They say the creative process takes them away – almost trance-like – and the pieces almost seem to build themselves. Gilbert and George say there is never any argument between the two of them. When I asked they laughed and said, “That is such a heterosexual question.” I’m not sure what that meant, and I probably should have pursued it but then again it felt like a set up like pubic lice, so I gave a quick courtesy laugh and moved on. The two do not talk about their sexuality but it is evident is almost everything they do, but still they insist that the final product is not meant to titillate or amuse, but rather make powerful statements about the world we live in.

There is a certain shtick to Gilbert and George: dressing almost identically in conservative clothing right down to the pen clipped in the breast pocket at exactly the same angle, the same shoes, their almost overly polite approach and even the fact that they have not been seen in public without each other for 30 years, but there is no denying they make people think. In England they are reviled and celebrated in equal measure. Their art does make people squirm but it’s worth a look (although you might want to leave the kids at home unless you want to do some explaining) – the visuals are big and bold and the process is impressive, as for the in-your-face messages laced with semen, blood and piss they are meant to provoke an emotional response and they do. But mired in the muck, you just might find some truth.

The retrospective was organized by the Tate Museum in London. It will be at the de Young Museum in San Francisco runs through May18, 2008.

Written By: Erin Clark