Parental Advice - The following feature contains explicit content.

TRADITIONAL VALUES

[Dream target date -February 1997]

Sunday evening television has traditionally been the domain of highbrow culture. Most of it a little too highbrow for my liking, though just occasionally London Weekend's 'Southbank Show' would cover a contemporary artist, then I'd tune-in!

In February 97 a two-part programme hosted by Melvyn Bragg featured the contemporary art partnership Gilbert & George, two of my favourite artists.

Posturing in tailored suits, the two elderly gentlemen waxed lyrical over their huge photomontages. I found their naive approach to bodily fluids both amusing and anachronistic. To hear George pronouncing obscenities in his plummy English accent was like hearing a headmaster say a rude word. It was refreshing to laugh along with them and reminded me of the schoolboy humour perpetuated by Chris Richards and myself when we were at art college - Irreverent and deeply personal, our lurid and sometimes sick anecdotes could be quite shocking and had little relevance beyond the boundary of our insular world. But even back in those days, we appreciated the shock-value of our art.

External wallpaper
Nottingham 1981

In 1981 Chris and I presented a slideshow to student audiences in Leeds and Nottingham. These pictures taken on demolition sites around Radford, Nottingham, depicted garish bedroom wallpapers, exposed to the outside world. The crumbling terraces had seen families come and go, and we imagined that the bedroom wallpaper had witnessed a great deal of sexual activity. This lead to overtly offensive picture titles such as 'All the fucking' which managed to upset a few members of our 'educated' audience who were unprepared for such directness.

MONUMENTAL SHIT

Such presentations would never have gone down well in our native communities either. Likewise, Gilbert and George's monumental 'shit, piss and spunk' photomontages could only exist within the hallowed walls of an art gallery.

I recall seeing an exhibition by Gilbert and George at the Hayward Gallery in the mid-eighties and connected with it immediately. The walls were covered in formalised photographic panels, glossy flat colours, full length self-portraits, nude male figures and obscene, sometimes fascist graffiti. The subject matter was unmistakably English, quite risque and like the Radford photographs, surprisingly beautiful.