Gilbert & George vs. Peter Voulkos

A short observational paper I wrote for my art history class, based on a recent visit to the De Young Museum...

Perhaps you have wondered, “What do leaves from ancient Chinese trees and piles of human feces have in common?” Or maybe not. If you had grown up, as I did, with a couple of female ginkgo trees in your back yard, you would know. Lovely though their fan-shaped leaves may be, they evoke for me the smell of ginkgo berries, which fall in autumn like plague frogs and smell pretty much like shit.

Beyond that, ginkgo leaves and turds are favorite motifs in the photomontages of the London-based artists Gilbert and George. When I visited the special exhibit of these artists’ works, in the ground-floor gallery of the De Young Museum, I chose to bypass the images that included fecal totem poles (whose texture, I noted with nausea, resembled that of chocolate ice cream). Despite my pungent memories of ginkgo berries, I settled in to write about one of the fan-leaf pictures, jocularly titled “Gink.”

 Like the other works in the exhibit, Gink (2005) is a grid of printed panels in black frames. Arranged in four rows and five columns, this work stands at least 15 feet high by 20 feet wide. With the frames packed in shoulder to shoulder, though, the montage appears as a unified whole, as though seen through one window with mullions. Still, there’s a mischievous pleasure in imagining you could spoil the composition by making off with one of the frames.

A brightly colored background unifies the image. Brightest blue at the top and brightest red at the bottom fade toward the center, where pale pink meets a powdery sky. Optical effects confuse the eye and make it look like there’s a white horizontal stripe at the center, but if you peer closer you see that the white is an illusion—you’re actually looking at lavender, jostled by neighboring hues into near invisibility.

Against this background the artist stand, almost as tall as the picture itself. Gilbert, who is bald and wears glasses, fills the second column, and George occupies the fourth. These two illustrate the phenomenon of the “uncanny valley,” as described by the roboticist Masahiro Mori. Mori hypothesized that artificial figures resembling humans closely—but not exactly—provoke revulsion rather than empathy. The quality that makes G & G look freakish is their absolute symmetry. We are looking not at their whole selves but at a composite made of half a body, split vertically from head to heel and reflected, as in a fun-house mirror. Their sober expressions and gray suits ought to give them an air of respectability, but the lights and darks of the suit are inverted, giving them a Stalinesque glow. Pale shoes, as well white-spotted tie-knots that look like beetle wings, complete the creepy effect. Not only their half-bodies, but also their half-shadows are doubled, and when shadows fall on both sides of the body they don’t look like shadows anymore. They look like mummy cases, or black-hole auras, the evil opposites of halos.

Standing at—or rather on—the artists’ feet are two teenaged boys in hooded sweatshirts. The boys, sized less than half as tall as George and Gilbert, the boys are also spliced together in symmetrical halves. The one perched on George’s toes has a thinner face, and the one with Gilbert is fatter. Possibly, they are built from two different halves of the same boy, but it’s hard to tell. One has a white skullcap and the other a black felt hat. The thin face is plausibly human, but the broader one is all wrong, the nose too tiny, the eyes drooping outward. Their faces have a hand-tinted look, a sickly yellow, and yet these two are far more accessible than the artists who tower behind and above them. The boys smile, and their eyes fall at the height of the viewers’ eyes, whereas Gilbert and George stare out blankly over everyone’s head, like caryatids holding up Greek temples or sculptures of Egyptian pharaohs carved out of cliffs.  It is as though the life spirits of the creators of the artwork have been transferred to proxies.

At the bottom center of the image, placed like the headline in an Absolut ad, the title “GINK” appears in capital letters with drop shadows.  Two metallic-looking plates feature handwritten annotations—the date of the picture and the signatures of the artists.  (These two elements appear in almost all of the artists’ work, and the signatures are also writ large on the “exhibition gift shop” wall.)

And the ginkgo leaves?  They’re everywhere, hundreds of times larger than life, looking natural and artificial at the same time.  They are tinted yellow, the same as the boys’ faces. Some leaves float in front of the people, while others fan out behind those uncanny George and Gilbert shadows.  Some are conjoined twin images, fused at the hip or merged with their reflected opposites, with two stems sticking out in opposite directions.  A few are just symmetrical bits of leaves the tiny ones compact like chrysalises and the larger ones spreading like butterfly wings.  Others join at the stems, framing the figures, forming a palm-like shelter for one of the boys and a slant-roofed over Gilbert’s head.  Two cloven fans come together over George’s right shoulder, leaving negative space in the shape of an upside down heart. 

Is the inverted heart a random convergence of shapes? Or is it a symbol for the emotional inversions in the artwork—the artists in their establishment haircuts and suits, tweaked to look like they’re from outer space, the jaundice yellow boys who connect with the audience, unlike the emotionally distant (jaundiced?) caryatids.  It occurs to me that ginkgo leaves and poo have one more thing in common.  They decompose, dissolving back into the earth.  One of Gilbert and George’s many obsessions is monumentalizing ephemeral objects, not just leaves and shit, but also human bodies.  I wonder whether it’s fear of mortality that leads the pair to set themselves at an ironic distance and symbolically carve themselves in stone.

While Gilbert and George’s works play with graphic design concepts and digital technology, Peter Voulkos’s 1958 sculpture Vee explores primal substances—clay and sand, iron oxide, a pigment that people have used for at least 50,000 years, and cobalt, an element whose name is synonymous with the color blue.  From a distance, this sculpture, perhaps 3 feet tall, looks remarkably like an Olmec figurine that sits in a nearby room, a sculpture of a baby holding up a ball.  Vee has more abstract versions of the baby’s stubby arms and legs, built out of clay slabs in triangular pyramids and trapezoidal prisms. It also has an oversized “head,” similarly constructed, as well a second object of the same size that could be a ball or even another head.   Unlike the Olmec baby, this one wears a hat—an arching cylinder of clay slabs that joins the two heads together.  The iron oxide Vs painted on the surface cross the planes of the sculpture at unexpected angles that counterbalance the three-dimensional realities of the piece.  They make it look as though the baby might be dancing.

The sculpture is painted with red-brown check marks (the iron oxide), as well cobalt splotches.  The upside-down “L” on the head section could be a nose an eyebrow, and a blue streak could be a sideways mouth.  From the side, however, the sculpture looks not like a baby but like a frog and a raven clinging to a melting totem pole.  I am struck by the solidity of the surface—many Voulkos pieces have gashes, holes and tooth-like objects embedded in the clay.  This one is a collection of relatively smooth intersecting planes.

With a closer look, however, the illusion of smoothness gives way, and Vee takes on the mystery, porousness, and complexity of a decaying garden wall.  The outer shell, made of raked clay full of sand, cracks or recedes in many spots, revealing glassy blue-black cobalt underneath.  The iron oxide has been painted on with big rusty chunks in it, and it still looks wet.  In grottos between the arm-, hip-, and leg-shapes, there are pale spots on the clay that look mossy and damp.  Some of the slabs buckle a bit near the places where the edges meet. The back of the sculpture is marked up with brown and pale blue, more riotously than the front and sides. Maybe there is a deeper meaning to this ornamental language, or perhaps it is a simple celebration of abstract expressionist spontaneity and the primal pleasure of writing on walls.