21 - Gilbert & George (British, 1943 and 1942)

Gilbert & George (British, 1943 and 1942) Rotten Bar - 1972 11 Photographs, 11,9 x 16,2 cm (each) Artist's label with title and date on verso With original backboards (separate) bearing title, number, date, and signature Provenance: Galerie Vega, Liège (1973) The Robert and Suzanne Pannier Collection, Bruges Published: Carter Ratcliff, Gilbert and George. Complete Pictures 1971-1985, Rizzoli, New York, 1986, p.45 Georges Vercheval, Marc Vausort, Emmanuel d'Autreppe, Dérision & Raison [exhibition catalog], Charleroi, 1997, pp.66-67 (ill.) Exhibited: Galerie Sonnabend, Paris, Gilbert & George. Any Port in a Storm, 9 January 1973 Musée des Beaux-Arts, Le Havre； École d'architecture de Normandie, Rouen； Musée d'Évreux, Britannica: Trente ans de sculpture, 15 October - 12 December 1988 Museum voor Hedendaagse kunst, Antwerpen； Centre d'Art contemporain Midi-Pyrénées, Brittanica: Trente ans de sculpture, 25 March - 8 May 1989 Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi, Dérision & Raison, 26 April - 31 August 1997, pp.66-67 (ill.) Rotten Bar, executed in 1972, belongs to the eleven Drinking Pieces that were brought together the following year in the exhibition Any Port in a Storm at the Galerie Sonnabend in Paris. The title itself plays on the familiar expression "any port in a storm", replacing the place of refuge with the fortified wine and turning the local public house into a haven from the pressures of everyday existence. Throughout the series, Gilbert & George photograph themselves in ordinary London pubs, drinking gin and tonics in an atmosphere that is at once mundane, ritualised and quietly theatrical. Gilbert & George's early work consistently sought to dissolve the distinction between art and everyday life. Declaring themselves "Living Sculptures", they made their own appearance, behaviour and daily routines the material of their practice. Performance, photography and film were never separate disciplines, but complementary means through which an "art-life" could be constructed. The photographic ensembles of the early 1970s emerged directly from this ambition, preserving actions that had first existed as lived events while transforming them into autonomous works. The same year, Gilbert & George made the film Gordon's Makes Us Drunk, in which they repeatedly pour gin, drink and intone the phrase "Gordon's makes us very drunk" with unwavering composure while Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance No.1, in D, Op.39 music accompanies the opening scene. Both the film and the Drinking Pieces transform intoxication into a carefully staged ritual, governed by repetition and restraint. The choice of motifs is equally significant. The pub, the gin and tonic, the impeccably dressed figures and Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance all belong to a distinctly British idiom. Rather than celebrating these conventions or parodying them from a critical distance, Gilbert & George inhabited them so completely that they acquired an unexpected theatricality. Everyday rituals become subtly estranged through repetition and understatement, revealing the peculiar tension between decorum and absurdity that would remain a defining characteristic of the artists' practice. The eleven black-and-white photographs from Rotten Bar are deliberately blurred, distorted, and printed to appear crumpled. Rather than recording intoxication, these distortions evoke shifting perceptions of intoxication while simultaneously asserting the photograph as a constructed image. The work therefore occupies an intermediate position between performance and object: the actions took place before the camera, yet their artistic form emerged only through the subsequent manipulation of the photographic prints. As such, the Drinking Pieces occupy a pivotal position within Gilbert & George's early practice. They mark the point at which the photograph ceased merely to document performance and became the work itself.