It has its origins in the investigation of art work that I respond to passionately, and attempts to unpick the basis for this response. As the critical thinking on my own work develops, it has become essential to see debates around art and aesthetics in a political and ethical context. Many claims have been made for this work and I want to look at some of these claims as they appear in the accompanying interviews and articles, catalogues and critical writings. Many of these artists seem to me to employ a ruthless assimiliation of the commercial and the kitsch in a way that is empty of imaginative space or invitation to the viewer. And in there somewhere there is the beginnings of a thesis on the relationship and similarities between madness and modernism, for example, defiance of authority, nihilism, examples of extreme relativism, strange transformations of the self, irrationality, and things like that.
Artists have to be outside to feel the world in a different way.
What comes through is Gilbert and George's complete inadequacy to deal with the issues of pain, mortality, suffering and grief that AIDS has introduced to their lives with anything approaching emotional comprehension. Humanism is not the philosophical framework that springs immediately to mind in considering their work or writings. Cultural pessimism has been transformed into conceptual energy, boredom into the impetus for action and provocation. The current generation is dismissive of the ideologically rigorous but aesthetically anaemic art leavened throughout the 1980's on the imported yeast of post-structuralism and the essentially foreign theory enlisted for its legitimisation. The supposedly anti-intellectual and in fact, positively political position that this occupies will be discussed later in this piece.