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As daunting as engaging with the immense retrospective, The Art Exhibition, might be, a strong notion emerged from it that Gilbert and George are performance artists still, and performance is the spine of all their work. While stolen newspaper headline sheets make up the body of The London Pictures (2011), it began its existence as a performance work. One of the artists would go into the local newsagent and somehow distract the person at the counter by buying some chewing gum, or something. Whilst this was going on, the other would surreptitiously filch the required headline sheet. That’s the performance action right there; it satisfies a possible version of performance art: repeat an action many times; see what this reveals to you. What Gilbert and George found through their action of stealing a headline, daily for a really long time (because they did not use all of the headlines they stole), was that certain words get used again and again. Anyone could have told them that, and they likely knew it themselves anyway, but this is how they make a work of art that creates a layered and complex point.
My point though, is that when we look at The London Pictures, what we are seeing is the end point of a process that grew out of covert performance action. There is a consistency in this approach that appears throughout this survey of Gilbert and George’s career: the artworks we see are end points of a process, and can be seen as residue of performance works. Gilbert and George are clever guys: they worked out how to sell performance art, by disguising it as something else. The subterfuge that