GILBERT AND GEORGE "Further all the time..." "Walking is the eternity of our living movement, it can never tell us of an end.." Like the logo of a corporation or a government office with public dealings, the image of Gilbert and George is often remade when it is applied. Repetition is persistent and persistently nuanced. The usual point of this process is to build the presence of an institution up to monolithic scale. Appropriated by Gilbert and George, the logo as we know it begins to reveal its nature. Their G&G seal was designed for envelopes. In 1969, they wore it on their foreheads. the living sculptures logo is their bodies. Here, that logo exhibited on its very skin one of its alternate versions. The presence of a public institution Gilbert and George, confounded itself with signs of that presence. The fact being there, public selves on public view, took on the intensity of an absolute. The game of the audience constitutes the living sculptures. They always return it in kind, installing us in our public role. If Gilbert and George did not look back, if they were to drift away in a self-preoccupied fog, they'd abandon their bodies in the public realm. Subsiding into the state of mere things, their visible forms would besculptural but not entirely living. This never happens. Gilbert and George stay protenaturally alert. Nothing escapes them as they stroll or pose or sing. Yet there is a sense in which everything done-communion with the audience form a very extended distance. Gilbert and George shed light of a different sort. Their metallised manner denies them and us, and of that glow, that warmth that reeks of "Eager-to-please". The living sculpture lead us to wonder if moments of convention melted, of roles blurred and lost, are not as conventional as any others that occur in public. This is not a point they make, however obliquely. It's a possibility with a tinge of certainty they inspire us, at our most alert, to feel. Gilbert and George are not to be analyzed, for they are presences, not propositions. After the traditional sadness of being alone on the stage comes the bitter sweet pleasure of it. Misundertood clown, heartbroken Pierrots... Gilbert and George evoke these forlorn creatures to suggest how thoroughly they are these creatures.. creations, in other words of at least some of the time. The mask of the public will be lowered forcibly. There will be reconciliation of efo and other, of self and savage regions of not-self. Since an image can be a character, ('This picture has ambition'), there is neither any way nor any reason to stop short of personifying the feelings which motivate other personifications. In 'Side by Side', 'happy desire' no longer has a beautiful shape. Melancholy smiles, actively instead of submitting to some such label as sympathy. And a feeling of great joy in conquering is a bird or angel-like presence to whom Gilbert and George direct the plea: "Take us away". Gilbert and George's world drifts through time, so that even devices invented way back in the eighteenth century can be personages in these meadows and lanes. 'Superiority' appears in one of 'Side by Side's' gloomier glades. Doing its energetic mischief. All is contrast, all is perverse for you.