 Dyw detyn ni'n ei chael quech, i'w hynny cymorth maen nhw... Da ki yw'r ddisbu yn fyddech chi, ti'n gwybod i ni'n meddwl hwnnw, a dwi'n meddwl hyn yn cael ei meddwg ddim, ac mae'r cinch o bwyllfa i chi, rhodaeth yn unig yn teimlo i'r llythoedd, ac mae gennym ond gennym prentuming yma. A'r ddweud ar hynny, so, rwy'n meddwl dechrau am yr yw anhall sydd sydd arwad yn iawn y brif yn ei cael ei meddwl. Gilbert and George rwy'n cael ei wneud o'r ffordd, ond rwy'n gweithio'n fawr i'r fawr. Rwy'n gweithio'r fawr, nid yw'r arbennig, yna'r Argyllust Argyllust Argyllust Argyllust yn Llyfrgell yn Llyfrgell, yng Nghymru. Yn y dweud yw'r unig yw'r un argyllust ar y gweith. Mae'r un argyllust ar y gweithio'r fawr, ond rwy'n gweithio'r fawr, ond rwy'n gweithio'r fawr, nid yw'r un argyllust ar y gweithio ar y gweithio'r fawr. Mae ddintrwyddol yn sgwrs, teuluurai'n sgwrs, rhaid i wneud yr argyllust, ac mae-lunio'r ffnwys i'r mfawr wrth iddyn nhw'n meddwl ysgol. Yn ddweud o gywir gorfod o'r exubieth i gweithio'r ffordd i'r ffordd o gw weld yng nghymru ar gyhoedku mae'r fforddau yn ysgriffwrdd yn ei ddweud, a gennych gyda gwlad ymwylau, mae'r fforddau yn ysgrifwrdd yn ymwylau, ac mae'r fforddau yn technynodyddau. Fe yw'r newydd yn ymddangos, mae'r fforddau yn ysgrifwrdd yn ei ddweud, mae'n fforddau'r newydd o'r ysgrifwrdd yn ymgyrchu'r gweithio, oherwydd yn 2003. Mae'n gorffodd ymgyrch â'r cyfleidiau yn arfer y clywed, yn arfer cael ei ddweud o'r dyn nhw yw arddur yn arweithio yn anthartyr, ar gyllid a gweldodd yn Gilyddaint, Llyfridur, oherwydd wr Zeus. A'u gael amserio j fellowddon yng Nghyrch Llyfridur yn 2005, mae'n ni'n gweithio Big Llyfridur yn 2007 – mae'n bwysig yng Nghyrch Lyrdan Llyfridur yn y sgwr i'! Mae'n rhan oes gan i mor hwn i Llyfridur yn ychydig iawn – mae'n i'r ar flooding o'ch jau a gael o'ch maesio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n sanft Feithrannisysgol ac mae'n SEE ond maesio yn dwyfn yng Nghyrch Llyfridur – i San Francisco i Milwaukee i'r newid i'r ffynale climatig. Here it is at Brooklyn. The first thing I wanted to ask you is, I think the most consistent thing in your work that anyone walking through the exhibition will see is the fact that the two of you are pretty well omnipresent in the work. Do you see these in any way as self-portraits? Can people see them in those terms? No, we see all of our pictures as letters, visual letters to the viewer. So, like every letter that you write, you will sign. Every artist's sign is his painting. We took it one stage further and put ourselves in the picture. So, it's us speaking to the viewer. It's not just a composition. In fact, it is. We are the subject of all our thoughts. And that's what we're trying to make. All what is inside our brain, we're trying to shoot on the walls. But it's all based on us looking at the world, feeling the world and being alive today. Can we believe that in that moment that it's us speaking to the viewer, then it's very much to do with the viewer? If you think of being in a museum with a friend, if you hear somebody say, oh, come and look at this van Gogh over here, it's fantastic. They would never say come and look at this tree with a bit of grass because you know it's van Gogh speaking to you from the grave. It is even like a novelist. Is that novelist what he was speaking through the book? So, when did you realise and how did you formulate what is in effect a singular voice that two people have? I think it was based on being alone, leaving St. Marge's School of Art and not being able to do anything except walking the street of London. We realised that's it. We have to become the living sculpture. Out of all bad luck, always good luck comes, we believe. So, when we left college, most people would say that we were done on our luck because we hadn't been the goody-goody students who would get a part-time teaching job, we hadn't been the goody-goody students who would apply for a grant for a studio, and we had no money, we were very poor, we were living in the wrong part of London, but that in a way was the best thing that ever happened to us. In that moment we became the art, the subject and the art and the sculpture, everything. And not only that, we believe so much in ourselves that when we went around London to ask them if they would do a show of us, they all refused and we thought, oh, how brilliant! We thought we must be right. We even went to see the head of the sculpture department a year after we left, the famous sculptor Anthony Carrer, and we had a beer and a pub near his studio, and we explained our new thoughts and feelings about art and how it should be democratic and how we should try to create an art which had a subject matter and a content and a meaning and a value and a moral dimension, and you listened very politely, I must say, and in the end he said, well, I hope very much that you won't succeed, but I rather think you might. That was our teacher. There's an early example of you coming up against jealous teachers or figures of authority and you're in the, I suppose, traditional model of the avant-garde, you're kicking against the system in that sense. Now, here we are in the Brooklyn Museum 2008. You've had pretty well every honour that the art world can bestow in terms of museums and where you show and so on. So do you now feel part of the system that you were kicking against? Are you part of the establishment, or do you still see yourselves as outsiders? We feel totally outsiders. Absolutely. Nothing has changed from the first day to today. I really believe that. Nothing. It is still a battle, but a very good battle and one that we enjoy very much. We feel that our pictures and our exhibitions are still capable, as they were from the first day, capable of bringing out the bigot from inside the liberal and bringing out the liberal from inside the bigot. So it's always going to be an exciting time, and we like that. You know when we walked the street of London a certain kind of liberal people, they frown at us when they see us. Why do you think that is? They don't accept our views. They prefer an abstract work of art by a foreigner who's dead. Then they feel comfortable. Especially if it's a name that you can hardly pronounce. Vusbate Gilbert and Georgian Jackson Pollock's town. That's good. People I think will be very struck. Many people will know you, or at least feel they know you, but people are always struck by the image that you create, the aura that you create, which goes even something as superficial as the tailoring. Not that you're tailoring as superficial. It's wonderful, but that's the first thing that people see. How did that decision come about? What made two art school students at the end of the 60s in London decide that wearing rather neatly tailored suits was the way they were going to dress and that you've stuck at that ever since? I think because we are both poor country people from a sort of lower class background who believe in being correct and being tidy and people change into a good suit for a wedding or a funeral or a christening or to apply for a job. For important occasions you look proper and I think we just did that on a full time basis. And even when we went around with this box of ideas to all these galleries, we put on our Sunday best. We always said we didn't want to be the artist with an eccentric appearance, who was strange whiskers or sandals. We didn't want to be a hippie artist. In fact, we said that we'd dress like this because we didn't want to become the artist that the mothers would be ashamed of. It didn't quite work out like that. You mentioned the fact that there's maybe a shared in us in background that you said you're both country boys who came to the big city and that's where you met. Gilbert, you were born in the Dolomites so you came down from the mountains. George came from the south west of England. He came up from the valleys. But people all over the world, however much they seek to get on, we have differences of opinion. Hopefully we can resolve them in civilised ways by debating or discussing. But you claim, but no-one's ever really seen you argue, but do you never have creative differences? From the moment you've started becoming an artist together, do you always think as one? People find that very hard to understand or believe. We wouldn't do anything that's not productive that holds things back. Every picture that we do make, somebody else is not going to make, we're all being dragged at increasing speed towards the grave and we want to do pictures. Arguing would not help him at all. He'll be wrong. I think we learnt that compromise that works totally. Totally creative and totally what you call forward. Everything is forward. Everything has to work to the end result. That's important. The end result is the most important. Nothing else is important. It's very good to be clear this up because normally it comes at question time and somebody says, do you ever argue when we say, here comes the great heterosexual question? LAUGHTER You work pretty well. You work always in series. People who know your work will be able to recognise the different series that these works come from. But I suppose for someone coming to your work for the first time, coming to see it at Brooklyn, you've mixed up work from different series throughout the exhibition. But of course when you make the work, you would make 10, 15, 20 pictures with a specific location in mind and the work has a sort of singularity, a totality. How is it for you now seeing fragments of different series juxtaposed in different rooms here in Brooklyn? It's very, very good for us. You know why? Why? Because we realised that if we would have done it chronological, they would have said, oh, we only like the early pieces. And now that's finished. LAUGHTER Which is what you did at the tape. The tape was chronological. Even if you have the exhibition chronological, it's too relaxing, too easy for the viewer. They can just stroll through it like a cat, and just flick through it and see it all. If it's mixed up, we thought it was called anachronic, which is the opposite of chronological, but the underbite of the curator says that it's diachronic. Diachronic. And I think in that way you have to, the viewer has to think more, and even if it's very good, you can create a red room like Dan said, where the bomb picked it. It's roughly red, and then you can do a room that is 75 or 85, mix up the full colour pieces and the very black and white pieces together to see how they look like. It's very, it is more thought-provoking. What's interesting is, because again... And they don't look, you don't see, oh, that's an old one, that's a new one. They do seem to mesh, absolutely. But you plan every exhibition. You have models, you plan it with rigorous choice. Everything is known pretty well before you get to the space physically to hang the show where things will be. Do you approach making exhibitions in a similar way to actually making work? You take various subjects, you're playing with images, and therefore in a sense, this is an installation. It's a singular installation. I always think of the viewer, how they come into the room, how they will turn to the left, the next room, and that's completely the opposite of a museum curator. Museum curators and directors hang exhibitions to suit their taste, and we want to do it for the viewer, to guide the viewer through. We want to create emotional rooms that speak to them. That's very important for us. They have to be able to remember those pictures. That's how we work. If they don't remember pictures, we fail. Looking at this exhibition for two years, you've been made in a way to look back at what you've achieved over the last 30 years. Has it changed the way you've seen your work in any way? That's already finished for us. We're already on a big news group of pictures, enormous. That's it. For us it's future, forward. We think, in fact, that we got traumatised by doing this huge tour. We stopped making pictures for a year because we had to attend to the different venues and all the celebrations and things. Early this year, something got hold of us, as though we were possessed. We started to design a group of pictures and we couldn't stop. We wanted to stop when we reached 20. We wanted to stop when we reached 50 designs. It went on until somebody said that it was all right to stop at 153. We never did that in our life before. We never thought of it. We wouldn't consciously say, let's design over 100 pictures. My knee said to me, one acre day. One acre. That brings round, I think, to one of the key questions. The process of how work comes about, how it's made. How do you actually begin? Once there's a germ of an idea, could you just explain how you use images, how you have an image bank, how the pictures, how the series evolve, how you physically put them together? First, we need images. The images are based on what interests us. We collect images. All different kinds of images. Inside, outside personally. Different people, skies, symbols. So we have all this group of pictures, of images that go into a big bank of images. You've got thousands, tens of thousands of images. Hundreds of thousands. They are scanned in low resolution that you are able to call them up very fast. But our designs are all done by contact sheets on tables. We have to be able to see what we have in front of us. Like in a computer, you could not call up 100,000 sheets, but you have them on tables, you can have them. Then we design what we call, we have a rough idea, every day is different. A rough idea of what we want to do. The main thing is, when we go to the studio in the morning, is not to have any plans. We go completely, as though we're deaf and blind and deadheaded, we don't want to know. And then however we are that day, that month, that year, that is how the pictures will be. We have to lift them out from inside of ourselves, drag them out. A lot of artists are able to pluck pictures or sculptures out of the air. Ours are all coming from inside, from our thoughts and feelings and memories, our hopes, our dreads, our fears, all out into the emotional format of the picture. And sometimes, like we take a lot of images, and in the end, when we are in front of her, what we call, and we start to do the design, maybe we use only 10 or 15 sheets, because we are only into those ones. We're always looking for the moral dimension in the subject matter. We wouldn't use something because it's pretty or nice, or because it looks good, or has a nice shape or a nice colour. It has to have a human moral issue within it. For instance, years and years ago, we took images of chewing-gums on the street, which we pressed and trodden on. And you take them just after it's rained and before it's completely dry. So the dirt is in all the cracks in the little chewing-gums, and they're like a relief in a way, like a coin is a relief, like a bass relief. And of course you didn't use them because you can't use a stupid thing like chewing-gums in a picture. So a couple of years ago, we took some more images in another year, and then suddenly the moral dimension came to us. That some of those chewing-gums are there put there by a person who is now dead. Some of them are two days ago, some of them are in love, some of them are happy. Some of them went to war, some of them are 30, 40, 50 years old. And they're each put there by a single human being. And they're very neglected. Nobody has a good word to say for them. Nobody wrote a permit by chewing-gums. They're hated and despised. We thought we'd give them a chance, give them some love, put them in a picture. And we love them for that reason. I suppose that's secondary to pubic crabs and love subjects that you've collected and shown in your work. Yeah, we didn't love them very much at the beginning. You saw I made the mistake of asking you where you got those croup pubic crabs from once. It's a journalist who said, where'd you get me from? I said, the same place you get yours. Just finally, just to finish my questioning on process, you've always stuck to the grid and art historians make the point that you emerged at the end of the 60s when minimalism was one of the dominant modes of artistic expression and therefore they've likened your grid to that. Others have said that your work has resonance or associations with stained glass windows. How do you plead on either of those or where do you see the structural influence coming from? Because we started out when we used to have such a little studio in Ffonyir Street that we were only able to make a big picture out of small fragments. So we used to buy a packet of photo paper and at that time nobody was able to make a big artwork out of photographs. They never did before. So we had to learn how to make it more than just a photograph. So we started to put them together in some kind of kaleidoscopic structure and then we pushed it together into format. But it's all based on protecting the work and being able to assemble and put it in a box to transport in other places in nothing else. It's just very simple. There are no aeroplanes big enough to transport these as a single image. It's also very good because of the lines the grid controls the composition slightly. We're not completely free like the artists in front of the blank sheet of paper or the blank canvas. That slight sort of discipline gives us a very good way of making a more controlled design and it's very good for the emotion and the feelings we've used. But it was based on having a very small studio and trying to make something bigger than the studio. And not having any money as well. You mentioned the studio which has now got bigger but this is Ffonyir Street. A wonderful part of East London. You've been there for 40 years now. Does it still feel like the centre of the artistic world that you've created? When you're in New York, for example, are you still collecting images looking for artistic inspiration or do you feel in a different place if you like when you are in a different place? Does it inspire you in the same way that the East End of London does? I think wherever there are people in streets and dirt and dead things, I think we're always thinking and feeling. But we wouldn't go out of our way to make a top of graphical art. We wouldn't fly out to the desert to sketch palm trees or camels. But in fact we never took an image outside the East End of London roughly. That's what I thought. Yeah, we never did that. Because mostly in Moldon now we don't even do it in the streets of London we do it just in the studio. Just artificially. Just explain. For people who don't know though what has happened to that area over the last 40 years and how that's in a way impacted on your work. It did become an enormous international bubbling extraordinary place for people from all over the world and young people and designers. I think there are 200 galleries just in that one little tiny district where there was not one when we were students. When George first took me to East End of London it really felt like walking into a Dickens book like all this yellow light and this narrow street this 18th century house and falling down and all these dogs and it was extraordinary and just Jewish people at the beginning of the Bangladesh and some artists. Some artists. But we were some of the first ones. You say you love change though George. Change and rolling change every day. You've cut the art world's moved in there. Not at all. The Bill Goats who were right. It was very good. We've seen all the changes because when we moved there first it was Yidish speaking some Polish speaking, Russian speaking then it became Maltese then it became Somali then the Bangladeshi and our city boys we've seen the synagogue turn into a mosque we've seen the Jewish off licence turn into a Hindi music centre we even see the gents public lavatories and whitechapel turn into an Indian restaurant some young friends were recommending it to us they said it's very good food the service is fantastic and it's eating or take away. I said it always was. In the early work the general jungle for example there's a rural almost idealised rural backdrop but you talked about the east end of London you said you were country boys who came to the city London in particular that's your place could you ever now consider the idea of making art that dealt with rural themes could you ever consider moving out of London and going living in the country? Not in a million years we never go out in the country not once I mean we are dragged to what we call we have to see a friend of ours once a year to what we call little snoring but by force and what is it about the country that you don't like? I think because we were country boys the first few years of our art we didn't know how to express our thoughts and feelings with the city so we used trees and grass and bushes and London parks and then we became city people and we could read newspapers and watch television and take part in the urban landscape and I think we forgot completely the country I think it was two years ago we were invited to see a friend in the west of England in a small village and we went down to see him we got up early in the morning and it was so incredibly beautiful it was on an estuary and the sun was rising and there were estuary birds swooping down there was no motor traffic you could hear insects buzzing wide and we walked up a little high street and there was the parish church medieval parish church with all these lovely antique tombstones and the flowers one tomb was gilded and one tomb was still one tomb was Mr George was still and then outside the church was a very pretty young couple probably 18 or 20 years old and they had a little baby in a pram and that just sort of completed this whole idyllic scene and it felt sad and romantic and lovely and we said to the young couple good morning and the young man turned to us and said fuck off you weird looking cunts and we said now we remember what we didn't like about London so we ran back to London you mentioned the way the East End of London has changed you mentioned in terms of different religious groups cultural groups first the Jewish population was there that's Bangladesh and you said the synagogue has been changed to the mosque two years ago in London you made an exhibition called there were the Son of a God pictures which asked a question was Jesus heterosexual not surprisingly this I don't think even you were surprised this caused a certain indignation amongst certain people although not actually amongst the majority of the gallery going public and about 50,000 people saw it and there were very few complaints but clearly if you deal with religious subject matter in that way there's a question, there's a provocation there were you genuinely and are you genuinely interested in provoking when it comes to matters of religion, sex, race we just wanted to ask a question what is left of religion is it just a superstition or what is it because we are not believers and sometimes the churches did very bad bad things we were responsible for so many deaths I think that's very provocative and the position was provocative I think what the Pope says today is provocative we think the Christian leaders should be taken to the Hague and tried alongside Milosevic there are people committing suicide and murder at this moment in the name of Christianity in the name of Catholicism it's horrific what they do and get away with and they show new sense of shame whatsoever they put on their funny clothes and walk down the street towards the church with their head held high it's a disgrace it's extraordinary stuff towards when you're here the Muslim, the Christian all the big battle because now we feel it's much more than ever before if you open a newspaper in London it's so much to do with religion all the vikers, all the Muslims all pretending what you call going backwards going backwards I thought we freed ourselves from that so you said you believe that changes you embrace change is a good thing but this change in the world and in London in particular where there's a kind of rise of fundamentalism presumably you cannot embrace that that's why you're challenging it we would like to say forget it it's quite strange when we did the exhibition was Jesus heterosexual all we had to say was yes you must have been something or they could have said no quite strange because it had a very big review in the church times Anglican newspaper which never reviews exhibitions normally and in the Catholic herald again they hardly ever review exhibitions and they both wrote in what I would say in a very un-Christian way a very unfriendly, mean way I didn't think that was Christian but we did have an enormous support as well from the Christian community to be fair one lady came up to us and said speaking as a committed Christian I must say congratulations young men you're asking all the right questions in our troubled times it's quite amazing and when the exhibition went to Cassero de Rivoli in Torino the director of the museum was very worried about having the picture which he scored was Jesus heterosexual in the exhibition and she was especially worried because her great uncle had been made a saint and I said how did he become a saint she said he gave all of the family money to the church I said that's called cash for honours in Britain and she had to actually consult with her priest to get clear that she was not going to sin even when it arrived in Munich they had big trouble they called in the priest who was looking after the soles of the German artist can you imagine in New York there's somebody who looks after the artist's soles I doubt it but it's amazing that he's still there in such a big way amazing power we are not free from the church I wouldn't dream of going inside a church and complaining about what we're talking about so as you say you're asking these questions and it's often been said that people find your art shocking but you've also said that what you want to do is deshock just explain what you mean by that I mean they all seem to be shocked about sex and we know that without sex we wouldn't be here so what's so shocking I think because it's a museum or a gallery people are a bit more weird it's the problem page of a woman's magazine they were very relaxed they say save your marriage, suck dick if you say that in a museum you're in trouble yes particularly with the camera running that's good probably the pictures that still seem the most I mean I don't think people go into galleries and look at things and go I am shocked I think that's not a reaction they have I think that's a media construct but there's still many pictures of yours I still look and look again and think I've grasped it and then I need a double taken they still surprise me they still kind of shake me out of a complacency that one often has wandering around museums and institutions are the naked shit pictures where you use turds but you've used all your own body fluids semen, spit, tears when you were conceiving that particular series did you in any way discuss the idea that you may be transgressing a particular border were you interested in doing that how did they come about then are they a form of self-portraiture because they're your body fluids we're just trying to accept ourselves totally in every way that's why we wanted to do it without without a shield even I think that when we took images through the microscope of sweat and tears and piss we found all these forms in there in the sweat for instance you find swords and daggers extraordinary guns in the piss they're actually contents, they're meanings there and I think that's right the you inside of you is probably all over you and the discovery of DNA rather proves that they can take one piece of a fingernail from someone and find out that it's exactly that person so maybe the you and you is not just in the head or people used to think that the you and you was inside the heart I guess at the time we were designing those pictures a young filmmaker was making a documentary about us we saw him every day with the camera crew and filmed for some hours and he saw the designs for those pictures and said oh what fun you must be having such fun playing around with these things and we said no it's not fun at all it's very serious and for us it's very emotional oh come off it must be a big laugh shit and piss and he just wouldn't believe us and then a few days later he came in with a completely changed appearance he was pale and he looked completely different and he said felt you should apologise and he said why he said I realised that you were right about the images you were taking because last night I went as I do every evening to visit my sister who was in hospital having an operation to remove all of her bone marrow she suffered leukemia and whilst he was sitting at the bed the nurse took a sample of the spit and they took a blood sample and they asked him if he would leave the room for a moment whilst they changed the toilet and things and in that moment he realised that for that sister of his all of those things were a matter of life and death that it is what we are if those things don't work we are finished we'll run to the hospital or to the mortuary there's nothing funny about shit if you have to give a sample of stool to the doctor he wouldn't giggle it's an absurd idea but in the museum they'll giggle in front of shit it's quite different it's got a very delayed reaction but I've just remembered that a woman who was a member of the Christian community described you as a young man which is brilliant because you do seem incredibly youthful still although she must have been getting on a bit to call you young men with respect but there is that amazing youthfulness still I think about the work that you produce there's a kind of freshness to what you still do a few years ago sensation was here in Brooklyn which was the generation of British artis who came to prominence in the 90s it's often said that your godfather figures although godfather would be a little provocative given what you've just said but do you take responsibility in any way do you see yourselves as having an impact are you interested in the impact you may have had on British art which was parochial in certain ways in the 1960s now I don't think we have any interest in what you think about us except the viewer and except when we walk the streets of London we see somebody come up to us and say I saw your show and that's what we prefer than an artist trying to tell us something we don't want to know anything by an artist but we're very supportive that there is and will be constant groups of artists coming up it's very good every country needs more artists there are not enough no I think because we cut ourselves off from the artwork in London totally and we only come out when we do an exhibition if not they will never see us we are there we stand monks in some way mad monks of 43 and it works because we only want to see the world in front of us and nothing else we don't want to see art in front of us some artists like to see art we like to see things that are not art we want undigested material so you don't go to museums not ever unless you're exhibiting in them we're making an exception and it is much better because your brain is totally clear we're much freer in that moment we have big empty areas in which to operate and think and feel we're not cluttered with having to make decisions about things that we cannot affect even if you start to go near the gallery our politics start to be listening and we actually don't like it it's very important for us to be alone and free to do whatever we want and even because we don't have assistance we are doing it all ourselves from the beginning to the end except we have what we call you and gang who help us if not we are doing from the beginning to the end alone you and gang he's scanning us he's scanning you those are the two great privileges that we feel number one privilege is being able to go to the studio in the morning and say in our pictures whatever we want without asking anybody anything so that's an amazing privilege we don't have a form and a boss we don't have to write down to check with anyone in the second privilege is we are able to get these pictures together and bring them to a city this time Milwaukee and Brooklyn and show them to tens of thousands of people there's no other way we could do it we cannot go through a Milwaukee shouting blood tears, spunk piss you get arrested right in a museum you can get away with it so how has the art world changed significantly in the last 40 years what is the big difference between the art world that you entered as singing or as living sculptures in 1969, 1970 and where you find yourself now I mean at the beginning there was so few galleries like in London there may be three or four galleries now you have hundreds and hundreds of galleries and you have thousands and thousands of artists and the art world is so big now it seems everybody wants to be involved in art and that it didn't used to be it used to be very, very small family and it was a kind of international small family and everybody had to be very nice to each other because we were so few and it was a kind of international small family we were so few so now it's big but backbiting I don't know about backbiting it was huge, huge compared and also I think it's rather good because people knew artists and they knew the work of artists and they knew the names of artists in the early 70s nobody knew if you asked a person on the street to name an artist they would only come with Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, they didn't know living artists so it's much better now let's throw it to the floor briefly because I think there is probably five minutes to ask questions are there questions that people would like to ask on the floor? Going on to something you said earlier I'm curious if you didn't have each other if you would be more engaged with other artists instead of being as isolated, do you think having each other opens the possibility for you to remove yourselves from the rest of the art world? I think being to remove self doubt and that gives us an enormous strength enormous strength I can't read anybody right because it's always said that being an artist can be a very lonely occupation but if there's two of you, by definition it can't be lonely or less lonely than if there's one of you good question I'm sure I haven't read any catalogs or newspaper articles about it when they see our work having an understanding we know that from people who stop us on the streets and people who write us letters I think it's very good if people want to see it in the sense of reading the introduction of the catalog and studying earlier pictures and other artists of our generation but it's not essential, we know that but interviews are very good I've come to work with very big interviews and maybe one way to the pictures I'm just looking I'm sure there are young artists and more senior artists in the audience too and you've never gone back to art school to teach you've said at the beginning that you weren't those kind of artists but I just wonder if you have any advice for artists who are not as successful as you or for young artists who are still at art school about how they might be successful what would your advice be? you've said too big you have the second one you have the second one we used to say when you get up out of the bed in the morning sit on the edge of the bed keep your eyes closed and think what do I want to say to the world today and don't open them and do something until you've decided that and then it won't matter what you do with a computer or a brush or a pen that's the way it goes fuck the teacher on which note you should end Gilbert and George, thank you very much