The Total Mystery of Each Man-Layed-Brick

‘ The content of mankind is our subject and our inspiration. Our art is the friendship formed between the Viewer and our pictures. Each pictures speaks of a “Particular View”, which the viewer may consider in the light of his own life.’
– Gilbert & George

Composed on a monumental scale, Gilbert & George’s 1971 drawing The Total Mystery of Each Man-Layed-Brick plunges the viewer into an illusory black and white exterior scene: behind a neatly manicured lawn, blossoming foliage seems to blow gently in the wind; just beyond stands a grand stately building with large French windows and a double row of balconies. The words of the title are imprinted like a gigantic comic strip across the bottom of the work: taken from their written work A Day in the Life of Gilbert & George, the text describes an element extracted from the artists’ daily lives, but deliberately does not quite equate with the drawn image. Rendered in charcoal on paper laid on canvas, the drawing comes from one of Gilbert & George’s most important early works, an extended body of twenty-three drawings collectively entitled The General Jungle or Carrying on Sculpting. First exhibited in 1971, this grandiose work combined Gilbert & George’s recently adopted status as self-declared ‘living sculptures’ with the strong tradition of English landscape painting. It was their first major pictorial statement to mark their setting out into the ‘general jungle’ of the world and the deliberate extension of their lives into art and of their art into life. The title The General Jungle alludes directly to Gilbert & George’s notion of life as an impenetrable entanglement, through which they wander as art works and the living embodiments of all art’s prospects of hope and romanticism, at once drawing from and parodying the canon of landscape painting.

Until 1969 Gilbert & George had been art students at St Martin’s College of Art in London where they had been taught in the college’s strong tradition of constructed metal sculpture established by artists such as Anthony Caro. Along with many others in their class including Jan Dibbetts, Richard Long and Barry Flanagan, Gilbert & George rebelled fiercely against this formal tradition in favour of a more conceptual approach to sculpture. Indeed, The General Jungle or Carrying on Sculpting stems from the artist duo’s series of so-called Charcoal on Paper Sculptures, which comprised of thirteen groups of drawings completed between 1970 and 1974. A visual manifestation of the artists’ Living Sculpture movement, the series sought to blend and blur the boundaries between art and reality. ‘The content of mankind is our subject and our inspiration,’ the artists have explained of their hybrid creations which, despite their papery materiality, verge on the sculptural by way of their colossal stature, and tactile physicality which protrudes into the viewer’s domain in gridded pleats of folded paper. ‘Our art,’ they continue, ‘is the friendship formed between the Viewer and our pictures. Each pictures speaks of a ‘Particular View’, which the viewer may consider in the light of his own life’ (Gilbert & George, quoted in P. Colombo, Gilbert & George: The General Jungle or Carrying on Sculpting, exh. cat., MAXXI, Museo nazionale della arti del XXI secolo, Rome 2005, p. 12).