Gilbert and George: Two's company

Meeting Gilbert and George is a damned odd experience. As you sit there, in one of the two enormous studios at the back of their house in east London, and drink their instant coffee and ask them things, it strikes you that you've never interviewed a work of art before. It can be difficult. Works of art do not follow standard conversational procedures.

Me: "Is it true that you do everything together? Do you never go out separately?"

Gilbert: "Always together."

George: "Always to the same restaurant. The same Kurdish restaurant."

Gilbert: "But when we have to take other people out..."

George: "We like to impress people."

Gilbert: "...we go to grand places. Grand-er places."

George: "When we're alone, we go to the Kurdish restaurant."

Me: "Is it, er, local?"

Gilbert: "No, it's in Stoke Newington."

Me: "That seems rather a long way to go."

George: "We take a bus."

Gilbert: "The No 67."

See what I mean? The effect is mildly anaesthetic. You feel as if you've strayed into a performance of Waiting for Godot, at the height of Vladimir and Estragon's crosstalk routine. And, of course, their way of talking is a performance, of a kind – a two-man display of artistic eccentricity, a duet that is striving to become a solo. They make works of art together – rather simple photographic statements blown up to massive size and tricked out with excremental additions – but their big selling-point is that their lives are artificially constructed, too, so that we're encouraged to gaze on them as a single, man-made phenomenon. They are two legs of the same trouser. As people used to say about Chesterton and Belloc, they are two buttocks of the one bum.

They first snuck into the nation's consciousness in 1969 when, clad in their sensible worsted suits, with hands and faces painted bronze, they sang "Underneath the Arches", and informed the world they were "The Singing Sculpture". Since then, they have featured in the majority of their own art works, either clothed and formal, or naked in extremely, er, informal poses, until their moony little faces and pallid bodies have become as familiar as those of television soap stars. They have always dealt in shock tactics, from the portraits of Gilbert the Shit and George the Cunt that appeared in 1969, to the Fundamental Pictures exhibition of 1996, which featured blown-up slides of blood, urine, sperm and excrement, photographs of the Terrible Two displaying their willies and anuses, and charming titles like Spunk on Blood and Shit and Piss. The colours were bold, the microscopic detailing of corpuscles and plasma was surprisingly beautiful, and the presence of Gilbert and George's naked flesh not so much shocking as cringingly embarrassing. You wish a kind friend had discouraged them from such a disastrous career move.

Smiling the half-smile of a suspicious butler, George opens the door of their cosy Georgian house in Spitalfields, east London, and you walk down a narrow corridor past a dresser piled with G&G publications. You encounter a Thai youth who may be a friend or some form of manservant. Through the tiny backyard, you find the double-studio, which is bare but for huge piles of posters for The Dirty Words Pictures exhibition, which is about to open at the Serpentine Gallery. The artists have to sign all of them for their fans.

In the flesh (fully clothed, thank God) they are an immaculate pair – literally, unstained by any trace of paint or the sweat and blood of composition, in a studio whose vinyl floor is nastily spotted with red, orange and blue flecks, like the aftermath of a vicious gangland massacre or a visit from Jackson Pollock. They wear similar but not identical suits of stripy worsted made for them by a local Hackney tailor called Mr Lustig, grey for George, blue for Gilbert, accessorised by fancy ties and tan shoes.

They are, in that Victorian locution of approval, well turned out chaps, just as their manners are studiedly polite and their delivery fastidious, even when discussing the noisome subject-matter of their late works, the shit and blood and spunk.

George is tall, bald, professorial and patrician, and speaks in a voice that combines the accents of Prince Charles and the late Auberon Waugh. Gilbert is shorter and chunkier, his grey hair brushed forward as though to conceal some incipient tonsure, and the more talkative. His vestigial Italianism (after 35 years in England) lingers in his delivery and breaks out in occasional squeaks and fond asides to his partner ("Wooden you sigh, George?") which remind you of the pretentious Lucia in E F Benson's stories, when she asks her uncomprehending husband, "Non è vero, caro sposo?". Sitting among the Dirty Words stuff, they're not so much shocking as bizarrely misplaced, like a pair of bank managers who've found themselves running an abattoir.

They met in 1967, at St Martins School of Art in London. Gilbert was 24, the son of a shoemaker from Cortina dall'Pezzo in the Italian Dolomites ("Our village is not so smart but they do all this skiing") where he attended art school at 14, hoping to become a sculptor in wood. George was 25, a Plymouth-born war baby whose family was relocated to Totnes, where he studied at Dartington College, where a teacher from the Adult Education Institute told him he should become an art student. They met on the progressive sculpture course ("It was famous all over the world," claims Gilbert proudly. "It was this new way of making art – now they call it 'conceptual art'") and never looked back. They moved into the Spitalfields house soon after meeting, and proceeded to reinvent themselves as the avant-gardists in the three-button suits.

Their lives are self-consciously minimalist. Unlike the rest of us, they don't bother with mundane things like shopping, cooking, watching TV, going to bars, buying clothes...

Me: "Do you go to the supermarket together? Or does just one of you take a shopping list?"

Gilbert: "We never go to the supermarket. Never have."

George (in his poshest voice): "Once a year, we go to the cash-and-carry on the corner here and buy 500 lavatory rolls, 50 tubes of toothpaste and 50 bars of soap, so we never have to shop. We just have to pick up a pint of milk in the morning and a newspaper."

Gilbert: "We get up at 6am, go round the corner to the café for breakfast."

George: "We take The Daily Telegraph." (Smirks.) "It's not difficult to be different in the art world."

Gilbert: "We have a fridge we used to keep the photographic paper in. Now it's filled with bottles of champagne."

Have they enough pretexts to break out the champagne these days? A constant refrain in their conversation is their irritation, sometimes edging over into fury, at the way they've been treated by the British art establishment. I asked if they supported David Hockney in his recent demand that the Chancellor supply more money for regional galleries and museums. Did they agree?

"No," said Gilbert, without hesitation. "We never ever go outside of London."

"We've never been involved outside London," said George.

"They never bought us," said Gilbert, sulkily, "Never showed us. We managed to persuade Tate Liverpool to show us once, but it was such a big persuasion. In the last 10 years, we've not sold a piece here."

Here? You mean in London?

"In England!" cried Gilbert.

"In Britain!!" yelped George.

Amazingly, it's true. They sell all over the world, in America, Italy, Holland, Moscow, China, they even had a Paris retrospective. "In 20 years," shouted Gilbert, "we never managed to persuade them to do a retrospective here in London."

"We had eight big shows last year," said George. "The one in Lisbon was unbelievable. Fantastic. They had the Fundamental pictures, the Testamental pictures, the Hornies, the New Hornies, the Nine Dark Pictures..." He reeled off the titles of their key collections with pride. (There is something bizarrely counter-intuitive about standing at a light-screen with this intelligent, magisterial man, in his tortoiseshell spectacles, as he reverently draws your attention to – "This is an extraordinary piece. Look at this. 'BLOOD TEARS SPUNK PISS'. Real blood, you see, real tears...")

They are unimpressed with Nick Serota of Tate Modern, who seems to be a fan (he came to last year's Lisbon extravaganza) but will not give them the Tate retrospective they so passionately crave. They claim not to know him, several times, and accuse him of racism for splitting the Tate galleries by nationality rather than, say, historical date. But then they're keen not to be thought of as part of the art establishment, even as they seem to crave its approval. In a supreme act of joining-in with the mainstream, they linked up with Jay Jopling (the bespectacled, Old Etonian magus of modern Britart) three years ago, and have basked in his patronage ever since, as he has spread the word about G&G all over Europe.

Perhaps stupidly, I brought up the big jubilee event at the Royal Academy, where the Queen met 600 key figures of the British arts world. Had they stayed away deliberately? It was a sore point. "We weren't invited," snapped Gilbert. "Appalling," said George. But, I said, the press would have loved to see them shaking hands with the Queen. "It would have been amusing," said George, looking distinctly hurt. "And we're monarchists," said Gilbert. "We're the only monarchists among the artists today, because they're all anti-establishment. To be an artist, you have to be anti-establishment. But we're not."

So they approve of the Queen? "Oh yes, we like all that. And we love Prince Charles." You do? "Oh yes," said Gilbert, with enthusiasm. "He's fantastic. He has good ideas, I think . Everyone laughs at him, but they will have to agree in the end."

But, I point out, he hates most modern architecture.

"It's another point of view," said George. "That's very good."

A chance to reassess the pair's aestheticising of bodily functions is offered by the return of The Dirty Words Pictures, which are on display at the Serpentine Gallery from Thursday. First seen in 1977, split between three different galleries in Düsseldorf, Amsterdam and New York, they're a series of 26 large photomontages on a 16-frame grid, yoking together images of inner-city tower blocks, black faces, Gilbert and George's worried-looking expressions and photographs of street graffiti from buildings, pavements and hoardings near their Spitalfields home: the complete list features the usual range of obscenities, with a few furious variants along the lines of "Bummed Communism" and "Smash the Reds".

This transgressive art was considered shocking back in 1977 by those who thought G&G were simply droll, living-sculpture dolls in suits. But the Dirty Words Pictures came out at the time of the silver jubilee and the heyday of punk, and, in hindsight, they seem a little tame beside the Sex Pistols. Looking at Gilbert and George's worried little faces beneath the shocking word "BUGGER" (eek!) reminds me irresistibly of a comic song by Flanders & Swann, the Fifties vaudeville act. It's called "Ma's Out, Pa's Out, Let's Talk Rude", and the chorus goes "Pee, poo, belly, bum, drawers".

Gilbert and George are convinced that the pictures are still relevant, edgy, controversial. "They haven't lost any of their power to shock," said Gilbert. What – even with The Vagina Monologues on stage, and the dialogue in Sex and the City, and everybody on Big Brother effing and blinding away? "But to have it in the art world," said Gilbert, "that is what people find difficult. Like in America, there's so much censorship now. We have a show coming up at the Brooklyn Gallery, which we have to self-censor or they can't show it. All the curators are totally terrified to show it, because they would lose their jobs the next day..."

Mmmm. I suspect curators who've encountered Tracey Emin's soiled knickers and Damien's carved-up livestock may be made of sterner stuff.

Their relationship to the Young British Artists who succeeded, and, frankly, eclipsed, them in the business of arty outrage, is ambiguous. Once, they used to hang out with fellow-artists. These days, they try to avoid them. Their memories of the late Seventies – the period of the Dirty Words Pictures – is apparently hazy from debauchery, because when they had real money coming in, they spent lots of it getting plastered. Where? "Oh, places around here, Richards Street, where the lorry drivers go, and a pub called the Cricketers in Battersea. We used to take everybody out and get very, very drunk." (You try to picture Gilbert or George in a pub, in their sensible suits, ordering rounds of Young's bitter in thin glasses and packets of pork scratchings, perhaps going for double-top at the dartboard – but your imagination is just not equipped for such a feat.)

Now, they are alarmed to find that the jeunesse dorée of smart-alec conceptualists have moved in next door. "If you look out the window," said George, "you can see where Chris Ofili lives, and Jake and Dinos Chapman's studio, and Gillian Wearing's place. Gary Hume has a studio over there. Tracey [Emin] has a house there, and that sculptress, what's she called? Rachel Whiteread, she has a house at the end of the street. When we go out to dinner, we have to be very careful to steer a path around them all. We don't get socially involved at all. We stopped some time ago."

"We have no time apart," said Gilbert. "We like to be alone in the evenings. Because we've never worked so hard as in the last year. And you have to do one thing or the other."

"If you hang out with other artists," said George, distastefully, "you wind up normal..."

"...because you have to agree with them," said Gilbert, "when they ask your opinion of their work. We don't want to have views about other people."

They sometimes seem prepared to acknowledge, with a murmur, that Damien and Co are their natural successors. But more often, they construct an elaborate excuse that they've never actually seen the young artists' work because they were always too busy at the time, putting on shows and editing catalogues. ("Unbelievable concentration," said George, vaguely). But then, they're fantastically aloof from the mire of modern living. They haven't, for instance, been to the cinema in decades.

"I think it was 1969 that we stopped," said George. "The last one was The Deer Hunter."

Gosh. Was it Meryl Streep that put them off the movies for ever? Or the Russian roulette scene?

"No, no, it was fantastic, but we just stopped after that," said Gilbert.

"It's just entertainment," says George, high-mindedly. "That's why we dislike it. It's too soothing. We're anti-pleasure-seeking."

But surely, I said, art is just a higher form of entertainment, as T S Eliot said about poetry.

"We think it's more serious than that."

They like to affect to ignore most of what's happening in the modern art world. Would they go to the Matisse Picasso double-exhibition at Tate Modern? Will they hell. "No!" said Gilbert with a squeak. "We haven't been to see a show in 25 years. We feel they've been feeding us this stuff for half a century, until there's no chance..."

"It's a fascism of taste," said George, with feeling. "Nobody has a capacity to look and decide what they feel about it any more. Nobody's allowed to have an opinion about it. You're considered an idiot if you say, 'I don't like Picasso'..."

What did they think of Picasso? "I think he's very overrated," said George. "Every city in the world seems to have a Picasso exhibition, or a Picasso museum – the drawings, the pottery, the this and that."

You may write them off as clowns, has-beens, querulous eaters of sour grapes, dreamers of an arty stardom that has eluded them in their own country. You may think that they have no opinions about art that stand up to a second's scrutiny. But however foolish their crackpot exhibitionism, or contradictory their pronouncements, they occupy a small but interesting niche in modern art history. Where would Chris Ofili, and his elephant-dung paintings of the Virgin Mary, be without them? Who would take Tracey Emin's reeking bed linen and look-at-me solipsism seriously, had Gilbert and George not blazed a skid-marked trail?

In the end, it's the strange, masochistic relationship they have with the art world, the press, the gallery-owners, and their own inadequacies that may seem most significant. I left their charming company wholly beguiled by both of them, and wholly bewildered by how they can invest so much energy in such two- dimensional nonsense.

"The pictures practically make themselves," said Gilbert.

"We don't have to think," said George.

"We don't have to decide," said Gilbert.

"We just lift it up and drag it out," said George.

In the hallway of their house, Gilbert offered me a paperback catalogue. "I wasn't sure how familiar you are with our work of the last five years." We said goodbye, shook hands and parted.

Halfway up the street, I looked at the catalogue. It was The Fundamental Pictures from 1996. I opened it at a picture of Gilbert and George bending over and spreading their buttocks. But whether they were mooning the rest of the world, or begging to be ravished by it, I had absolutely no idea.

Gilbert & George – The Dirty Words Pictures, 1977, opens on 6 June at the Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2

Deborah Ross returns next week