The Tuileries is the only commission we ever fulfilled.
In fact, we've been offered,
not so much recently but in the early days we were always
asked if we do something for a particular project or something.
We always said, "We don't want to go to the studio
with some other information in our head.
We want to go empty headed, blank."
“Zonked,” we say. With the eyes closed...
and closing the ears to be– nothing and then we can...
fall into some truth of some kind, hopefully.
We never wanted to...
We never wanted to go up to the studio
with the idea that we have to satisfy somebody.
But we did it for Art & Project as they were some of the first
people to be kindly to us.
We were introduced to Art & Project by the late artist Ger van Elk
who wanted us to join his Dutch gallery.
He felt it would be good for him as well and good for us.
And we became very fond of Ger and Adriaan, I recalled.
Adriaan died quite recently
and they wanted something that they would keep for themselves
and we said we would do The Tuileries.
And it's very interesting because then...
at that time, we used to have a lot of shows in Paris.
with Ileana Sonnabend
and the friends of... what do you call...
We had a group of young people taking us around
and we ended up in the Tuileries.
And at that time, the Tuileries was a kind of sex playground.
Sex playground hiding in the bushes or something.
So it became a new way
of dealing with nature that it could have a bit of sexual element.
The trees are not only trees,
it could be something behind the trees.
So to make up...
The images in The Tuileries are not of the Tuileries.
We could've gone to Paris and done that
but we didn't need to do that.
It just had to be the suggestion of the sexuality
combined with nature.
We were quite excited by that.
And the chairs are based on, what do you call?
In 1970, we had two green chairs
in the ground floor of number 12 Fournier Street.
We only had the ground floor.
It had two rooms. It had the kitchen and one room.
And, for ten years all the art was done there,
in the kitchen, it was extraordinary.
And only two chairs.
All of the famous pieces, like the Red Mornings,
or Cherry Blossom, all were done in the kitchen.
And we had these two green chairs and we asked John
if he could copy the two green chairs.
And then we put this jungle, what do you call?
-The Tuileries? -On top of it.
It was very exciting. There were a pair of, I suppose they were...
some prototypes of chairs that never actually got produced.
And we liked them, because they were similar but different.
Whenever we had a visitor we always used to say,
"It's a male and female pair of chairs. Which is which?"
And half the world says, that's the man, and the other half says...
We realized that even the furniture had that very strong sexual element.
We were fascinated by that.
Yeah, sexual...
To bring in sexuality into the art...
was quite unusual as well at that time.
It was one of the many taboos. Color was taboo.
Sentiment was taboo.
-Sexuality was taboo. -Being unhappy was taboo.
-And sexuality was totally... -Sexuality was totally taboo.
Using your hands was taboo.
You talk about being in a generation
that was largely conceptual and minimal
in post-studio, and you were very much an outpost-studio.
Yeah, that's true.
And we were very lucky that we were poor enough not to have a studio.
It didn't hurt us at all.
It was very good because it became abstract in some global way.
We didn't have a studio to go back into it and start stretching.
We were able... We only had to...
promoting our feelings through other ways of thinking
and that's why we started to become more involved
in the power of the negative.
We saw that through that power
we could make our pictures or sculptures
much more powerful, much more direct,
and much more real.
We felt that everything that has to do with artistic hand,
the artistic hand, it tried to take away all of that...
That you end up in front of powerful imagery.
That's why we gave up charcoal-on-paper sculptures
because we became...
-Disillusioned. -We became very disillusioned with...
the reality that people came to the charcoal-on-paper sculptures
and admired their form and their texture.
And almost the sound they made, their crinkliness.
And the edges, they liked the edges and we thought,
"How awful. They're not listening to us.
We're not reaching, speaking to them."
We are not able to get our message across
so let's try something different, we tried different ways.
Like even videos, we tried videos.
The first video sculpture that we saw
that's quite a good way of doing it
and we only did three because at that time we didn't want to make our films
because we did it with Gerry Schum,
from Gallery Schum in Dusseldorf at that time: 1971, '72, '73.
But after that, in 1980,
we did write an extraordinary script
of the world of Gilbert & George.
And that we did storyboard and every shot was designed by us
and we think that it's still one of the best things we ever did.