As Day Breaks Over Us We Rise Into Our Vacuum

The work is part of the cycle "The General Jungle or Carrying on Sculpting" (1971) in which Gilbert & George act as “living sculptures”, using their bodies as material and fusing art with the everyday in large-scale black and white images. The series of charcoal works was created on the basis of slides portraying the artists as they walk through a London park during a performance. Charcoal and slides recall Romantic English landscape painting and the poetic of the picturesque, which exalts the aesthetic qualities of the irregularity and spontaneous disorder of nature. The drawings are, therefore, a kind of transposition of the performance. The titles, in a sense captions to the images, are sarcastic comments on the function and the role of the artist in contemporary society.