ARTS REVIEW: Gilbert & George tackle the taboo at the MAC

Artists Gilbert & George are masterful agents provocateurs, creating art that is confrontational, innovative, sometimes bizarre but always intriguing. The pair met in 1967 while studying advanced sculpture at St Martin's School of Art in London and have worked together ever since, sometimes casting themselves as '˜living sculptures' and describing their very existence as an elaborate and ongoing act of performance that constitues a unique work of art. The Singing Sculpture, their universally admired 1970 performance that made them famous, saw the duo pose as metal-faced android outsiders singing along to a record of the old music hall classic Underneath the Arches. They have also produced a vast body of pictures from sketches to collage and prints, always returning to provocative questions and issues from morality to cultural practices. This exhibition at the MAC - SCAPEGOATING PICTURES - sees the duo interrogate that base tendency to scapegoat or villify certain figures or groups, a practice that displays our troublesome capacity for being blinded by prejudice and the need to apportion blame. Gilbert & George are here asking why we need to create bogeymen and what are the consequences of sweeping social judgements. Here large pictures of collaged newspapers and signage are overlaid with imagery of both artists in their trim trademark suits, their faces and bodies alternately fractured or coloured, obsured by gimp masks or displayed as shattered against riotously busy backgrounds of veiled figures and strangers, empty canisters of nitrous oxide strangely appearing prominently throughout. Sometimes the images of the artists appear cartoon-like, elsewhere they are sinister and foreboding. Veiled figures point to current anxieties about the rise of violent Islam and Gilbert & George are clearly determined to interrogate how this prejudice or scapegoating of a particular ethnic group displays the fear and pejudice we often experience towards cultural otherness. The palette here is a riot of reds, yellows and