Gilbert & George: Art That Speaks to the AIDS Issue : Art: The duo raised $1 million for charity at a London photo show. ART/LA89 honors them with a special award.

“Early in 1988 we had a strong feeling that we should be doing something more to help people with AIDS,” wrote Gilbert & George in the catalogue for their exhibition of photographs last spring at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London.

The British duo, who discarded their surnames and became a team in 1969, didn’t produce a series of works spelling out the anguish of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Illustrating specific subjects is not their style.

Instead they assembled a show of photo pieces on broader themes and pledged to donate the entire proceeds of the show--even the dealer’s customary commission--to CRUSAID, a London-based charity. The show sold out and raised nearly $1 million.

“It was an amazing success,” Gilbert said this week in Los Angeles.

“It’s the nearest we’ve ever been to happy,” George added.

Now the artists are being honored for their generosity. They were to be presented with a special International Art Award on Wednesday night at the gala preview of ART/LA89, Los Angeles’ fourth international contemporary art fair at the Convention Center. Today at 1 p.m. John Howell, arts editor of Elle magazine, will conduct an informal public discussion with the artists at the fair.

Gilbert & George generally lead what they describe as “very quiet lives,” but they are pleased with the public award. It’s a way of penetrating the secrecy that surrounds AIDS and treating those with the disease more “normally and fairly,” they said.

This buttoned-up, poker-faced pair of English gentlemen in identical tweed suits and flowered ties is often mistaken for a comic act--a spoof of strait-laced businessmen. Since 1969, when they billed themselves as “Living Sculptures” and posed for hours on end at museums and galleries, they have presented themselves as interchangeable, almost anonymous men who are unfailingly polite and proper.

But the artists are not entertainers. Their suits are part of their quest for a “democratic” art that speaks clearly about tough issues. Their work over the last 20 years tackles all themes that move or disturb them, including scatological and sexual images that would surely dismay the conservatives who have spoken up in recent arguments over art censorship.

Gilbert, who is 46 and was born in Italy, and George, 47, met in 1967 when they were students at St. Martin’s School of Art in London. At first they worked separately and showed their work together, but they joined forces after leaving school.

Becoming a team was “something that happened to us, not something we planned,” George said, but now “it is our greatest strength.”

“We didn’t have a studio after we left school, but we still wanted to make art so we started making human sculpture. It was an immediate success,” Gilbert said.

“Then we started to make big drawings--leaving behind ideas of us--because we realized we couldn’t be every place,” George said.

At first, their work took the form of postcard mailings, letters and drawings. Then they began taking photographs--the medium for which they are best known. They compiled groups of separate black-and-white photos, and later combined multiple images in large gridded panels. Bit by bit they added color to emphasize meanings--red for blood, green for nature.

These days, the artists sometimes include pictures of other people in their work, but the typical Gilbert & George photo piece contains images of the properly garbed artists striding through a deadly landscape, curled up in the smoke of a bomb blast or sitting on the knees of a friend who has died of AIDS.

“We think of ourselves in the pictures as rather like people in the letters they write. We never like to think of our pictures as aesthetic compositions. They are very much messages from us,” George said.

But how do they work as a team? Who gets the ideas?

“No ideas. Never ideas, then they could be wrong,” George said. “When we go to the studio to make pictures, we always take everything out of our heads. How we are at that time--what we fear, what we hope, what we dread, what we love, what we hate--that’s what we put in the pictures. It’s directly lifted from our feelings, so it’s without conscious ideas.”

But do these two people always feel the same way at the same time?

“We know that we cannot disagree,” Gilbert said. “Ours is a personal view of the world, but we work rather like a country or a company or a family” that agrees on certain issues and acts accordingly, he said.

“We don’t believe that our pictures can be good or bad, because it’s only what we can do at the time. Our vision changes from day to day,” he said.

That vision is consistently radical, at least in art-world terms. In public statements, the artists have declared, “We want our art to speak across the barriers of knowledge directly to people about their life and not about their knowledge of art. The 20th Century has been cursed with an art that cannot be understood. The decadent artists stand for themselves and their chosen few, laughing at and dismissing the normal outsider. We say that puzzling, obscure and form-obsessed art is decadent and a cruel denial of the life of people.”

“The art professional always wants an art that cannot speak to the viewer and then he will explain. We cut through that system,” George said.

Gilbert & George’s quest for a “democratic” art hasn’t won them points in some high-art circles, but their belief that art can effect social change is even more controversial. Members of early modernist movements--the Russian Avant-Garde, the Bauhaus in Germany and De Stijl in the Netherlands--passionately worked on behalf of an art that could improve the quality of life, but such ideas have been unfashionable for decades.

Reminded of this fact, Gilbert & George don’t blink.

“We always say that if there’s one thing that everyone in the world agrees on, it’s that there’s room for improvement,” George said.

“And only through art, can one change the world,” Gilbert added.

Gilbert & George say that they know their art makes a difference because people tell them so. “We just walk down the street in London and people tell us they are so moved by our pictures,” Gilbert said.

“We show ourselves in our pictures and people--particularly young people--see themselves,” George said. Most artists are congratulated for their style, he said, while Gilbert & George are praised for the meaning of their art.

Some of their work was on view last year at the Los Angeles art fair, but none will be shown this year. And there are no plans for a major local exhibition of their work in the near future. The artists had hoped that an exhibition that will open in Moscow in May would travel on to Los Angeles, but no museum was able to accommodate the exhibition, they said.

So it’s back to London and back to work for Gilbert & George.