Private View for ‘Reclining Drunk’ by Gilbert & George, Nigel Greenwood Gallery, 1973

Gilbert is on the far left and George in the middle, stood next to their display of two hundred ‘An Ash Tray/Collapsed Bottle Sculpture’. Drink and gin was an important part of the artists work at the time. The writer Gordon Burn, a great friend of Nigel Greenwood’s, captured this well, too well in fact, in an interview for Vogue which at the time was never published because the artists, and Gordon, got too drunk. It was later published in Gordon Burn’s collection of art writing, Death and Violence, Sex and Silence. ‘Nearly all the artists’, George said, ‘they are nearly all drunks. The whole art world, they get drunk all the time. It’s amazing. We think it’s very honest of us to realise it can be a subject. You get really smashed and the next day you paint a beautiful picture, pretty stripes or something, and then you get drunk again, and it’s absolutely nothing to do with your way of life, really. And we like to be very lifelike, in a way, not to be too artistic.’