NEW YORK—The world-famous "living sculptures" Gilbert & George have made their lives their art for nearly 40 years. They first met at London's St. Martin's School of Art in 1967 and, with their iconic Singing Sculpture (Underneath the Arches) (1969), established the performative element that has been a constant in their art ever since. However, as their recent Tate Modern retrospective (which concludes its current world tour at the Brooklyn Museum in winter 2008) and the accompanying Aperture publication Gilbert & George—The Complete Pictures, 1971-2005 make obvious, they have also been making pictures for about as long. The duo's images are among the most confrontational art of the last quarter century, dealing in a consistently unsettling way with issues of sexuality, race, class, religion, politics, and morality.

Gilbert & George are utterly convinced of, and committed to, the ready accessibility of their art—they first coined the catchphrase "Art for All" in 1969. But they have also encountered years of criticism (some of it highly personal), which has left them understandably bitter about how they have been treated by the media, particularly in the United Kingdom.

Gilbert & George were in New York last month promoting The Complete Pictures, and they spoke to ARTINFO at the offices of the Aperture Foundation. Interviewing them is a unique experience, and in our transcript of this AI Interview we have endeavored to maintain the character of their language and personalities. George [Passmore] is the taller and more sober of the pair; he is urbane, terribly English, and has a voice very like Prince Charles. Gilbert [Proesch] is more excitable, and more mischievous. His voice is rather shrill and heavily accented, and—considering he has shared his life with George for so long—his English is far from idiomatic and is full of idiosyncracies. Together, the duo creates as captivating a verbal act as they do an artistic one.

Gilbert, George, you're obviously political artists. What are your thoughts on Tony Blair's decision to finally step down?

Gilbert: He should have done it ten years ago.

George: Good-bye and good riddance!

He's an old fake.

What would you say to the suggestion that you are chroniclers of Blair's England?

I don't think that for one single moment. I don't think we're party-political, not in our pictures anyway. I think that we're political in that we believe in the force of culture more than a lot of people in the art world. They think it's more decoration or entertainment or something. We believe that how you are and how your grandparents were—what music they listened to; whether they read poetry or not—is a big part of who you are.

How you free yourself, from the everyday. Do you believe yourself to be a free person or not a free person—or part of the government. The free market, that's what we believe in, the free market economy as art. You can buy it or not buy it, that's it.

You've talked in the past about your pictures being "visual love letters to the viewer." What does that mean?

We don't think that our pictures are laying down the law. It's more like a doorway, an opportunity to think about some subject in the picture.

A personal letter to the viewer. That's what art is for us ...

... Each one is slightly different ...

... Personal letters that they can explore if they want to. We want to make the kind of art that they can understand. They don't have to be for or against it, but they have to be able to understand it in some way. You cannot be so abstract that they don't know how to start to see it.

And we love the viewer. We stopped being social with a lot of artists in the 1970s because we realized that they had a condescending idea about a stupid general public that they were superior to. It's an appalling idea. So cruel! Everyone is fantastic. You can speak to any single person, and they all have incredible lives.

That attitude is reflected in your motto, "Art for All," isn't it?

Yes.

It started quite naively at the beginning. As a kind of slogan in '69.

But it became more and more true.