Pierre & Gilles Masters of Gay Sailor Iconography

Pierre et Gilles, A brief essay if you will...Two of the most important artists in creating homosexual iconography and interspersing it into pop-culture;

Their sensibility is one of post-modern appropriation and blending: "they consort with so-called low-brow aspects of our visual culture -- television, advertising, mangas, gay imagery, gaudy religious pictures, variety shows, rock-disco-techno culture and so on." Building intricate sets formed of "diaphanous fabrics, blinking Christmas lights, elaborate papier-mache frames, Kleenex garlands, Oriental bric-a-brac [and] gilded tchuktchas," they create a candy-colored, overflowing world that approaches glamour, drama, and beauty at a level that cozies up against kitsch, while remaining sincere and idealistic. "Their reality comes straight out of Baudrillard -- its very centre is artifice, what Umberto Eco would refer to as the 'Absolute Fake,' something out of hypperreality." Mining the most familiar and well-worn themes and stylistic conventions from advertising, vintage postcards, movies, and magazines, they create attractive, colorful image imbued with a super-concentrated syrup of popular media, which resonates with the viewer as simultaneously familiar yet surreal, pleasant yet menacing.

A few major thematic categories dominate the bulk of their work: Catholic saints, gods and goddesses of world mythology, fetish or burlesque stars, lascivious beefcake nudes, and nautical images of mermaids and sailors. These often capitalize on the erotic potential of the sailor persona and the history of the sailor as an iconic image of queer sexuality. Their body of work featuring imagery of the sea, "unique and preponderant in that it encapsulates the romantic potential of their work,” is informed very directly by Genet's novel and Fassbinder's camp-conscious adaptation of it.

Dan Cameron, in a series of essays on the duo, articulates their status as artists whose sexual identity informs every aspect of their work.
Cameron relates their photographic work to that of contemporary Cindy Sherman, with an important difference:“where [she] locates her allegories squarely within the cinematic tradition, Pierre et Gilles prefer to submerge themselves in the more sentiment laden … underworld of keepsakes, tinted postcards, outdated physique magazines, and old movie posters … the artists are adamant about creating a visual universe that was unmistakably and deliriously gay.”

Pierre et Gilles, Cameron argues, create a idealized gay utopia that hinges on scopophilic pleasure and decadence rather than the political urgency which has marked the past few decades of queer culture. The “resolutely homosexual stance” which they assume allows them to appropriate from multiple modes of representations and world-views while maintaining a cohesive ideological framework. This idea of a ‘gay’ point of view is echoed from Fassbinder, whose film is also resolutely gay, in terms of content and of style. Rather than being about gay characters, as many of his earlier films are, it is about ‘gayness,’ and the complex visual and narrative codes that are identified with a gay sensibility, including his wholehearted reclamation of conventions and motifs from an array of historically gay artists: transgression from Genet, campy melodrama from Sirk and cartoonish eroticism from Tom of Finland, all articulated within the trope of the lusty sailor. Pierre and Gilles, then, borrow all of this as well: Genet, Sirk, Tom of Finland, and Fassbinder, dose it with ridiculously heightened glamour, and refine it into individual images of great beauty, artifice, and plurality.