The penis is no longer a penis. This is the dilemma facing Gilbert & George in their latest series of hand-colored photomontages titled New Democratic Pictures (all works 1991). Up to a certain point a penis was still a penis; prior to the ’80s an artist didn’t need to be any more explicit about what a penis actually meant. And as long as Gilbert & George remained clothed in their works, they didn’t need to worry either. But genitalia are now as implicated as soup cans and kitsch in the dance of transfiguration and transgression in Art and Life. Gilbert & George know this quite well and in

For the duration of Tim Head’s show, the gallery was transformed into the countryside in summer: downstairs the walls were painted a pale blue, the floor was laid with artificial grass, and fluorescent tubes replaced the usual spotlights. Not really the countryside, not even a pretend-pastoral scene, this transformation represented the all-purpose, anodyne, nowhere space in which contemporary ad-mass society pitches its battle for hearts and minds. Double banked on the walls were 13 large rectangular canvases—their images symmetrical, curvilinear, appealing, sexual, nonspecific, familiar. The