Within the worlds of twentieth-century art and thought, there exist creators who resonate with one another at a surprisingly deep level, despite being separated by era, nationality, and medium. Paul Valéry (1871–1945) was a French poet and thinker who spent his life questioning the nature of art and the body through precise language and philosophical inquiry. Gilbert & George — Gilbert Proesch, born in 1943, and George Passmore, born in 1942 — are a contemporary art duo based in London who achieved international renown by presenting their own bodies and daily lives as works of art.No record survives of the two ever meeting in conversation, nor is there strong evidence that either was acutely aware of the other. And yet, when viewed through the axis of the relationship between body and art, a strangely profound intellectual resonance emerges between them. In the pages that follow, we trace both the points of contact and the points of divergence, digging deep into the questions surrounding body, art, and existence.Living Art: The Body Itself as WorkIn his reflections on dance, Valéry fixed his attention on a particular moment — the moment when the body ceases to be a mere instrument and becomes an end in itself. In ordinary life, we use the body to accomplish something. In dance, however, the movement of the body is itself the meaning, the goal, the complete event. It was here that Valéry located the essence of art.Gilbert & George put this idea into practice in a far more radical form. In their landmark early work Singing Sculpture (1969), the two painted their faces and hands with metallic paint and stood on a table, repeating the same gestures endlessly while an old English music-hall song played on loop. These sessions sometimes lasted for hours. This act of presenting their own bodies as sculpture can be described as the ultimate expression of what Valéry called the body's self-purposiveness taken to its logical extreme.The proposition that the artist does not make the work but is the work is the core shared by Valéry's philosophy of the body and Gilbert & George's practice. In the London art world of the time, this piece landed as a genuinely shocking question: What is sculpture? Where is the boundary between work and maker? What Valéry posed philosophically through language, the two demonstrated empirically through their own flesh and time.One behind-the-scenes detail worth noting: at the premiere of Singing Sculpture, gallery staff reportedly attempted to offer the two a break partway through, given how long they had been moving continuously. The two refused. Their logic was that sculpture does not tire. It is an anecdote that perfectly captures the thoroughness of their commitment to applying the logic of sculpture to the human body, and their uncompromising insistence on it.The Everyday and Ritual: The Repeating BodyValéry was deeply interested in the tension between habit and attention. The physical movements of daily life become habituated and automated over time, until we perform them with almost no awareness at all. Walking, holding chopsticks, breathing — all of these were once actions that required conscious effort, and all have since dissolved into the unconscious flow of life.What Valéry asked of art was the breaking of this automatism. Artistic attention strips the surface from the familiar and reactivates sensation, making it vivid once again. The concept is close to what Russian Formalism called defamiliarization, though in Valéry's case it is articulated as a renewal of bodily attention.A consistent structure runs through the work of Gilbert & George: the ritual, repetitive presentation of fragments of the everyday — newspaper headlines, street scenes, their own faces. Their large-scale photo-piece works return obsessively, almost compulsively, to the streets of London and to their own ageing faces. There is no clear message, no narrative — only the structure of repetition through which the everyday rises up as something strange and unfamiliar.This aligns structurally with what Valéry described as the transformation of the everyday through attention — the defamiliarization of the familiar and the renewal of the senses. The means are entirely different: poetry on one side, visual art on the other. But the will to use the everyday as material in order to reboot sensation is shared.The fact that the two have continued for decades to appear exclusively in suits is also not unrelated to this commitment to repetition. The suit is their daily uniform, and a device for dissolving the boundary between art and life. Just as Valéry sat at the same desk and reflected at the same hour each time he wrote, the two approach the world in the same clothes, in the same posture, year after year.Being Two: The Plurality of the Body and the Mystery of the SelfValéry described the body as "the most intimate thing I have, and yet the most enigmatic." The body is unquestionably mine, and yet it cannot be fully grasped or controlled. The relationship between the self and the body is neither one of ownership nor one of identity, but a strange proximity in which nearness and distance coexist. In this, Valéry saw a philosophical abyss.Gilbert & George turned the very form of their existence — two people as one artist — into a work of art. They always appear together in matching suits, respond to interviews and exhibitions as a single entity, and deliberately blur the boundaries of individual selfhood. The particularity of individual judgment, individual taste, individual feeling — all of this is intentionally made indistinct, and in doing so, the question of what the self is is enacted at the level of existence itself.It could be said that what Valéry sought to dismantle through language — the binary oppositions of mind and body, self and other — the two practised at the level of how they actually lived. A condition in which it is impossible to tell whose statement belongs to whom, whose idea came from whom — by making that condition itself the work, a critique of the modern fantasy of the autonomous individual self is embedded within it.One illuminating behind-the-scenes detail: the two met at St Martin's School of Art in London in 1967 and began living together almost immediately after. They have lived together, worked together, and travelled together for more than half a century since. People often ask about the nature of their relationship, to which they reply: "We have no private life. We are artists twenty-four hours a day." This is not a pose. It can be read as a Valéryan attitude — the self-purposiveness of the body extended across the totality of life itself.Ugliness, Taboo, and the Dark Side of the BodyIn his discussions of the body, Valéry tended to focus on the aesthetically refined and elevated: the body in states of heightened sensation, as in poetry or dance. And yet he also looked steadily at the body's opacity and its capacity to resist control. The body does not obey reason; it harbours drives and impulses, ages, sickens, and dies. These darker dimensions are genuinely present in Valéry's philosophy of the body.Gilbert & George engage with this dark side more directly and more aggressively. Works presenting excrement, blood, sex, and death in large-format, intensely saturated colour — including the Naked Shit Pictures series (1994) and related bodies of work — seek to reclaim what has been excluded by the civilizing of the body. It is a frontal assault on the convention that only what modern society deems clean, orderly, and rational qualifies as art.On this point there is a clear difference in temperature between Valéry and Gilbert & George. Valéry tended to suggest the body's dark side philosophically, by implication; the two thrust it forward visually and physically. Among critics, there are those who dismiss Gilbert & George's provocative body imagery as mere scandal-mongering. It is true that many viewers respond to the display of excrement on a monumental scale with revulsion, and protests were indeed raised at London gallery exhibitions during the 1990s.Viewed against the backdrop of Valéry's questions, however, their practice can be read as a more aggressive extension of the fundamental inquiry: What is the body? What does it contain? The claim that aesthetically refined bodies are not the only valid material for art pushes the horizon opened by Valéry's thought in a more extreme direction.From a positive standpoint, such work functions as a critique of the social convention that medicalizes old age, illness, and death into things that must be hidden from view. From a negative standpoint, there is always the risk that the drive to shock becomes an end in itself, and that philosophical depth is lost in the process. Both readings carry a degree of legitimacy, and it is precisely that tension which has given their work its long-term vitality.Resonance and Divergence Between the Philosophical Poet and the Living SculptureThere is no evidence of direct influence between Valéry and Gilbert & George. And yet, in their shared conviction that the body is the foundation of art, the two hold a profound intellectual continuity.Valéry arrived at his philosophy of the body through language and reflection. To write poetry was to inscribe the rhythms of the body's tension and release into words; thought itself was an activity carried out by an embodied being. His writings on poetry and art are inseparable from the problem of bodily sensation.Gilbert & George embodied that proposition through the practice of making living and making art into a single, undivided act. There is no studio set aside for making works, no dedicated time carved out for production. Their entire existence is the work; every gesture of daily life is already part of the art.To draw the key distinctions together: on the question of the body's place, Valéry understood the body as the intersection of thought and sensation, while Gilbert & George presented the body itself as the work. On the definition of art, Valéry saw the self-purposiveness of sensation as art's essence, while the two practised the self-artification of existence. On the relationship to the everyday, Valéry spoke of defamiliarization through attention, while the two transformed the everyday through ritual repetition. On the boundaries of the self, Valéry posed the mystery and opacity of the body as a philosophical question, while the two answered that question through a plural form of selfhood.The greatest point of divergence is this: Valéry maintained throughout his life the position of the reflective observer, while Gilbert & George threw themselves entirely into the work. The difference between philosopher and practitioner, between poet and sculpture, appears enormous. And yet in their conviction that the body is the foundation of art, the two stood in surprisingly close proximity.One can speak about art. One can make art. But what does it mean for a person to become art itself? The question that Valéry posed and Gilbert & George lived remains, as a question about the essence of body and existence, as vital as ever.ReferencesPaul Valéry, L'Âme et la danse (1923), Gallimard Paul Valéry, Degas Danse Dessin (1938), Gallimard Paul Valéry, Cahiers (29 vols.), CNRS Editions Gilbert & George, The Complete Pictures 1971–2005, Tate Publishing (2007) Michael Bracewell, Gilbert & George: Major Exhibition, Tate Modern catalogue (2007) Daniel Soutif (ed.), Gilbert & George: The Singing Sculpture, Sonnabend Gallery documents Andrew Wilson, "Gilbert & George: Interview," Art Monthly, No. 147 (1991) Michael Peppiatt, "The Art of Being Gilbert & George," The Art Newspaper (2005) Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, MIT Press (1985) Christina de Montfort, Valéry and the Philosophy of Arts, Routledge (2012)