Terrible twosome, The Guardian

Gilbert & George's huge Tate retrospective is a roller-coaster ride of brutality, tenderness, boredom and booze. It is also deeply filthy. Adrian Searle leaves it winded - but thrilled The most striking thing about Gilbert & George is their independence. They once proclaimed that they "believe in the art, the beauty and the life of the artist who is an eccentric person with something to say for himself". Forty years after their first meeting, in the sculpture department of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, Gilbert & George have cultivated an eccentricity that is to be found throughout their work, as well as in the personas they present to the world. They seem to be a single entity. And they have never stopped having things to say for themselves.

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Gilbert & George may see the world askance, but they address it, and us, unswervingly. If they weren't Gilbert & George, I might be tempted to describe them as a moral conscience. Being a witness to one's age, if one is to be more than a voyeur, is not without its responsibilities. Gerhard Richter, who once painted their portrait, has said what impresses him most is that they have always taken their independence as a matter of course. They position themselves as outsiders, marked by their suits, their professed conservatism, their delight in perverse and sometimes outrageous opinion.

But their complaints about being ignored and slighted by the art establishment in Britain can no longer be sustained. Gilbert & George are the only artists, apart from Andy Warhol, to have been given an entire floor of Tate Modern. From Thursday, their retrospective occupies both of Tate Modern's suites of temporary exhibition galleries, as well as the concourse in between, the coffee bar and seating areas. Maybe I should have checked the toilets, too.

Out on the concourse, their most recent, large-scale pictures rub shoulders with early black-and-white photo works, and with display cases filled with stilted manifestos, squiffy "postal sculptures" about drinking (there is a heady bar-room haze over much early Gilbert & George), and printed ephemera from the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the artists' own annotated copy of the sheet music to Bud Flanagan's 1931 song Underneath the Arches, which they famously performed as a singing sculpture. There is also the infamous photograph of the two young artists smiling innocently to the camera, spoiled somewhat by the cut-out lettering they sport on their suits: George the Cunt and Gilbert the Shit. This all has the air of a lark by two particularly unsavoury denizens of Bertie Wooster's Drones Club.

When they began, Gilbert & George might have wanted to disassociate themselves from conceptualism and from Fluxus, from the grunt'n'grind aesthetics of welded steel sculpture at Saint Martins, and from the amateur naiveties of happenings, the everyday poetics of arte povera and the interminable longueurs of structuralist film-making. But what you reject also informs you. Just as they proselytised a democratic "art for all", so Gilbert & George entered a period of profound inwardness, photographing themselves walking and looking at nature, and redrawing the images in charcoal. (They also produced paintings of this peregrination; alas, those are not here.)

Later, they photographed themselves in the dusty gloom of their house in Fournier Street, east London, with its creaking floorboards and wormy panelling, the murky windows, the holes in the ceiling, the silences. There is an air of time frittering away, of emptiness and prolonged hesitation. Offstage, you can hear the gin glugging into a glass. Bloody life, as if to say. The artists emerge with sudden splashes of milky semen and sanguine runs of red dye.

The city about them, as much as their interior lives, became their subject. They saw beauty in a naked young man, pictured stark against a river of yellow piss; they described a mullah's face in the knots and whorls of the floorboards, and found dignity in a madman's stare. Images, subjects and bodies collide throughout their art, which is often a roller-coaster of brutality, tenderness, threat, the pretty and the disturbing. It is also frequently filthy, in every sense.

Gilbert & George have drawn cartoon hand-jobs, photographed skinheads, Asian boys, mouths, navels, bums, leaves, tears, words and expressions. Their multi-panelled pictures burst into acid colour and became ever more lurid and confrontational. In some ways, their art prefigured punk, saw fundamentalism coming and foresaw the shocks of Aids. And the mood in their art kept flipping, from celebration to horror, from flowers to shit. In Shitty Naked Human World, Gilbert & George got down to their underpants - two middle-aged naked men ungainly in their skins, George never taking his glasses off, their turds like sentinels behind them.

Graffiti on a wall, an ejaculation, spatters of bird droppings and chewing gum flattened on the pavement, inarticulate curses - "every body has prombles woste then mine" reads one hopeless message they found scrawled on the street and incorporated in a picture. Gilbert & George's London is more than a backdrop. It teems with life and dirt, shock, surprise, boredom and beauty. Their retrospective is as relentless, cumulative and varied as anyone could ask for. You exit winded - you've seen too much. Like the city itself, the show is uneven and sprawling, and goes from dark to garish, sexy to monstrous. Their best and worst are here - and which is which, one keeps on asking, and what do we mean by best and worst? Good filthy or bad filthy, raving mad or just raving? Are they brave or are they bores? They provoke ambivalence. The contrariness and contradictions are essential to their art, and to our responses to it.

Here, in one great, late room, is Nineteen Ninety Nine, whose four parts present a montage of scribbled messages, a wash of piss, globs of blood, brick walls, the London street map, the artists clothed and naked, undaunted. The atmosphere is abrasive. Opposite hangs Named, an enormous picture with the calling cards of 90 male escorts, in a sort of city grid of desire. Declan, Rudy, Guido, Bob and Felipe, the names read, listing the services they offer. Gilbert and George, suited, collide in the middle of the picture. They have said that Named is like a war memorial. It is always wartime now, one way or another. Gilbert & George may have begun as a double act, but the exhibition ends in the confusion and hysteria of London after the July 2005 bombings.

The show climaxes with their most recent series of pictures, produced for this exhibition, whose imagery largely consists of the felt-tipped bills that accompany each edition of the London Evening Standard. The bills appear outside shops, at newsstands, on vans. They are a black-and-white shout, a fusillade of bombs, bombings, bombers, terror plots, terror laws, blunders, heroes, arrests, and more bombs. Against the blunt graphics the artists loom, weirdly.

Looming is what Gilbert & George have come to do best. They emerge from a jungle of signs, lurking, mooning, grimacing, praying, howling wide-eyed and horrified. Then they stare back, mute and hypnotic, calm, from the dead eye of their theatrical rages.

It is impossible to walk through these rooms without being made aware of how prescient so much of their work has been. The artists themselves rarely travel far from their neighbourhood. Just as Kafka told writers that there was no need to leave their desks, and the world would come to them, so Gilbert & George have discovered that the world does indeed pass along Fournier Street. Their art has witnessed the rise of fundamentalisms, the grimness of the Callaghan years, the divisive Thatcherite epoch, the hollow capitalism of New Labour, the disaffection of young working-class kids, a confusion of identities.

They have recorded all this without pandering to received opinion, and without becoming lovable media stereotypes. In their more recent, digitalised and computer-manipulated images, they muck about with the lateral symmetry of their bodies, making themselves appear strangely warped. They chart their ageing bodies. To which one might add that they spit, scowl, drop their pants, are frequently drunk, bored, stilted, static, silly and utterly serious throughout this exhibition. The most shocking thing they could now do would be to be spotted on the golf course.

Their art might often appear punch-drunk, but Gilbert & George never underestimate human and social complexity. They wrestle with stereotypes. How are gay men meant to look? What platitudes are artists supposed to spout? What does it mean to be avant garde now, and, if art is supposed to be important, what exactly does it say, and to whom and how?

The 24-hour-a-day business of being Gilbert & George, and the creative struggle itself, became inextricable almost 40 years ago. They are immensely prolific: they are what they do. Truman Capote said that Andy Warhol was a sphinx without a secret. Being Gilbert & George is not an act. Their secret is that there is no secret. At the same time, they are their greatest invention.