I’ve heard people describe the Tate Modern as some kind of graveyard to the avant-garde, revolutionary expression pinned up for easy consumption, sapped of their power like tins of beans on a supermarket shelf. I don’t really buy that, though; it makes the assumption that experimental creation must be, is always, an act of war. Of course, that’s conceptually really tempting, but looking around the current Gilbert and George retrospective at the Tate Modern, I have my doubts that’s true.

For approaching 40 years now, Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore have played the role of self-proclaimed “human sculptures”, creating a colourful dynasty of artwork from their home on Fournier Street in London’s East End. Typically, their pieces are large and lurid, housed in large single or arranged multiple frames; and almost without fail, the primary topic of their artwork is themselves. They appear propping up bars in blurry unfocus, walking the bare boards of their unfurnished house, grimacing like gargoyles on a plinth, or naked and dangling their saggy balls.

To Gilbert and George, the gallery is not a life-sapping museum space: they exist to be collected, pictorialised, documented, referenced. In doing so, they’re the classic mirror that reflects their surroundings. All their artwork is created by source material from in walking distance of their East London address, from the personal (their bodies, charted swelling, flopping, disintegrating; splashes of urine or sperm viewed under a microscope, luridly coloured, inflated to massive size to the social (racist graffiti and personal ads; pasted flyposters and leaflets preaching Islamic fundamentalism, or offering the services of an African witchdoctor).

You could accuse it of being conservative, you could accuse it of being reactionary. But as time goes on, I’ve begun to greatly admire this manner of creation. It’s a spirit I can identify in some of my favourite bands (Kraftwerk, Whitehouse), and also what John Peel meant when he said that great thing about The Fall: “Always different, always the same”. ‘Ploughing a furrow’, you could say, but I prefer to think of it as a steady, meticulous recreation of the same ideas, themes and practices; the idea being, perhaps, that truth is to be found in some bigger picture, revealed inch by inch. If “genius” (a horrible, misused word, as a current discussion on the Plan B forum attests) exists, surely it’s to be found in the small differences.