Hell

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They are the cleverest of the YBAs (Young British Artists)," says the art critic Matthew Collings. But Julian Stallabrass, lecturer in art history at the Courtauld Institute, has something far more withering to suggest. In his book High Art Lite: British Art in the Nineties, he talks about something that "looks like art but is not quite art, that acts as a substitute for art". The majority of artists purveying this, he writes, "have been content to play the well-remunerated role of court dwarf" while at the same time claiming they are engaged in some ironic exposure of the pretensions of old-style art. The brothers’ 2001 work, The Disasters of War IV, is being shown alongside pieces from the museum’s collection, which include the original sketch for the Charge of the Mamelukes. The brothers will also be running drawing and poetry workshops. "Another idea we had is a colouring competition, where the winner would have me and Dinos come round and read them a bedtime story." What would they read? Quite possibly something from their soon-to-be published collection of reworked fairytales, entitled Bedtime Tales for Sleepless Nights. It's a book that begins: By bringing together Goya's eighty-three part series of etchings into one entity, in which all parts are simultaneously visible, the Chapmans' Disasters of War suggests a reduction and encapsulation of events of momentous emotional impact. The tiny size and anodyne manufactured appearance of the figures transform the horror of the original material into the representation of a war among toys, a comic-strip rendition of brutality. Both the large white plinth, which provides a broad margin between the figures and the viewer, and the perspex box, which seals the figures off from the viewer, add to the reductive and distancing effects of the work. The Chapmans have said: 'We fantasise about producing things with zero cultural value, to produce aesthetic inertia' (quoted in Unholy Libel, p.149). This work, like their subsequent Hell 2000 (Saatchi Collection, London), stages a neurotic fixation with an ironic edge: the hours of careful work required to cut up and reconstitute the little figures to represent grotesque human acts in a time of social uncontrol. Disasters of War reflects the detachment of Western societies from the realities of war-time killing, both through computer and missile technology (which have produced weapons that fire long range and permit operational distance) and through the comfortable spectatorship provided by television and the film industry.

Controversy is one thing but I think the seriousness of the work will go unnoticed. That’s the thing. One of the things that’s never discussed is the seriousness of the work.” Christoph Grunenberg and Tanya Barson (eds.), Jake and Dinos Chapman: Bad Art for Bad People, exhibition catalogue, Tate Liverpool 2006, p. 85, reproduced pp.86–91. This is pure Freud; in a 1927 essay, Humour, he asserted that, “Humour has something liberating about it, but it also has something of grandeur and elevation… the ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.” As Dinos puts it, “If you can laugh at someone while they’re beating your head in, they’re not beating your head in.” if baroque marked the start of modernity, tuymans explores the search for authenticity, the political significance of artistic representation, and the emotional turmoil generated by art. the exhibition title ‘sanguine’— a word that signifies the color of blood, but also a violent and vigorous temperament, and a pictorial technique — suggests a multiplicity of perspectives to interpret the exhibited works, in which violence and its simulation, cruelty and dramatization, realism and exaggeration, disgust and wonder, terror and ecstasy coexist.

Sunday Mix: Jaakko Eino Kalevi

Because Goya was the first artist to reveal the gross face of war stripped of all chivalry, romance and idealism, because he captured something quintessential about modern war, all succeeding generations of artists have seen war through his eyes: they have recognised in the Disasters of War a template for their own nightmares. The new works are not in the studio when we talk about them. I feel I have a pretty good idea of the Chapmans' approach to Goya, so I don't worry too much about this. We talk about criticism and the way it resorts, always, to the humanist rhetoric of moral, emotional and political meaning. We laugh at the pious things the art critic of the Sunday Times said about them. The Chapmans have spent years reworking Goya's most disturbing images; they even bought a set of his prints only to deface them. "Like us, Goya had a heretical approach to the body," Jake explains. He cites one of the most upsetting prints from Goya's series The Disasters of War, created between 1810 and 1820, a work entitled A Heroic Feat! With Dead Men!, in which three hideously butchered corpses hang from a tree. It's a work the brothers recreated in three dimensions, in their 1993 work of the same title. Why does it resonate for them? "When Goya put three mutilated bodies in a tree, it was read as echoing Christ's crucifixion, suggesting that some kind of redemption is possible. But you can see it another way. Goya is being quite cruel about Christian redemption, shifting the Christian iconography to show there's nothing beyond. That what you're looking at is dead bodies. There is nothing to be optimistic about. It's just aestheticised dead flesh. He looks to be giving a moral demonstration, but he's not." Martin Maloney, 'The Chapman Bros.: When will I be Famous', Flash Art, no.186, Jan.-Feb. 1996, pp.64-7, reproduced (colour, detail) p.67 The thing we objected to was not so much Goya’s meaning – we’re actually trying to gouge them from this moralistic framework and maybe release its libidinal economy to show that these works are much more radically unhinged and unstable and they don’t deserve to be accumulated to some sort of post-Christian redemption.”

The idea, according to the exhibition’s curator, Lola Durán, is to illustrate just how profoundly Goya has influenced artists from Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí to the Chapmans. The "new" work is called Insult to Injury. The exhibition in which it will be shown for the first time, at Modern Art Oxford, is called The Rape of Creativity.

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In 1863, the very year the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid published the first edition of Los Desastres de la Guerra, French modern artists watched appalled as the cynical regime of Napoleon III installed and then betrayed a puppet government in Mexico; the great modern painter Edouard Manet's painting of the end of this squalid imperial episode, The Execution of Maximilian (1867-8), emulates Goya's cynical delineation of war atrocities in its icy, close-up depiction of a firing squad killing at embarrassingly close range.

Iakovos “Jake” Chapman (born 1966) and Konstantinos “Dinos” Chapman (born 1962) are from London, UK. They are the children of an English art teacher and an orthodox Greek Cypriot: Dinos studied at the Ravensbourne College of Art (1980–83), Jake at the North East London Polytechnic (1985–88) before both together enrolled at the Royal College of Art (1988–90), when they also worked as assistants to the artists Gilbert and George. The brothers' first joint work is also their first tribute to Francisco Goya, an artist that they have continued to reference throughout their careers. This piece is a three-dimensional representation of Goya's etchings of the same name made in miniature using toy soldiers. Goya's etchings depicted the atrocities of war experienced during the Napoleonic invasions of his native Spain in 1808 including gruesome scenes of bayonetting, beheading, torture, and death. Goya's work provided such a powerful polemic, that it could not be exhibited in his lifetime The Chapmans once told the art critic Robert Rosenblum that Great Feat! represented a secular crucifixion, ‘because the body is elaborated as flesh, as matter. No longer the religious body, no longer redeemed by God. Goya introduces finality – the absolute terror of material termination’. There is something troublingly artful about the arrangement of the figures. They have been posed by their murderers – as a warning to others – in a gruesome echo of the classical statue of Laocoon and his two sons writhing in the coils of a huge serpent. Robert Hughes wrote of Goya’s macabre trio: ‘They remind us that, if only they had been marble and the work of their destruction had been done by time rather than sabres, neoclassicists. would have been in aesthetic raptures over them.’The Chapmans realise the fragmented classicism hinted at in Goya’s print in the heroic scale of their sculpture, but they mean the magnification to assault rather than uplift the viewer. Goya's Disasters of War is a precocious modern masterpiece, a work left by its creator as his final savage bequest to the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries - it was far too anti-clerical and unpatriotic to be published in his lifetime, and the first ever edition came out in 1863, three and a half decades after his death in 1828. From the very start of its public existence, it has been experienced not as a historic but as a contemporary work, its images so urgent and truthful that they function as living, new art.Chapman said he hoped visitors would not be distracted by “personality antics” and would focus instead on what had brought him and Dinos to The Disasters of War in the first place – “but, having said that, of course it’s going to be amazing to see”. Jake and I decided beforehand that we were going to make a monstrous failure. It was intentionally unmagnificent and unrewarding. We used the most pathetic way of representing the thing that has most exorcised western civilisation. We had a few assistants, but Jake and I did the donkey work. I’m quite glad the original burnt because it wasn’t very well made. It was clumsy and inaccurate Dinos Chapman