The Chapman Brothers Make Their Own Hell
by Zoe Strimpel
Sun, 1 Jun 2008 at 8:50 PM
Is this what the cutting edge in art has become? Jake and Dinos Chapman, the brothers whose previous work includes mannequins of children with genitals on their faces, opened their latest show last week at the White Cube gallery, and it's entirely about Hitler. What is it with Hitler these days? The recent notorious Korean makeup ad that uses Nazi-esque uniforms on its models springs to mind.
"If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be" includes 13 original watercolors by Hitler that the brothers have painted over with psychedelic colors. They've also overlaid some of the Fuhrer's serious(ly bad) oil painting portraits with grotesque masks and the like. "F---ing Hell" (dashes added by us, not the Chapmans), another part of the latest show, is in its second incarnation, having been made simply as "Hell" five years ago, before being destroyed in an art warehouse in east London. It features rows of glass cabinets filled with thousands of Nazi miniatures committing atrocities. The unflinching smugness of the rich and successful Chapman brothers beggars belief: "I couldn't imagine a world without hell," Jake told reporters at the opening party last week, explaining the need to create hell on earth. "By mucking around with the past, we are making the future more apparent." What is he talking about?
Whatever it is, it isn't Islam. The icing on the cake came when Jake told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper that the one topic the brothers wouldn't feel comfortable touching on is Islam. "It's a very difficult and sensitive issue and we wouldn't see it in our remit," Jake told the paper's gossip column. "This is especially because of the fact that there are 900,000 Iraqi citizens dead and we are bombing them." Right, and the Holocaust and Nazism are far from difficult and sensitive topics.
Barbara Ellen made a different, worthy point in the Observer today: "Come on: using Hitler's paintings from his time as a failed artist? That's asking for 'appalled' headlines. And here's one now. I am appalled by the lameness, and ersatz shock of it all. It makes you wonder when not just the Chapmans but all other art provocateurs will give everyone a real shock by not producing lame, obvious garbage about Hitler, Myra, Saddam's testicles or whatever else they think will provoke a Middle England furore. Surely, by now, these 'controversial' themes are getting as stale as any of Adolf's crummy landscapes?" Apparently not — just as long as whatever it is isn't too "sensitive."
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