THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY
Jake, Dinos and Dante
"If one of the challenges of great art is to express eternal truth – about love or death or beauty or goodness, then it’s fortunate that our best writers and painters are unafraid to look at evil and call it by its name: the visions of Hieronymous Bosch, Dante’s Inferno, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Goya’s black paintings, Otto Dix’s Der Krieg, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica spring to mind. And in our time, the Chapman Brothers. We need our artists to ‘run through creation like an open razor’, as Bϋchner’s Woyzeck has it, and Jake and Dinos do just that. Their Disasters of War took the imagery and horror of Francisco Goya and Otto Dix to a new level, a step deeper into the abyss of the human psyche. With volcanic force the Chapmans integrate the imaginative narratives of civilisation’s theological museum with the genocides of the 20th century.
Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Hell, according to the critic Brian Sewell, ‘was the greatest work of art made in Britain at the end of the last century’1 (second only to Disasters of War, then). It was destroyed in the Momart Warehouse fire of 2004: over thirty thousand miniature figures made by hand and individually painted went up in smoke, a holocaust of the killing fields of man’s psyche that had taken two painstaking years to make. The brothers set about making a replacement, retitled Fucking Hell, and just in case the same thing happened again, they made copies while they were at it. If Hell had become famous at its first showing, its immolation had canonised it, and there’s money to be made in the art market. Unsurprisingly the remake doesn’t quite capture the power of the original, the hand of a copyist less able to transmit feeling than the hand fired with passion: a reproduction is always a reproduction. But this is not to denigrate a major work: for the first-time viewer, Fucking Hell (despite its lame retitling) may well have the impact of Hell, and in any case Mayfair’s White Cube pale walls located it differently, in what Brian Sewell calls a ‘bleak and oppressive torture chamber policed by many guards’. This is where Fucking Hell went on show in summer 2008, home not so long before to Damien Hirst’s diamond-studded platinum skull. Conflating irony with cynicism Hirst had called his piece For the Love of God, demonstrating the deathly void behind the glittering mask of celebrity, the vacuity it conceals, the valueless values it represents. Hell as a metaphor for what is inside our heads. ‘Every human being is an abyss,’ Bϋchner’s Woyzeck again, ‘one grows dizzy looking down.’..."