Jake & Dinos Chapman

Jake & Dinos Chapman and the Surplus Value of Hell

Parental Advisory

For the Chapman brothers, the imagining of horrors returns time and again
to the example of Goya, whose etchings Los Desastros de la Guerra they
have obsessed over, attacked, reworked and supplanted in several separate
projects. Goya's work does not represent simply a turning point in the
representation of history, it coincides with a reconceptualising of history. The
long-memoried Catholic nation of Spain is seen colliding with the forces of
modernity – with the revolutionary, atheistic culture of the new France. It was
Georg Lukacs who argued that the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon
changed the historical imagination, by revealing that history was not forever
in the keeping of an aristocratic elite, but could be seized by ordinary people
and channelled in new directions. However, what Goya, and the Chapmans
after him, propose is that the individual imagination is never content to be
subsumed in a collective identity – ordinary people acting only as a group –
but must express its participation in acts of control through direct, immediate,
local expressions of power, all too often in appalling acts of brutality.

The opposition of traditional and innovative societies, of anciens régimes
and revolutionary states, also remodels the symbolic meaning of youth, a key
topos in the oeuvre of the Chapmans. Starting history again from the year zero,
the revolutionaries projected the new social formation as youthful, independent
of the past, genuinely experimental, exploratory. Goethe invented the
bildungsroman, a literary form that focused on the protagonist's development
from youth through to maturity, giving a special value to adolescence for the
first time. Counter-revolutionary societies abominated adolescence and
asserted the superior moral value of early childhood, a cultural elision of

unreliable youth encapsulated in Wordsworth's phrase 'the child is father to
the man'. English culture was mobilised in a monstrous rearguard action; GH
Lewes, husband of George Eliot, wrote the first English biography of Goethe,
consigning his subject's adolescence to three pages entitled 'The Child is Father
to the Man'.

The Chapman brothers pivot around the European, revolutionary conception
of adolescence as the period of dreaming, the imagining of possible lives,
impossible desires, immense ambitions; the ability to change direction
dramatically and comprehensibly. Their 1999 project, Dinos and Jake Chapman
GCSE Art Exam revisits their own adolescence at precisely the juncture where
individual creativity encounters formal constraint through social conventions
and institutional criteria. Both artists were awarded a 'B' grade GCSE by the
examiner, clearly an heir of GH Lewes. (An 'A' would have been problematic.)
The Chapmans' subsequent assemblage, Hell Sixty-Five Million Years BC
(2004–2005), revels in the use of schoolroom materials and pigments in the
construction of cardboard and papier-mâche dinosaurs, both subject matter
and technical peformance evocative of the youthful imagination surpassing
the limits of verisimilitude. Part of the appeal of the dinosaur is its simultaneous
ability to conjure a world of unbridled predation and to push this back into
an almost inconceivably remote past. Hell does not have this kind of geological
distance. 'Why, this is Hell,' says Dr Faustus in his study, 'nor am I out of it'.

Under the Nazi Christmas Tree

The 'GCSE Art Exam' exhibition included two drawings of nuclear explosions.
In Little Cloud on the Prairie, a mushroom cloud appeared as a picturesque
detail in a sentimental landscape, while in Kid with Mushroom Cloud, the
eponymous cloud was a table-top affair, a fantasy projection in a child's game.
This miniaturisation of catastrophe has a clear bearing on the scale adopted
for Hell and Fucking Hell.

The late eighteenth century inaugurated a change in the meanings of history
and youth but was also responsible for the manufacture and marketing of toy
soldiers, which began to be mass-produced by the Paris-based firm Mignon,
established in 1785. The French royal family had amassed quite a collection
before it was destroyed by the Jacquerie.1 Enthusiasm for the marshalling and
manipulation of vast armies in miniature grew inexorably throughout the
nineteenth century and the first half of the next. These experiments with
power were not always illusory, however. Wellington thought that he had
won Waterloo, until 1838, when Captain William Siborne created his diorama
of the battle with no fewer than 90,000 lead soldiers, demonstrating that victory
had only been secured with the aid of the Prussians. The Duke was furious,
and Siborne's career was permanently stalled, but perceptions of Waterloo
were revised accordingly. (Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian war of the
early 1870s was attributed directly to Kriegspiel, the habit of war-gaming
with figurines on maps.)

Among the British, the scale of volunteering for the First World War (2.5
million in 1914–1915) was related to the ubiquity of toy soldiers, 11 million being
sold by British manufacturers in 1914 alone. In Nazi Germany, it was common
practice to give boys sets of tin soldiers as Christmas presents.2 The hygienising
of war through miniaturisation is a cultural phenomenon that reflects an
important aspect of the Chapman brothers' decision to create a version of Hell
with thousands of mass-produced figurines. The size of the installation is
daunting and the excessive crowding of the figures disorientating, and yet the
implicit invitation to closely inspect the details of individual scenes confers on
the viewer a feeling of being dominant. The generic figures discourage
identification, instead encouraging fantasies of torture and mutilation without
feelings of guilt, since the scenario is plainly the product of make believe; and
yet the glibness with which the individual imagination invents varieties of
suffering prompts reflection on the facility with which the Nazis ceased to regard
their victims as human.

Jaws

From the end of the eighteenth century, Hell was to lose much of its power in
an increasingly agnostic era. But if a metaphysical underworld started to
disappear from the conditions of knowledge, Goya showed that it had only
one place to go: here and now. At the same time, there is an extremely
medieval element in the Chapman's iconography of Hell that has to do with
an emphasis on incorporation and expulsion. The most familiar image of Hell
in pre-Reformation Europe was of an enormous and all-encompassing mouth
from which there was no escape. For the less prosperous members of the

congregations in churches where such images were on show, there was a
paradoxical gratification in the spectacle of Hell as egalitarian, indifferent
to rank or privilege. In this respect, the idea that punishment in the afterlife
centred on the maintenance of a system of ingestion and excretion – in the
conversion of material into different forms of energy – bracketed the infernal
with the carnivalesque, with the subversive imagining of a world in which the
existing hierarchies were turned upside down. This was a possibility that
could only be empowered by the activity of the carnivalesque body, which
Mikhail Bakhtin characterised memorably as the 'devouring and devoured body',
the body caught up in an appetitive cycle of flows and discharges, the body
as a system that 'swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world'.3

The plan of the Chapmans' installation makes it clear that the nine tableaux
that comprise the shape of a swastika are also squints that allow a series of
partial views of a closed system of energy conversion. The infernal ecology
requires victims as fuel for the continued operation of the system; the rounding
up and driving forward of the miniature Nazis is reminiscent of the activity of
traditional devils with pitchforks, stoking the damned like solid fuel into a boiler.
Once the bodies have been composted and decanted into silos, they can feed
the greenhouse cultivation of skull-plants in a process of regeneration. The
main departure from the tradition of the carnivalesque is indicated by the
presence of a toxic waste pit. It is characteristic of the Chapman's acerbic wit
to observe that even Hell is post-industrial these days, that in a world where
the endless engrossing and exhausting of materials has become toxic in both
a moral and a chemical sense, there are certain by-products too poisonous
even for Hell itself.

But the main form of adherence to the traditional functions of the carnivalesque
body is in terms of the tendency to de-individualise, its concentration on
bodily rhythms and processes that are held in common – not only with all classes
of humanity, but also with other forms of animal existence. The Chapmans are
at their most philosophically consistent when they are most mischievous, as
they demonstrate with the inclusion of a landing craft powered by a cargo of
farting pigs, truffling busily on human heads. And there is throughout the artists'
career an extraordinary consistency in their representations of the human body.
Their most celebrated and notorious hybridisations of the human figure, the
'zygotic' multiples with their profusion and confusion of gender characteristics,
are grossly magnified versions of the traditionally conceived grotesque and
carnivalesque figure; intensifying the desires, compulsions and physical
exigencies of bodily existence, at the expense of any indication of how the body
might be related to individual history, identity, personality.

Too Much is Nowhere Near Enough

Fucking Hell is excessive: in its grand scale, its microscopic exactitude, its grisly
ingenuity, its outrageous mixture of tones. But its most rampant form of excess
is semantic: in its provision of an uncontrollable range of references and
allusions to the visual languages of both high and popular culture, it resists
any attempt to establish a hierarchy of meanings among its superfluous data.
The most exquisite torments of Hell are reserved for the critics: whatever
they say can be reversed, engulfed and eliminated. From the mountainous
outcrops of quattrocento painting, specifically the background to Andrea
Mantegna's Agony in the Garden, to the McDonald's icon superimposed on
the masonry of a classical temple, the Chapmans run the gamut of available
styles and contexts. There are the horror insignia of Hollywood's versions of
evil: the ubiquitous skulls on poles from Apocalypse Now; the obscene tailoring
with human skin from Silence of the Lambs. There are the memory shards of
definitive news footage: of the column of burned out and abandoned vehicles
on the road to Basra; of the cargo spillages of cumulative ecological disaster,
the ever-growing numbers of oil drums drifting around the world's coastlines.
There are the commercialised visions of endlessness and unstoppability: of the
labyrinthine arrangements of stairs and platforms in the architectural trickery
of MC Escher; of the always renewable threat of the skeletal warriors in
Jason and the Argonauts.

There are also the repositories of mourning, sentiment and pathos: the
sculptural friezes of the generic war memorial; the isolated figure of Anne Frank
in her attic. And there are the classic scenographies of genocide: the mass
graves; cattle trucks; Polish factory buildings. The inscription over the gate at
Auschwitz, 'Arbeit Macht Frei' ('Work Shall Set You Free') – a cruel misprising
of Dante's inscription over the Hell mouth: 'Abandon Hope All You Who Enter
Here' – is here given an especially parodic twist in the postmodern lifestyle
slogan 'Work Hard/Play Hard'. This vertiginous recessing of implications,
colliding of portentous and playful tonalities, confusing of historical and
mythical narratives, reproduces the ethical challenge of individual response

to the corruption of the languages of value and judgement in postmodernity;
in a global system whose governing vocabularies are those of economic
consumption and of the consequent reduction of the vast array of differently
coded versions of experience to interchangeable units. One size of
interpretation fits all: Mantegna; Escher; Harryhausen. It is in the wide margin
of difference between the carnivalesque and the postmodern body that the
Chapmans screw around with our inherited methods of viewing and reading
the topographies of consumption, forcing us to experiment with our buried
juvenile selves in imagining the world before we were forced to inherit it.

ENDNOTES

1 Edmund Burke, 'That furious insurrection of the common people in France called the Jacquerie', An Appeal from the
New Whigs to the Old (1791)
2 Ralph Thurlow, 'Under the Nazi Christmas Tree', The New Republic, 25 December 1935
3. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Bakhtin Reader (Edward Arnold, London 1996), p.233

More on Jake & Dinos Chapman

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Bibliography
The Cruel Practice of Art by Simon Baker

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http://www.kunsthaus-bregen... KUB Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria
http://www.tate.org.uk/brit... Tate Online
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