Jake & Dinos Chapman

Promotional Trip to Hell

In 1921 the Viennese satirist and critic Karl Kraus read with alarm an advertisement in the Basel News in which the newspaper offered ‘Battlefield Round Trips by Automobile!’ to Verdun.1 The resulting essay, entitled ‘Reklamefahrten zur Hölle’ ('Promotional Trips to Hell'), begins as follows: ‘I am holding in my hand a document which transcends and seals all the shame of this age and would itself suffice to assign the currency stew that calls itself mankind a place of honour in a cosmic carrion pit.’2 Kraus goes on to describe this damning fragment as irrefutable evidence of the real horror of cultural conditions in the aftermath of the First World War:

After the monstrous collapse of the fiction of culture, and after the nations, by their actions, gave striking proof that their relationship to anything that ever was of the spirit is a most shameless trickery – perhaps good enough for the promotion of tourism but never adequate to raise the moral level of mankind – after all this, it has nothing left but the naked truth of its condition, so that it has almost reached the point where it is no longer capable of lying.3

For Kraus, the hypocritical doublespeak of post-war tourism is nothing less than an open articulation of the absolute moral vacuum at the heart of the conflict itself. So after reproducing the advertisement in full, Kraus retraces his way through the text line by line, uncovering its tacit content, and revealing its ideological essence:

You receive your newspaper in the morning.
You read how comfortable survival has been made for you.
You learn that 1n million had to bleed to death in the very place where wine and coffee and everything else are included…
You hear about all that is offered you by way of compensation for the sufferings of these men, and for an experience whose purpose, meaning, and cause you have not been able to discover to this day.
You understand that it was organised so that some day, when nothing is left of the glory but bankruptcy, there might at least be a battlefield par excellence…
You understand that the destination has made the promotional trip worthwhile, and that the promotional trip was worth the world war.4

Kraus, understandably horrified by the glib banality of the advertisement, was also scathing about the newspaper that produced it. The Basel News, he suggests, with characteristic black humour, ‘will undoubtedly succeed in using the casualties of Verdun to augment its subscription list', later describing its staff as ‘press pirates’ who ‘make money on a catastrophe’ and ‘especially recommend an excursion to Hell as an autumn trip.’5 It seems too, that Kraus found the strangely inappropriate tone of the advertising copy offensive: its cheery, positive sales spiel (‘careful organization’, ‘no additional expenses’, ‘comfortable seating’); punctuated with encouraging exclamations (‘Unforgettable Impressions!’, ‘No passport formalities!’, etc.). The following lines, however, taken directly from a lengthy central quotation in the original advert, are perhaps the most revealing in this respect:

Afterwards [meaning after seeing Verdun] the traveller should cover the battle areas of the Argonne Forest and the river Somme, wander through the ruins of Reims, and return via St. Mihiel and the Priest Forest: everything is merely the repetition of details which at Verdun combine into an unprecedentedly phenomenal panorama of horror and dread.6

The idea that this ‘phenomenal panorama of horror and dread’ might (or might not) have, or need, a precedent, at the same time as suggesting a wilful disavowal of the war itself, implies that there is some aesthetic level at which Verdun could be said to trump its neighbours: where they ‘merely’ repeat detail, Verdun is a panorama. There is a strange, perhaps deliberate echo in this phrase, of the incredible battlefield panoramas of the late nineteenth-century: the Bourbaki panorama of the Franco-Prussian war in Lucerne, for example, painted by Edouard Castres (and well known through Jeff Wall’s 1993 work Restoration) epitomises their aim and effect.7 The visitor enters an environment of apparently ‘real’ objects (including wooden fencing and a railway carriage), ascending to a position of surveillant omnipresence in the centre of an all-encompassing scenario that can then be ‘taken in’ everywhere, almost at once, simply by turning around. Providing this sense of a masterful synthetic totality, was, as Kraus’s advertisement betrays, also fundamental to the logic of battlefield tourism: revealing the normalisation of a paradox whereby reality is deliberately reconceived in panoramic terms; which is to say, as a representation.

And yet, in the aftermath of the First World War (the aftermath in which Kraus was writing), this panoramic sensibility permeated the re-presentation of the devastation that, alongside memorials and war graves, came to constitute the most evident visible ‘effect’ of the conflict. Postcard books offered small, convenient panoramas such as the one entitled From Reims to Soissons, which took the viewer on a portable, pocket-sized tour along a ridge known as the Chemin des Dames: arranging scenes of the most incomprehensible devastation into an orderly pilgrim's progress. Likewise, on guided visits to the ruins of the city of Reims, visitors were invited to peruse the effects of four years of bombardments in predetermined sequences, the paths suggested through the devastated streets taking the strolling spectator on a heavily edited, compressed trip through traces of events that happened hours, days, weeks and months apart. Bizarre maps, and plans of buildings, overlaid multiple shell strikes onto a single pictorial plane, as though they had all fallen in one simultaneous deluge. Carefully contrived photographic layouts showed key sites ‘before’ and ‘after’ their destruction, so that a visit to these ruined towns still engaged the normal tourist's desire to see local highlights (château, church and town hall, etc.), with the added frisson that, as piles of rubble, they were now hard to identify.

To follow a typical battlefield guide is to read a list of careful, well-researched descriptions of aesthetically and culturally remarkable sights (ancient settlements, gothic architecture, civic monuments and tree-lined streets), followed by the relentless repetition of phrases such as ‘badly damaged’, ‘cut to pieces by the shells’, ‘now destroyed’, ‘completely destroyed’ and ‘now a mere heap of ruins.’8 In the 1919 Michelin guide Rheims and the Battles for its Possession, tourists were only directed to the village of Berméricourt (near Reims) because the road linking the remains of Loivre (including ‘the ruins of the Loivre Glass Works’) and Brimont (entirely destroyed) had itself ‘completely disappeared’.9 Tourists could identify the location of the little village (of ‘Gallo-Frankish origin’) although ‘bombardments had literally wiped it out’ by a roadside sign saying BERMÉRICOURT. The photograph in the guidebook that shows this sign is captioned: ‘All that remains of Berméricourt village’. The sinister facility with which these battlefield guides satisfied their customers would later provoke Karl Kraus to comment pointedly that on such tours: ‘You receive unforgettable impressions of a world in which there is not a square centimetre of soil that has not been torn up by grenades and advertisements.’10

* * *

Fucking Hell, the Chapmans’ own ‘phenomenal panorama of horror and dread’ works in a related, but distinctly different way to the orderly, synthetic tours of real events and places that so offended Kraus, although both attempt, at some level at least, to account for something presumed to be beyond the comprehension of their intended viewers. But where the ruins of Berméricourt, Reims, or even ‘panoramic’ Verdun could be carefully scheduled into an itinerary (punctuated by meals), everything in the Chapmans’ Hell happens at once, all action having been conveniently arrested for the scrutiny of the visiting ‘tourist’. And where in the aftermath of the First World War, visitors to combat zones were offered a fixed series of temporal signposts (‘before that’, ‘after this’, ‘and then’) relating events to the experiences designed to evoke them, Fucking Hell demands only interminable reiterations: meanwhile, etc., and so on…

There are precedents for the disjuncture generated between multiple, simultaneous episodes of manic action, and their compilation into single incomprehensible images, in representations of both war and Hell: in the case of the latter, Hieronymus Bosch, whose nightmarish visions of Hell and the last judgement have quite rightly been described as ‘upheavals’;11 and the former (somehow more obscure), Frank Hurley. Hurley was an Australian photographer, famous for Antarctic expeditions who, during the First World War, courted controversy with large-scale composite photomontages of battlefield scenes.12 Hurley (like Bosch, perhaps) was driven by an urgent moral imperative to give a sense not of events as they had happened, but of the full horror of experiencing them: something presumably unimaginable to anyone who hadn’t been there. Accused by his superiors of fabrication and falsification, Hurley responded by suggesting that, in all honesty, none of the single photographs that he had taken gave an adequate impression of being at the front. His expanded, panoramic montages brought together events captured individually at different times (exploding shells, firing soldiers, crashing aeroplanes) into what were, essentially, synthetic scenes that had never happened. But somehow, for their author, they nevertheless remained truer to his experiences than the separate ‘facts’ from which they were comprised. Hurley’s solution to what we might call the ‘panoramic drive’ (a desire to have war happen all at once) is thus reminiscent of Bosch’s strategy in picturing Hell. Both Hurley and Bosch lean heavily on the (inconceivable) fact of simultaneity, representing an abstract (rather than literal) ‘truth’ about the likely nature of an exceptional experience. In order to create a depicted fantasy that will adequately over-reach and overwhelm the scepticism of the viewer (to produce a scenario that is necessarily and literally beyond belief) each artist relies on the strategic dispersal of dramatic, horrific instants that their viewers must attempt to assimilate for themselves, under the rhetorical conceit ‘meanwhile…’.

But unravelling the ‘meanwhile’ of the Chapmans’ Hell is a process as inimical to the work itself as the conception of ‘promotional trips’ to Reims or Verdun. Fucking Hell, in other words, cannot be allowed to lapse into the condition of something that is made worthwhile by the fact that it permits a synthetic solution through the process of its own (perverse) acculturation. Where, after all, could a promotional trip to this Hell take us? What kind of ‘before’ or ‘previously’ could possibly be prefixed to the fantastic panoramas of carnage and destruction that it contains? (For a partial answer, see the 'Illustrated Guide to Fucking Hell’ included as pages 18-23 of this volume.)

An alternative answer to this question can be found in the work of another of the most strident critics of the cultural conditions revealed by the First World War and its aftermath. In Krieg dem Kriege ('War on War') the German pacifist Ernst Friedrich published hundreds of photographs that were precluded or excised from both war-time journalism and post-war battlefield guidebooks.13 War on War presents a corrected ‘truth’ of war, as Friedrich saw it, by following archival impulses of repetition and reiteration. Images of death, mutilation, cruelty and exploitation follow one another, relentlessly, as if aiming for a point of exhaustion that they will never quite reach. Whenever the corpses and body parts seem to be at an end, there are always more, however barely recognisable, concealed somewhere within the grainy reproductions. Friedrich duplicates the guidebook offer to describe ruins as the buildings they once were, but with bodies: and plays out this utterly unpalatable game with brutal sarcasm. Throughout the book, Friedrich either produces or borrows captions for his battlefield re-visions: jubilant, meaningless rhetoric plundered from those who glorified the sacrifices of ‘fallen heroes’, and trite religious epithets bounced back at their sources. War on War also contextualises the realities of mechanised mass slaughter and state-sponsored torture with the seemingly harmless social conventions upon which they rely. The book begins at childhood, in the imaginations of the next generation of German soldiers, showing ‘how children are educated for war by means of toy soldiers’ and warning ‘Do not give the children such toys’.14 The truly horrific achievement of Friedrich’s book is not only that it provides visceral evidence of the reality of conflict (which it continues to do to this day), but that it establishes the deeper character of war as a cyclical social system without end: war games, war, war dead, Hell, etc., and so on…

It is clear in this context that the ‘meanwhile’ of the guidebook or montage is only the most limited panoramic term that might be used to describe the condition of the Chapmans’ Hell: a work that was produced, and that will continue to be produced, under the iterative auspices of the limitlessness suggested by etc., and so on… That is to say that the complexity and inconceivable redundancy of the detail in Fucking Hell is not simply aimed at baffling potential viewers: it by no means constitutes a Herculean challenge to the powers of an overdeveloped synthetic memory that might somehow be capable of making sense of it all. What it demands, instead, is a tacit understanding that it continues, and continues endlessly in the same ways, in every direction, through every theme, and to the impossible exhaustion of every idea etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam.

This, undoubtedly, is why Fucking Hell was not simply ‘re-made’ following the destruction of an earlier version of the work: instead an entirely new series of imaginative abominations cancel out and replace their precursors.15 It is also why the Chapmans insist that there will be more Hell(s) in future: the decision to keep making the work (or not), to acknowledge and negotiate its infinite, mind-numbing potential, lies at the heart of the brothers’ practice. In his novel Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut describes an equivalent productive conundrum as follows:

I could go on and on with the intimate details about the various lives of people [the characters in the novel]… but what good is more information?
I agree with Kilgore Trout [Vonnegut’s anti-hero] about realistic novels and their accumulations of nit-picking details. In Trout’s novel The Pan Galactic Memory Bank, the hero is on a space ship two hundred miles long and sixty-two miles in diameter. He gets a realistic novel out of the branch library in his neighbourhood. He reads about sixty pages of it, and then he takes it back.
The librarian asks him why he doesn’t like it, and he says to her, “I already know about human beings.”
And so on.16
Fucking Hell is not, evidently, a realistic (much less nit-picking) account of the behaviour of ‘human beings’. But it is relentlessly descriptive, in its own conflicted way. Despite depicting actions, scenes and ‘events’ in great detail, it contrives deliberately not to add up to anything, instead relentlessly failing to reach the limit of its potential content. The question remains, then, as to the precise nature of these strained relations of parts to whole. Just as in Kraus’s promotional trip to Hell, Verdun was a ‘phenomenal panorama of horror and dread’ at the same time as standing for other repetitive, less panoramic alternatives, so Fucking Hell’s panoramic character disguises (or offsets) the true nature of its contents. In this way, the work restages the precarious fabrications by which exceptional real events are absorbed by greater (contrived) fictions in order that they might somehow ‘make sense’ as truths on an abstract level. It not only describes relentlessly (and explicitly) but it implicitly (and relentlessly) unveils the synthetic work of art (representation) for the fictive framing device that it is.17 It seems inadequate to point out that Fucking Hell merely describes description: that it describes is incontrovertible; what it describes (both in microcosm and macrocosm) and how it describes are questions that it continues to pose.

‘The key question, of course’, as Slavoj Zizek put it in his recent book Violence, ‘is what kind of description is intended here?’ And Zizek goes on to quote Wallace Stevens (via Alain Badiou) as follows:

Surely it is not a realistic description of the situation but what Wallace Stevens called ‘description without place’ which is what is proper to art. This is not a description which locates its content in historical space and time, but a description which creates, as the background of the phenomena it describes, an inexistent (virtual) space of its own, so that what appears in it is not an appearance sustained by the depth of reality behind it, but a decontextualised appearance, an appearance which fully coincides with real being.18

Although Zizek proposes this formulation in the service of a discussion of violence at different abstract levels (what he calls 'subjective' and 'objective' violence), he makes a series of assertions about the nature of the relationship between these types of violence and their discursive construction that are of direct relevance to the problem of the Chapmans’ Hell. Zizek insists first and foremost that there is an epistemological glitch that violence effects: ‘something inherently mystifying in a direct confrontation with it’, that troubles the relationship between the reality of violence, and representing it or even discussing it: that, in his words, ‘prevents us from thinking’.19 He suggests, furthermore, that ‘there is a sense in which a cold analysis of violence somehow reproduces and participates in its horror’, proposing that ‘a distinction needs to be made… between (factual) truth and truthfulness’, (something like the paradox at work in Frank Hurley’s photomontages.) Zizek’s complaint about the complicit relationship between analysis and participation in horror may well be directed at contemporary socio-political examples but it also holds true for the pre-modern historical context (Robespierre and the French Revolution) against which he grounds his polemic. There are, for example, few things more horrific in twentieth-century literature than Michel Foucault’s transcription of the account of the death of Damiens in Discipline and Punish.20 It is not just the (seemingly endless and unnecessary) list of tortures to which Damiens is subjected before dying: nor even the stomach-churning references to Damiens' consciousness throughout, that makes this text so horrific. It is, as Zizek predicts, the steely, relentless clarity of the blow-by-blow account that engages the reader that is truly unbearable. Foucault does not so much present the verbatim account of Damiens’ execution as historical matter, as use it, cudgel-like, to ‘soften-up’ his audience; producing a state, at the very outset of his intellectual project, where the reader’s critical faculties can barely take another direct hit. It is for this reason that Zizek is quite right to suggest that, however paradoxically, ‘a dispassionate conceptual development of the typology of violence must, by definition, ignore its traumatic impact.’21

Foucault’s descriptive overkill, read through Zizek, brings us back to Fucking Hell with a changed understanding of the way in which a work of art might contain violence as its subject. Not through a spectacular fictional assemblage of facts (Hurley’s response to war), nor through an attempt to seed a spectacular fantasy with some central conceptual truth (Bosch’s answer to Hell) but instead through what Zizek isolates as a situation proper to art: ‘a description which creates, as the background of the phenomena it describes, an inexistent (virtual) space of its own, so that what appears in it is not an appearance sustained by the depth of reality behind it.’ This ‘inexistent’ autonomy is not a new space for art and violence: in fact, it is a very old one, conceptualised in 1785 by the Marquis de Sade in his epic The 120 Days of Sodom:

Give a thought to your circumstances, think what you are, what we are, and may these reflections cause you to quake – you are beyond the borders of France in the depths of an uninhabitable forest, high amongst naked mountains; the paths that brought you here were destroyed behind you as you advanced along them. You are enclosed in an impregnable citadel; no one on earth knows you are here, you are beyond the reach of your friends, of your kin: insofar as the world is concerned you are already dead, and if yet you breathe, it is by our pleasure and for it only.22

The conclusion of this vast work (a point that few readers are ever likely to reach) exists only in the form of a draft, complete with what appear to be the author’s instructions to himself. The final lines (if the endmatter – ‘notes’, ‘supplementary tortures’ and ‘addenda’ – is ignored) take the form of a staggering invitation to describe the last scene and then ‘sprinkle in whatever tortures you like’.23 It seems that de Sade, then, like Vonnegut, and like the Chapmans in Fucking Hell, sets the literally incredible violence of The 120 Days of Sodom under the aegis of etc., and so on...

It is, however, just possible that, despite its resistance to any sense of a perceptible chronology; despite everything seemingly happening at once; and despite this incredible wealth of descriptive detail being frozen into an eternal instant, Fucking Hell nonetheless leads to its own conclusion. This ‘end’ might be arrived at (or achieved) by overcoming the cold comfort of the self-deluding, all-consuming gaze of the Hell-bound tourist, and accepting instead the full implications of endless, obsessive, disinterested production: something that bifurcates and iterates unceasingly; that will not, cannot and does not stop. Sprinkle in whatever tortures you like. And so on.

ENDNOTES

1. The battle of Verdun took place around the city of Verdun-sur-Meuse in north-east France. The fighting, between French and German forces, became one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the First World War, lasting from February until December 1916 and resulting in 250,000 dead and one million injured. For more on the cultural significance of the site see A. Prost, ‘Verdun’ in P.Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory, Volume III: Symbols, trans. A. Goldhammer, (Columbia University Press, New York 1998).
2. All references are to the English translation of this text (which includes both a facsimile and translation of the original Basel News advertisement): in Karl Kraus, In These Great Times, H. Zohn (ed.) (Carcanet, Manchester 1976), pp.89–93
3. Ibid., p.89
4. Ibid., p.92
5. Ibid., p.93
6. Ibid., translation of facsimile between pp.90–91
7. The following link enables you to pan virtually around the Bourbaki panorama: www.vrmag.org/projects/bourbari01
8. References here are to the Illustrated Michelin Guides to the Battle-Fields (1914–18), of which there were a whole series, including volumes on Arras, Reims, Soissons, Verdun, etc.
9. Rheims and the Battles for its Possession (Michelin & Co., Clermont-Ferrand & London 1919), pp.148–154
10. Kraus, Op. cit., p.93
11. In his remarkable study Hieronymus Bosch: The Paintings (Phaidon, London 1959), Carl Linfert says of Bosch that ‘all his pictures can be termed... upheavals’. The author goes on to describe Bosch’s nightmarish scenes in terms that are uncannily close to those appropriate to the Chapmans’ work.
12. One of the best accounts of Hurley’s war-time image-making (and the basis for the claims related here) is the BBC documentary Frank Hurley: The Man Who Made History. See also A. McGregor, Frank Hurley: A Photographer’s Life (Viking, Australia 2004).
13. Ernst Friedrich, Krieg dem Kriege, 2 Vols. (Internationales Kriegsmuseum, Berlin, c.1924). This book went through numerous editions from 1919 onwards: the first volume, which was the most widely circulated, was always published in four languages (German, English, French and then a fourth, either Dutch, Russian or Polish, etc.): a second, lesser-known volume, in German only, was produced in the mid 1920s and included photographs of Friedrich’s anti-war museum (in which he exhibited many of the images published in the book) during its forced closure by Nazi officers.
14. Ibid., pp.37–39
15. This confirms Sylvère Lotringer’s characterisation of the Chapmans’ work as being like a machine: see his contribution to the forthcoming book J. Harris (ed.), After Bad Taste (Liverpool University Press).
16. Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions (1973) (Vintage, London 1992), p.278
17. To (mis)quote Vonnegut at his disingenuous best, Fucking Hell might well be described as showing ‘a series of accidents'. The reference here is to the (tragic) life of Malachi Constant in The Sirens of Titan, who is forced to explain his life-long manipulation by his nemesis with the lie: ‘I was a victim of a series of accidents: as are we all’. See Kurt Vonnegut Jr., The Sirens of Titan (1959) (Gollancz, London 2006), p.178
18. Slavoj Zizek, Violence (Profile Books, London 2008), p.5; he continues: ‘To quote Stevens again, "What it seems it is and in such seeming all things are." Such an artistic description "is not a sign for something that lies outside its form." Rather it extracts from the confused reality of its own inner form in the same way that Schoenberg "extracted" the inner form of totalitarian terror. He evoked the way that terror affects subjectivity.’
19. Ibid., p.3
20. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977) (A. Sheridan trans.) (Penguin, London, 1991), pp.3–6; ‘the body of the condemned’.
21. Zizek, Op. cit., p.3
22. The Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings (compiled and translated by A. Wainhouse and R. Seaver (Grove Press, New York 1966), pp.250–251
23. Ibid., p.672

Text from 'Fucking Hell', published by Jay Jopling / White Cube, (London), 2008

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