The art of the Chapman brothers is cynical and morally bankrupt
Like Laurel and Hardy, Flanagan and Allen, Gil bert and George, the artists Jake and Dinos Chapman realised that forming a duo is a good career move. The audience gets two for the price of one and there is always someone around to act as a foil. The self-appointed bad boys of British art, they came to prominence with the advent of the notorious Young British Artists. Now they have produced Tate Liverpool's "Bad Art for Bad People", and the more they shock us, like pigs wallowing in their own muck, the happier they are. "We are sore-eyed scopophiliac oxymorons . . . our discourse offers a benevolent contingency of concepts, a discourse of end-of-sale remnants, a rationalistic hotbed of sober categories . . ." declares a mud-spattered manifesto plastered on a wall at the Tate. But what are they really up to, with their infantile, penile-nosed mannequins and their obsessive scenarios of death-camp horror made up of myriad tiny plastic bodies, like those used by small boys for Airfix models?
"Nothing loses its effectiveness more quickly than shock," wrote Peter Bürger in his account of the avant-garde. Provocation cannot be repeated indefinitely without either losing its muscle or someone upping the ante. One generation's shock - say, impressionism - becomes another's tea-towel decoration. The legacy of shock tactics stretches back from the brothers' copulating dolls through the surrealists to medieval visions of hell.
But does the Chapmans' work reveal or criticise anything? Or is it simply excreta, emptied from the bowels of an impoverished society - sterile, commercial diarrhoea for profit and titillation? They may occasionally make us laugh but is it gallows humour, the jeers of the crowd at a gladiatorial contest through which, as spectators, we become complicit in their end-of-everything, schadenfroh humour? Theirs is a scornful, cruel, caustic wit that rejects all forms of Enlightenment morality and humanist endeavour, and in the face of which the viewer's involvement and discomfort leave the last laugh with them. Shock is part of their agenda, part of their manifesto, and, with cynicism, it forms the dual prong of their credo. At the very end of postmodernism, these heirs of Nietzsche and Bataille play with the shards of a morally bankrupt society, like children in a war zone picking over gruesome remains.
The Chapman brothers are fully versed in the uses of the critical scaffolding that supports their position. They nod in the direction of Walter Benjamin and his arguments about repetition and reproduction, and also towards critics such as Rosalind Krauss who have dismissed the notion of innovation or genius as a "modernist myth". To create work of "verti ginous obscenity" (to use their own words), they have repeatedly returned to Goya, and particularly his series Disasters of War (1810-20), in which he portrayed the atrocities he had witnessed during the peninsular war between Spain and France (1808-14).
Yet while Francisco Goya's unflinching aesthetic was born out of moral anger at the politics of his time and his despair at man's bestial treatment of man, the Chapmans' aesthetic grows not from outrage but out of post-moral ennui. Goya's men, mutilated and bound to their trees like flayed versions of Christ, may well have called out to a God whom they believed had forsaken them: for the Chapmans, the image represents a celebration of the abject. As Jake (the articulate one) has written: "We've always argued that pornography is the perfect representation of 21st-century sexuality because it hints at sex through an act of reproduction and repetition." Provocatively, he has also said that Goya's copper plates for the Disasters of War etchings are scarred "with indelible signs of auto-eroticism".
The brothers would no doubt argue that their work exposes the ruptures and hypocrisies within modern culture, that they are interrogating what we value as art, and that their subversive strategies question the role of the artist in contemporary society. They might also add that, as utopian modernist values crash around our ears, their encrusted skeleton dangling from a tree crawling with luminous worms and maggots is the only possible response to this moment in history. Such visions of putrefying decomposition, rendered in painstaking detail, offer a disquietingly ambiguous response to violence and the loss of all belief. As Julia Kristeva has written: "Abjection is above all about ambiguity." Here, through the pornography of violence and death, Eros transcends the abject horrors of Thanatos. As with the erotic violence of the Marquis de Sade, the visual pleasure the piece offers has a direct correlation to the pain it evokes.
Such sadism is evident in their investigations of evil where piles of squirming, uniformed and torturing figures made from tiny models present a version of Dante's hell, or a Nazi death camp. No other images of theirs so clearly signal the failure of Enlightenment values. This theatre of cruelty represents a world of perpetual torment in which the title Arbeit McFries conflates the totalitarianism of fascism with that of contemporary commerce. Another glass case holds a writhing mass of miniature soldiers as they decapitate one another and triumphantly place the dismembered heads on spikes, an evocation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. When Conrad examines the struggle between good and evil, light and dark, savagery and civilisation, however, he none the less stresses the importance of restraint in balancing such destructive impulses. Conrad observes the collapse of a moral framework and sheds light on its dangers, but we do not know whether the Chapmans are critics of the present state of society, or whether, like bullies watching a victim being mugged, they are simply standing on the sidelines laughing.
"Bad Art for Bad People" is at Tate Liverpool until 4 March. Info: www.tate.org.uk/liverpool
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