Hell

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Jake Chapman, who flew to Spain on Thursday to attend the opening of the exhibition, said he and his brother had been drawn to the tension between The Disasters of War and how the pictures have traditionally been viewed and interpreted. And then, in words likely to chill the staff of the Goya museum, he added: “I’ve brought some felt tips with me, so … ” It occurred to us that the Chapmans are the artists who have best captured and reflected the artistic and ethical criticisms contained in Goya’s prints,” Lola Durán. Hell is riddled with detail, but no one bit is more significant than any other: it’s equally horrific. Every act is occurring at the same second. It’s a snapshot, one mass moment of nastiness. The process of making it was the whole point: even if you create something out of 60,000 Nazi figures, it’s still nowhere near the actual thing it’s referring to. Two years of work making 60,000 little soldiers – and the Nazis were able to murder 60,000 Russian PoWs in six hours. It's not about the Holocaust. It’s the Nazis who are being subjected to industrial genocide Jake Chapman

Our next Artists You Need To Know are Jake and Dinos Chapman who are known as the Chapman Brothers. Of course, the Chapman Brothers didn't intend anything like that. Ready, as ever, with a dense rationalisation, Jake riposted: "Our intention was not in any way to trivialise the Holocaust." Rather, you see, it was a comment on the innate inadequacy of artistic responses to such genocide. "This is an event that's beyond representation. Using toy soldiers is a way of emphasising the impossibility of that. Here are these little figures that are totally incompatible with the pathos they're supposed to support." This question goes to the heart of their art, and explains a lot about those cuddly images of children and cutesy animals. The adult insistence that children are innocents corrupted by civilisation is a presumption the brothers want to subvert. "It's a will to believe, as Nietzsche would have put it. You can see it in Picasso, where he has this idea of getting rid of nasty adult instincts and seeing like a child. We don't believe in the idea of innocence, in the same way we don't believe in beauty in art. Celine [the French writer] said beauty is for poodles. He was right." Their large Hell landscapes, such as Hell (2000) and The Sum of All Evil (2012-13), are at once monumental in scale and minutely detailed. These apocalyptic landscapes, teeming with miniature figures, depict scenes of excessive brutality involving Nazi soldiers and, in more recent works, McDonald’s characters. The grotesque and often surreal violence of the scenes is offset by the overwhelming detail and painstaking labour evident in these and many of the Chapmans’s works. Ultimately, she says, "What I think this work is all about is waking us up, so we don't sleepwalk our way through 21st Century life."The Chapman bothers, however, note that they are not making a point about human savagery, rather about art, and its eventual impotency. Picasso turned to Goya for inspiration when he produced Guernica (1937), a powerful piece which responded to the bombing of a Basque country village in northern Spain by German and Italian warplanes. The work is revered now, but had no impact on the course of the Second World War and its resulting 60 million deaths. Art cannot stop violence, the Chapman brothers assert, just as Picasso's Guernica was unable to prevent the horrors of the Second World War. Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

The "new" work is called Insult to Injury. The exhibition in which it will be shown for the first time, at Modern Art Oxford, is called The Rape of Creativity. The brothers' first joint work is also their first tribute to Francisco Goya, an artist that they have continued to reference throughout their careers. This piece is a three-dimensional representation of Goya's etchings of the same name made in miniature using toy soldiers. Goya's etchings depicted the atrocities of war experienced during the Napoleonic invasions of his native Spain in 1808 including gruesome scenes of bayonetting, beheading, torture, and death. Goya's work provided such a powerful polemic, that it could not be exhibited in his lifetime The connection between making toy soldiers and making mannequins seemed to be the only way to maintain a relationship between found objects or readymade, which we could manipulate … Disasters of War … was made with the intention of detracting from the expressionist qualities of a Goya drawing and trying to find the most neurotic medium possible, which we perceived as models. It gave us a sense of omnipotence to chop these toys up.Significant exhibitions of their work include the Young British Artists (YBA) showcase exhibitions Brilliant! and Sensation. They were nominated for the annual Turner Prize in 2003 but lost out to Grayson Perry. The original Goya on which this sculpture is based depicts three mutilated men strung up on a gallows-shaped tree. One, partially obscured, is hung by his legs, one by his arms and the third, victim of the most extreme mutilation, is himself divided in thirds; inverted body, decapitated head and severed arms. All have been castrated. A previous sculpture by the Chapmans depicts the scene fairly literally. Time has clearly passed since then, and the decay is evident; this tree is writhing with maggots, the human forms reduced to bone. The severed head, in the original mustachioed and oddly serene, is a fiendish skull, with bat ears and a clown’s nose.

This is pure Freud; in a 1927 essay, Humour, he asserted that, “Humour has something liberating about it, but it also has something of grandeur and elevation… the ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.” As Dinos puts it, “If you can laugh at someone while they’re beating your head in, they’re not beating your head in.” The message that the Chapmans have taken from Goya is that today we’re still living in the midst of violence – just turn on the TV news. It’s mean to make us think about the senselessness and confusion of war.” There wasn’t a whole lot of good art coming out of the UK in the nineties. The landscape was dominated by the YBAs – the Young British Artists, mostly graduates of the posh Goldsmiths college, all of them very comfortable with self-promotion and massive quantities of cocaine. Some of the art they made was striking, some of it was at best memorable, but real capital-A art was thin on the ground – unless it was being made by Jake and Dinos Chapman. Reading this, I burst out laughing at the thought of two strange men sitting on my daughter's bed at dusk reading such risibly ghoulish stuff. What would the second prize be? Two bedtime stories from Jake and Dinos, at a guess.Jake cites Freud's Civilisation and Its Discontents. "Freud wrote that primary instincts are driven out of children for the sake of secondary gains. I may want to kill someone who is in my way on a bus, but it's better to ask them politely to move aside. Politeness gives me a secondary gain. That's what civilisation is like." So, in his art, is he trying to point out that beneath the veneer of civilisation we're all seething ids and repressed psychotics? "I don't think artists can do anything. An artist can only add shit to shit. Dinos once said, 'Our art is potty-training for adults.' He got that about right." The Chapman brothers are trying to help grown-ups be more civilised? "We're not here to help," he giggles. "We certainly don't care about moral instruction. Our interest in morality is not in being moralists, but in how morality works as a functional pacifier." Jake and I decided beforehand that we were going to make a monstrous failure. It was intentionally unmagnificent and unrewarding. We used the most pathetic way of representing the thing that has most exorcised western civilisation. We had a few assistants, but Jake and I did the donkey work. I’m quite glad the original burnt because it wasn’t very well made. It was clumsy and inaccurate Dinos Chapman It's just this kind of pronouncement that has driven previous inteviewers (Lynn Barber, Johann Hari) nuts, prompting them to denounce the Chapmans brothers as pretentious, anti-Enlightenment artists who wallow in our irrationality and baseness, who merely add shit to shit. "Well, we're not anti-Enlightenment," counters Jake when I put this to him. "We're all part of the Enlightenment, in the sense that we're on a burning Concorde and we can't get off. But we're very suspicious of this idea of progress and of reason."

It’s] a way of gouging out something that has kind of been censored by a complacent notion of a moral reading.

Many of the works created by the Chapman Brothers’ are installations, or three dimensional environments with multiple facets and nuances. In light of this, we’re sharing a number of videos of their exhibitions, to offer a more complete sense of their art and aesthetic. The graphic images of rape and impalement, she added, were meant to fascinate and appal the viewer. The Chapmans' series is from a - historically very significant - edition published directly from Goya's plates in 1937, as a protest against fascist atrocities in the Spanish civil war; its frontispiece is a photograph of bomb damage to the Goya Foundation. Given how important the Disasters of War were to Picasso, Dali and the image of the civil war, this is clearly an important, evocative, emotionally raw thing, and they have scribbled all over it. curatorluc tuymans next to caravaggio’s ‘david with the head of goliath’, post 1606, at fondazione prada, milan