Jake and Dinos Chapman

Fucking hell!

I't's the ATU I Champman Brothers thread.

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Hosni wrote:

Discuss.

Eddie wrote:



Death 2002- Chapman Brothers.

Eddie wrote:

See Andy's "Fucking Hell" thread (EDIT: Does this still exist, post-ATUI shipwreck?)- another magnum opus by the Chapman Brothers.

By accident or design, both the Chapman's "Hell" piece and Tracy Emin's "Everyone I've Ever Slept With" tent were destroyed in a warehouse fire a couple of years ago.

Hosni wrote:

Eddie wrote:



More from the Chapmans- all in the best possible taste, of course.

Hosni wrote:

BTW, Tweedle & Tweedle are hugely derivative of my boy Jeff Koons.



Koons gets a pass from me because his stuff if often funny, at least. Not so much with Tweedle & Tweedle.

Eddie wrote:

Eddie wrote:
By accident or design, both the Chapman's "Hell" piece and Tracy Emin's "Everyone I've Ever Slept With" tent were destroyed in a warehouse fire a couple of years ago.


I need to qualify this. Apparently, the Chapman's ORIGINAL "Hell" piece was indeed destroyed in the 2004 MOMART fire, but it seems that "Fucking Hell" was a new piece created in response to this tragic event.

Hitler gets Chapman treatment as Hell rises from the ashes

· Smiley faces for the Führer's watercolours
· Successor to work lost in fire goes on show


Mark Brown, arts correspondent The Guardian, Friday 30 May 2008


An installation by artists Jake and Dinos Chapman, entitled 'Fucking Hell', is seen during the inauguration of their new exhibition 'If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be'. Photograph: Alessia Pierdomenico/Reuters

Five years ago the artists Jake and Dinos Chapman were labelled vandals for defacing a set of Goya prints. There may be less fuss over their new target: 13 watercolours of dubious quality by a man who never made it to art school despite his best endeavours. Adolf Hitler.

Yesterday the brothers revealed new works including the amateurish Hitler paintings, on which they have painted rainbow skies, smiley faces and colourful stars and flowers.

The work is entitled If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be, and the artists take delight in what the tyrant's reaction might have been. "If hell exists and Hitler is there, I think he is turning in his grave," said Jake.

The brothers - once called "the cleverest of the Young British Artists" by the critic Matthew Collings - also marked the fourth anniversary of the loss of one of their most celebrated pieces of work, Hell, destroyed in the 2004 Momart warehouse fire in east London, by revealing its successor. This time it is entitled Fucking Hell.

The brothers spent £115,000 on a "job lot" of pretty dire paintings by Hitler. They said that they were exploring themes of redemption and had made Hitler's art "better by it being worse".

The Hitler watercolours are the sort of works that can be seen in junkshops the world over, say the brothers, describing them as impoverished and benign.

"They are absolutely archetypal of the miserable representation of art that was going on then," said Dinos. Too much time could be spent looking at the art to try to read the mind of the man Hitler became, they say. "All they indicate is that this person is not very good at art, they don't indicate this person will become a terrible tyrant," said Jake. The last time the brothers had a go at someone else's art was in 2003. In Insult to Injury, they took a collection of 80 Goya prints and drew puppy and clown heads on the faces. It offended some and delighted others.

Fucking Hell - also on show at the White Cube gallery in central London - is nine glass cabinets arranged in a swastika formation with tens of thousands of miniature figures enduring awfulness on a grand scale. The original installation was lost in the east London fire which destroyed much of Charles Saatchi's stored art collection four years ago.

"You couldn't fail to see something funny about Hell being on fire," said Jake. Their first thought was: let's do it again. Jake said: "We wanted to rescue the work from the sentimentality that soon clothed the work after it burned, an affection for the work that wasn't there when it actually existed as an object, so the idea of a world without Hell was unacceptable to us.

"While everyone else was whingeing around kicking their legs in the air like overturned cockroaches, the first thing we said was we'd remake it". The Chapmans did not realise Hell was in the fire at first. "We thought it was in special storage for the stuff that he [Saatchi] really liked," joked Dinos.

Backstory

Adolf Hitler, like so many amateur artists, thought he was rather good with a paintbrush, if not brilliant. After school he applied to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts but was turned down because he lacked a school leaving certificate. He tried to persuade it with the quality of his landscapes and, much to his fury, was turned down again. Hitler's view of art was straightforward - he liked sentimental landscapes. What he didn't like, he labelled decadent. He instructed his minister for popular enlightenment and propaganda, Josef Goebbels, to lead a purification purge against this degenerate art (ie virtually all modern art) as "part of the Jewish conspiracy". He complained that modern artists "see meadows blue, skies green, clouds sulphur yellow, and so on ..." In 1937 the Degenerate Art exhibition was held in Munich. Organised by the Nazis, it was to show how corrupting the art was. If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be subverts his work with a sky of rainbow colours.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

Thin line between art and hate: is this the most repellent work of modern art?

The Chapman brothers' sneering sculpture of Stephen Hawking sickened me in 1995, and still does now. What do you think is the most hateful work of modern art?

Jonathan Jones
The Guardian


Sarcastic sculpture ... Ubermensch by the Chapman brothers. Photograph: Elizabeth Dalziel/AP

What is the most detestable, the most repellent, and the most pointless work of art you have ever seen?

This week I remembered the most hateful work of modern British art, and maybe a candidate for the most repugnant of modern times. In the 1990s, when British artists became renowned for their readiness to shock, there was one work that fell over the cliff from provocation to plain ugly stupidity.

I recalled it, darkly, this week as I read about 70th birthday celebrations for the scientist Stephen Hawking. Against all odds, Hawking has survived motor neurone disease for half a century. And much more than survived. Suffering from such an illness, he has advanced revolutionary ideas and defined an era in physics. He has held the same university chair as Newton and shown others in his field how to communicate, so well that theoretical physics is now far more accessible to the public than, say, art history.

Have you guessed what the work of art is yet? In 1995, Jake and Dinos Chapman created Ubermensch, a lifelike 12ft-tall fibreglass image of Hawking in his wheelchair perched on top of a rocky pinnacle. It was clearly not a homage to Hawking's intellect or courage. Its title – meaning "Overman" or "superman", a term used in Nietzsche's philosophical writings – is plainly intended sarcastically. The work seems to suggest that Hawking, the modern superman, is a prisoner of his sick body. It stresses his carnal weakness and mocks the idea that his mind has somehow conquered matter.

It is less a work of art than a sneer. The Chapmans went on to make more interesting art. But the clumsiness of this caricature betrays their limitations.

They got it bizarrely, horribly wrong. Hawking's story really is an epic triumph of the human mind. His defiance of illness is profoundly moving, his ability to mentally explore the universe in spite of it an inspiration for our time and times to come. How many lives are so poetic?

I suppose it's not even worth remembering the Chapmans' daft image of him. It just came into my mind again this week, and reminded me of the case against contemporary British art.