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"If Hitler Was a Hippy How Happy Would We Be" The Chapmans, White Cube, June 2008

From:     Clem
Category: Art
Date:     08 June 2008
Time:     05:15 PM

Review:

   This time round, "Hell" has been remade with a barely perceptible though discernible increase in 
confidence , its original tropes internalised and extended. There are the devices that make it 
terrifying;its relentlessness, its circularity( you find yourself returning and returning to the same points), 
the profusion and claustrophobia, its strange fusion of fecundity and deadness.The magic of this 
piece of work( and how many artworks can you truly claim as "magical", even in this negative sense?) 
is partly due to the simultaneous apprehension of a manic swarming movement, and an absolute 
stasis.So vivid is the  sense of dynamic that one remembers the incidents almost as scenes from a 
film, the movement in film compensated for by ones continuous movement around the vitrines.
  There are unforgettable moments repeated from the last "Hell"; for me the most stomach churning 
being the lake of compressed bodies,filling almost a whole vitrine, sucking the air with its palpable 
inertia and suffocating deadness. The work has a sense of completeness, every crime against 
humanity represented in correct proportion, the Nazis figuring prominently, and some that are clear 
extensions of a collaborative imagination that is both frenzied and unnervingly frozen, locked into both 
a frightening logic and a nihilistic amorality.And there is the final bitter irony that the whole terrifying 
spectacle is both insignificant both on human terms( the figures are as small as worms),and on an 
aesthetic level (this is modelmaking!)
   In fact, it would not be innacurate to say that "Fucking Hell", like its predecessor "Hell", lost in the 
Saatchi fire, (an incident the insurers described as an "act of God"- like, if only)  has absolutely no 
redeeming features whatsoever; morally ,aesthetically, politically(its ingrained pessimism is deeply 
right wing,perhaps), and this is what makes it so important. This is perhaps the most totally negative, 
negatory, negatavising work in the history of art- its genius is unprecedented. This work will live 
forever- but for The Chapmans, at what price immortality?
        Next door, The Chapmans have "disfigured" twenty Hitler watercolours with  lumpen 
modernist "hippy" pattern and decoration motifs, like rainbows. Their additions are surprisingly 
tentative, as though contact with the same paper Hitler touched turned out to be more daunting than 
they expected . Upstairs are some brilliantly disfigured nineteenth century junk shop 
portraits ,beautifully and cruelly cold and displaying the same extraordinarily lucid and vivid concerted 
imagination that has allowed them, intermittently, to achieve the status of great artists.  


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