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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.