In the aftermath of the 2004 MOMART fire, the national press wallowed in schadenfreude, warming its hands over the embers of Britart and the charred remains of Tracey Emin’s tent, Damien Hirst’s Charity, and the Chapman Brothers’ Hell. ‘Didn’t millions cheer as this ‘rubbish’ went up in flames?’ crowed the Daily Mail while the letters pages were filled with the Pooterish response of Middle England: the disgusted-of-Tunbridge-Wells brigade who saw the immolation of the scatological excesses of the YBAs as a fitting bonfire of the vanities.
Four years on from the immolation of Hell, and the Chapman Brothers are back with a new version of the inferno, vaster and more horrible than the first. This time round it’s Fucking Hell; a two-fingered salute to the pre-Raphaelite loving middle-class. This is no mere exercise in juvenile obscenity-mongering, but a relentless and seemingly infinite pandemonium of evil and suffering. Nine glass vitrines stand in the shape of a swastika, once an emblem of eternal life and now, since the Nazis, a symbol of inhumanity. Each is filled with a monstrous regiment of toy soldiers, their uniforms emblazoned with swastikas, their features and bodies contorted as they heap atrocities on one another. Here, a phalanx of soldiers assembles with spears embedded in their eyes; there, severed heads are savagely tossed in the back of a Jeep. Score upon score of soldiers form rank, racked and bent double beneath the weight of physical and psychological tortures. Spliced creatures with two heads and Catherine-wheel arms career across cratered battlefields, while in one gut-churning Golgotha of a case, dismembered corpses lie six deep in a slurry of blood and sewage.
The violence is nauseating. Forget the bums-on-seats sadism of Torture Porn and Grindhouse cinema, this is the stuff of nightmares. The emaciated G.I.s and Wehrmacht troops recall the cavorting, grinning skeletons of the danse macabre and the Black Death carnival. In one diorama, troops converge on the ruins of a Greek temple whose pediment is filled, not with gracious muses, but with a frieze of maimed and mutilated infantry.
The violence is nauseating. Forget the bums-on-seats sadism of Torture Porn and Grindhouse cinema, this is the stuff of nightmares. The emaciated G.I.s and Wehrmacht troops recall the cavorting, grinning skeletons of the danse macabre and the Black Death carnival. In one diorama, troops converge on the ruins of a Greek temple whose pediment is filled, not with gracious muses, but with a frieze of maimed and mutilated infantry.
Plastic vultures hover expectantly over each grisly vignette, their bloodshot eyes feasting on the mass graves and scenes of genocidal fury. The day I visited, a lone housefly buzzed above the vitrines like some vengeful spitfire, a pestilential presence sucked in from the street by the stench of carrion rising from the White Cube killing fields. Spend too long in this charnel house, this claustrophobic basement, amongst so many unholy martyrdoms, and a creeping sickness sets in, leaving you reeling, polluted and ashamed.
The adjoining exhibition of landscape watercolours ought to be a breath of fresh air; but the thirteen twee landscapes, the preserve of the lady watercolourist, are the work of Adolf Hitler. How do you reconcile these mediocre daubs with the orchestrator of the Holocaust? We want our villains to be monsters and it is a source of endless disconcertment that the great dictator, the creator of a Fucking Hell on earth, had a fondness for saccharine views of the German countryside.
Hitler’s watercolour idylls have been covered by the Chapmans with Crayola rainbows, butterflies and love hearts, and other faux-naive scribbling of the nursery school. ‘If Hitler had been a hippy, how happy would we be?’ asks the exhibition title. Their detractors call the Chapmans ‘puerile’ or ‘adolescent,’ likening the language of Fucking Hell to that of a Warhammer set or Airfix model, or comparing the defacing of the watercolours to schoolboy graffiti. But these Brothers Grimm are no pedlars of teenage fantasies, theirs is not the wet dream of the high school killer or video game assassin, theirs is a vision of hell to compete with Virgil, Dante, Bosch or Rodin, a chilling rendering of apocalypses past and still to come.
Hitler’s watercolour idylls have been covered by the Chapmans with Crayola rainbows, butterflies and love hearts, and other faux-naive scribbling of the nursery school. ‘If Hitler had been a hippy, how happy would we be?’ asks the exhibition title. Their detractors call the Chapmans ‘puerile’ or ‘adolescent,’ likening the language of Fucking Hell to that of a Warhammer set or Airfix model, or comparing the defacing of the watercolours to schoolboy graffiti. But these Brothers Grimm are no pedlars of teenage fantasies, theirs is not the wet dream of the high school killer or video game assassin, theirs is a vision of hell to compete with Virgil, Dante, Bosch or Rodin, a chilling rendering of apocalypses past and still to come.
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