Mick Hartley

Another example of the belief, mentioned in the post below, that the worst human behaviour is somehow the truest, the most real, is to be found at the Chapman brothers absurdly-titled show If Hitler Had Been a Hippy, How Happy Would We Be at the White Cube gallery off Piccadilly, which I visited today. Here's a gushing review from Waldemar Januszczak:

The Momart fire in 2004 destroyed scores of important artworks. Tracey Emin’s notorious tent, in which she had embroidered the names of everyone she had ever slept with, was burnt. Pieces by Helen Chadwick, Rachel Whiteread and Damien Hirst were torched. But the really critical loss was the huge installation by the Chapman brothers, called Hell, that had been the centrepiece of the Royal Academy’s Apocalypse show. Hell was a great evocation of human evil, acted out by vast numbers of toy soldiers on a relentless scale. It had taken years to make. Those of us who were lucky enough to have seen it stored the sight away in our memories and assumed that was that.

The Chapmans are not like other artists, however. They don’t get deterred. They don’t get maudlin. They finish the Airfix kit. And this hard-core determination of theirs led them to announce that they would be remaking Hell, and that this time it would be bigger. The results have now been unveiled at the White Cube gallery in St James’s. They are nothing less than astounding. Hell, in its new, extra-large form, is so ambitious, so ghastly, so sick and so brilliant that I hereby nominate it as the key contemporary artwork of our times.

Nine large glass cases arranged on the floor in the shape of a swastika have once again been filled with zillions of scenes of murder and mayhem, acted out by countless numbers of Nazi soldiers and their mutilated victims. As in the original Hell, the central case contains an erupting volcano that is spewing evil to the four arms of the swastika. One journey ends on a ruined church, in which Hitler is being baptised. Another ends on a ruined pseudo-Greek temple that turns out to be a McDonald’s franchise. A third ends on a factory of death; the fourth on a killing field piled high with corpses.

That "Airfix kit" remark is appropriate. This is boys' stuff: little Jake and Dinos playing with their toy soldiers and trains and tanks, but now they're grown-up, so they put blood and mutilated bodies and tiny model corpses all over, like some nursery Hieronymous Bosch, with swastikas and Nazi helmets and models of Hitler (where's Adolf?) and they can make out they're saying something really profound about human nature and how horrid we all are.

This idea of using the Nazis as a shorthand for human evil, though: maybe someone should tell them that it's been done before. A lot.

Let's hear more from Waldemar, on "the key contemporary artwork of our times":

Other artists have chosen to memorialise human wickedness by resorting to evocative abstractions – the Washington memorial to the soldiers lost in Vietnam being the ultimate example. But the Chapmans seem to view abstraction as a get-out clause. Hell is Auschwitz reenacted in full, gory detail. Goya favoured the same approach. Don’t avoid it. Show it. On and on it goes. Carnage and dismemberment in every direction. Once the impact of the whole of Hell has bowled you over – which it will – the thing to do here is to wander among the cases picking out the absorbing close-ups. Spot the little attic with the toys in it belonging to Anne Frank. Note the calm figure of Hitler standing by his easel and enjoying his hobby. The deranged detailing is hilarious, in that dark and outrageous Chapman manner.

Don’t let the sick humour fool you, though. In its heart, this immense piece of creative nihilism isn’t only attacking Hitler and the Nazis. Hell is a scale model of a cycle of evil that shows no sign of ending. It’s having a go at all of us.

Having a go at all of us. Well didn't you just know that was coming. It's not just a bit of toytown fun, you see, with nasty Nazis doing unspeakable things amidst a general atmosphere of Auschwitzy kitsch. It has contemporary relevance. Yes, we're all Nazis. You, me, that Mrs. Jones down the road, the newsagent, the butcher, the baker, Uncle Fred – all of us, Nazis. And there's no sign of it ending! The camps are still going, the trains are still trundling into Belsen unloading their human cargo, the gas chambers are still being filled, and you and me, we're sorting out the hair, pulling the gold teeth from the corpses, and going off to our Beethoven concerts in the evening.

Or not. Or this is just a silly self-indulgent game, which rather than pointing up our guilt serves to leach any meaning or significance from the Nazi years and the Holocaust, until they become just one more gimmick in the furtherance of easy thrills and cheap points from a decadent art culture whose only philosophy is the urge to shock.

So we move on from Hell (or, to give it its full title, Fucking Hell), to perhaps the most publicised part of the show, the defaced Hitler watercolours. And more banality:

To complement Hell, the brothers have also acquired a set of real watercolours by Hitler, which they have added to and redrawn. The fact that Hitler was a keen amateur artist is widely known. What isn’t perhaps as clear is that he was a really bad one. His friends would receive twee postcards, painted with little landscapes and flowerpots, which he would sign “A Hitler” in the childish handwriting of a 15-year-old schoolboy.

The Chapmans have bought a stack of these and covered them with childish squiggles of their own, of rainbows, flower patterns and butterflies. It’s a mock language of innocence, created deliberately, you feel, to match the mock innocence of the 20th century’s worst monster. The idea that the man responsible for the genocide of the Nazis should have painted watercolours of roses is, indeed, as obscene as it is telling. As Hannah Arendt pointed out so astutely, evil is banal. It’s everywhere. Under all our noses. And the banality of evil is the Chapmans’ greatest theme.

The banality of evil meets the banality of art criticism. 

This is the most self-indulgent part of the exhibition – which is really saying something when it comes to the Chapmans. There may be some interest in looking at Hitler's original watercolours, but there's none whatsoever in looking at them after they've been daubed over with rainbows. (Here's a slideshow from the Times: see photo 2). Januszczak is at pains to inform us that Hitler was a really bad artist, but in fact he's perfectly competent. The idiocy is in thinking that his art has any relevance to anything; that because he was a nasty dictator he had to be a bad painter; that we might gain some insights into his mind by looking at his pictures of castles in Germany. There's something perverse about fetishising these ordinary little watercolours; indeed about fetishising Hitler. But that's what the Chapmans are doing. It's a gimmick, but not, I hope, a cheap one. I imagine they must have paid a fair sum for the original paintings.

Finally, there's the third segment of the show, One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved (example). Here's Waldemar: 

To complete their fiendish investigation of the rest of us, the brothers have also acquired a set of family portraits, mostly Victorian, which they have also defaced by adding misshapen mouths and cancerous eyes to the poor, unsuspecting dads and grandmas. We usually have our portraits painted to commemorate our lives. The Chapmans seem keener to commemorate our disintegration. It’s another wicked and hilarious wheeze.

For once I agree. This is the only successful part of the show, because it's not trying to make some major point. This is the level at which the Chapmans' brand of subversion actually works: not in building cartoon visions of Nazi violence, but in taking the piss out of the pomposity of Victorian portraiture. Not a difficult target, of course, but at least they do it well. As the man says, it's "another wicked and hilarious wheeze": it's the Chapmans being naughty, and that's really what they're good at. Being naughty. But not being profound.