SUPERSWEET : JAKE AND DINOS CHAPMAN'S IF HITLER HAD BEEN A HIPPY HOW HAPPY WOULD WE BE

JAKE AND DINOS CHAPMAN'S IF HITLER HAD BEEN A HIPPY HOW HAPPY WOULD WE BE

Exhibition

Fucking Hell

The Chapman brothers have a tendency towards defacing historical works of art. The characters in Goya's Disasters of War etchings were transformed into clown-faced ghouls, furthering the already disturbing nature of the original images and transferring them pointedly into a twentieth century context.

Their recent work seems to be approached similarly. One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved is a series of Victorian oil paintings that the artists acquired at an auction, each one a portrait set in a typically dark background of muddy, blackish brown paint, indicative of this gloomy era in history, with a curious luminosity about the face of each figure. Jake and Dinos, with their usual dichotomous approach, have deformed and defaced these paintings with the most intricate, laborious detail. In one such painting a young girl and boy, the girl aboard a pony obscured by shadows, have had their faces effectively peeled back by the artists, their skin decomposing in parts to reveal the eyeballs and vile, rotting muscle. The eyes, however, are still shining, the intact parts of their skin still translucent with youth. Through these paintings the transience of beauty is confronted plainly, without the delicateness that is usually expected when the subject of mortality arises, while the permanent nature of portraiture is destabilised; where youth and beauty is fixed indefinitely in paint, the subject ages and becomes as ugly as it will do in reality, like Wilde's picture of Dorian Grey.

If Hitler Had Been A Hippy

The gazes of the two children protrude blankly from behind their wounds, like gruesome drawings from a Victorian medical text book. Others in the series are more carnal, ape-like even; an elegant, slender woman in a blue shoulderless dress sits demurely with hair sprouting all over her face, as though she is unaware of her external hideousness. In another, an old woman wearing a white bonnet has a vertical slash on her face which violently resembles the female genitalia. In keeping with the Victorian allusions, there is something notably Frankenstein-esque about these paintings – a tampering with nature, something sickly and perverse. But there is an extraordinarily attractive element in the considered detail of these monsters, with each brush stroke carefully and sensitively applied, each colour in harmony with the original painting; a quality redolent of their previous Goya series.

After the disintegration of Hell in the warehouse fire of 2004, the Chapmans have created a re-working of the sculpture entitled Fucking Hell. A series of glass cabinets are arranged in the shape of a swastika, each one containing demonic scenes of war through miniature figurines and objects; mutated bodies, vultures lingering above corpses, heads impaled on spears and soldiers in Nazi uniforms performing sadistic rituals. The fictional scenario aims to portray the collective atrocities of the twentieth century with a focus on the second world war. In one cabinet, stag-headed monks hold bibles outside a dilapidated wooden church. The church; symbol of Christianity, of hope and faith, in ruins, futile and rendered meaningless. In the same scene a factory conveying dead limbs is operated by zombies in black boiler suits, while in another cabinet, the skeletons of soldiers hang on crucifixes, never to be resurrected.

Fucking Hell

The validity of this installation lies, as I believe it does in all the Chapman brothers' work, in its detail. Each figure has a hand-painted facial expression, their black eyes pointing in different directions, their bodily mutations unique. In contrast to this heaving mass of humanity's downfall epitomised, the final room in the gallery displays a series of watercolour paintings by perpetrator of global war himself, Adolf Hitler, sardonically entitled If Hitler Had Been A Hippy How Happy Would We Be. A fairly proficient draughtsman, Hitler was rejected from Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in the 1910s on the fair premise that his work lacked intellectual depth.

The Chapman brothers anonymously collected a series of his original paintings from an auction and proceeded to adapt them using the same medium. The juxtaposition of this series with Fucking Hell is startling. It is difficult to believe that these delicate, detailed – albeit mediocre – drawings of flowers, cathedrals and citizens at peace were executed by one of the most ruthless, inhumane political leaders of the twentieth century; but despite the sensitivity of line they lack the integrity that is prerequisite for art to be interesting. Through their adaptation, the Chapman brothers challenge the idea of authorship, claiming that the paintings are no longer Hitler's work. They objectively consider him a bad artist, highlighting his own failures, his weaknesses. His paintings are faceless, passive and meaningless, and the artists have worked into them with images that mock their superficiality, with childlike, colourful rainbows and hesitantly drawn butterflies. It comments on the futility of war, on the complexities of the human psyche, on the naive religious notions of good and evil; but most of all, it forces you to wonder how different the world would be if Hitler had been accepted into art college. - Amy Knight

'If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be' is currently at White Cube, Mason's Yard, London from 30 May - 12 July 2008

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