...was our immediate response to encountering this somewhat daring exhibit by the infamous brothers Jake & Dinos Chapman at the central London White Cube gallery earlier this week. It's also the name of the artwork itself - a series of nine large glass cabinets, each containing perfect scale models of a wholly unwholesome battleground. Among the noble pursuits featured are decapitation (see photo), necrophilia, cannibalism, and... pig-rape. All washed down with a dash of Nazism. Well, I say a dash - more like a tidal wave. Even the cabinets are arranged in a swastika, although that particular touch of genius escaped me at the time. It's all a bit sickening, and even more so because it clearly took such an exceptional level of craftsmanship to make every single severed head, crucified skeleton, etc. etc. Such attention to detail, especially in the infrastructure and terrain, almost appealed to the 10-year old in me, and I definitely had to stop myself saying 'that's so cool!!!' out loud. Not at the pig-rape though.
Anyway, I couldn't really tell who was winning out of the Nazis and the skeletons/zombies, but I sense that wasn't the point. What, then, was? The Chapmans must have employed a vast team of highly skilled model-makers for a pretty massive space of time. You get the sense that they could have asked them to build absolutely anything, and yet they chose this.
Incidentally, the other side of the gallery is devoted to original Hitler watercolours from back in his bohemian student days when he was twice-rejected from Vienna's art school, only they've all had big clumsy rainbows daubed on them. That part was actually quite funny, but overall this was still by far the most disturbing exhibition I've ever wandered innocently into.
Take a sickbag, and don't take your mum. I didn't but it would not go down well.
1 comment:
This is what happens when one spends that little bit too long in Games Workshop...
Post a Comment