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It occurred to us that the Chapmans are the artists who have best captured and reflected the artistic and ethical criticisms contained in Goya’s prints,” Lola Durán. ake and Dinos Chapman have long been fascinated by Francisco de Goya’s depictions of rape and torture. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer The brothers' first joint work is also their first tribute to Francisco Goya, an artist that they have continued to reference throughout their careers. This piece is a three-dimensional representation of Goya's etchings of the same name made in miniature using toy soldiers. Goya's etchings depicted the atrocities of war experienced during the Napoleonic invasions of his native Spain in 1808 including gruesome scenes of bayonetting, beheading, torture, and death. Goya's work provided such a powerful polemic, that it could not be exhibited in his lifetime It's just this kind of pronouncement that has driven previous inteviewers (Lynn Barber, Johann Hari) nuts, prompting them to denounce the Chapmans brothers as pretentious, anti-Enlightenment artists who wallow in our irrationality and baseness, who merely add shit to shit. "Well, we're not anti-Enlightenment," counters Jake when I put this to him. "We're all part of the Enlightenment, in the sense that we're on a burning Concorde and we can't get off. But we're very suspicious of this idea of progress and of reason." Their goading is encouraged by the national attitude towards contemporary art, for which the artists have to shoulder some, if not most, of the blame. As part of the YBA crowd, they’re responsible for its popularisation in this country and the elevation of its appreciation (and criticism) to a national pastime. It’s their own fault if “what’s happened recently is that everyone has become interested in art, but generally at an unqualified level.”

They’ve taken Goya’s message – that war can’t be justified, that violence can’t be justified – and transformed it and built on it.” Controversy is one thing but I think the seriousness of the work will go unnoticed. That’s the thing. One of the things that’s never discussed is the seriousness of the work.” in luc tuymans’ vision, caravaggio was the first to transcend classical and mannerist tradition thanks to the psychological realism expressed by his innovative pictorial language; he also embodied the spirit of the baroque artist and the wish to communicate with the public through the power of representation. Goya's Disasters of War is a precocious modern masterpiece, a work left by its creator as his final savage bequest to the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries - it was far too anti-clerical and unpatriotic to be published in his lifetime, and the first ever edition came out in 1863, three and a half decades after his death in 1828. From the very start of its public existence, it has been experienced not as a historic but as a contemporary work, its images so urgent and truthful that they function as living, new art.Reading this, I burst out laughing at the thought of two strange men sitting on my daughter's bed at dusk reading such risibly ghoulish stuff. What would the second prize be? Two bedtime stories from Jake and Dinos, at a guess. By bringing together Goya's eighty-three part series of etchings into one entity, in which all parts are simultaneously visible, the Chapmans' Disasters of War suggests a reduction and encapsulation of events of momentous emotional impact. The tiny size and anodyne manufactured appearance of the figures transform the horror of the original material into the representation of a war among toys, a comic-strip rendition of brutality. Both the large white plinth, which provides a broad margin between the figures and the viewer, and the perspex box, which seals the figures off from the viewer, add to the reductive and distancing effects of the work. The Chapmans have said: 'We fantasise about producing things with zero cultural value, to produce aesthetic inertia' (quoted in Unholy Libel, p.149). This work, like their subsequent Hell 2000 (Saatchi Collection, London), stages a neurotic fixation with an ironic edge: the hours of careful work required to cut up and reconstitute the little figures to represent grotesque human acts in a time of social uncontrol. Disasters of War reflects the detachment of Western societies from the realities of war-time killing, both through computer and missile technology (which have produced weapons that fire long range and permit operational distance) and through the comfortable spectatorship provided by television and the film industry. Many of the works created by the Chapman Brothers’ are installations, or three dimensional environments with multiple facets and nuances. In light of this, we’re sharing a number of videos of their exhibitions, to offer a more complete sense of their art and aesthetic. The Chapmans have remade Goya's masterpiece for a century which has rediscovered evil. And I have fallen into their trap.

Jake cites Freud's Civilisation and Its Discontents. "Freud wrote that primary instincts are driven out of children for the sake of secondary gains. I may want to kill someone who is in my way on a bus, but it's better to ask them politely to move aside. Politeness gives me a secondary gain. That's what civilisation is like." So, in his art, is he trying to point out that beneath the veneer of civilisation we're all seething ids and repressed psychotics? "I don't think artists can do anything. An artist can only add shit to shit. Dinos once said, 'Our art is potty-training for adults.' He got that about right." The Chapman brothers are trying to help grown-ups be more civilised? "We're not here to help," he giggles. "We certainly don't care about moral instruction. Our interest in morality is not in being moralists, but in how morality works as a functional pacifier." So we've gone very systematically through the entire 80 etchings," continues Dinos, "and changed all the visible victims' heads to clowns' heads and puppies' heads." Christoph Grunenberg and Tanya Barson (eds.), Jake and Dinos Chapman: Bad Art for Bad People, exhibition catalogue, Tate Liverpool 2006, p. 85, reproduced pp.86–91.I think that works pretty well," says Chapman. (Dinos did not want to be interviewed, and, it later turns out, is busy colouring in the final artwork for this week's opening of their Whitechapel Gallery show.) Aren't these images too disturbing for children? "Nope: there's nothing we've done here that can rival the darkness of the imaginations of children. They aren't the innocents that adults want them to be." This work is an assemblage of eighty-three small mixed media sculptures composed of bought, reformed and modelled elements. The sculpture is made of a variety of materials, mostly plastics. The Chapman brothers have worked as a collaborative team since the early 1990s. Disasters of War was their first major work. It is a one in thirty-second-scale model based on a portfolio of etchings by Goya (Fransisco de Goya y Lucientes, 1746-1819), of the same title, depicting the atrocities of war experienced and witnessed during and after the Napoleonic invasions of Spain in 1808. Goya's eighty-three etchings contain scenes of brutality and horror such as bayonetting, mutilation and decapitation. The Chapmans have translated each of the etchings into a three-dimensional tableau made of hybrid toy figures which have been pieced together from various sources and painted over. Goya's dark settings have been replaced by clumps of simulated grass of the type used in architectural models. Each miniature scene is set on a grass-covered island of irregular form; the islands are clustered together on a large white plinth and covered by a perspex box. Goya's modernity has never exhausted itself; he was as immediate to Picasso and Dali as he was to Manet; of all pre-modern artists, he is the one who most resembles a modernist. This is who the Chapmans have victimised.

Ultimately, she says, "What I think this work is all about is waking us up, so we don't sleepwalk our way through 21st Century life." And then, in words likely to chill the staff of the Goya museum, he added: “I’ve brought some felt tips with me, so … ”Martin Maloney, 'The Chapman Bros.: When will I be Famous', Flash Art, no.186, Jan.-Feb. 1996, pp.64-7, reproduced (colour, detail) p.67 Of course, the Chapman Brothers didn't intend anything like that. Ready, as ever, with a dense rationalisation, Jake riposted: "Our intention was not in any way to trivialise the Holocaust." Rather, you see, it was a comment on the innate inadequacy of artistic responses to such genocide. "This is an event that's beyond representation. Using toy soldiers is a way of emphasising the impossibility of that. Here are these little figures that are totally incompatible with the pathos they're supposed to support." The graphic images of rape and impalement, she added, were meant to fascinate and appal the viewer. The Chapman bothers, however, note that they are not making a point about human savagery, rather about art, and its eventual impotency. Picasso turned to Goya for inspiration when he produced Guernica (1937), a powerful piece which responded to the bombing of a Basque country village in northern Spain by German and Italian warplanes. The work is revered now, but had no impact on the course of the Second World War and its resulting 60 million deaths. Art cannot stop violence, the Chapman brothers assert, just as Picasso's Guernica was unable to prevent the horrors of the Second World War. Violet and white bursts of colour, the clown heads and puppy faces are astonishingly horrible. They are given life, personality, by some very acute drawing, and so it's not a collision but a collaboration, an assimilation, as they really do seem to belong in the pictures - one art historical antecedent is Max Ernst's collages in which 19th-century lithographs are reorganised into a convincing dream world. What the Chapmans have released is something nasty, psychotic and value-free; not so much a travesty of Goya as an extension of his despair. What they share with him is the most primitive and archaic and Catholic pessimism of his art - the sense not just of irrationality but something more tangible and diabolic.

Many of their shows offer titles that are as provocative as the artworks themselves, such as The Blind Leading The Blind (Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague), In the Realm of the Senseless (Artur, Istanbul, Turkey), To Live and Think Like Pigs (UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, USA) or SHITROSPECTIVE (Contemporary Fine Arts Galerie, Berlin). The brothers will also be running drawing and poetry workshops. "Another idea we had is a colouring competition, where the winner would have me and Dinos come round and read them a bedtime story." What would they read? Quite possibly something from their soon-to-be published collection of reworked fairytales, entitled Bedtime Tales for Sleepless Nights. It's a book that begins: The Chapmans have spent years reworking Goya's most disturbing images; they even bought a set of his prints only to deface them. "Like us, Goya had a heretical approach to the body," Jake explains. He cites one of the most upsetting prints from Goya's series The Disasters of War, created between 1810 and 1820, a work entitled A Heroic Feat! With Dead Men!, in which three hideously butchered corpses hang from a tree. It's a work the brothers recreated in three dimensions, in their 1993 work of the same title. Why does it resonate for them? "When Goya put three mutilated bodies in a tree, it was read as echoing Christ's crucifixion, suggesting that some kind of redemption is possible. But you can see it another way. Goya is being quite cruel about Christian redemption, shifting the Christian iconography to show there's nothing beyond. That what you're looking at is dead bodies. There is nothing to be optimistic about. It's just aestheticised dead flesh. He looks to be giving a moral demonstration, but he's not." The Chapman Family Collection is one of a number of works by the artists that make reference to McDonalds; others include The Rape of Creativity 1999 (private collection), Rhizome 2000 (private collection) and Arbeit McFries 2001 (Tate L03203). Unholy Libel: Six Feet Under; exhibition catalogue, Gagosian Gallery, New York 1997, reproduced (colour) fig.xvii [pp.98-9]The thing we objected to was not so much Goya’s meaning – we’re actually trying to gouge them from this moralistic framework and maybe release its libidinal economy to show that these works are much more radically unhinged and unstable and they don’t deserve to be accumulated to some sort of post-Christian redemption.” Jake and I decided beforehand that we were going to make a monstrous failure. It was intentionally unmagnificent and unrewarding. We used the most pathetic way of representing the thing that has most exorcised western civilisation. We had a few assistants, but Jake and I did the donkey work. I’m quite glad the original burnt because it wasn’t very well made. It was clumsy and inaccurate Dinos Chapman They are the cleverest of the YBAs (Young British Artists)," says the art critic Matthew Collings. But Julian Stallabrass, lecturer in art history at the Courtauld Institute, has something far more withering to suggest. In his book High Art Lite: British Art in the Nineties, he talks about something that "looks like art but is not quite art, that acts as a substitute for art". The majority of artists purveying this, he writes, "have been content to play the well-remunerated role of court dwarf" while at the same time claiming they are engaged in some ironic exposure of the pretensions of old-style art.

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