The Brothers grim

Now, in 2003, when Saatchi is mounting a retrospective exhibition of the Chapmans’ work in his own new gallery and he could have reconstructed this extensive piece as the artists intended it to be seen, not as a tableau but as figures with which visitors could mingle, he has merely repeated the Academy’s presentation as a peep-show seen through an open door.

This does not recover and renew the impact that it had seven years ago; then we talked of shock, now we are inured to it. Goya shocked, too, when we first saw his work — but he shocks still.

And then, in 2000, came Hell. Gone was the life-size scale, gone the waxwork finish, gone the window-dressing references and in their stead we had nine tableaux in vitrines arranged in swastika formation. In each of these, hundreds of tiny figures are frozen in the apocalyptic finale of a World War, all lovingly engrossed in psychotic violence that embraces not only every act imagined in the Nazi concentration camps, but every act of cruelty devised by men: from the crucifixion and impalement of antiquity to the blood-spattered torture chambers of Saddam Hussein, from the slow choking of piano-wire hangings reserved for those who attempted to betray Hitler’s regime and the Japanese decapitations of prisoners of war, to the mass killings in south-east Asia and the Balkans that are fresher in our memories.

Obsessively, determinedly, the Chapman brothers spent more than two years
dismantling modelmakers’ figures and, with fastidious attention to detail, reconstructing them so that they far exceeded the manufacturers’ purposes.

Often it is impossible to distinguish between victor and vanquished, tormentor, murderer and victim. The abiding sense is that roles have been reversed and will be interchanged again; with the passage of a minute it will be the
brute who is without his trousers, he who is garrotted, shot, decapitated and
dismembered, he who is fresh flesh for vultures, he whose head is stuck upon a pole.

Astonishing though the variation is in these single figures — engaged in every conceivable act of a chaotic war, with the gloss of sadism and sodomy, leather, chains and bondage, the ovens and the soap factory, the God-invoking and the hopelessness of surgery in field hospitals — it is the grand operatic scale and scope of the Chapmans’ joint imagination that horrifies.

Here the petty vision of the model railway fanatic is extended and transmogrified to trap in a glass box the cinematic gruesomeness of Apocalypse Now, the mass slaughters of the biblical, historical and recent past, the industrial disposal of unwanted people and their conversion into useful commodities.

As in the opera house, it is the scene within the scene that gives the telling detail, while in the scene itself every member of the cast and chorus is on the stage to blast the audience.

Three years have passed since I first saw Hell and — unlike Tragic Anatomies — it is not one whit diminished in its impact, even though, wrongly reconstructed in the Saatchi Gallery, its inexorable logic is unforgivably disrupted. It
should be in the rotunda there, but instead of its swastika layout, it is arranged in unequal blocks in the long transverse entrance room.

The limitations of the Saatchi Collection’s County Hall premises are apparent, too, in the two rooms where the Chapmans’ spoofs of ethnic fetishes are appallingly displayed, as badly as though in a private provincial museum undisturbed since Livingstone’s day.

These pointed mockeries of McDonald’s — of Christian missionaries and imposed American democracy, too, as well as of all other forms of global commercialism — deserve, indeed need, to be free-standing and seen in the round in more sympathetic light.

Talking to the brothers, their disappointment with the insensitive and uncomprehending display of their work was evident — with the labels, too, the texts of which plumb greater depths than the banalities of Tate Britain and Tate Modern.

Of all the things of which Saatchi should beware — and I wholly support him in his recent outburst against the bleak white cliché that is now the worldwide commonplace of gallery display — it is of the jabberwocky of the contemporary art world, for it belies his own innocent and impetuous enthusiasm.

Not entirely to my surprise I liked the brothers, sceptical about politics, religion and the art world, their sometimes solemn pessimism enlivened by a sense of mischief.

Asked if their prize-winning contribution to the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition this year had been, as it were, a Duchampian insult to that devious institution, they chuckled, confessed and went on to say that its president, with nod and wink, had told them that they would soon be elected Academicians.

Astonishingly, they seem not to have recognised the Academy’s capacity for
unscrupulously exploiting anything that gives it free publicity — and giving the brothers its £25,000 prize for “the most distinguished work” in the exhibition was an example of exactly that, for to the brothers their exhibit — The Marriage of Reason (a small painting) and Squalor (a bust apparently cast in faecal matter) — was a wilful affront to the institution and to the
rest of us a test of its integrity.

As Academicians, shall we, they pondered, be Jake and Dinos Chapman RA, or RARA (which they fancy), or Jake RA and Dinos RA? “We have a problem, too, with the MBE and OBE,” murmured Dinos, “though for myself I’d much prefer an HRH.”

Both have considered changing their name to Goya, so weary are they of the inevitable comparison.

“It would put an end to half the stuff written by the critics — they could hardly say that the Goyas are influenced by Goya.”

Weary, too, of being photographed with any of their zygotic images, they briskly remove themselves when they see a camera approach: “Penises just excite editors — the photographs do nothing for the work or us.”

They are burdened with a bad-boy reputation, yet they have moved so far from anything that justifies it that the later work on show here is scarcely recognisable as coming from the same imaginations, the same hands, as the early root on which the present flower flourishes.

The Chapmans are infinitely more various (the word Gainsborough used admiringly of Reynolds) than Hirst, more profound than Emin (not difficult) and, by far and over a far wider range, technically more skilled than both. I dare say that their recent etchings will eventually be judged a homage to Goya and at least the equal of any made by Klee.

There is in the brothers no hint of the aesthetic and intellectual exhaustion so evident in their contemporaries, nor the urge to turn aside from art, make films, run restaurants and succumb to the sad need to be celebrities, to expose and exploit their private lives.

They strike me as men with a firm philosophical base, the pessimism of Heraclitus and the humour of Democritus, artists who will do, not what their dealer wants, not what the public has been misled to expect, not what the gossip-mongers hope for, but what, as artists, they feel driven to do. They are that rare thing in our contemporary art world — genuine.