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On To the Gates of Death with Song Literature, film, poetry, cinema, photography, music, all are capable of moving me, on occasion profoundly and unforgettably. But not contemporary art. Do I perhaps have a disease, some sort of worm or block? Or does anyone else suffer this affliction? Rare is the occasion when one of the fashionable visual artists touches me with the beauty and seriousness of their imaginings. Indeed, rare is the occasion when they actually communicate visually anything at all to me. More often I visit their press-inflated flea circuses out of dutiful curiosity before ticking them off a mental list of chores. I wonder why I bothered. Most are forgotten within minutes. A poison has entered contemporary art to corrupt it into something other than a means of collective celebration and elucidation. Newspaper commentators obscenely groomed by State Art functionaries and chaperoned around – for example – the Twombly exhibition by its curators recently fell into raptures and mass knicker-wettings over scribbles. A vague if pretentious sophistication informs these doodles and skidmarks but they affect me in the gut not a twitch. And there is no peep of dissent in the papers as though, with Twombly, it is a foregone conclusion that we are dealing with works of genius. I’ll never forget one regular, all-purpose ‘expert’ on every art form from modern dance and poetry to historical art who confessed to being “deeply moved” by Martin Creed’s on-off light. Perhaps she was, but I doubt it. It is impossible to believe in the views of those who are moved, apparently so easily, by everything. In contrast to my dead response to fashionable art, a recently read novel, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, remains in my mind long after finishing it. The power and pathos of its images, the grandeur and originality of its spare prose, the agony of its message and the bleak kernel of hope it offers... these continually work upon me. They won’t be shifted. This is the thrill and sustenance of great art. It invades all the senses and, for want of any other purpose, helps ease the journey to the municipal furnace. At this point I come upon the flatulent claims made on behalf of the ‘shocking’ and ‘erotic’ art included in Tracey Emin’s room at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Its shallow, catchpenny tricks roused in me only derision. Nothing of this superficial trash is remotely profound or formally distinguished. None of it will endure beyond the confines of its promoting and investing clique. It fails conspicuously, yet it is lavishly praised and respectfully indulged. Why someone in a position of authority won’t break ranks and tell Emin to piss off and grow up I can’t begin to fathom. One exception exists to all of the above. A pathetic side-effect of advancing age is that virtually any art about war, from the highly serious down to the cheapest sentimentality, can in seconds reduce me to blubbing misery. A most exquisitely conceived memoir written by a young American nurse based on her service in Vietnam, read recently in a haunting matter-of-fact voice by Sigourney Weaver on the BBC World Service, made me shake. A mortally maimed young soldier in a field hospital whose death is imminent has choreographed his last breaths with his gentle and uncomprehending nurse. When he realises the end is near she has agreed that they will sing together his chosen song. In the middle of one hot, heartbreaking night the moment arrives... This intelligent boy’s last refrain sung in a foreign country for reasons he can’t explain is unforgettable. Shocking listeners out of their complacency, art worked its strong magic. It seems that the larger lessons of war are more likely to derive from small, intimate moments than they are from panoramic set pieces in which the individual’s tragedy is lost. Whether it is a casual utterance in La Grande Illusion or All Quiet on the Western Front, or even that harrowing opening sequence among the teeming crosses of a Normandy graveyard in Saving Private Ryan, the tears flow and the emotion leaves its mark. War moves. Whether it is a line from Christopher Sorley, who wrote mature poetry and was dead at 20, Wilfrid Owen or Siegfried Sassoon, one is emotionally undone by their finest efforts, inspired to anger, bitterness, pity, melancholy. Phrases bite into the nervous system like etcher’s acid. And whether it is a smokescreen of melodic strings when Vaughan Williams is at his most terrified before events, or the incomprehension of measureless destruction in a painting by Paul Nash, war moves. But not in contemporary art. Little in the State Art orbit can induce me on to a bus even once these days. So to traipse twice in consecutive weeks to St James’s must mean that, for whatever reason, some thing commands a second look if not a new thought. The thing is Fucking Hell, the Chapman Brothers’ extraordinary coup de théâtre housed in a dungeon beneath White Cube’s concrete premises – it’s another story how the gallery managed to win planning permission to build such a repellent bunker in the middle of an otherwise appealing period area. The Chapmans are an intriguing phenomenon. From Tate retrospective to Turner Prize nomination, their CV is impressive, their prices astronomical. Clever and apparently well-informed they have manipulated publicity to their advantage for well over a decade but have rarely produced art which scored, seared or soared. We chatter about the Chapmans but never ruminate in silence on the effect of their stunts. For all the discussion about them few would appear to regard them as more than fascinating epiphenomena of State Art. They can be entertaining and silly and are rarely avoid stultifyingly pretentiousness when called upon to defend the significance of their own work. Refreshingly outspoken about everyone, they are particularly disdainful and disobliging about the art world. And yet, in the end, they come to heel and play the celebrity game in precisely the same way as all the artists they purport to despise. Perhaps their bile assuages the guilt they feel at playing a game they know is rotten to the core. They are also prone, I note from their cuttings, to denouncing their critics as ‘fascists’ – a sloppy put-down commonly indicative of both political naïvety and poor education. One of them – I don’t know which, although possibly the one without the deformed hand – plays tennis gracelessly in my local park, clutching the racket in his fist like a truncheon and battering the ball as hard as he can into the bottom of the net: my son and I greatly enjoy mocking this perfectly idiotic macho spectacle. The brothers are adept at eyecatching and moderately controversial initiatives; girls with penises for noses and anuses for mouths, copulating dolls, and ranks of ‘primitive’ sculptures concealing burger logos... that sort of stuff. Two similar hors d’oeuvres fill out the remaining rooms in their present offering. Continuing the practice they began with Goya’s Disasters of War, by which they doodle on the original work of others, they have bought up watercolours allegedly by Hitler and drawn sunbursts and rainbow skies upon them. OK. Upstairs, Victorian hack portraits of the sort knocked down for pounds in regional auctions have had their faces deformed with daft noses and ghastly war wounds of the sort which inspired Francis Bacon. OK. Fucking Hell, however, has more stamina than such quickly exhausted caperings. An ambitious and impressive work, four year’s labour for a team of assistants no less, its big theme demands considered response. It is the replacement work for an antecedent in the same modelled genre called Hell, which was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 2001 from where it was bought for – it was claimed – £500,000 by Charles Saatchi. Regrettably, this was lost along with hundreds of other stored artworks in the Great Fire of Leyton in 2004. In faintly comic-book form, Hell illustrated Nazi depravities mainly the Holocaust. On the two occasions I saw it, it didn’t strike me as any more than a magnificent toy. Big on sensation it was thin on subtlety and completely void of poetry. Fucking Hell is even less subtle. Better organised, it is epic in detail. For the record, it is not an imagined description of Hell, in the sense that Traini’s Pisa fresco or the mosaic in Torcello cathedral were intended to be. This is a literal interpretation taking place in our world and unfolding in apparently real time. For those of you still intending to see it, it is better you know nothing about it and allow yourself the stimulus of seeing it fresh. My understanding was greater on my first visit when necessarily forced to answer questions. On the second, following interim consultation with a largely unreadable and overpriced catalogue (a waste of money at £30 – I’ll accept twenty for mine), the mystery is spoiled by explanation. So if you intend visiting before it closes on July 12th stop reading now. Nine large glass cases are configured – as with Hell – in the shape of a swastika. Each contains literally thousands of tiny, toy soldier-like figures. Murder is all about. Everywhere are clustered trophy-heads on the end of long pikes and lances – the Rout of San Romano grislified. Dismembered bodies and emaciated prisoners are viciously marshalled by uniformed soldiers themselves behaving like mutant walking dead. It is a scene of blanket slaughter, the reality of which would be quickly maddening to any normal person who by miscalculation wandered into it. Though a narrative seems to be unfolding in the episodic manner of a film, it is still hard to follow. A road with a procession of saluting Hitlers and tanks snakes through and around the cases as though some deadly invasionary force has landed and is intent on imposing a death cult. In hills and valleys massacres are taking place and rivers, ponds, swamps and sea stagnate with gory flotsam. Truck loads of naked bodies are brutally fly-tipped down remote gulleys and endless carcases are butchered and packaged into barrels and mincers like so much supermarket meat. There are crucifixions sufficient to have satisfied even Cato’s bloodlust, bestiality in abundance, and the depraved, startling results of eugenic experiments. It is as though cruelty without rhyme or reason is all that now remains in a world where death is industrialised. The modelling is quite superb, each figure bespoke of pose within its type. Set pieces of laboratories and train sidings, temples and shelters are compelling contrivances in themselves. (Apologies for pedantry here, but a minor criticism obtains concerning the otherwise marvellous train. Few 2-10-0s, like the European engine featured, bore flanges on the middle set of driving wheels. Removal of the middle flange was the only way such long engines might negotiate even the slightest bend in the track.) In short, one can’t help being impressed, even overawed by the imaginative energy that has gone into Fucking Hell’s conception. Like one of those digitally enhanced battle scenes from the Lord of the Rings’ films, it is impossible not to be wowed by its ingenuity and attention to detail. In all of this mayhem, real events and characters impinge to the work’s disadvantage. Confusingly, historical figures blur the boundary between fiction and reality. Hitler himself features as an en plein air Sunday painter standing with his easel before a scene straight out of The Killing Fields: he paints a pleasant pastoral. Elsewhere, in a workshop, he appears to be stitching body shards together in pursuit of some Frankenstein creation, presumably the ‘maquette’ for his master race. In the factory attic above his floor hides, we are informed in the catalogue, Anne Frank. So frightened is she, it says, that she can’t play with her toys for fear of making noise. In another place slumped upon a miniature tank outside his seaside chalet is the angular physical wreckage of Stephen Hawking – token evil/mad scientist one assumes. Some distance offshore from his Bond-villain-like island retreat floats Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. This seemingly random inclusion is accurately re-created perhaps in order to emphasise the drift of even normal humans towards expedient cannibalism. Doubtless I’ve missed many other literal references. What on earth is all this about? Obviously war, man’s cruelty to man etc.. But beyond such generalities I’m not sure. It doesn’t tell us anything about the Nazis we didn’t know before, nor about the criminal mentality war can induce in even decent people. And despite the vast accumulation of unpleasantness on display, and the effortful excellence of its crafting, I’m not in the slightest moved by any of it. The fate of the cloned and deranged humanity, so unreal as they are, is a matter of indifference to me, in much the same way as I feel nothing for the mass-murders casually encountered on X-box war games. Any previous dread of war is no worse for having seen this. I imagine the Chapman Brothers think war a thoroughly revolting business, but I’m not certain this is their response. Perhaps they are furtive members of a perverse cult and to them this purge is their idea of heaven, and the title ironic. There is no way of knowing as no critical reference points enter. They have, after all, gone to a great deal more trouble than they need have done in order to demonstrate any pacifist message, if such were their objective. Neither is their any evidence here that the brothers actually feel anything or believe in something, or are arguing a cause. That kind of inspiration to communicate has been replaced by a surfeit of evidence. In fact there is so much of Fucking Hell that it swamps the ability to respond. I doubt even savage editing of its myriad repetitions would be likely to improve it. There is no more art or poetry here than might be discovered in the equally marvellous working models in the National Railway Museum. Magnificent as it is as an object, Fucking Hell fails the war test. Pleading for attention, it barks loudly but its bite is curiously toothless. It didn’t touch me or arouse pity. More pain imbues one line of a Sorley poem than all the decades of man-years of labour invested here. I suspect this is because the poet’s agony and distress were genuine. And here lies the failure of so much contemporary art – the claims made for it are so often demonstrably unwarranted. Subject matter is rarely truly felt. In the end I don’t believe the Chapman Brothers have any strong feelings about anything at all, most of all war, beyond a desire to be topical and noticed and talked about. Their record suggests that they will only ever be career strategists, willing pawns in the bankrupt and censorious apparatus that State Art has become. Sorley, Owen, Sassoon, Renoir, Brooke, the Nashes, Spencer, Bourke-White, Cartier-Bresson, Graves, Vaughan Williams, all were intimates of war. They had witnessed piles of fresh corpses and some of these were all that what was left of their friends and comrades-in-arms. As their references demonstrate, the Chapman Brothers don’t know war except second-hand. And it shows, and their lack of authentic feeling for the subject is not concealed by the painstaking effort they are prepared to make to persuade us of the opposite. There is a tremendous void at the heart of contemporary art. It is the void where feeling used to reside. David Lee | |||||
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