Standing there among all the Sensation hubbub, somehow overshadowed by issues of elephant dung, were 21 child-sized mannequins wearing identical running shoes and standing in a circle. Some had penises where their noses should be, some had anuses in lieu of...
[more]Standing there among all the Sensation hubbub, somehow overshadowed by issues of elephant dung, were 21 child-sized mannequins wearing identical running shoes and standing in a circle. Some had penises where their noses should be, some had anuses in lieu of mouths, and vaginas melded the ring of bodies together.
Jake and Dinos Chapman, creators of "Zygotic acceleration, biogenetic, de-sublimated libidinal model (enlarged x 1000)" were astonishingly overlooked during the Brooklyn Art Museum fiasco of 1999, but they've been making waves in Britain for years.
The brothers Chapman began working as an artistic team in the early '90s, claiming that their partnership was more political than familial; by working together, they said, they could reduce the impact of the individual ego on the work. With a creative process structured through "antagonism and hostility" (as they put it), the siblings demonstrated a flare for the grotesque from day one. Their first solo exhibition, "We are Artists," was an "anti-aesthetic manifesto" that splashed excrement on walls as if it was brown paint.
The team soon hit upon the fiberglass mannequins that were to become their prime medium -- the following year, they unveiled a horrifying diorama of mannequins modeled after Goya's "Disasters of War". The second installment in this series, "Great Deeds against the Dead," featured three castrated soldiers tied to a tree. In 1996's "Tragic Anatomies" the Chapmans introduced the generic, mutated children who would populate many of their future installations.
The creatures, which the artists refer to as "organisms," romp through a sterile forest of astro-turf and plastic leaves in yet another exploration of Freudianism and monstrosity. However, the Chapmans' creations do not glorify aberration -- instead, they represent the possibility of permutation, using human bodies instead of abstract shapes as a starting point.
For these unsettling preoccupations the Chapmans make no apologies. "Political correctness lends itself as a phallic maypole around which all the naughty children skip and play and recite obscene rhymes," they once replied in an interview. "We are only doing what has always been required of us."
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