Hell Hath No Fury ...

Yesterday I decided to go and take a gander at the current Jake and Dinos Chapman exhibition at the White Cube Mason's Yard If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be. Now, I must admit, I was very much in the dark with regards to this exhibition. I didn't know it was taking place, I didn't know the artists by name (though I recognized their earlier work), and I definitely had no idea what it was all about. This, of course (especially after having read up on it after the fact) makes me feel like a right ass, but that is neither here nor there. If anything, at least, it's always kind of interesting to go into something as a complete ignoramus (something recently stated in a Guardian blog post, though a bit more eloquently stated) since you have nothing but your aesthetic point of view to go by (and I guess some bits of art history that you can draw on - which anybody with a bit of an art history background will do). But to the work ...


The exhibition takes its name from the series of original watercolour drawings by Hitler that the Chapman brothers bought and then added upon with psychedelic rainbows and shapes. What's great about this collection (which was the last part of the show that I saw), was that I had no idea of their provenance when I was looking at them. I noticed the signatures, and I became suspicious when I noticed how aged they looked, but it seemed a little too weird to be true. I actually really enjoyed the images, not because Hitler's sketches were good or because he was the one who originally made them, but the intervention added a surreal and naive quality that reminded me a bit of Henry Darger.

Quoting Dinos from an article in the Independent:

He tried to get into art school with these. They are bland and show no presentiment of the genocide to come. They represent the husk of a man who would be filled up with bitterness and hatred. They are identical to thousands of drawings in junk shops. All they demonstrate is that they are a terrible work of art, not that the person behind them will become a tyrant.

Wondering how things would be different had Hitler a creative spark and been accepted into art school is a bit weird. Could he have turned out differently? Could he have been just another aspiring artist? And if he had made it in, who's to say he wouldn't have been broken a little further along the way? The artworld can be a cruel one. But I guess that's what really differentiates Hitler from Darger; Darger was clinical, but had a creative energy that he was able to channel - and he didn't need any approval to continue with his (tonnes of) work. But I digress ...

What I was really meaning to talk about was the intense diorama Fucking Hell a recently completed redux of the original Hell (1999) which was destroyed by fire in 2004:

HELL hath no fury
Like a chapman spurned,
So come see the second,
'Cos the first one burned.


I really quite enjoyed this work - it was very surreal, very engaging, and very sublime! I didn't recognize that the cases came together to become a giant swastika until I flipped through the exhibition catalogue but I gathered rather quickly that this was Nazi hell (death camp) for the Nazis. Some nice little touches, though, were the Hitler Factory sponsored (?) by McDonald's which produced some kind of radioactive ooze that produced hoards of zombies that would attack the Nazi soldiers intended to become new Hitlers ... at least that's what it looked like to me.


What's always fun about going to art galleries as well is hearing what the others are saying about as they wander around. I heard a pair of women bring in the art historical landscape tradition, and I've read elsewhere something about the Victorian display cases (and cabinets) of curiosities, and I know of a few people who couldn't resist comparing it to Warhammer. But it's basically a giant WWII diorama. They bring back all the WWII miniatures that the son of a family friend used to make as a teenager - they were always very exciting to me as a child. These are a bit more horrifying, but anybody who gets a kick out of gore and is susceptible to the sublime can gain some kind of (sick?) pleasure from this piece (a pleasure heightened by the fact that it did go up - or down? - in flames).

Although there was another room on the ground floor with a lot of great and creepy paintings, I'm going to stop here ... and with another quote from the Independent! But this time it's Jake on the reason for recreating Hell:

As an event, we couldn't fail to see something funny about hell being on fire. We couldn't imagine a world without hell and we wanted to rescue the work from the sentimentality that some clothed it in after it was burned. There was an affection for the work that did not exist when it was there as an object before the fire.

(I imagine it's also a lot easier to laugh when your recreation goes for £7.5m!)

*All images are from the Independent article on the exhibition except for the church scene which comes from Juxtapoz*