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27/11/2008

Jake and Dinos Chapman

Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover

With Jake and Dinos Chapman, the kestnergesellschaft brings two of the most important currant British artists to Hanover. Emerging under the label of Young British Artists in the 1990’s, the brothers’ art is scandalous and provocative. Behind the shocking appearance on the surface, however, there is an intense engagement with themes of humanity and moral behaviour like humankind’s capacity for violence, barbarism and war.

“memento moronika” brings together different groups of works and thus demonstrates the diversity of the Chapmans’ picture language and techniques. Composed of toilet paper rolls, cardboard and poster paint, the new sculptures Hell Sixty-Five Million Years BC (2004 – 2005) or Two Legs Bad, Four Legs Good (2007) seem, in their unique and rough materiality, harmless when contrasted with the painted bronze sculptures, Little Death Machines (2008). The impression of dilettantish or infantile clumsiness, however, is deceiving, because the individual works hold a pivotal thematic position in the context of the brothers’ overall oeuvre. The title, Hell Sixty-Five Million Years BC, refers to what is certainly the most ambitious and excessive work in the Chapmans’ oeuvre which was destroyed by fire in 2004: Hell (1999 – 2000), a tableau masterpiece consisting of more than thirty thousand tiny crafted figures which, mostly clothed in Nazi uniforms, carry out horrible acts of cruelty. Even though Hell Sixty-Five Million Years BC, with its primeval dinosaurs, presents an entirely different motif, it is plausible to understand this work as a continuation of Hell. The graphic series, Etchasketchathon (2005) and If you eat meat digest this II (2005) oscillate between the previous works’ themes and Chapman’s newest visual world, too. While the former goes back to motives of children’s colouring books, the latter combines pictures of tortured animals with images from earlier works. Relating to their own creative process, all the works on paper have to be considered as self-referential. The Victorian portraits in Memento Moronika, under the title of One day you’ll no longer be loved, are visual novelties on the one hand. On the other hand, the Chapmans follow a strategy they have already put to the test on graphics by Goya: Painting onto the original work.

explaining dinosaurs to christians
[Jake Chapman, excerpt]

It is very common knowledge that a period of profound chaos persisted on Earth before order was established, and that a time of extreme primeval pandemonium was necessary to allow Nature to fully flex itself in the dynamic manner of a gastrulating egg, in readiness for Adam’s rib to create Eve and the ensuing reproduction cycle of human life to begin. And yet, within this period of turmoil the world was inhabited by chimeras and monstrous beings of sublime form, vindictive creatures appearing to contradict the very image and premonitary paradise depicted in the Bible. Distributed across the Earth’s surface, evidence of these creature’s existence can be witnessed in any natural history museum in any capital city anywhere in the whole wide world. Paleobiochemical carbon dating has suggested the last of these monsters – or dinosaurs – died at least 65 million years ago, and it is fossil evidence which betrays their unequivocal presence upon the planet. Fossils represent the flesh and bone of dinosaurs having been compressed under the articulated weight of metamorphic rock. In death, allocated hydrocarbon atoms acquiesce with an organism’s termination as a process of inevitable mineral redeployment. Under extreme environmental pressure pneumatic H2O seeps down through sedimentary rock, permeating the interred fibre of dead bone, leeching out the marrow congregation, depositing silicon and calcium atoms, replacing organic hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon.The schematic substitution of organic by pseudomorphic material occurs very slowly, atom by atom – a meticulous replacement process causing little or no disturbance to the whole. Eventually only the structure of the skeletal organic material is retained while its chemical content is entirely transformed. Organic bone is flushed away and replaced by inert stone.The radical discovery of fossil remains could be a matter of heresy to advocates of Divine Creation, while acting as solid proof to the claims of humanistic atheism.The vision of super-organic aberrations preceding human life introduces the problem of an unimaginably expansive time-scale for Christians, while the discovery of complex fossils introduces a further dilemma – the persistence of matter acting beyond the limits of salvation and eternal life. Fossils betray their atheism by outliving the ragged flesh and lipid husk that clings to skeletal armatures for dear life. Such ontological ornamentations form temporary entanglements in the desperate hope of metaphysical salvation, and yet the only form of credible transcendence in real terms is in the petrified form of the fossil. The fossil is living proof of life after death. As one atheistic geologist has elegantly described, ‘Life is not life, but rock re-organising itself under the sun’. One might add that compound skeletal material itself is made up of calcium phosphate, which is a precipitated ancient sea salt decomposed from rock. Complete fossil skeletons of dinosaurs have been found, so that we know how they looked.They were reptiles, and evolved from the small crocodile-like creatures from the Permian.They existed on planet Earth for 140 million years, all through the Mesozoic era which is categorically divided into three distinct periods: theTriassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous.The first dinosaurs appeared in the lateTriassic, just over 200 million years ago, at about the time that the continuous super-continent of Pangaea began to break up and separate. During the rest of the Mesozoic era dinosaurs ruled the world.They were various, of many kinds, many colours and shapes and forms.The largest of all, theTyrannosaurus, towered to at least 20 feet, and walked with an anthropoid gait, upright on its two powerful hind legs – its front legs were very little, almost thalidomide. Super- predatorTyrannosaurus had formidable front teeth and the capacity to exterminate every single other animal alive. Other dinosaurs favoured great big huge gouging claws, used to eviscerate and tear their victims into tiny quivering pieces of mangled flesh - others were covered with tectonic armour plates to stop them doing this to them. Not all dinosaurs were carnivorous since some appear to have been petite and harmless and had nucleated families and monogamous reproductive mates. Some Dinosaurs evolved the capacity to fly – or at least glide free-as-a-bird from tree to tree to tree to tree to tree to ground.These dinosaurs are called Pterodactyls, which flew above the surface of the Earth 150 million years ago.

Image: Jake & Dinos Chapman, Etchasketchathon © the artists. Courtesy: Jay Jopling | White Cube (London)

A catalogue will accompany the exhibition, with texts by Jake Chapman, Veit Görner and Kristin Schrader

For press photographs and more information please contact Judith Reitter tel +49 511 7012016, fax +49 511 7012020 presse@kestner.org

Kestnergesellschaft
Goseriede 11 - Hannover
Opening hours daily 10 am – 7 pm
December 25 and 26 (Christmas) 2008, 10 am – 7 pm
January 1, (New Year’s Day) 2009, 10 am – 7 pm
December 24 and 31, (Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve) 10 am – 2 pm thursdays 10 am – 9 pm
closed on mondays

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