Rude Awakening

In Pasolini's film Salo, two characters on a balcony watch the tortures taking place below. As if to distance themselves from the carnage, however, they stare at the proceedings through the wrong end of their binoculars. Kinky? Perhaps. Or does their reaction parallel our own? Living vicariously through artworks involves capturing reality while dissociating oneself from it. After all, ownership - even temporary, visual ownership - requires defences. Hence the lordly disdain. Sculpture in particular, depends on this type of irony, since it does not inhabit a visual climate as alien as painting. It looks real, feels solid, occupies actual space. Indeed, only by functioning as a souvenir or a maquette can it be relieved of its burden of actuality. Or perhaps this never really happens, and the virtual is simply present or not, like a graft, a fact which accentuates the dual aspect of its existence.

Small sculptures with separate bases are packed together on a single plinth. Each depicts a detailed incident. Since there are eighty-three of these, all demanding attention, the godlike panorama the visitor is granted proves less advantageous that it might. For each contains the same elements: a tree, a plot of grass and naked figures - tied, mutilated, bleeding and abandoned, dead or left for dead. Vertical, diagonal, upside-down, in more permutations of pose than could be imagined, they work in quite opposite ways: while they exercise the mind as variations on an abstract theme, they offer a spectacle of improbable violence, all the more bloodthirsty because the grassy knolls on which the forked tree-trunks are planted remind us of the bases on train-sets or farmyard models. And, of course, toyshops operate on a level of carnage that no abattoir could rival. That the spectacle could also verge on humour may not be one's first thought. It finally dawns, however, when, like the Fat Boy in 'The Pickwick Papers', the artist wants 'to make your flesh creep'. And where the inhabitants of Dingley Dell viewed this prospect with alarm - 'The Fat Boy has run mad again!' - we giggle with embarrassment at the composite artist, the Brothers Chapman, but pay them no real attention. Indeed, as the Marquis de Sade realised, a surplus of sex and violence can leave the witness unmoved.

This is not the only occasion on which Jake & Dinos Chapman have deliberately offended their audience, however. The first was at the outset of their partnership, when they made a statement in mud on a white wall: a definition of themselves in almost purely scatological terms, which, like the habitual use of bad language, reduced the force of the obscenity until only the phatic element remained. The very idea of swearing in print is nullifying. But the Chapmans' stock-in-trade is grossness on the one hand and circumlocution on the other. That the slaughter had already been depicted altered the setting on the binoculars once again. For the Chapmans' poses were taken directly from Francisco Goya's etchings, in which his powers of objective reporting deserted him and his reactions verged on the manic. The idea of castration, in particular, seems to have resulted in a rush of unbridled emotion as Goya lost control, cancelling the genitals of the murdered men with some of the force that the enemy had already employed. Admittedly, this was a reaction rather than a considered tactic, but one which ends by seeming paradoxical if not completely contradictory. The Chapmans' focus is on aporia, a far point at which the conventions that govern the chosen mode are pushed to their limits and therefore clarified as conventions. And by indicating an emotional surfeit in Goya's work, which destroys the entire framework he had accepted - in other words by identifying a weakness in the conception of his work - the Chapmans located their own niche.

The binoculars were adjusted differently when another work, a set of single, life-sized sculptures, was shown in London in October 1994. On a plinth, a grassy knoll was depicted with a single, leafless, gibbet-like tree to which three naked men were attached, in various states of incompleteness. A severed head appeared on one branch, while a pair of arms tied together at the wrists dangled from another. One of the figures seemed to have fallen with his head down and his legs in the air, while a third resembled the crucified Christ: tenderly positioned, arms elegantly outstretched. All three men had been castrated, leaving a bloody triangle at the base of the stomach, through which tendons and veins were visible, drained of blood. Suavity triumphed over realism, however: the victims resembled mannequins, with that overly cosmeticised look that shop-window dummies and religious statuary have in common. Human scale had altered the meaning. Before, death was cheap, now it was simply enigmatic. From Goya's prints, with their own private madness, to a cluster of defeated soldiers, their bodies displayed as a public warning, to a parodied crucifixion, with Jesus and the two thieves on Calvary... The larger the size, the higher the stakes, and the more potential there was for degrading the image, which mysteriously acquired cosmetic colouring, as if black were the natural habitat of such misery and the nearer the approach to verisimilitude, the further it retreated. Life-sized, as if in a shop window - an impression heightened by the fact that this was the only work in the gallery - the figures took on imitation flesh-tones too dainty to be plausible. And while realism as a project was ousted, the truth of effigies, like the scarecrow or the November 5th Guy, was ratified. How strange that false base seemed: a reconstruction of something that had only ever been a mock presence, like the island on which the smelly mariner Philoctetes is marooned in the Greek tragedy of the same name. Or even more like the cardboard Naxos on which Ariadne is discovered in the Strauss/ Hofmannsthal opera, featuring an opera within an opera, a stage set within a stage set and the sensation of regressus in infinitum, that hall of mirrors effect which unravels ideas of certitude.

'We are artists. We are sore-eyed, scopophiliac oxymorons, or at least we are aristocrats, under siege from our feudal heritage. The graphic promise of our absent yet sonorous letraset honours the dead (and the bad conscience) of past generations, a recollection of the discordance between concepts and pictures. Our discourse offers a benevolent contingency of concepts, a discourse of end-of-sale remnants, a rationalistic hotbed of sober categories. We have manufactured our products according to the market demands of a deconstructive imperative, and policed them according to the rules of an industrial dispute - our bread is buttered on both sides...' Beginning in 1992 with a deliberately inflammatory statement of intent, disinheriting themselves from former work which they now regarded as following a 'party line' of conceptualist/ post-structuralist thinking, the Chapmans submitted themselves to what Jake Chapman has referred to as 'almost a rebirthing technique'. It was a farewell to an approach to artmaking as a manipulation of signs and signifiers, and the beginning of an investigation into the consequences of espousing pleasure and excitement. ('Even speaking economically, art is an excess', he has remarked.) Freud talked about the pleasure principle doing battle with the reality principle and speculated on forms of repression. For example, Goya concentrated on a political skirmish between the aims of the Enlightenment (represented by the French) and the moral position of the peasants who deplored it. And Freud's essay 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' could be thought of as undermining the whole of his previous work. The Chapmans' reading of that text is as a description of an artistic nirvana, a way of returning to some kind of intimacy with objects, 'intimacy' in this case meaning communion without conscious judgement or measurement. The results of such an approach are described in another manifesto called Blood, Shit and Semen: A Study in Perpetual Motion, written by Jake and illustrated by Dinos Chapman. 'I'll come clean and donate the following as a religiously personal and purgative document,' it begins. 'I want to rub salt into your inferiority complex, smash your ego in the face, gouge your eyes from their sockets and piss in the empty holes - give you what you've never had: a true-real experience.' Mismatching technique and subject-matter, indeed using the same technique only once, while striving to produce not an anti-aesthetic but what they call a 'terrorist' aesthetic, the Brothers Chapman made it their business to disgust.

In 1993, they constructed a machine in which pulleys and spindles set off a hammer which fell repeatedly onto a mould of a brain. The result was a strange toy. Indeed, most of their works could be regarded as toys: little studies in sex and death with no inherent value, sentimental or financial, gewgaws that existed only to give pleasure. Yet as with many toys, the type of pleasure derived tends to be suspect in light of normal moral codes. 'We're caught in the imminence of such terms as good and bad as well as in the ethics of that. People like Bataille propose a religion of evil which is neither good nor bad but which is certainly religious.' (Another word purloined from Georges Bataille is 'intimacy', which he uses in a quasi-religious sense.) The new works need not have focused on Goya at all, though there is an advantage in borrowing from someone, since the work is degraded from the start. Indeed, Goya is irrelevant, and even by this time, old hat for the brothers themselves, who scaled up one section of their Disasters of War in order to make their current, life-sized, three-man atrocity. Like Koons and Steinbach, the Chapmans make art in order to generate criticism which then becomes part of the work. Unlike them, the brothers' critique of their own practise is severe. 'We have always been functions of a discourse' they continued in their wall-drawing; 'In short, our subjectivity (our labour) deserves professional interpretation, our mental agitation demands a limitless expressionism, our contractual teleology demonstrates our servility to a cultural climax never to be experienced. The future remains excluded. But sometimes, against the freedom of work, we phantasise emancipation from this liberal polity, into a superheavyweight no-holds-barred all-in mud-wrestling league, a scatological aesthetics for the tired of seeing.' The result might be good old English nonsense, but, like good old English nonsense, it has its uses.

It parodies British snobbery, for example, and the class-ridden British art world. It even parodies the parodies of British snobbery. (The Chapmans' former employers were Gilbert & George, who began by pretending to be the right-wing old fuddy-duddies who hated men like themselves and ended by turning into exactly the reactionaries they had always pretended to be.) It parodies the techniques of clapped-out conceptualism. (Richard Long's pseudo-primitivistic wall drawings made in mud.) It shifts the arguments around art away from the reading of signs to matters of ethics and desire, away from the simulators' arid demonstrations. It opens up questions of childhood need and of adult sexuality. Above all, it makes us aware of what art cannot do. The shift from the small, tabletop Goya to its life-sized equivalent is a transformation, not a scaling up. Yet confronted by this, what is the viewer to feel? Awe? Pleasure? Disgust? Or some aesthetic feeling we do not have a name for? The easiest approach is to regard the work as a contemporary conversation piece, raising questions but leaving them unanswered. The Chapmans talk about a terrorist aesthetic rather than an anti-aesthetic, and their references to Georges Bataille, in particular, indicate the desire for the same embattled position which characterised the Surrealists, perhaps the last real European avant-garde. And though it is impossible to turn the clock back, the shock value of the newest works - a recent portrait of their parents, for example - there is no danger of their lacking philistines to battle against. The difference between the Chapmans' ways of annoying the bourgeoisie and the Surrealists' may be less great than it seems. There will always be people watching. The difference may be which setting the viewers choose for their binoculars.