Post #13832 by Trader Woody on Fri, Nov 15, 2002 9:47 AM

bigbrotiki wrote:
I would be curious to find out if the artists themselves made these, or, as I suspect, found Oceanic natives, artisans that mass-produce airport art for tourists, and commisioned these pieces from them

I assume that they were made by Oceanic craftsmen, specially commissioned by the artists. I've been to a previous show by the Chapman Brothers, called Chapmanworld, where the exhibits were mannequins of children
but with peculiar deformities such as penis' for mouths and that kind of thing, (Very odd indeed!) and I assumed at the time that they commissioned some craftsmen to actually make them.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to go to the actual exhibit, and with a bit of luck I'll get a definitive answer. I'll try to get a few more photos as well, if photography is allowed.

Here's an article about the exhibit:
Laura Cumming
The Observer

At Jake and Dinos Chapman's new show - a spoof collection of ethnographic art - I was startled to see a man produce a notebook and begin reverently sketching one of the exhibits. Surely he must have realised the grimacing wooden figure was a fake, another bit of crafty work from the Chapman brothers' studio? Unless, perhaps, he was a plant in his own right - a hired hand employed to wander through the hushed darkness drawing the objects on their spotlit plinths: as if he were some earnest scholar and this a crepuscular outpost of the British Museum.

Credit to the Chapmans: their show looks properly authentic. Every object, pur portedly collected by generations of the Chapman family over 70 years, looks damaged, ancient and suitably Other. The idioms and genres are aped to perfection - masks, totems, fertility figures, shields and fetishes. If you were an art-innocent, hadn't heard of the Chapmans, didn't know their game, you might even be taken in for more than a few moments.

And there are some genuine plants here, or at least figures simply intended to look exactly like African and Oceanic sculptures. Masks with knob-like eyes and gaping, chasmic mouths; pregnant, crouching forms; grotesque distortions of head, legs or ears; copious use of cowrie shells and ritual scarification. But then you notice that one squatting wooden figure, still with its polychrome traces, is clutching a coke and a carton of fries. Or that a weird little hominid, reminiscent of that Hieronymous Bosch egg that gets about on human legs, is in fact a walking Big Mac - albeit with hideous slitty eyes - carved out of blackened wood.

There are other kinds of prank. A ceremonial mask has a hint of Bart Simpson about the hair. A reptilian funerary fetish grips nothing more sinister than joss sticks. Physiognomy is taken to the edge of cartoon: the double-headed monster bares both sets of teeth in a rueful Wallace and Gromit grin. But you will by now have guessed the key to the show, as carved on the back of a shield - the triumphant Golden Arches of McDonald's.

The 34 objects in the Chapman Family Collection offer a few art jokes as well - there's a good parody of one of Barry Flanagan's tiresome totemic hares; a frazzle-haired fertility figure is supported by a miniature version of Brancusi's Endless Column (but then consider where he got it). Indeed, for the more studiously inclined, I suppose the show will occasion various thoughts about modernism's use or abuse of primitive art, all the way from cubism and surrealism to expressionism onwards.

But as for the heavy gag about commodity fetishism, is it any more than wordplay or pun? Only the humourless could possibly believe the Chapmans were advancing any theories about twenty-first-century capitalism, or proposing the Burger as God, or McDonald's as cult. And only the most literal-minded among the humourless could get worked up about the Chapmans' pastiche of ethnographic art. None of the objects on show have a fraction of the unnerving beauty or terribilitá of the genuine articles - nor is this intended. Their incitement is deliberately and gleefully childish.

A couple of years ago, Jake and Dinos Chapman showed their scale-model of hell - thousands of inch-high Nazis being tortured by those mutant mannequins that were once the brothers' trademark, all done in a toyshop aesthetic of spongy furze and enamel paint. Some people claimed to see the true heart of twentieth-century darkness in this boxed diorama, for all its nods to Hollywood and Humbrol. But this teensy hell, mediated through multiple media, had more the character of farce.

So it is here, with these bastardised and bathetic icons, more farcical than fierce - yet somehow not quite comic and not quite compelling as a spectacle. The impediment this time is the craftmanship itself. What you are most aware of in this show is the sheer skill of the artists, their ability to manufacture fakes, to replicate the surface characteristics of priceless artefacts right down to the chisel-mark. For these endeavours they have earned a million pounds from Charles Saatchi, the supreme commodifier of contemporary art - surely a too-perfect coda to the Chapman brothers' joke.

Trader Woody

[ Edited by: Trader Woody on 2002-11-15 09:49 ]