Art

It could be the death of art as we know it. Two shows currently on at two of the most important commercial galleries in London represent emphatic end points for the traditional art practices of painting and sculpting. Just as the futurists called on their followers to demolish museums for being ‘absurd abattoirs’ and ‘cemeteries of empty exertion’ in their manifesto of 1909, here are two examples of artists rejecting the preciousness and beauty of all that has gone before them, in order to strike out on their own paths.

First up is a grisly return to form for the Chapman brothers, Jake and Dinos, at White Cube. There’s a conventional- looking hall of portrait paintings to greet you, until closer inspection reveals that the ladies and gentlemen recorded for ancestral posterity have been realistically ruined by the finest sable brushwork, leaving them horribly disfigured with bulging eyes, bloodied faces and skeletal features. We don’t really care who these people were or who first painted their perfectly acceptable portraits in oil because the cheeky Chapmans clearly don’t either. Their macabre alterations to the historical heads recalls Duchamp’s plea that ‘The dead should not be permitted to be so much stronger than the living.’

The main event is downstairs, where the writhing, hallucinatory dioramas of ‘Fucking Hell’ are installed in nine separate glass vitrines, which could also be open sarcophagi or rusty, man-sized cages. Each is a vision of destruction and despair, meted out by undead Nazi soldiers rendered as mutated plastic figurines in a bleak landscape of flawless model-railway detail. The complexity of the scenes is bewildering and stunning. Nestled among thousands of tiny torn-up torsos and body parts are moments of sheer farce, such as a baby Hitler’s baptism in a burnt-down church or an adult Führer perched on the side of a mass grave, painting a pink house and sunny sky at his easel. Humour and horror are given the same deathly grey patina, whether it’s a three-headed babe playing with a beach ball on the banks of a blood-red lake or a man sucking milk from a sow in a Panzer tank.

Of course, none of this is exactly new. ‘Fucking Hell’ was commissioned by Louis Vuitton owner François Pinault to be a bigger and badder version of the Chapmans’ original ‘Hell’ of 2000 that was destroyed in a fire at Charles Saatchi’s storage depot four years ago. In turn, these gory battle scenes owe much to painters such as Ucello or Bosch of 500 years previous, while the Chapmans began defacing and ‘disimproving’ others’ work a long time ago, first in perverse homage to Goya. If the futurists were right to think that ‘Art can only be violence, cruelty and injustice’, then the Chapman brothers’ show is the spectacular apotheosis of this belief. Morally, they inhabit an ambiguous position somewhere between National Socialism and the Entartete Kunst, or Degenerate Art that the Nazis loathed, making ‘Fucking Hell’ both a masterpiece that takes no prisoners and a travesty of art at the same time.

Repeating yourself as an artist is not always a good thing, especially in an art world obsessed with the new. Tom Friedman’s puerile solo show, ‘Monsters and Stuff’ at Gagosian is an enjoyable, if slightly tired reworking of the American artist’s greatest hits, which have included glueing together hundreds of toothpicks, miles of dental floss and scores of Styrofoam cups.

He’s the slacker generation’s Robert Gober (which is to say his sculpture is seriously playful) and finds all his material at the mini-mart: cereal boxes are cut into tiny squares and elongated to three times their height, trashy porn magazines are shredded into spiralling confetti collages or pulped to make a shambling life-size zombie.

Friedman has the potential to be as iconoclastic as the Chapmans, but stops short of their all-out assault tactics. Instead of painting over or scandalising past art, he makes his out of cheap crap and then miniaturises or super-sizes it. His is the kind of work that might get accidentally swept up and put in the bin – a neat row of rolled-up snot balls on a shelf, the ‘Artist’s boogers’, and a flimsy construction entitled ‘Gods and wads of paper’ could easily meet their maker with one swift sneeze.

It’s maximum effort for minimal effect, but, as with the Chapmans, you sense that Friedman relies on hoards of assistants and helpers nowadays and is much less hands-on with these mind-boggling, Herculean feats of artistic labour himself. What’s left is still deliciously crummy and low-rent in comparison with most recent art – his butt-ugly ‘Green Demon’ made from globules of foam filler is worthy of a Japanese B-movie, while other pieces wear scattered clumps of Friedman’s own pubic, underarm and head hair like apologetic artist’s signatures.

When the time comes to storm the museums and burn and pillage the history of art, Jake and Dinos Chapman will surely beat the front of the queue. And however slight the usually brilliant Friedman’s one-liners are becoming, they’re still great jokes at the expense of the stuffiness of most art. Let’s hope these fortysomething men never grow up.