Art Review - March Issue - (Page 137)
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labour-intensive studios around. While others, particularly the more
iconic pieces, such as the 1994 reworking of Goya’s Great Deeds against
the Dead or Zygotic acceleration, biogenetic de-subliminated libidinal
model enlarged x 1000 1995 , seem to be finely layered through the
display and storage conditions of collections private and public. It’s
striking how this interchange a ects the reading of these works, for while
some have been in existence for a decade or more, their appearance here at
the Tate reminds us that the moral dust surrounding their activities has
likewise settled, with the possibility of providing a clearer view of the
battlefield. As expected, the transgressive act surfaces almost to the
point of exhaustion in the use of subject matter and methods, tactics
encapsulated in the Chapmans’ reworkings of two sets of prints from
Goya’s Disasters of War 1810–20 . In Injury to Insult to Injury 2004
the relentless grin of a rampant mock-adolescent mind drawn over the
protagonists’ heads greets the viewer, as the terrible actions in these
celebrated tableaux unfold. It’s a defining principle of the
avant-garde’s Oedipal gesture that recalls Duchamp’s rendering of a
moustache over a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. Similarly, another set,
Like a Dog Returns to Its Vomit 2005 , has the framed images configured
in the shape of its own shitting dog of war, fizzing with absurdly
comical hand-tinted etchings. On it goes. There’s seven full rooms of
this, and the distinctions between parody, satire and the spectacle of
entertainment become increasingly confused. Other avant-garde strategies
recur in Hell Sixty Five Million Years BC 2004–5 , a room filled with
plinths, each presenting their own a ectionately made, brightly painted,
mixed-mediaconstructed dinosaurs. In some pieces it’s hard to avoid
considering the postwar assemblages of Dubu et, or early cubist sculpture,
or the aesthetic discoveries of tribal sculpture, and their subsequent
looting by artists bent on newer horizons of modernity. That’s the
point. Except here, the papiermâché dinosaurs have been produced from a
huge supply of toilet paper. A scatological metaphor for our own state of
inner cultural anxiety, or of our postmodern disenchantment with the
promise of creativity? After all, perhaps even our most original ideas
aren’t our own… Above it all, a papier-mâché meteorite prepares to
deliver its deathly end, cutting short this recursively primitive scene of
creative arrested-development. The miniature epics of four separate cases
of recently produced ‘hellscapes’ pick up where the mammoth,
fire-destroyed Hell 1999 left o , promising even fuller e ects of
apocalyptic vertigo, producing wildly diverging forms of negation, in an
endless cycle of carnage on a mass scale. Perhaps the lost original serves
as a psychological reminder of a ghost they feel necessary to revisit in
still further acts of laborious redundancy. The reconstructed space of a
saddened wallpapered room stands alone to form a mock studio in Painting
for Pleasure and Profit 2006 . Filled wall-to-wall with oil portraits of
their paying subjects, undertaken in a production line of sittings at the
last Frieze Art Fair, the space is littered with the creative detritus of
unspent canvases: oils, bottles of white spirit, cloths and empty lager
bottles lie in testimony to their activity – like a performance residue,
but with all the tops screwed on safely, in an attitude contradictory to
the work’s spirit. Somehow unsurprisingly, and in contrast to the
others, a portrait of what looks like a well-known collector gets o
lightly – not a penis or vulva in sight. To explore the contract of
exchange between artist and patron seems somehow better suited to the
spectacle of its original context than here, giving weight to a
realisation that not everything is best seen in the light of looking
backwards. David Osbaldeston Hell Sixty Five Million Years BC, 2004-5,
toilet roll, cardboard, newspaper, glue, poster paint, bronze, dimensions
variable. Photo: Markus Tretter. © the artists. Courtesy Kunsthaus
Bregenz, Bregenz p135-149 Reviews AR Mar07.indd 137 31/1/07 12:52:57 Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - March Issue
Manifesto
Dispatches
Consumed
Tales from the City
David Lynch
Marcel Dzama
Future Greats
Art Pilgrimage: Moscow
Mixed Media: Moving Images
Mixed Media: Photography
Mixed Media: Digital
Reviews
Book Reviews
On the Town
On the Record
Art Review - March Issue
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