According to Jake and Dinos Chapman, “When our sculptures work they achieve the position of reducing the viewer to a state of absolute moral panic … they’re completely troublesome objects.” The tongue-in-cheek subtitle of their current exhibition at Tate Liverpool - a first retrospective for these British brothers in art, born in 1962 and 1966 respectively – is “Bad Art for Bad People”. The art on display is notable for the careful consistency of its over-the-top tastelessness. Child mannequins with penises for noses, and anuses or vaginas where mouths might be expected to be found, loiter with no apparent good intent. Vast tableaux of diminutive armed figures, arranged in glass cases somewhat resembling the displays of tin soldiers in old-fashioned toy shops, reenact the polymorphously perverse atrocities and tortures of twentieth-century history. A broken masturbating machine, consisting of a dusty anatomical model of a human brain, hooked up by various cogs and levers to a mechanised phallus, lies idle in a glass vitrine.

The implication behind the installation is clear enough. Nothing is sacred, nothing immune to attack, defacement or distortion. Yet the artists come across, cumulatively, as nostalgic intellectuals with a positively academic attachment to the modernist traditions of aesthetic disturbance and disruption they both claim as their own and, it seems, feel bound to refute. They are nearly-but-not-quite modern-day Dadaists – artists of protest who are, yet, too wise to the clichés and preconceptions of the supposedly radical inheritance of early modern art to take it entirely seriously. Their work often looks as though it just might be meant to shock in the same ways as – for example - a readymade by Marcel Duchamp or an anatomically distorted and sexualised doll by the Surrealist Hans Bellmer. But the suspicion remains that what the artists are really engaged...

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