Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution: Royal Academy
Publication:   Talk  
Subject: 20th Century    

“Apocalypse”, the main exhibition this fall at London’s Royal Academy, looks set to be just as much of a shock-horror phenomenon as its controversial predecessor of three years ago, “Sensation”.

The new show, jointly selected by independent curator Max Wigram and the Royal Academy’s own exhibitions organiser, Norman Rosenthal, has as its centrepiece an elaborate figurative sculpture by young British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman depicting multitudinous scenes of rape, torture, mutilation and genocide. Arranged on a group of tables laid out in the shape of a swastika, and succinctly titled Hell, this grisly work may be taken to encapsulate its creators’ less than cheery view of the twentieth century. But it is also an epitome of its own time, embodying the deep attachment of artists right now to an aesthetics of violence, shock and outrage.

In the once serene world of the contemporary art exhibit there are, these days, bodies everywhere. American artist Robert Gober makes works resembling amputated human limbs that protrude from floor or wall. British sculptor Damien Hirst, whose raw (extremely raw) materials include neatly sliced pieces of dead animal, continues merrily chainsawing his way through enough carcases to fill an abbatoir. Meanwhile Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan devotes his energies to the creation of such monumental and theatrically morbid sculptures as La Nonna Ora (“The Ninth Hour”), a lifesize representation of Pope John Paul II as he might look if suddenly struck by a large meteorite.

Cattelan’s sculpture, with its crash-bang-wallop biblical symbolism, was an irresistible choice for inclusion in “Apocalypse”, and even though room couldn’t be found in the show for such luminaries of artful nastiness as Gober or Hirst there is certainly no shortage of the disturbing and the disconcerting. Other exhibits include Gregor Schneider’s Cellar, a dank, dark and forbiddingly claustrophobic installation approvingly compared by Max Wigram to the mass murderer’s cellar in The Silence of the Lambs; a multi-media piece by Mike Kelley, the principal theme of which is child abuse and its traumatic after-effects; Wolfgang Tillmans’s manipulated photographs of atom-bomb explosions; and Chris Cunningham’s flex, a short film in which a man and a woman beat one another up before proceeding to have highly energetic and extremely violent sex.

The London public’s response to the exhibition is unlikely to reach the heights of iconoclastic fervour aroused by “Sensation” in 1997, when Marcus Harvey’s portrait of the child-murderer Myra Hindley was physically attacked by protesters. But it can safely be assumed that the show will be a somewhat higher profile affair than, say, the Royal Academy’s recent exhibition of still life paintings by the eighteenth-century French master Chardin. Even before its opening “Apocalypse” attracted vast quantities of  media coverage, albeit mostly (and predictably) of an unfavourable nature. Max Wigram says he was initially disconcerted by what he calls “the manufactured indignation of the media” until he was reminded of the old adage “don’t read it, weigh it.” As the ticket office of Britain’s oldest and most august art institution readies itself for a siege it seems clear enough that, bad press or no, the shock tactics of contemporary art are very good for business.

Whereas the works in “Sensation” were drawn exclusively from the collection of advertising millionaire Charles Saatchi, “Apocalypse” is a conventionally curated show, albeit one unashamedly aimed at the youth end of the market. “There was a very strong feeling at the Academy, after ‘Sensation’, that we mustn’t lose the new young audience that we had managed to attract,” says Norman Rosenthal. Defending himself and his co-organiser against the charge of opportunistically sponsoring horror for horror’s own sake, he argues that much of the work included in “Apocalypse” is – contrary to appearances – venerably traditional. “Shock is nothing new in art,” he says. “It goes back to Greek tragedy. Think of the crucifixion itself … I don’t think there’s anything in our show quite as shocking as a man crucified on a cross and bleeding, as painted by Grunewald. There is a sense of apocalypse in every generation. When I was young we worried about the Bomb. Now we worry about GM foods and aids. But the potential for apocalypse is always there, and has always been there. So I see the artists in this exhibition pushing a tradition forward. There’s been Grunewald, Bruegel, Bosch, Callot, Goya … and now there are the Chapmans.”

The question of whether Chapman brothers Jake and Dinos belong in quite such elevated company remains moot. It is certainly true that there is a long-established tradition which casts the artist in the role of seeker after truth – a bold witness who goes to the limits of experience, confronts man’s seemingly infinite capacity for evil and degradation, and brings home to those less brave the unpalatable reality of what he finds there. Grunewald sought to make Christ’s suffering vivid and encouraging to the ill and infirm of his own time. Goya sought to reveal the chasm of atrocity into which Spain had been plunged by Napoleon’s despotism. Closer to modern times the Surrealists, who also famously courted shock and horror in their work, sought to plumb man’s inner depths and administer a jolting shock of recognition to complacent bourgeois sensibilities. But contemporary artists seem distinctly uneasy to claim that type of pioneering or heroic role for themselves, to judge by the ironic quotation marks suspended over so much of even the most visceral modern work – whether it’s the schlock-horror of Cattelan’s stricken Pope or the Chapmans’ own bloodbath of a tabletop tableau.

In Max Wigram’s opinion, the true theme of the Chapmans’ Hell  is the artists’ consciousness of their actual inability to encompass or truly empathise with the horrors of world history: “Thousands of impossibly minute figures are cut up and reconfigured to depict torture and genocide. It’s absurd. It’s too much. The more you look at the work the more you get used to it. The figures become metaphors, their repetition and their diminutive scale gradually erasing the shock until the whole sculpture becomes a toy…”

It may be that what “Apocalypse” dramatises most clearly of all, in its feverish way, is the contemporary artist’s sardonic, discontented sense of his own historical marginality; and perhaps it is really that same sense of marginality, rather than any deepseated sense of moral outrage permeating the zeitgeist, which accounts for the hysterical overkill of so many modern works of art. The hardest thing for artists today is simply getting heard, getting themselves noticed above the rising hubbub of a world blandly indifferent to their feelings, perceptions and struggles.

The nineteenth-century aesthete Walter Pater famously said that “all art aspires to the condition of music”: a dubiously sweeping generalisation, but one which could none the less be plausibly applied to the visual arts from his day to quite late in the twentieth century (from Whistler’s Nocturnes, say, to Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie). During that time artists still found it possible to assert their originality in largely formal terms: by exploring languages of abstraction, or by finding different ways to configure unorthodox working materials. How shockingly new, how uncompromisingly “radical”, Carl Andre’s mute arrangements of bricks once seemed. But not any more. These days, now that more or less anything one could ever imagine being “nominated” as art has made its way into the gallery, that type of formal innovation has itself effectively been reduced to the level of an academic convention. Small wonder that so many artists go in search of extreme and shocking content. It is (or at least so it may seem to them) all they have left.

It would be irresponsible to suggest that virtually every practising artist is in thrall to the poetics of violence; and even a deliberately crowdpulling show like “Apocalypse” contains more than enough understated or otherwise oblique work to demonstrate the perils of such oversimplification. But caveats aside, it is still true to say that rarely have so many artists expended so much collective effort in the attempt to stun and disorientate their audience. All of which may help to explain why so much art now – to modify Pater’s formulation – seems to aspire to the condition of the freak show or fairground spectacular; and why visitors trooping from “Apocalypse” to rival attractions like The London Dungeon or Madame Tussaud’s may be surprised by the extent to which each offers an experience curiously similar in kind.