Photo by Ben Westoby. Courtesy of White Cube
White Cube Mason’s Yard and Hoxton Square
Opening Hours: 10 – 6pm Tuesday – Saturday
15 July – 17 September 2011
In homage to the gimmickry of separating the artistic pair and leaving the audience guessing, this is a review of either Jake or Dinos Chapman at either Mason’s Yard or Hoxton Square.
The best thing about Jake or Dinos Chapman, exhibiting simultaneously at both White Cube galleries is, on the face of it, the most boring. Forty-seven corrugated cardboard sculptures on the ground floor at Mason’s Yard (or Hoxton Square) tread somewhere between a naïve pastiche school project by a genius child and a deliberate lazy spoof by an adult buffoon.
Fortunately, they balance delightfully on a tightrope in the middle. The aged painted sculptures would indeed fall by the wayside were it not for the simple addition of white typewritten labels using language not unfamiliar to anyone versed in Chapman Brother mythology; “Potlatch”, “Stump”, “Smear”, “9/111/2”, “The curse of common sense” and “Runt”. Adding these words has a modernising effect on the sculptures and coupled with the implicit simplicity of painted cardboard, lifts them from being unnotable props to subtly engaging artworks.
The real action of the exhibition takes place on the lower-ground floor as it is called at Mason’s Yard (or Hox…). A handful of similar looking sculptures, this time made of black-painted steel and towering around three metres in height, provide perches for taxidermied pigeons and crows, as well as, focal points for gatherings of menacing flayed mannequins dressed in Nazi uniforms.
The four walls are hung with grey painted etchings (Human Rainbow 1 – 38), pencil drawings on dot-to-dot printed pages (various titles quoting ‘weird fiction’ pioneer HP Lovecraft), photogravures of artworks shoehorned via collage into home collections (Living with dead art 1- 10) and eighty messily blackened Goya etchings (From the blackened beyond).
On the same floor in the dimly lit lift lobby stands a Ku Klux Klan mannequin whose lower half is marked out by colourful tie-dye, rainbow socks with sandals and an erection pointing at an intricately defaced Pieter Brueghel painting. This confusion of loaded provocative symbolism draws little more than a visitor’s curious peek up the aroused mannequin’s gown.
So we have a lower level that includes Nazis, Goya, Ku Klux Klan, stuffed crows, naughty drawings, casual buggery and an erection. All the excitement of what could pass for the ‘niche’ viewing interests of many semi-educated middle-class males with a subscription to satellite television and broadband internet. All I’m missing is Sky TV and yet, I find this basement of outlandish subjects to be surprisingly boring; a roll of the eyes inadvertently greets the periodical squirts of shit (white paint) from a dead pigeon’s arse.
If you are familiar with the work of the oft-called enfants terribles of British Art, this exhibition (along with its sister exhibition across town) seems much the same as usual. It traces, dot-to-dot, previously visited shock imagery and if not quite Chapman-by-numbers, it is certainly as clichéd as using such a line at the end of a review.
