Hell

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Ultimately, she says, "What I think this work is all about is waking us up, so we don't sleepwalk our way through 21st Century life." The thing we objected to was not so much Goya’s meaning – we’re actually trying to gouge them from this moralistic framework and maybe release its libidinal economy to show that these works are much more radically unhinged and unstable and they don’t deserve to be accumulated to some sort of post-Christian redemption.” Apart from Goya's surviving proofs - above all, a unique album with his handwritten captions in the British Museum's prints and drawings collection - there are no entirely "original" sets of the Disasters; published posthumously, it does not even have Goya's original title - he called the etchings "Fatal consequences of the Bloody War in Spain against Buonaparte and other Emphatic Caprichos". Goya's Disasters of War is a precocious modern masterpiece, a work left by its creator as his final savage bequest to the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries - it was far too anti-clerical and unpatriotic to be published in his lifetime, and the first ever edition came out in 1863, three and a half decades after his death in 1828. From the very start of its public existence, it has been experienced not as a historic but as a contemporary work, its images so urgent and truthful that they function as living, new art.

It's all very sophisticated. The next day I see the images. I think they are brilliant and profound. Oh dear. Somehow, they do not destroy, but find something new in the Disasters of War. The Chapmans use the word "evil" to describe the atmosphere that pervaded their recent ethnographic show; there is a wild sense of evil in what they've done to Goya. The altered prints make you think a serial killer with an addiction to drawing psychotic clown faces has got into the British Museum's prints and drawings room - like the killer in Red Dragon who eats an original Blake.Hell is riddled with detail, but no one bit is more significant than any other: it’s equally horrific. Every act is occurring at the same second. It’s a snapshot, one mass moment of nastiness. The process of making it was the whole point: even if you create something out of 60,000 Nazi figures, it’s still nowhere near the actual thing it’s referring to. Two years of work making 60,000 little soldiers – and the Nazis were able to murder 60,000 Russian PoWs in six hours. It's not about the Holocaust. It’s the Nazis who are being subjected to industrial genocide Jake Chapman Goya's modernity has never exhausted itself; he was as immediate to Picasso and Dali as he was to Manet; of all pre-modern artists, he is the one who most resembles a modernist. This is who the Chapmans have victimised. The individual works draw on a range of sources, one of the carvings, for instance, mimics Constantin Brancusi's Endless Column (1938), but here it is topped by a red-haired mask of Ronald McDonald. This can be interpreted as a comment on Modernism's appropriation of so-called "primitive'" art. As with all the Chapmans's works, it is full of contradictions and the installation can be interpreted in a number of ways - for example it can be read as a critique of the display of ethnographic items as aesthetic objects rather than pieces imbued with social and historical meaning. In a wider sense it can also be seen as a criticism of colonialism and globalization, although this could be an over-simplification as the brothers have declared that the world is "a shitty place in which capitalism and the production of art are not separated". This work is an assemblage of eighty-three small mixed media sculptures composed of bought, reformed and modelled elements. The sculpture is made of a variety of materials, mostly plastics.

By bringing together Goya's eighty-three part series of etchings into one entity, in which all parts are simultaneously visible, the Chapmans' Disasters of War suggests a reduction and encapsulation of events of momentous emotional impact. The tiny size and anodyne manufactured appearance of the figures transform the horror of the original material into the representation of a war among toys, a comic-strip rendition of brutality. Both the large white plinth, which provides a broad margin between the figures and the viewer, and the perspex box, which seals the figures off from the viewer, add to the reductive and distancing effects of the work. The Chapmans have said: 'We fantasise about producing things with zero cultural value, to produce aesthetic inertia' (quoted in Unholy Libel, p.149). This work, like their subsequent Hell 2000 (Saatchi Collection, London), stages a neurotic fixation with an ironic edge: the hours of careful work required to cut up and reconstitute the little figures to represent grotesque human acts in a time of social uncontrol. Disasters of War reflects the detachment of Western societies from the realities of war-time killing, both through computer and missile technology (which have produced weapons that fire long range and permit operational distance) and through the comfortable spectatorship provided by television and the film industry. Many of the brothers' works have their basis in the art of others, of particular inspiration are the etchings of Goya, which the Chapmans recreated in miniature in Disasters of War (1993) and as a life-size sculpture in Great Deeds Against the Dead (1994). Later, they directly appropriated original artwork, adding to and painting over the etchings of Goya, watercolors by Adolf Hitler, and 18 th and 19 th century oils. A more complete listing of their exhibitions – with links out to documentation of the same – can be found here.The idea, according to the exhibition’s curator, Lola Durán, is to illustrate just how profoundly Goya has influenced artists from Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí to the Chapmans. In 2003 the Chapmans held a show at Modern Art Oxford called The Rape of Creativity. At this they displayed a range of pieces including Insult to Injury, a series of original etchings by Goya which they "rectified" by adding clown and puppy heads to all the victims depicted. The pair received a 2003 Turner Prize nomination (Britain's foremost contemporary art award) for their work. Their Turner Prize exhibit included Insult to Injury alongside new works Sex I, a sculpture of decaying and dismembered corpses hanging from a tree and Death, a bronze statue of two sex dolls painted to look like plastic. Although the two were beaten by Grayson Perry, they did win the Charles Wollaston Award for the most distinguished work in the Royal Academy summer exhibition the same year. The Chapmans have recently found it remarkably difficult to offend people. While their early works - the lifesize girl mannequins with penises for noses - were routinely dismissed as emblematically egregious grotesqueries of 90s British art, in the past few years they have received massive acclaim, in language they profess to find baffling and hilarious. They made Hell, a tableau in which thousands of toy second world war German soldiers mutilate and kill each other and themselves in a psychotic Nazi orgy, and had it interpreted as a profound comment on the Holocaust and its representations: "The idea of making 5,000 little toy soldiers all running round mutilating each other, and then find pathos in that - it's alarming that people are prepared to cathartically reappropriate these things which are so redundant and void," says Jake. "It took us three years to make 5,000 people. It took the Germans three hours to kill 15,000 Russian prisoners of war." For some critics, this is all a callow waste of energy. It seems pathetic to take the most powerful of all artist-moralists, an artist who needs no apology or explanation and for whom the deadening phrase "old master" seems utterly inappropriate, and make these sterile simulacra, these crass copies. The critic Robert Hughes, who is writing a book on Goya, has dismissed the Chapmans' translations of his images as superficial exercises. As the National Gallery opens Picasso: Challenging the Past, I found myself wondering if any 21st-century artists are worthy of the same honour. It has taken a long time for the great Picasso to make it. Is there anyone at work in Britain now who could have a meaningful exhibition here? I think there's only one answer.