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AES+F – more than just a matter of (bad) taste

In the context of the Chapman brothers’ visual art practice and their deliberate transgression of established aesthetic and cultural ‘norms’ through their provocative exposition of contemporary society’s ‘spectacular wasteland of anti-sociality’, this essay explores the contemporary significance of the concept of taste with its inherent value hierarchies and attendant moral adjudication in a mediated world and within the aesthetic domain embedded in its specific historical and cultural contexts. The Chapmans’ approach is here juxtaposed with the work of the contemporary Russian art group AES+F, focusing in particular on the ‘Last Riot’ ensemble of works, including glossy, digitally-manufactured tableaux of posed violence. The analysis of this work is embedded in an examination of the formal repertoire, cultural symbolism and art historical references of exemplary bodies of work by AES+F from the late 1990s and 2000s within their specific historical contexts. The essay contributes to critical discussion of work by AES+F, increasingly recognised internationally. It reconsiders value concepts of taste in their specific historical and cultural situatedness in the digital age, in tension with the mobility and fluidity of (media) images across cultures and geographies and their respective tensions with normative frameworks. This commissioned and peer-reviewed essay evolved out of Mey’s earlier work on the relationship between the aesthetic and the obscene in 20th-century and contemporary art that resulted in the monograph Art and Obscenity (IB Tauris 2007), which included specific work on the Chapman brothers. Research for this present essay drew upon Mey’s presentation at ISEA2008 Singapore, which explored the ‘Last Riot’ from the perspective of hybridity in relation to the first exhibition of AES+F’s work at Ormeau Baths Gallery (Belfast 2009), which Mey initiated and oversaw. Her related paper on their video work ‘Trimalchio’, which expanded the exploration of aesthetic hybridity, was presented at ISEA2011 in Istanbul.