Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Southampton
If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be
Research content/process:
The output created by Jake Chapman for this temporary exhibition at White Cube gallery in London (co-produced equally with his brother Dinos) comprised three groups: (1) A series of 13 early-twentieth century water colour paintings, reputedly painted by Adolph Hitler, retitled as a single work ‘It Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be,’ to which Chapman added both iconographic and colouristic elements in the form of rainbow, flower and sun motifs. These additions questioned and transformed both the ‘authorship’ and ‘ownership’ of the original paintings, which the Chapmans had purchased on the open market. (The paintings are reproduced in the accompanying catalogue publication If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be). (2) A series of 17 obscure late-nineteenth century bourgeois portrait paintings all individually retitled ‘One Day You Will No longer Be Loved,’ to which Chapman has added a variety of features including grotesquely elongated noses, excessive amounts of teeth and gums sewn together. These additions, reminiscent of the modifications the Chapmans made to prints by Goya in their 2003 series Insult to Injury, created horrific imagery undermining the humanistic intentions of portraiture and family remembrance. (3) 9 glass-fibre, plastic and mixed media cabinets, with about 30,000 miniature models of soldiers, military equipment and war environments. Entitled Fucking Hell this work was a major extension in size and conception of the Chapman’s 2000 work Hell (destroyed in a warehouse fire in 2004). Artistic themes of mechanistic process, alteration and repetition related to the iconography of apocalyptic cruelty, suffering and the destruction of normal human subjectivity characterise all the works in this exhibition.
The experimental text by Chapman, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor (2008), indicates his co-pursuit of these themes in extended written form, subverting narrative conventions in novels.
