Spin: Infuriating more than the Fuhrer
The photos in this post are by Teri Pengilley for the Independent
Dorothea Tanning, a member of the original surrealist tribe, long-time wife of Max Ernst, and turning 98 in August, gave an interesting interview to Salon.com in 2002 in which she lamented the art being produced today.
“Most of it comes straight out of dada, 1917,” she said. “I get the impression that the idea is to shock. So many people labouring to outdo Duchamp’s urinal. It isn’t even shocking anymore, just kind of sad.”
Tanning didn’t drop any names, or even nationalities, but I think Britain currently seems to be leading the world in inane, derivative pointlessness. I’ve given up trying to find hope in Damien Hirst, and now this …
Jake and Dinos Chapman — who once infamously added funny faces and clowns heads to Goya’s “Disasters of War” etchings — bought a set of watercolours by Adolf Hitler for £115,000, added psychedelic rainbows and big wobbly hearts to 13 of them, and are now offering the batch for £685,000.
The point, you see, is that they’ve taken Hitler’s art away from him.
Apparently people gave them dirty looks when they paid good money for the creations of a mass murderer, so they decided to turn perception on its head, that old dada trick. They are not, Jake said, “redeeming” Hitler, as someone must have put it to his face. “The idea of redeeming Hitler is bad. The idea of redeeming his work is a staggering work of genius.”
As is quintupling your investment, but there are plenty of collectors with more dollars than sense.
“If hell exists and Hitler exists in it,” Jake said, “he would be spinning if he saw these. It’s not his work anymore. It’s our work.”
The edited collection is called “If Hitler had been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be”, and it’s on view in London at the moment along with “Fucking Hell” (detail below), a new version of the Chapmans’ 2000 setpiece “Hell”, which was destroyed in a gallery fire four years ago after being sold to Charles Saatchi for £500,000.
Jake, left, and Dinos Chapman in ‘Fucking Hell’
Not to worry, the new one has found a buyer at £7.5 million. It’s a vast, swastika-shaped sculpture teeming with miniature Nazi soldiers running amok, maiming and torturing.
Then there is “One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved” — aristocratic portraits of the sort painted in the 18th and 19th centuries, but with fright masks and deformities.
“Hitler banned and burned ‘degenerate art’. Stalin did the same,” Dorothea Tanning said in the 2002 interview. “I suppose they had their moral standards too. I can only say that if a work doesn’t make being sane and alive not only possible but wonderful, well, move on to the next picture.”
The last time Hitler visited Dali House: Master race masterpieces
