Jake and Dinos Chapman--Great Deeds Against the Dead-Peter DeGabriele
Jake and Dinos Chapman are artists and brothers from Britain whose work has often been intended to shock the general public and, in particular, the art gallery-going public. This has included exhibiting original artworks by Adolf Hitler that the artists transformed and defaced. They have also had a long artistic engagement with Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War.
They have produced several works based on Goya’s etchings . Disasters of War (1993) is a large diorama which consists of miniature 3D renderings of the atrocities that Goya represents.
The life size sculpture “Great Deeds Against the Dead” is striking not only because of its size, but for its use of mannequins.
The sculpture can be seen here:
Chapman Brothers, Great Deeds Against the Dead
The sculpture alters the context in which Goya was working, which was almost documentary, to a very stylized and aestheticized setting. More than that, however, it emphasizes, to a point of considrable discomfort, Goya’s idea that dead bodies were being manipulated as if they were mere objects. Mannequins, of course, were never alive, and using mannequins here alerts us to the horror of using corpses, which were, as objects of art.
This distinction between the mannequin and the corpse is perhaps most strongly signaled by the genital mutilation of the mannequins in the sculpture. Mannequins, in general, don’t have genitals to begin with, and so the wound marks a double absence. Strangely, though, in the case of the mannequins, this mutilation almost makes them more human than in their otherwise strange and uncanny sexless form. The mutilated corpse, on the other hand, used by soldiers to create something that is almost art, and etched by Goya as a work of art, seems dehumanized and made mannequin-like for its use as material for art. The work thus calls attention to the way art may also be complicit in violence and the process of rendering figures either human or something less than human.