Jonathan Jones 

Bad jokes and mutated cats from the Chapmans

Modern Art, London
  
  


Jake and Dinos Chapman - or Jackie and Denise Chapwoman, as they now wish to be known - have thought up some nasty things to do to cats. There are genetic mutations, surgical interventions. In Pussy in the Middle, two cats joined at the head look at you pleadingly, a woman's vagina inserted between their furry faces. Another cat has the biggest, most imploring eyes - six of them.

This is a new medium for the Chapmans, oil paint, and a new species to assault. The works are disconcerting as well as funny because of the hyperrealism of the painting, the brushstrokes that make each cat alive. Stretched Pussy, a painting of a cat subjected to hideous abuse, is hauntingly lifelike, far more so than the Chapmans' plastic models. Oil paint has a disturbing power to create life.

This small, lighthearted exhibition - six paintings in a tiny Shoreditch gallery - duplicates the Chapmans' iconography of human cruelty. Everything they have previously imagined done to human bodies, they translate to feline anatomy. The jokes are deliberately bad, the self-reference flamboyantly redundant - the Chapmans have always enjoyed putting vaginas in unlikely places. They cheekily identify themselves with Marcel Duchamp, or rather his female persona, Rrose Sélavy, whose punning they parody in J'appelle un Chat une Chatte. The Chapmans take themselves less seriously than any of their contemporaries, stomping all over the idea of unique creativity, consuming different media. Here they become painters, not to demonstrate talent but to mock it. They satirise contemporary painting, incorporating the stylistic tics of Gary Hume, Glenn Brown and Martin Maloney.

Yet there's a terrible clarity to the way they imagine the worst. In the past they have taken inspiration from Goya's Disasters of War. Here William Hogarth's The Four Stages of Cruelty come to mind. Hogarth's engravings demonstrate how a boy's habit of torturing animals leads him to murder, the gallows and dissection by surgeons. Hogarth engraved The Four Stages of Cruelty when the love for animals was new. The Chapmans exhibit tortured moggies at a time when it can seem harder to imagine a compassionate human society than to picture a Shoreditch gallery being mobbed by a protest movement against the stretching of cats.

With their latest show, the brothers demonstrate that if you pursue a half-arsed idea, concocted from bits of surrealism and a naive desire to shock, systematically and with enough lateral ingenuity, you will eventually leave your critics exhausted. Or in other words, if the fool persists in his folly he will grow wise.

· Until July 1. Details: 020-7739 2081.

 

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