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Chapmans are down on Orwell's Farm
By Tom Teodorczuk, Evening Standard 12.02.07
Tree sculpture: An exhibit at the Two Legs Bad, Four Legs Good show
Farmers' market: the works send up those who have social aspirations for art
Look here too
It is news that will no doubt leave George Orwell spinning in his grave.
Modern art duo Jake and Dinos Chapman have satirised Animal Farm, Orwell's 1945 classic allegory of Stalinist Russia, for their new London show Two Legs Bad, Four Legs Good.
The Chapman Brothers have made 31 sculptures from cardboard and painted them with poster paint.
Some are mounted on plinths while others hang from the ceiling of new gallery Paradise Row in Bethnal Green.
The sculptures include animals from, or inspired by, Orwell's book. They feature a cow, a pig, sheep, a farmer and, most graphically of all, a bucket holding eyeballs floating in blood. Many of the animals are depicted defecating.
To reinforce the allusions to Animal Farm, an audio dramatisation of the book plays loudly in the gallery - providing a surreal accompaniment to the works.
Paradise Row is a new gallery curated by Nick Hackworth, the Evening Standard's Contemporary-Art Critic.
Although the brothers would not comment on their new work, Hackworth said they were sending up those who have political and social aspirations for art: "The Chapmans have said in the past that they're aiming to produce works of zero culture value. I think they're getting pretty close with these new works."
It is already proving to be a busy year for the Chapman Brothers. The pair have a show of new bronze pieces, When Humans Walked The Earth, at Tate Britain as well as a major retrospective running at Tate Liverpool.
The brothers have made a career out of creating static images and sculptures that have shocked and offended.
In 1996, the work Tragic Anatomies forced the boundaries of taste in showing child mannequins with genitalia in place of facial features, naked except for a pair of Nike trainers.
In 2000 they created Hell, a massive tableau arranged in the shape of a reversed swastika with 5,000 tiny models of mutant Nazis participating in a surreal orgy of death and destruction.
In 2003, among their work nominated for the Turner Prize was Insult To Injury in which the artists doctored a set of Goya's etchings with hand-painted cartoon heads - breaking the ultimate artistic taboo in desecrating a celebrated work.
Their exhibition, Works from the Chapman Family Collection, in 2002 paid ironic homage to fast food giant McDonald's through a fictional collection of rare ethnographic objects. Closer inspection of them revealed the chain's corporate symbolism.
• Two Legs Bad, Four Legs Good is at Paradise Row and runs until 4 March. Telephone 020 7613 3311. www.paradiserow.com
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