Hell

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The Chapmans' series is from a - historically very significant - edition published directly from Goya's plates in 1937, as a protest against fascist atrocities in the Spanish civil war; its frontispiece is a photograph of bomb damage to the Goya Foundation. Given how important the Disasters of War were to Picasso, Dali and the image of the civil war, this is clearly an important, evocative, emotionally raw thing, and they have scribbled all over it.

Jake and I decided beforehand that we were going to make a monstrous failure. It was intentionally unmagnificent and unrewarding. We used the most pathetic way of representing the thing that has most exorcised western civilisation. We had a few assistants, but Jake and I did the donkey work. I’m quite glad the original burnt because it wasn’t very well made. It was clumsy and inaccurate Dinos Chapman

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Our interest is in what adults do to children and the image of innocence they project on to them," Jake continues. "Our thought about children is that they're pretty much psychotic, and that through sweets and other forms of coercion they are civilised." Spoken, I say, like a father. "Like a father of three," he says. (Dinos has two daughters.)Would Jake be happy for his kids, aged between three and 11, to see the show? "Of course. There are definitely things I wouldn't want them to see, and which I will protect them from seeing. But the things we've imagined in our art are anaemic compared with what kids imagine. I know it was a long time ago that we were kids [Jake was born in 1962, Dinos in 1966], but we were never innocents, were we?" Their goading is encouraged by the national attitude towards contemporary art, for which the artists have to shoulder some, if not most, of the blame. As part of the YBA crowd, they’re responsible for its popularisation in this country and the elevation of its appreciation (and criticism) to a national pastime. It’s their own fault if “what’s happened recently is that everyone has become interested in art, but generally at an unqualified level.” Many of the brothers' works have their basis in the art of others, of particular inspiration are the etchings of Goya, which the Chapmans recreated in miniature in Disasters of War (1993) and as a life-size sculpture in Great Deeds Against the Dead (1994). Later, they directly appropriated original artwork, adding to and painting over the etchings of Goya, watercolors by Adolf Hitler, and 18 th and 19 th century oils.

The brothers' first joint work is also their first tribute to Francisco Goya, an artist that they have continued to reference throughout their careers. This piece is a three-dimensional representation of Goya's etchings of the same name made in miniature using toy soldiers. Goya's etchings depicted the atrocities of war experienced during the Napoleonic invasions of his native Spain in 1808 including gruesome scenes of bayonetting, beheading, torture, and death. Goya's work provided such a powerful polemic, that it could not be exhibited in his lifetime Apart from Goya's surviving proofs - above all, a unique album with his handwritten captions in the British Museum's prints and drawings collection - there are no entirely "original" sets of the Disasters; published posthumously, it does not even have Goya's original title - he called the etchings "Fatal consequences of the Bloody War in Spain against Buonaparte and other Emphatic Caprichos".The individual works draw on a range of sources, one of the carvings, for instance, mimics Constantin Brancusi's Endless Column (1938), but here it is topped by a red-haired mask of Ronald McDonald. This can be interpreted as a comment on Modernism's appropriation of so-called "primitive'" art. As with all the Chapmans's works, it is full of contradictions and the installation can be interpreted in a number of ways - for example it can be read as a critique of the display of ethnographic items as aesthetic objects rather than pieces imbued with social and historical meaning. In a wider sense it can also be seen as a criticism of colonialism and globalization, although this could be an over-simplification as the brothers have declared that the world is "a shitty place in which capitalism and the production of art are not separated".