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Norman Rosenthal, Exhibitions Secretary at the
Royal Academy, and architect of a dramatic financial recovery through
exhibition takings over the past five years, admits to seeking to
engage the public in art, and his current estimate that some ninety
percent of visitors do engage with the work on display seems hard
to challenge, however. But it is here already a different interaction
than was the case with Rosenthal’s 1997 precursor in this show
"Sensation". Then the opportunity naturally to engage,
rather than submit to shock, was limited, and the work was more
immediately confrontational. Apocalypse seems by contrast to rely
heavily upon "the word", the explanatory text, substantial
catalogue explanations to relive direct confrontation, or to mediate
this by easing the passage of the bemused.
Leitmotif
Inside, the keynote pieces seem to be a vast "tableau"
of models. The text advises that the whole is in the form of a swastika,
which is not at all apparent visually. Hell is a vast set piece
of nine model landscapes, vignettes of horror, which collectively
revisit the experience of twentieth century holocaust. In this one,
the Nazis are persecuting other Nazis.
So much Bosch-like activity and Bruegelesque persecution
is in process (and we are obligingly provided with an illustration
in the Catalogue, of Bruegel’s "The Triumph of Death",
to prompt us. As Daniel Libeskin, architect of the Jewish Museum
in Berlin has reminded us "the holocaust was an everyday event".
But the Chapmans, authors of "Hell" here, reduced their
ultimate message exactly be charging up the fantasy factors and
so discounting that realism.
Cavorting Figures
By contrast, and without any text mercifully Chris
Cunningham’s film "Flex" shows two human figures,
male and female, turning through a vortex of horrors, flaying each
other in blood lust, then slowly cavorting, embracing, and making
love. Visual effects dramatically used, enhance this unreality.
Next door, Wolfgang Tillmans, fashion photographer
turned artist, seems all too slick, belying the emphasis on a seamless
transition between these two worlds. In another space, Maurice Cattelan
has as his subject the current Pope being floored by a meteorite;
is it shocking, or merely juvenile to see a contemporary hero of
the struggles against totalitarianism in the twentieth century waggishly
ridiculed?
Cellars without Aroma
In interview, Norman Rosenthal has claimed that
there is a different aim in the exhibition that simply to shock;
a work may, incidentally, prove shocking, but that is not the main
point. Nor was any art exhibited actually created specifically for
the show. Perhaps fatefully, there is this element of play: as if
one had broken into a warehouse of horror by chance. It feels somehow
freeze-dried, safer than reality.
The spectre of Fred West lingers in the English
folklore, in company with the murderers of small children, still
at loose. Not a particularly English show: and yet an English perversity
that plays with shock-horror pervades the selection of works here.
Beauty is conspicuous only by its absence as the phenomenology of
perceived horrors wins out. Groggier Schneider’s work "Cellare",
of an abandoned house conveys this negative aesthetic.
Such unease cannot compensate the visitors for
the pungent insincerity behind the show. As Will Self said, of Noble
and Webster’s pile of rubbish "The Undesirables",
"it didn’t smell…it should have stunk to high heaven".
Curators please note and correct.
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