Stallabrass is an academic, do-gooding, vicarish Marxist who is repelled by the sadism of the Chapmans’ art in the first place, but even more repelled that the mode should be comedy—whereas Sewell is turned on by the sadism of Fucking Hell and doesn’t even notice the comedy. The careerist leftie assesses too low and the overheated fogy too high, but they both don’t know what they’re looking at.

The critical difference between Fucking Hell and pop culture is the work’s open-endedness, its refusal to be so certain about what its morality really is, as opposed to the wrapped-up meanings that are always present in gross-out violent movies as much as in tabloid news stories. The Chapmans’ fiberglass children-figures with adult sex organs growing out of their heads are not really titillating like the tabloids; they go in too much for something like mutation: clumped-together anus-penis children are too repulsive and zombie-like to be titillating.

The Chapmans are uneven, but at their best—as with Fucking Hell, their children-horrors, and their African fetish carvings with disguised McDonald’s symbols—they think up scenarios and see the idea doggedly through until it works. They make up for the lack of a high visual aesthetic with constant, restless, inventive idea-energy. In picturing the sickness of society on their own terms, thinking up their own original takes on corruption and distortion, they are not complying with hypocrisy but doing the opposite: refusing illusions, trying to exercise judgment about right and wrong. Ultimately, they’re on the side of the angels.

"Hell Calling" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.