Jake and Dinos Chapman have remade Hell, their funny “sculpture” consisting of 30,000 little plastic Nazis torturing each other, which was created in 2000 and destroyed in a warehouse fire four years later. Entitled Fucking Hell, the “newer, improved, bigger, and brighter” (the Chapmans’ words) remake was commissioned for a fee of $15 million by François Pinault. Pinault owns the biggest collection of contemporary art in the world and is 34th from the top on the latest list of world billionaires. His motivations can be summed up in two words: attention seeking. Not that he should be condemned, or that condemning him would say anything important about Fucking Hell.

In England, the middle-class art audience knows the Chapmans well. They are survivors from the early waves of 1990s Young British Artists. Transgression merchants. Shockers. Their success and their first class existence, the respect they enjoy—their status as iconic figures— has a lot to do with the readable, literal content of their art. But also with sections of the mass media in England being willing to tune in to art and exploit it. So between art and the media, a kind of contest of unreal shocks is played out for a public that is used to grappling with a feeling of unreality generally, because of fast-moving social changes.

The insider audience mostly reveres the brothers (although there is a sanctimonious subsection who deplore their irresponsibility and lack of obvious worthiness). I like them too, because of their intelligence. But they can be preposterous. One of them, Jake, is in the habit of giving interviews to curator-mandarins. He spouts a lot of stuff about transgression, trying to get on top of the clichés of the Bataille discourse while at the same allowing himself to get hopelessly buried beneath them in a sort of conflicted attempt to be obedient and original simultaneously.

What this says is that the Chapmans want to be taken seriously. They don’t really want to violate the law; they want to please solemnity. And it must really hurt that on the whole, it’s only lightweights who fall for their strained intellectualese (Tate curators) and not higher-up Wizards of Oz like Rosalind Krauss or Thierry de Duve or Hal Foster.

On the other hand, I don’t think a bit of posturing in interviews counts against the success of Fucking Hell. At White Cube, nine metal and glass vitrines were arranged in the form of a swastika. An epic journey was described within: many individually modeled humanoid creatures emerge from a kind of volcano hole or giant anus and start torturing and killing each other, while at the same time traveling over rope bridges across deep valleys (the landscape changing from rural to industrial, northern to tropical), heading for some kind of reprocessing endpoint where the torture can start up all over again. A horror cycle.

The figures are full of comic animation, pursuing their nutty riffs on the death drive in an environment that is part Nazi death camp (huts, barbed wire, and burial pits) and part Apocalypse Now (foliage, rivers, and heads on sticks). Plus, since many of the figures seem to be skeletons, there’s a definite element of Ray Harryhausen’s charming 1963 movie Jason and the Argonauts.

I looked at the work twice, once alone except for an art dealer who’d come with me, and once with the gallery filled with visitors. On the second trip, I was struck by the audience’s social type, which was middle-class, educated, but not arty or intellectual. They didn’t seem an ironic crowd. They were earnest, amazed by the detail— which was amazing—but also made thoughtful by the idea of what they were seeing.

In the piece, Nazi torturers make decorative arrangements of mutilated body parts: long necklaces of heads; or severed human arms atrophied in right angles and stuck together to form a swastika. Skullhead Nazi zombies form a semicircle around Hitler, who stands at an artist’s easel on the edge of a deep valley filled with bodies and carrion, painting a happy picture. One death zombie regards Hitler’s canvas with a quizzical expression, head cocked in thoughtful, focused concentration, as if he’s imitating an art critic—a perfect joke on aestheticism.

On the first visit, I’d come from the Bernard Jacobson Gallery, where I saw a painting by Robert Motherwell (an exhibition of his work is on view from October 15 through November 22). Some blue, some charcoal lines, and that was it. I looked at it with pleasure, frowning and squinting. The work’s owner came with me to White Cube. I said the Chapmans’ stuff obviously isn’t what Motherwell was about: his calm, high drama; his sensitivity and chance taking; his knowledgeable, elegant, experienced, pared-back visual forms. But, I said, it’s a worthy opponent to all that. They work like hell at their lowness.

The dealer thought that was a good way of putting it, and then after a few minutes, he said he’d had enough. But the structural point of Fucking Hell is that there’s never enough. It relates to the brothers’ proposal that violent fantasies are endless. Whatever horrible thing you just heard about, you can always think of something worse. In Fucking Hell, giant cows give birth to human corpses, men have skulls instead of heads, and vultures have the heads of men. Machines create death chemicals and somehow use mutilated human body parts as fuel. A Nazi skeleton surreally steps out of its covering of flesh, or maybe it’s Death stepping into a Nazi— we don’t know which way we’re going—atrocity is circular and endless. I looked again at the ordinary people on high-ish incomes staring at the scenes. I wondered if they thought the work was about mankind. Was it the new Seventh Seal? Or did they think it was about jazzing a market? Was it impressive because it did that so successfully?

Fucking Hell is far from Ingmar Bergman, far from the medieval dance of death, far from anything in art of the past that is substantial and important. But still, the Chapmans are great at what they do, which is a new kind of game, exemplified by the YBAs in the ’90s, in which you use art to focus on the uncertainty that the public has about value, but always stay somehow within the capabilities of an audience, which, up until this cultural moment, has had little to do with art.

The audience fails to develop, and that’s how the YBAs prefer it. So the Chapmans work with visual forms that the ignorant tend to like, such as Hollywood model making. Or obsolete high art forms, like etching and watercolor, the kitschy potential of which the Chapmans don’t at all undermine or challenge but deliberately exploit. They picture horror but in a pleasurable, if unrefined, way. They have their own refinement, their own original balance of skill, silliness, and wickedness, of hilarity, stamina, and focus.

When they reference art history (Goya, Brueghel, Bosch), it is only that: reference. Blind to anything profoundly visual, they demonstrate an interest in art’s simple literalism, a perspective that fits with culture’s present preoccupations. The kind of art that plays well generally now is engaged with a kind of punning, ironic exploration of a sort of multilayered, slightly aestheticized daily life—aestheticized only as much as is needed to get the idea across. The question is how to adjust to the new mind-set without acting stupid.

Society’s new fantasies about the artistic mind-set are part of the joke of Fucking Hell. Artists live on the edge. They dare to go “out there,” to zones the rest of us don’t dare think about, but we’re intrigued when artists bring back their psychic souvenirs. These are primitive Romantic thoughts, separated from anything believable that Romanticism has to say about the connection between the inner life and Nature. But also totally untrue in terms of what the global art scene is really like now, with its population of pampered artist-pets; worthy critics and curators with obedient, suburban imaginations; and Theory high priests, with their droning theology.

Hitler was an artist; tribes make tribal art; and when civilized people regress, they perhaps become tribal. And beneath the streamlined fakery of the consumer society is a lot of writhing caveman murderousness. Simple thoughts like these go into Fucking Hell and are realized in a profusion of engaging detail: humans and their gestures, their faces and poses, their relationship to objects and to landscape, and their interesting changeability as they individuate or as they merge into crowds.

There is a definite reminder in the work of the great casts of characters in medieval paintings of the Last Judgment, all the detailed weirdness of medieval hell. But although the Chapmans do have their own sense of form, there is nothing in their approach that recalls the medieval eye for pattern and arrangement—hell’s former sublime musicality. (This is Motherwell’s area.)

What is the power of medieval religious art, anyway? When you’re looking at the Isenheim altarpiece (Grünewald is a hangover of medievalism into the Northern Renaissance), you’re not looking at horror and disgust but at a monumental, distanced, grand staging of these emotions, an animation involving realism and symbolism that is simultaneously playful and of the greatest seriousness. You’re looking at a staggering buildup of abstract values—the whole range of visually compelling effects of which an art form at the peak of its development is capable.

This all sounds as though the Chapmans deserve a good whipping. But hang on. They compensate for their lack of interest in transcendent visual experience—or visual ideas, even—with jokes, an element often present in artistic expressions of biblical hell, but not paramount. But they also compensate with something else, something that Bosch, Brueghel, or Grünewald, or even Motherwell, who died in 1991, can never offer: contemporaneity, creative mainlining into Now.

After all, Fucking Hell isn’t really about hell or evil. It’s not as if the dark side of human nature were really being explored. The work is about taboos, contemporary people’s fascination with seemingly evershifting lines between what society finds acceptable and what it doesn’t: the Chapmans have something real and original to contribute to this discussion.

A notoriously conservative art critic, Brian Sewell, wrote in his regular Evening Standard column (on June 6, 2008) that Fucking Hell is so important, so indisputably connected to the greatest art and culture that’s ever existed (he says he sees in the work the “digested influence” of Rubens, Ingres, Goya, Greek antiquity, the Pergamon altar, Roman triumphs, medieval art, Altdorfer, Brueghel, Bosch, and Michelangelo), that in the future the Chapmans will be “the only artists of their generation to deserve more than a wry footnote in the history of art.” Sewell is wrong about there being any real or important connection back to old art, but even so, the Chapmans have got something.

The argument against them from the worthy brigade in art academia in England (summed up in the books of art historian Julian Stallabrass) goes something like this: the aesthetic heights can’t be in the cards for art right now, because of problems of elitism and so on, not to mention the impossibility of inhabiting old artistic mind-sets originally produced by defunct social structures. You have various options instead. One is the Chapmans’ strategy, which is the wrong option; to do a kind of ersatz old-fashioned type of art just for the sake of entertainment, for lulling the middle class or pandering to this class’s hypocrisy and delusion. (Sewell’s farty trumpeting of the brothers’ genius falls into the hands of this argument.) The more correct artistic thing to do, the worthy argument goes, is to help society by making art using democratic forms (especially the Internet), which have a wide currency and appeal, with the aim of changing consciousness and bringing to light invisible structures of regression and injustice.

Stallabrass’s errors are to assume that (a) the Chapmans ape high art and (b) that their shocks are of the same nature as the shocks in movies such as Hostel and Saw, or (especially in their earlier works featuring distorted child mannequins) the English tabloid newspapers’ double-standards treatment of stories combining sensationalist stimulation with virtuous hunting-down of pedophiles.

In fact, the Chapmans are sophisticated in their unsophistication— they dumb down their forms, but they don’t suck up to contemporary piety. They offer a critique of hypocrisy that involves imaginative new takes on despair and futility, but without the expected easy moral homilies that go with pop-culture movies and tabloid stories. Their achievement is all in their refusals. The Chapmans are sophistocated in their unsophistocation—they dumb down their forms but don't suck up to contemporary piety. Their critique of hypocrisy involves imaginitive new takes on despair and futility, without the expected easy morals and homilies.

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.