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Lot Essay
Jake and Dinos Chapman’s The tragiK Konsequences of driving KareleSSly brings their viewer into direct contact with the contemporary human experience by giving material form to horrific concepts in a visceral manner. Embodying the Chapman brother’s macabre and wryly insightful oeuvre, this highly detailed and intricate sculptural piece was exhibited in their 2007 mid-career retrospective at Tate Liverpool, Bad Art for Bad People, as well as Museum Kunstpalast Dusseldorf and Museum für moderne Kunst, Bremen, Weserburg.
The meticulously constructed diorama shows a catastrophic car-crash involving many vehicles at an intersection of four roads. Against the natural surroundings of grass and trees, the cars seem worn-out and rusted, as the artists make crucial points about the hazards of modern, industrial life and its intrusion on the natural environment. Forming part of the artist’s celebrated Hellscapes, in which the artists made miniatures of horrific and morbid scenes to present a critique of the modern world, Jake and Dinos Chapman explore the universal issues of human tragedy on a small scale. Through their use of model-making equipment, the artists have not only achieved a high level of detail but also allow their viewer a God-like perspective on the scene.
Shock is used as a tactic here, exploiting the immediacy of the visual as a means of attracting attention and establishing engagement. Like much of the greatest work that emerged from the yBa movement, The tragiK Konsequences of driving KarelerSSly lifts realism to a new level and uses the shocking reality of its depiction to ask important questions about the nature of our existence and the society that surrounds us.
The idea of ‘compassion fatigue’ is also being addressed here, meaning the emotion that is experienced following over-exposure to images of excess violence or suffering. This follows on from the work of Andy Warhol in his Death and Disaster series, in which he appropriated images of trauma, cataclysm and death, testing his audience’s reaction to images which had previously occupied newspaper front pages. In contrast to the photographs of their predecessor, by bringing their work into three-dimensions the Chapman brothers present the fateful scene in miniature, drawing attention back to the reality of the situation and encouraging the viewer to genuinely consider their own reaction to it. In The tragiK Konsequences of driving KareleSSly, the Chapman Brother’s successfully employ shock as a critical device to encourage debate and introspection, and ultimately it is used as a levelling tool. As Dave Beech writes, ‘shock is an indicator of our shared frailty and our common fate as a species. Shock humanizes. An aesthetics of shock is the cultural equivalent of the ethics of care’ (D. Beech, Shock: A Report on Contemporary Art in Jake and Dinos Chapman: Bad Art for Bad People, exh. cat., Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, 2006, p. 110).
The meticulously constructed diorama shows a catastrophic car-crash involving many vehicles at an intersection of four roads. Against the natural surroundings of grass and trees, the cars seem worn-out and rusted, as the artists make crucial points about the hazards of modern, industrial life and its intrusion on the natural environment. Forming part of the artist’s celebrated Hellscapes, in which the artists made miniatures of horrific and morbid scenes to present a critique of the modern world, Jake and Dinos Chapman explore the universal issues of human tragedy on a small scale. Through their use of model-making equipment, the artists have not only achieved a high level of detail but also allow their viewer a God-like perspective on the scene.
Shock is used as a tactic here, exploiting the immediacy of the visual as a means of attracting attention and establishing engagement. Like much of the greatest work that emerged from the yBa movement, The tragiK Konsequences of driving KarelerSSly lifts realism to a new level and uses the shocking reality of its depiction to ask important questions about the nature of our existence and the society that surrounds us.
The idea of ‘compassion fatigue’ is also being addressed here, meaning the emotion that is experienced following over-exposure to images of excess violence or suffering. This follows on from the work of Andy Warhol in his Death and Disaster series, in which he appropriated images of trauma, cataclysm and death, testing his audience’s reaction to images which had previously occupied newspaper front pages. In contrast to the photographs of their predecessor, by bringing their work into three-dimensions the Chapman brothers present the fateful scene in miniature, drawing attention back to the reality of the situation and encouraging the viewer to genuinely consider their own reaction to it. In The tragiK Konsequences of driving KareleSSly, the Chapman Brother’s successfully employ shock as a critical device to encourage debate and introspection, and ultimately it is used as a levelling tool. As Dave Beech writes, ‘shock is an indicator of our shared frailty and our common fate as a species. Shock humanizes. An aesthetics of shock is the cultural equivalent of the ethics of care’ (D. Beech, Shock: A Report on Contemporary Art in Jake and Dinos Chapman: Bad Art for Bad People, exh. cat., Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, 2006, p. 110).