The Chapman Brothers- Mannequins

The Chapman Brothers are English visual artists who work as a sibling duo to create works. They have a reputation for presenting grotesque and visually shocking works, often viewed as inapporpriate and pornographic.
Their trademark mannequins of children morphed together are some of their most controversial and well known works. The mannequins feature children stuck together, often missing body parts such as arms and legs. Some children are also flipped upside down and stuck to others on their head, or alternatively one body is presented with two heads coming off it.
One particular set of The Chapman Brothers mannequins are very controversial. Where the original facial body parts such as noses and mouths would usually be have been replaced with adult genetalia. Some of the child mannequins are facing others looking puzzled by the replacement facial parts on the other children. For the society we live in children that look to be this young (around 6 or 7) would not usually have seen fully grown adult genetalia. This type of thing is not presented or shown to children of this age. Due to society we automatically use this link of adult genetalia and children to being something inappropriate and criminal. It is strongly linked to cases of abuse and phedophilia.

 

 

 

Another set of The Chapman Brothers mannequins however are what attracted me to study further into the artists. In this set of mannequins the childrens facial parts have again been replaced, this time with body parts of animals. These children insead stand alone and are not morphed together, all wearing black tracksuits and trainers. These mannequins belonged to the exhibition based on Hitler germany and the Nazi's. All of the children wear the Nazi badge on their tracksuit. When looking at these mannequins I automatically related the english youth culture of chavs (the tracksuits and cheap trainers) and Hitler's Nazi youth army (Nazi Badge). It is almost as if The Chapman brothers are implying the Chavvy youth of England are as bad as the Nazi Youth. A very bold and controversial statement.

 

The childrens facial parts have been swapped with those of unattractive and quite scary animal body parts. The Chapman Brothers have clearly tried to chose animal body parts that provide a grotesque look when placed onto a human. The parts include pig snouts, elephant trunks, and dogs snarling jaws. They have been chosen to make the children look disgusting, for example cute little whiskers and cat ears could have placed on the children but it would have a totally opposite effect. The childrens positions themselves do not imply that they have taken on the animalistic qualities of the animal parts that are on them. Instead the animal parts serve a purpose of providing a message of the childrens personalities relating to the animal and the current and historical situation.