When dinosaurs roamed the earth

A preoccupation of the Chapman brothers, dinosaurs do roam their earth  - a boyish, fetishistic but playful preoccupation. Hell, Sixty-Five Million Years BC, 2004-5 is a childlike interpretation of what dionosaurs were like - small-scale, made from toilet-roll-innards and washing-up bottles and poster paint and what ever Mum has going to spare at the time kind of aesthetic. These dinosaurs are really cute.

Hell, Sixty-Five Million Years BC, 2004-5, Detail (Roger, I've called him), Jake and Dinos Chapman,

 

 

Courtesy of the artists who are not friends of mine but I do facebook them

 

 

 

 

 

But the Chapman's work isn't really about cute, it's serious stuff. Engaging, seductive, wherether in a childlike way, or a malicious way - to draw the viewer towards something that is beyond disgust, as we are forced to confront the thirst for sensationalism in ourselves, with a pretence towards an academic interest in themotivations of these artists and the meanings and messages of the work - but it's there: cohesive and reasoned, clever, witty and dry.

These dinosaurs aren't scary but the ones I do see around me are. I'm not imagining things: I see painters who claim their work is painting when I see an object, and the artist engaged in concerns that I consider sculptural: weight, balance, space - of the physical, not visual kind, and colour. Planes of colour, monotone, be it a pretty purple or earthy green, but held in this physical space by virtue of the canvas underneath, stretched across a plane to create an opacity that then encapsulates physical space. Okay, so some of those concerns are painterly.  Stick it on the wall, Simon Callery, and call it painting, but the physicality of the object, the desire for physicality is yearning. To provoke the viewer to explore the canvassed object - to ask them to physically move themselves, to explore the form through different viewpoints, that's being engaged with an object. Little objects: pick them up, turn them round; big objects: walk around them. The dematerialisation of colour has more to do with Rothko's spiritual experiences and less to do with Dulux colourmatching, but slowly the hues have bled away. This has more to do with the transubstantiation of materials - to dematerialise the visual, to explode the physical - the solar plexus blow of Rodins' Kiss. A friend, on completion of his MA at Manchester in Painting some years ago, announced that Painting Is Dead. I would now be inclined to agree with him. he's now in the business of architecture. In regards to callery, one wonders if he was hung in the Sculpture Room in the Grover and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Museum, Stiles, Wilcox and Mathieu (date not given), published by Sesame Street: a totally charming book. Well, one wonders what the playing field would be like in regards to images and objects and their transmogrification (for all you Calvin and Hobbs fans). Short and sweet: put your work on the floor and reconsider?

And another pterodactyl shadowed my footpath recently. Archaic ways of seeing the world, an over-romanticised view of the Way Things Should Be and Do Take My Advice and Guidance, I Know What's Best Because I Teach. Silly ideas like Bring Out Your Work (I'm ringing the bell), Bare Your Soul, That's Very Good, and It Is Because I Say It Is, belong to Tracey. Who, incidentally, is not a personal friend of mine but I do facebook her.