Jeepers. That’s pretty offensive. Not the most offensive thing I’ve ever seen, but yeah… I mean, I can sort of see that there’s possibly sort of some thing there - Goldilocks, childhood, destruction of innocence, etc - but the execution…jeepers.
That’s exactly what I took from those two works.
So that MS Paint monstrosity is “real art” hang-able in a gallery? What gallery would allow that?
I tried to find the “collaged pornographic images” but I didn’t see them. Also, you wouldn’t know it had poop on it if you weren’t told. The most offensive thing about it is the depiction of a black woman with the stereotypical black faced lips. That’s just unnecessary.
WTF is wrong with them? How is that art? Please help me understand how it is artistic to depict a child’s face as a vagina mouth and penis nose?
The biggest problem with this thing is that anybody can happen on it, including children, adults who suffered childhood sexual trauma, etc. It’s much more offensive in person than in the photograph.
That guy is a repressed serial killer.
Who is the artist?
Faces of Death
I think that building is wonderful, a clever statement of the distortions - in perspective, in relationships, in self-image - caused by neurological disease. It’s good art - as art. If it is intentionally confusing internally - and the article you linked to didn’t mention anything about the inerior - then it’s form trumping function and inappropriate to its purpose. So it may be bad architecture, but good art. The building itself is beautiful to me; Gehry is brilliant.
But is that really offensive as a piece of art? Sure, a monument to a dictator is an offensive concept, but the monument itself is rather mediocre, not so much offensive as meh.
Well, putting a penis together with a vagina sometimes results in a child, right? I’m not defending the work - I haven’t opened the link and seen it - just pointing out the thnking behind it.
Hah!
Don’t be vulgar; it’s an anus mouth. 
I spoke a bit about their artistic meaning in an above post, which I took from an online interview with the artists: here. Personally I like both pieces, but once you get past the rather shallow meanings and shock value, there’s not much to look at again.
Edward Kienholz, as noted above. He primarily did “found object” art pieces, many of which are interesting. This one is not, IMO.
Oh, the penis bear one.
And as for the ass-face penis nosed child, it’s not art. It’s vulgar, there is no social commentary or thought provoking controversy involved. It’s just gross.
and I laughed when I read the part of the interview yu posted which said “We’re not interested in making copies of things.”
Really? Then why did you copy your ass-faced penis nosed child for at least 2 sculptures?
Wow, these guys really wallow in their own self importance don’t they? Those two sculptures are no less representations of children than dolls without genitalia. It’s obviously a child, or a child-like representation. They could have very easily made it a dog or a grown adult, but they chose to make it child-like just to upset people.
here is what they have to say about it:
[spoiler] JAKE AND DINOS CHAPMAN: The good thing about sculptures is that they exist in a funny art-hyperspace that runs alongside the normal, non-art world. There are a lot of very strange things in galleries that you don’t apply the usual set of moral rules to. On the whole, people understand this, but then you get agitators - like journalists - deliberately misunderstanding the situation and provoking others to misunderstand it too.
For example, a journalist said to us, ‘How can you dare do these things to small girls?’ So you think, well, hold on a minute, let’s just take that question apart - why is it a girl? So the journalist replies and says, ‘Well it’s got long hair and freckles’. OK. When Jake was a little child he had long hair and freckles, does that mean that he was a girl then and now, miraculously, he’s turned into a man because he’s got short hair and his freckles have gone? He says, ‘No, no, you know what I mean’. We’re like, no, we actually don’t know what you mean. You’re applying rules to something that they don’t actually apply to. This thing is inanimate, it’s made from resin and paint. It bears 90% relationship to a mannequin, and maybe less than 10% to things that you can buy in Ann Summers [a chain of sx-toy shops]. There’s no point at which you can say this is a child. It might look like a child from the back, but from the front it doesn’t. And then the idea that something with an erect pnis on its nose could ever be female is also another problem…
The whole point of these objects was actually to back people into a corner with their strange morality. You make an object and put it in a gallery and people don’t really see it; they see what they think about things reflected in the object. You might as well put a mirror in the gallery because they’re not looking at the object. It’s an attempt to force people to take into account their bad thinking. ‘Zygotic acceleration…’, for example, it doesn’t work if you say it’s a child or it’s children; I’ve never seen 20 children fused together with adult gen*talia on their faces.
IMAGE: Jake and Dinos Chapman, Zygotic acceleration, biogenetic, de-sublimated libidinal model (enlarged x 1000), 1995
Jake and Dinos Chapman
Zygotic acceleration, biogenetic, de-sublimated libidinal model (enlarged x 1000), 1995
DAVID BARRETT: With the full title of that work, ‘Zygotic acceleration, biogenetic, de-sublimated libidinal model (enlarged x 1000)’, the final part tells you that this is not even a child-sized creature.
Exactly, although people don’t read the titles. If you look at our work and think about child abuse, then that would have to be in your mind before you looked at it. You have a matrix of knowledge, of references, before you understand anything, because when you look at something your mind compares it to prior experience in order to understand it. You run through this pattern-recognition process comparing what you’re looking at with previous knowledge, and if you don’t recognize what you’re seeing then you move onto something else that it might be: ‘Well, it’s obviously not an elephant, maybe it’s a pig…’ And we do this at such incredible speed that it sometimes goes wrong, so instead of saying ‘I don’t know what it is’, people say ‘It is a…’, and then make a really stupid analysis of what it is. ‘It’s an abused child,’ they say. Look again; it isn’t.
So once viewers make that initial misreading, their ongoing attempts to understand the sculptures simply unravel?
Exactly.
Also, if you’re going to talk about abuse, I would say that our objects are more likely to cause abuse than receive it. If you decide that 'Fck Face’ is a child, for example, then it is an unbelievably aggressively empowered one. Its sxuality is on its face. It’s not going to have any problems telling you what it wants.
I’ve known that work a long time and, for some reason, the idea of child abuse never occurred to me; 'Fck Face’ does not look abused in any way. In fact, as far as I can tell, all the creatures that have anses for mouths also have p*nises for noses.
Yes. You can’t fck them unless you get fcked yourself at the same time. They’re polymorphous s*xual beings and people get very anxious about those grey areas around their morality. They’re so desperate to place everything in a comfortable box that, the moment you put something in front of them that doesn’t fit in with this, they run around screaming their heads off. Which is the reaction we were trying to provoke; the effect is more interesting than the object. They’re like moral hand grenades in galleries. But if you go into a gallery you should be expecting to see things like that. That’s what a gallery is: a place where you leave your baggage by the door and you look around and hopefully you see something that makes you think a little bit. [/spoiler]
Sometimes I think calling something “art” is just giving yourself liberty to shove trash in people’s faces then look down on them when they don’t “get it.” Maybe, just maybe, it is trash and it does suck and it isn’t artistic no matter how much you delude yourself into thinking art has to be controversial to be valid. Things can be weird, and interesting, and thought provoking without being purposefully bad just to get a reaction out of people.
I sense the artist is being ironic. “I will lead you all off the edge of the cliff!”
Um, I know you posted the interview with the creators of Fuck Face in order to show what a couple of self-important art-school wankers they are, but it makes the opposite impression. Clearly these guys have thought about what they are trying to say with their art. Your reaction, on the other hand, sounds like pure emotion. You are looking at a sculpture of acrylic and paint, with features no human face has ever had, and seeing a child with inapproriate sexuality. Just exactly the unexamined mental processing that they talked about.
Art is about making you think not just about what you are seeing, but how you are seeing it. It is necessarily transgressive. That’s why Modigliani is a great artist and Thomas Kinkade is not. And it was ever thus - a critic said that the only thing more obscene than Goya’s Naked Maja Reclining was his Clothed Maja Reclining. G.K. Chesterton thought that Impressionism was literally Satanic.
I’m not saying that Fuck Face is great art - I’m not competent to judge, but it seems juvenile and unsubtle to me - but it is art.
I heartily endorse everything Slow Moving Vehicle said.
It is true that transgressiveness does not prevent art from being art. However, transgressiveness does not, all on its lonesome, make something art (except in the trivial sense that any object placed in a gallery by an artist is “art”). Aside from this trivial sense, the better question is “is this art in any way interesting?”
The problem in this particular case is that all the artists are aiming at is to offend the easily offended. Heck, they say as much. From their interview:
[Emphasis addeed]
It is very easy to offend people. This talk about “unexamined mental processes” is all very well, but the creators of this piece knew full well (and anyone of any common sense already knows) that making sculptures that resemble children and sexualizing them will create offence - which is what they were aiming for, as they themselves say in the above quote. It is an uninteresting insight that many will be offended by such images. The offence is totally predictable and indeed they predicted it. If this (totally predictable) reaction is “more interesting than the object” (that is, their art), then I have it on no less authority than the artists themselves that their “art” isn’t interesting.