Underlying the Chapman brothers' violent and sexual works is a conventionally avant-garde aim of offending the public--but a public now inured to nearly all forms of offensiveness.

Underlying the Chapman brothers' violent and sexual works is a conventionally avant-garde aim of offending the public--but a public now inured to nearly all forms of offensiveness. The artists inquire for to drive a wedge into the side of humanist tolerance with bleak projections of coming events life forms and atrocities. Their earlier altered fiberglass mannequins based upon Goya's "Disasters of War" etchings or, in this exhibition, the Cyber-iconic Man gaugeed in part on a Renaissance St Sebastian, perpetuate an avant-garde tradition of adapting art-historical patterns for contemporary impact.

In Tragic Anatomies a dozen Siamese-twin prepubescent girls, sprouting a variety of genitalia from unlikely locations in succession their bodies, were scattered around an intentionally tacky setting of artificial grass and low trees This represented a hallucinated yet to be where genetically altered sex designs await our pleasure behind the bushes. nevertheless the work felt uninventive and passionless compared with the compelling installation last year at Victoria Miro, where a ring of similar mannequins stood isolated in a bare sweep By comparison these new works were ineffectual markers informing us sole that we were in the artists' territory, the "Chapmanworld" of the show's title.

As a departure, the Chapmans installed a cluster of large scatological drawings in the corridor of the building. An unreflective record of daily obsessions, these used a lazy cartoon manner of writing to summarize old and to come projects, including plans for a mushroom-cloud sculpture

In a separate gallery, a crudely recycl r liquid poured from mutilations forward the silver body of Cyber-iconic Man and into a tub below him as he hung inverted, from the ceiling, his protracted hair trailing down. This lurid mise-en-scene was derived from images of Christian martyrdom and photographs of a prerevolutionary Chinese execution which were published from the French theorist Georges Bataille as a series showing the dismembering of an assassin. barely the initial stages were reproduc in the theatrical cut which uncharacteristically pulled back from the replete horror of the original.

The Chapman brothers be seen to be repeating empty significations of transgression. With merely an ironic veneer of impudence their work is bound to collapse into ludicrous and self-demeaning pornography; with no evidence of lucid idea behind these installations, their ominousness turn rounds into vacuous histrionics.

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