Ubermensch

For 'Ubermensch', Jake and Dinos Chapman have drawn formal and theoretical qualities from their trademark repositories of bodily obscenities. The work is a towering fibreglass rendition of physicist Stephen Hawking perched in his wheelchair at the edge of a rocky cliff. "We are interested in perfect and imperfect bodies", say the artists. "With 'Ubermensch' we were interested in Stephen's perfect mind animated within an imperfect body, which gives rise to a kind of fanatical or extreme idealism which is fuelled by his bodily entropy. The degeneration of his body infects his theoretical position, becoming more spectulative and flowery. We elevated him to become a sort of Monarch of the Glen, or Monarch of Astrophysics." ('Unholy Libel', London 1997, pp. 152-153.) Hawking is portrayed as a purveyor of the void, his elevated position poignantly echoes that of a Nietzschean 'superman'.