![]() Fortunately, it comes unaccompanied by too much deep-brain scholarly text or polysyllabic manifesto. The sculpture's highly-crafted, consummate attention to detail echoes the work of the gallery's artist proprietors, Jake and Dinos Chapman, who have here successfully launched what seems to be as much a school of art as a gallery. There is also the sense of a plippity, ploppity piling of excreted waste - it looks like a monument to an unspecified incontinence. These could include genocide and ethnic cleansing (Pol Pot's piles of skulls) slaughter and ritual (the mice are a sacrificial offering to the art world) obsessional neurosis (the preoccupation with disease and the obsessive, repetitious detail of the work's fabrication) subsumed, collective male potency anxieties (individual mice are like flaccid penises, but the column is erect) hierarchy, equality and differentiation (all mice are created equal) as well as, most obviously, mortality (all the mice are dead). It is possible to consider a number of correspondences between. Stack creating a slightly strained, overly self-conscious counterpoint. Rat (1996) is a separate work, a stuffed rodent walking upside down across the ceiling - its genus and proximity to. ![]() The stack is wider at the base than at the top and is slightly asymmetrical, looking a bit like a natural organic form such as a tornado twister or termite colony. The tapering phalanx of small, grey, dead mice is taller than a human, stopping just short of the ceiling. These are disposed in a filigree of corpses whose details are finely painted in a naturalistic style: a skillfully crafted trompe l'oeil of fine whiskers, delicate hands and tiny death grins. It is a grey tower of dead mice, constructed from fibreglass casts of frozen mus musculus, as sold in pet shops for snake food. Vermin Death Stack (1997-98) stands in the middle of the shop. The atmosphere is of uncleanliness and the potential for disease. The venue is an old butcher's shop off Brick Lane in London's East End, its original interior retained for the show: a grim, dirty box of soiled, unmatching tiles and perishing vinyl floor. This tradition goes back a long way, certainly beyond the visits made by the Victorians to abattoirs and insane asylums, of which this show is a bit of both. Butcher's shops and their contents have a valued status amongst artists and others reflecting on mortality.
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