Jake and Dinos Chapman: Come and See

Press Release
Jake and Dinos Chapman:
Come and See
29 November 2013 – 9 February 2014
Serpentine Sackler Gallery
Serpentine Galleries presents Jake and Dinos Chapman: Come and See at the new
Serpentine Sackler Gallery, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. Come and See will
demonstrate the range of the artists’ output - from painting, drawing, printmaking
and sculpture, to film, music and literature - providing a unique insight into the
complexity of their practice and their prolific career. It will be the first exhibition in a
London public gallery to encompass the breadth of their work since Chapmanworld at
the ICA in 1996.
Jake and Dinos Chapman create iconoclastic sculptures, installations and twodimensional works that address a wide range of themes including morality, religion,
history of art and consumer culture. Their work is provocative and deliberately
confrontational, approaching controversial subjects with irreverence and dark
humour.
Julia Peyton-Jones, Director, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director, at Serpentine
Galleries said: “Since their surreal and sometimes nightmarish imagery took up
residency in our collective subconscious in the early 1990s, Jake and Dinos have
continued to prod, provoke and entertain. Whether subverting artists’ original works –
including their own – twisting historic narratives or peeling back the surface of
consumer-driven culture to reveal the horror and humour that lies beneath, the
Chapmans compel us to confront the nagging fears that lie at the dark heart of the
Western psyche. Their use of film, music and literature as well as painting, drawing,
printmaking and sculpture anticipated the multi-disciplinary approach of the 89plus
generation for whom they are heroes and trailblazers. We are thrilled that they are
exhibiting at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery this winter.”
The Chapmans began collaborating in the early 1990s and first gained attention for
their work Disasters of War, a three-dimensional recreation of Goya's series of etchings
of the same name, for which they reconstructed Goya's scenes of brutal violence
using miniature plastic figurines that they carefully reshaped and painted by hand.
Goya, and the Disasters of War particularly, have remained a continued presence in
the Chapmans’ work. In 2003, they famously acquired a set of Goya's etchings and
altered them, painting clown and cartoon heads over the original faces of the figures.
Their large Hell landscapes, such as Hell (2000) and The Sum of All Evil (2012-13), are
at once monumental in scale and minutely detailed. These apocalyptic landscapes,
teeming with miniature figures, depict scenes of excessive brutality involving Nazi
soldiers and, in more recent works, McDonald's characters. The grotesque and often
surreal violence of the scenes is offset by the overwhelming detail and painstaking
labour evident in these and many of the Chapmans’ works.
An exhibition featuring the work of Egyptian artist Wael Shawky runs concurrently at
the Serpentine Gallery. Shawky’s and the Chapmans’ work is linked by their
employment of models and marionettes to re-cast myths, stories and historical
events.
Jake (b. 1966, Cheltenham) and Dinos (b. 1962, London) Chapman were nominated for
The Turner Prize in 2003 and have exhibited their work extensively since the 1990s,
including recent solo exhibitions at SongEun ArtSpace Museum, Seoul, and
PinchukArtCentre, Kiev, (both 2013); The Hermitage, St Petersburg (2012); and Tate
Liverpool (2006).
For press information contact:
Miles Evans, milese@serpentinegalleries.org, 020 7298 1544
Holly Blaxill, hollyb@serpentinegalleries.org, 020 7298 7543
Press images at serpentinegalleries.org/about/press-page
Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London, W2 3XA
Serpentine Sackler Gallery, West Carriage Drive, Kensington Gardens, London, W2 2AR
Image credits:
Jake and Dinos Chapman
The Sum of all Evil (detail)
2012-2013
Fibreglass, plastic and mixed media in four vitrines
84 5/8 x 50 11/16 x 98 3/8 in. (215 x 128.7 x 249.8 cm)
Courtesy White Cube
© 2013 Jake and Dinos Chapman
Exhibition: Jake and Dinos Chapman: Come and See
Serpentine Sackler Gallery
29 November 2013 – 9 February 2014
LIST OF WORKS
World Peace Through World Domination, 2013
Banners
Circa 300 cm tall each
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
Kontamination examination of the significunt material related to human eXistenZ on earth,
2009
Mixed media
215 x 128 x 128 cm
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
Disasters of War IV, 2001
Portfolio of eighty-three hand coloured etchings with watercolour
Courtesy of the Artists
Little Death Machine (Castrated, Ossified), 2006
Painted bronze
34 x 63 x 44 cm
Courtesy of the Artists
I wanted to be popular, 2008
Painted bronze
125 x 116 x 94 cm
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
I felt insecure, 2008
Painted bronze
180 x 141 x 88 cm
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
I laugh in the face of adversity but it laughed back louder, 2008
Mixed salad
Courtesy of the Artists
Striptease, 2012
Painted bronze
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved (that it should come to this…) XIV, 2013
Oil on canvas
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
A Bad Night, 2007
Oil on canvas
Courtesy of the Artists
One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved II (No.7), 2008
Oil on canvas
Courtesy of the Artists
Swallow It Dog, 2007
Oil on canvas
Courtesy of the Artists
One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved II (No.8), 2008
Oil on canvas
Courtesy of the Artists
One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved III, 2008
Oil on canvas
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
What A Tailor Can Do, 2007
Oil on canvas
Courtesy of the Artists
One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved II (No.4), 2008
Oil on canvas
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
Idiotidyll I-VIII, 2013
9 oil on canvas paintings, throughout the exhibition
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
Rivers of Blood, 2007
Fibreglass, plastic and mixed media
215 x 127 x 127 cm
Courtesy of Terence of Katrina Garnett
When the world ends, there’ll be no more air. That’s why it’s important to pollute the air now.
Before it’s too late. After the end of the world, also, all the technological advances which have
been made in this century, which could at this very moment allow a leisure society for all but a
few technicians, and a few women with wombs, - so that there will, I mean there could, be no
more social class - after the end of this world when humans are no more, the machines for
human paradise will run on their own. Just as McDonald’s now runs. (Free Willy), 2012
Glass-fibre, plastic and mixed media
205 x 127.8 x 127.8 cm
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
The Axminster of Evil, 2008
Edition of 5 (2 APs)
244 x 244 cm
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
Always judge a book by its cover, 2013
Book covers
Courtesy of the Artists
Rubbernecker, 2013
Mixed media and painted wood
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
Peephole, 2013
Mixed media and painted wood
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
Juxtaposing Planes plus Adjacent Elements, 2013
Mixed media and painted wood
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
Fucking with Nature (Somewhere Between Tennis Elbow and Wanker's Cramp), 2013
Mixed media and painted wood
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
Cul-de-sac, 2013
Mixed media and painted wood
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
Who's Afraid of Red, White and Black?, 2013
Mixed media and painted wood
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
Approximation, 2013
Mixed media and painted wood
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
Tooth Fairy, 2013
Mixed media and painted wood
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
Not to Dot, 2013
100 Watercolour and ink on paper works
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
The Disease Within The Disease, 2013
99 Watercolour and ink on paper works
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
Archival Work, 1971-2013
79 mixed media on paper
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
Chapman Family Collection, 2002
Bronze
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
The Sum of All Evil, 2012 2013
Dioramas in vitrine without glass weights
215 x 128.7 x 249.8 cm (each)
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
What Really Happens To Us After We're Dead?, 2012
21 pencil on paper drawings
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
South Powder Room
Shitrospective, 2009
Cardboard, paste board, newspaper, wood, polystyrene, glue and poster paint
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
North Powder Room
Kino Klub, 2013
Cinema installation
Featuring: Fucking Hell, 2013
Film, 26' 17"
Courtesy of the Artists and White Cube
Directors’ Foreword
Jake and Dinos Chapman create iconoclastic sculptures, installations
and two-dimensional works that address a wide range of themes
and associations, including morality, sex, death, religion, philosophical
theory, history of art and consumer culture. Their work is provocative
and deliberately confrontational, approaching controversial subjects
with irreverence and dark humour.
and for being such thoughtful collaborators throughout the planning
of the exhibition. They have also produced a wonderful Limited Edition
to accompany the exhibition and we remain indebted to them for
this generous gift. Anika Jamieson-Cook at the artists’ studio has
provided crucial assistance in realising the project and we extend
our thanks to her and to the entire studio team.
The Chapmans began collaborating in the early 1990s and first
gained attention for their work Disasters of War, a three-dimensional
recreation of Goya's series of etchings of the same name, for which
they reconstructed Goya's scenes of brutal violence using miniature
plastic figurines that they carefully reshaped and painted by hand.
Their large Hell landscapes, such as the iconic Hell (2000) and The
Sum of All Evil (2012-13), are at once monumental in scale and
minutely detailed. These apocalyptic landscapes, teeming with
miniature figures, depict scenes of excessive brutality involving Nazi
soldiers and, in more recent works, McDonald's characters. The
grotesque and often surreal violence of the scenes is offset by the
overwhelming detail and painstaking labour evident in these and
many of the Chapmans' works.
We are delighted to continue our collaboration with Hiscox, who have
generously sponsored this exhibition. We cannot thank them enough
for their continued support of the Serpentine’s programmes and would
like to acknowledge the involvement of Robert Hiscox, Chairman, and
Steve Langan, Managing Director UK & Ireland, in establishing such
a successful and longstanding partnership. Terence and Katrina Garnett;
Wendy Goldsmith; Frank Gallipoli and Christine Mastro; and SongEun
Art Space have made important gifts in support of the exhibition and
we extend our heartfelt thanks to them as well as to the lenders who
have kindly shared works from their collections.
The Chapmans are also prolific producers of drawings and prints as
well as distinctive artists’ books. This beautifully-crafted book, made
with the artists’ long-term collaborators FUEL, is published to coincide
with the Chapmans’ exhibition Come and See at the Serpentine
Sackler Gallery, the second exhibition at the unique Grade-II listed
building and former 1805 gunpowder store. The group of drawings
included here comprise elements from Jake and Dinos Chapman’s
two-dimensional works that have been manipulated to produce a
book of ‘tattoo flash’, in line with what might be found on the walls
of tattoo parlours. In purchasing this book the reader can become
part of the Chapmans’ oeuvre; it enables the owner to pick any or
all of the Chapman-designed tattoos.
We are deeply grateful to Jake and Dinos Chapman for accepting
our invitation to show their work at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery
White Cube, the Chapmans’ representatives, have provided invaluable
advice and assistance and we are indebted to Jay Jopling and Irene
Bradbury for their close involvement from an early stage. Damon
Murray and Stephen Sorrell have worked closely with the artists on
this book and our thanks go to them for overseeing every aspect of
the publication. Koenig Books London are our co-publishers and we
are grateful to them for our continued partnership.
Finally, we would like to thank the team at the Serpentine, whose
hard work and enthusiasm are essential to realising projects such
as this one.
Julia Peyton-Jones
Director, Serpentine Galleries and
Co-Director, Exhibitions and Programmes
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Co-Director, Exhibitions and Programmes and
Director, International Projects
The Sixth Reich
Will Self
6
One fact first: Jake and Dinos Chapman’s artwork entitled Hell (2000),
which featured nine large vitrines containing a painstakingly contrived
tableaux mordant that comprised myriads of 1:32-scale Waffen-SS model
soldiers, skeletons and mutants torturing and being tortured, discorporating
and being discorporated, was consumed by an arsonist‘s fire in the early hours
of 25th May 2004 at a warehouse in Leyton, East London, leased by the artinstallation and storage specialists Momart. One fancy second: or was it?
Given that the Chapmans have now created two further avatars of Hell :
Fucking Hell (2008) and The End of Fun (2010), it may be erroneous to
conceive of Hell as ever having been destroyed at all, when perhaps it was
only tempered by the flames. I don‘t mean to suggest that Hell qua Hell still
exists, but the moral topography of Hell most certainly endures, while, insofar
as the artists set out to make a work that would both in its existence and its
assemblage embody diabolic praxis – its Sisyphean tasking of excruciating
repetitiveness, its temporal transcendence – their committal to Hell and its
spawn was only confirmed by the original work‘s immolation.
On a visit to the Chapmans‘ atelier – also in East London – in March
of 2011, Dinos put it to me thus: ‘The previous one wasn‘t complete – the whole
idea of these is that you can just keep making them – ‘ then his younger brother
Jake broke in to correct him: ‘It did also start from a malevolent claim that you
made, the idea that an object that was not so much vilified as ignored in its
first material incarnation, once it burned, it seemed to generate more interest
than when it was a solid object. It turned into a black cloud of pathos and
sadness and sentimentality, and Dinos said, well, fuck it, we‘ll make three, as
a way of saying not only do you duplicate something that‘s gone, and been
rendered as this melancholic memory… but to add insult to injury you make
three of them.‘
This transmission between the artists can serve several functions: to
introduce them as profoundly serious about their own antic – if not diabolic
– praxis; to illustrate the extent to which their creative thinking is conjoined,
with one brother‘s line often proceeding to the other‘s by enjambment; and
to state something very precise about the ‘Hell’ series itself, which is, that these
are in nowise to be considered as conceptual artworks, conceived of by two
minds then fabricated by many other hands. Jake and Dinos Chapman are
physically implicated in their work – that is their harrowing; and while
assistants may be employed to do some of the detail, to spend une saison en
enfer with Jake and Dinos Chapman – or even a couple of hours as I did,
virtually examining The End of Fun – is to become insistently aware of the extent
7
to which they are both unashamedly artisanal: the work takes shape from the
laying on of their own hands.
If you require any confirmation of this, take my word for it: arriving
at the studio I was struck by the unassuming character of the operation;
Dinos Chapman and a trio of assistants were eating a pasta lunch in an
upstairs kitchen. In the main space, long benches were laid out with raw
materials: model birds pinioned in a polystyrene block, tiny black dogs frozen
in mid-stride, shrunken Waffen-SS men in field-grey overcoats caught at
topsy-turvy angles – are they the hunters or the hunted in this greyish snow?
The half-completed details of what will be, presumably, the ‘Hell’ piece that
succeeds The End of Fun , included a gelateria mound of miniature corpses,
hundreds of them melting into an inhuman sludge.
In back of a swathe of plastic sheeting I rediscovered Dinos tinkering
with votive statuary and gargoyle off-cuts. ‘If you take any photos don‘t show
them to Jake,‘ he said, then explained: ‘We‘re doing a show where neither of
us is allowed to see what the other one is doing until it opens. We‘ve become
so accustomed to working together that we wanted an impediment – so that
we‘ll work from the heart, also, we thought we might begin to understand the
nature of the collaboration more if we broke it up in this way, but actually…‘,
he mused, ‘I just find myself thinking about what will amuse him.‘ When we
last spoke in 2008, Dinos‘s brother had been very clear about the collaboration:
‘The thing is, after 15 years of working together we‘ve developed an artmaking mechanism – and in turn it starts to make its own exhaust, the
materials start speaking to each other. It‘s also oddly comforting working
together like this – [it] avoids the reductive belief that a work of art is in itself
the belief of one person. The way we work puts a spin on that [because] when
I look at my work it‘s some other person‘s.‘
This undercutting of the unity of artist(s) and their artworks may well
be one of the stratagems that allow the Chapmans to take on such ethically
raw subject matter – after all, if your work is some other person‘s, in what sense
are you responsible for the outrage it causes? But, paradoxically, it also puts
the creator in the position of a voyeur; of course, all artists alternately embody
these roles, yet probably only a blood-tied collaboration could allow for such
a pure and simultaneous confusion of objectivity and subjectivity – while the
very form of the ‘Hell‘ series, as models-in-glass-cases, necessarily implies the
didactic and the expository, setting up a comparable tension in the viewer
between a need to comprehend a totality, and a puerile desire to gawp at the
details of this atrocity exhibition.
8
When, later, I pointed out to the Chapmans that the immolation of
Hell may have engendered a certain grudging sympathy in those who had
vilified it, simply because of the vast number of man-hours lost, Jake said,
‘There‘s something purgatorial about having to make three of them. We
always said there were these contradictory ideas going on in the work; on the
one hand its endeavour to literally represent a Holocaust moment falls far
beneath any comparison: it could have no chance of assuming this magnitude,
but in a sense the idea of subordinating ourselves to the task of making it was
somehow an analogue of the event. The labour in making the work would
undermine its representational content.‘
And while this subordination was underway – an activity Jake
characterises as the ‘construction of a meta-narrative‘ – another metanarrative was being pounded into being on the opposite bank of the River Lea
Navigation, where the piles for the 2012 Olympic Stadium were being driven
into Stratford Marsh. Jake Chapman said: ‘It was like the Protestant work ethic
telling us to carry on, “Boom-boom-boom!” and shaking the studio.‘
The extent to which Jake and Dinos Chapman‘s work can be
considered politically – or even morally – engaged in any conventional way
is a matter I will return to, but an unproblematic assertion is that they have
always been temporally engaged, their preoccupation with time – its raw
passage, its deluding apprehension, its warp without weft – shows itself in
their art-about-the-mutability-of-art, such as the celebrated Great Deeds
Against the Dead (1994), as much as it does in their equally oeuvre-defining
Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic Desublimated Model (Enlarges X 1000)
(1995). That the primary materials for both these pieces were standardised
fibreglass models showcases the Chapmans‘ enduring preoccupation with
taking the machined time of technological reproducibility and retro-fitting it
within the timeframe of human manufacture. Speaking of the thousands of
mass-produced models used in the ‘Hell‘ series, Jake Chapman commented:
‘The thing is how [do] you somehow manipulate the bastardized materials into
offering something less impoverished […], how [do] you incite pathos from
them?‘ And pathos is, of course, implicit in the use of models of humans, which,
no matter what their scale, always reveal to us our capacity for being
fabricated then manipulated – whether by God, Fortuna or determinism.
These two early works that first brought the Chapmans to a wider
British public through the ‘Sensation‘ exhibition at the Royal Academy in
1997; they marked out a terrain – or rather two estates that marched with each
other. On the one side, the conjoined, incestuous clones of Zygotic Acceleration
9
were irrefutably of the zeitgeist, concerned to remark upon – if not comment
about – the voyeurism of the viewer in an age when polymorphous perversity
inheres not in the metaphoric and the psychic, but in the prosaic reality – the
metaphrand. On the other side of the divide, the recreation of Goya‘s etching
as a life-size, three-dimensional piece showcased the Chapmans‘ willingness
to go head-to-head with the canon, an inclination that set them apart from
those of their peers – Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Marc Quinn
inter alia – who, for the purposes of marketing as much as manifesto, were
loosely grouped under the heading ‘Young British Artists‘.
It might be trite to seek biographical explanations for this divergence
– such as the Chapmans‘ time at the Royal College of Art and as assistants
to the artists Gilbert and George, in distinction to the tutelage of Michael
Craig-Martin at Goldsmiths College that nurtured others of the YBAs. But the
fact remains that the Chapmans, whose fraternal collaboration dates from the
early 1990s, have persisted with this engagement, creating scores and
eventually hundreds of works using Francesco Goya‘s figuration – most
notably the ‘Insult to Injury‘ (2003) series, which took the 80 ‘Disasters of War‘
etchings and systematically altered them with the addition of rabbit ears, cutesy
rodentine and canine heads, mutant clown faces poised uneasily between
horror and kitsch, and so forth. This is not to neglect the Chapmans‘ own series
of ‘Disasters of War‘ etchings, which offer lurid fauvism and hyper- naif
depictions of creepy-crawlies, chance meetings between scrawled notes and
atrocities on the draughtsmen‘s worktable, together with worked-up vignette
details of the ongoing ‘Hell‘ series.
That the critics as much as the public were determined to see the
Chapmans‘ Goya interventions within reflex and diametric oppositions:
this/that, pornography/attack upon pornography, defacement/improvement,
shouldn‘t blind us to the stated purpose of these works, any more than the
brothers‘ much bruited statement that they had at the outset of their careers
considered changing their names to ‘Goya‘ by deed-poll should give them a
prank-out-of-jail card. The Goya works, like the watercolours attributed to Hitler
– and ‘prettified’ (Jake Chapman’s term) by the brothers – that were exhibited
in the Chapmans’ 2008 White Cube show ‘If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How
Happy Would We Be’, can only be fully apprehended by those willing to step
outside of the mandated schematics. ‘We are not offering a model of progress,’
Jake Chapman told the critic Sarah Kent. ‘We’re making work that contradicts
the idea that art is inherently good and based on idealism. This is not the
Enlightenment; it’s the age of light entertainment.’ I particularly like the
10
second part of this statement, which demands the saccharine-sweet “bboom-chhhh!” of a cymbal hit to accompany a punch line. It confirms my view
that inasmuch as the Chapmans are provocateurs at all, they are responding
in the only faithfully satiric way possible to the moral relativism stirred up by
globalization’s centripetal whirl: by just wanting to be misunderstood.
But time, like the ebony clock in Poe’s The Masque of the Red
Death , reigns supreme. By producing works that aim – as Jake Chapman
expressed it to me in 2008 – ‘to undercut the monism of art and life,’ the
Chapmans have begun, ineluctably, to inch into the realm of the transcendent.
Goya’s Disasters of War and the Chapman’s Insult to Injury etchings are
interleaved then joined together, with neither works having chronological
precedence. Together they form a Möbius strip, that, when looped around the
sprocket of the stationary bicycle pedalled by a dinky Nazi, serves to power
the factory-cum-charnel house in Fucking Hell. For, just as the Chapmans’ artabout-the-mutability-of-art creates an atemporal realm, so the three ‘Hell’ works
completed thus far, by depicting an infinitesimal portion of an ongoing mass
atrocity, subvert the static/dynamic antagony within which humanists wish to
view both the progress of art and that of civilisation.
Nevertheless, prosaic stuff must still be clearly stated. This is
important not because of assaying the Chapmans’ intent – recall, they just
want to be misunderstood – but because without fully assimilating these facts
about the works, it is impossible to properly see them at all, let alone read
them. For a start, just who exactly is in the Hell of the ‘Hell’ series? Confronted
by the overwhelming display of atrocities, their apparent trivialisation through
being depicted via the medium of serried plastic models, and the deployment
of the full panoply of Holocaust impedimenta – barbed wire, concentration
camps, Babi Yar ravines full of corpses, Mengele-style ‘experimentation’ etc.
– viewers tend automatically to outrage: surely, they cannot help but think,
the victims of the Die Endlösung are being profaned here? And yet the most
salient fact about the Hell of the ‘Hell’ series is that its only occupants are
Nazis. Nazis are both perpetrators and victims, Nazis strip Nazis, Nazis
decapitate Nazis, Nazis excoriate Nazis. The massed phalanxes of skeletons
that goad the Nazis on are unmistakably the revenants of still more Nazis,
while the mutants that cartwheel through the herd with their multiple arms,
legs, heads and even cornucopias of genitalia are also indisputably concocted
from the genetic material of… Nazis. If we wish to see eternal retribution being
enacted on the perpetrators of the Holocaust, then what’s not to like about
the Hell of the ‘Hell’ series, which imprisons them in nine glass vitrines
11
arranged, in plan, to form a giant swastika?
I say ‘eternal’ retribution – but this must be qualified. Each term of
the ‘Hell’ series includes details that make it clear the works are not
representative of a process taking place within time as it is ordinarily assumed
to be: a continuing dimension, but are rather in media res that are temporal
excisions or out-takes. In Fucking Hell the detail was as simple as a stray car
tyre rolling along the plastic ground, so, according to Jake Chapman: ‘The
magnitude of the atrocity occupies the blink of an eye - that for me is the
essence of the piece.’
Yes, surely this is true – but whose is the eye that is blinking? On
reexamining the works with a view to writing this essay it struck me that
although I had seen Hell when it was first exhibited – at the Royal Academy’s
‘Apocalypse’ show in 2000 – and discussed Fucking Hell with its creators, then
subsequently written about it, I had never made the unimaginative leap
required: I had never grasped that the primary subject matter of the pieces –
and indeed the topography they occupy – is Hell itself. It’s important to
capitalise the Hell in question – for this is manifestly a Christian underworld,
rather than a generalised hellish realm. As the Chapmans and I clicked from
detail to detail of The End of Fun we were gripped by a sardonic amusement.
‘There’s absolutely no insurgency,’ Jake Chapman pointed out as we scrutinised
a tight knot of mutual genocidaires, at the core of which a swastika-armed mutant
throttled a Nazi. ‘The best they can do is to stand behind where they can’t be
seen and shake a fist… There’re no incidences of brave, heroic Nazis…’
The End of Fun includes scenes that, with their mass of sandwiched
and naked figures lashed on by skeletons sporting horned Wehrmacht helmets,
cannot help but evoke the Nazis’ death marches at the end of the Second
World War, when concentration camp inmates were forced into the interior of
Germany with the loss of an estimate 1.5 million lives. But thronging the
shattered buildings of this miniaturised Buna, once again, there are no Jews,
Roma or homosexuals – only Nazis, their ghosts and their fantastical chimeras,
pressing up against the glass of the vitrine with agonised, half-comprehending
expressions. ‘What’s quite funny about this bit,’ Jake Chapman said, ‘is that
this is the point where the volcano […] has a bridge coming down and a
platform going across to the next section; it’s obviously truncated by glass and
they’re like cockroaches, the Nazis, because they have an awareness of the
glass… they’re contemplating how the hell they’re going to get through this
to the other side.’ And Dinos adds to general merriment: ‘It’s a device to make
sure that you don’t think they’re real.’
12
The notion of such ‘abominable fancy’, whereby the saved gleefully
contemplate the sufferings of the damned, was once central to Christian
eschatology. In the current era – at once programmatically sanitised and
systemically maculate – such a response is inadmissible; for according to
theologians such as Tertullian, this glee is one of the confirmatory bonuses
of blessed status: ‘Comedians skipping in the fire will be worth praise! The
famous charioteer will toast on his fiery wheel, the athlete will cartwheel not
in the gymnasium but in flames… These are things of greater delight, I
believe, than a circus, both kinds of theatre, and any stadium.’ Moreover,
devotional art from the Byzantine through to the medieval period often
depicts this theatre of enacted cruelty, while Byzantine examples in particular
range the saved and the damned in carefully delimited zones – the vitrines
of their time.
In their asynchronous scale the ‘Hell’ pieces also conform to Christian
eschatology; a central point of contention for theologians from the early
Church fathers on is the timing of the Dies Irae. Matthew (24:36), cites Jesus
on the Mount of Olives, spooling all time’s Möbius strip into the Deity’s
mind: ‘But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels in
heaven, but my father only.’ When I questioned Dinos Chapman as to the nature
of the skeleton figures in the ‘Hell’ series, he remarked ‘they’re angels’ then
laughed this off as flippancy; but the first cohort of Satan’s workforce does,
indeed, consist of fallen angels, demons whose persecutory zeal is inflicted
first upon the souls of the dead, then upon all those who are alive on the Day
of Judgement.
Or is there any precedence? The problem of what happened to the
dead in between their demise and the apocalypse was hardly helped by
Gospel exegesis. Some argued for a ‘particular judgement’, whereby the
eventual destination of the individual soul was determined at death – but this
was hardly in keeping with the millenarianism of Christianity, certainly not if
The Book of Revelation is included, rather than confined to the Apocrypha.
Various solutions such as the confinement of dead souls to intermediate
states where they could await the end of days were proposed, but Augustine
of Hippo’s ‘twin-track’ judgement, whereby damned souls are punished
initially by the removal of God’s grace – a psychic torment – and then
physically tortured upon their resumption of their bodies at the Last Trump,
seems to confute the commonsense, and scriptural, conception of Hell as at
once static and eternal.
The kind of space/time bricolage involved in planning a viable
13
Christian Hell is plainly evident in the ‘Hell’ series. I asked the Chapmans who
had made the homicidal swastika-armed mutant and his queasy conspecies
and they both replied without demurring: ‘God’. Then Jake explained that the
skeleton-angels were dead people who have ‘attained a sort of redemption
by being allowed to work for the mutants.’ Whereas, according to Dinos: ‘The
Nazis in Hell just get recycled; they don’t ever die they just come back more
damaged.’ And what about the mutants?, I asked. ‘Well,’ Dinos said, ‘they’re
the fantasy of the Nazis.’ A fantasy, I suggested, that had taken over: ‘They’re
the future.’ Jake interpolated.
It isn’t strictly accurate to say that all the inhabitants of the ‘Hell’
series are Nazis in one form or another – in this eschato-system, besides
mutants there are also ‘sports’ such as Ronald McDonald, crucified snowmen
and the physicist Stephen Hawking running amok in his powered wheelchair.
In Fucking Hell Anne Frank makes an appearance, while in The End of Fun a
cod-pulchritudinous Aryan woman serves as a life model for a septet of en-
plein-air artist Hitlers. In Fucking Hell there was just the one Hitler, caught
in the act of producing a tiny naïve canvas, but in The End of Fun , besides
the Hitlers who are rendering their model in distinctly ‘degenerate’ modes, there
are other Hitlers – some buried in a stygian cavern carved out beneath a
decrepit kampong, where they labour on Piranesian machinery assisted by
spacemen who are – according to the Chapmans – ‘Nazis sent back from the
future’. Yet this brief census of the ‘Hell’ pieces is by no means exhaustive;
it omits the numerous birds (corvids, raptors and, of course, vultures), the robed,
animal-headed figures who appear to be enacting an auto-da-fé, the
Galapagos tortoises (employed as draught animals by the skeleton-angels)
and the large numbers of pigs, some of which (in The End of Fun ) are milked
of their methane for engine fuel.
The presence of some individuals – Hawking, Frank – that fall
outside the rubric of the damned and the damning, is nonetheless still
consistent with a Christian Hell, with its limbos full of virtuous but unbaptised
Old Testament prophets and its purgatorial annexes added at a later date
to accommodate souls that are pending. As for the enacted anachronisms –
the future Nazis, and Hawking’s new vocation in The End of Fun as a
marijuana dealer after ‘going to the future and coming back again’ – these
too are entirely permissible within the schema of Hell, which mandates a realm
that endures forever while remaining exactly the same – and therefore must
contain all possible sinful acts from all possible times. To explain the
vertiginous baroque of the tortures portrayed in the ‘Hell’ series, Jake
14
Chapman recalled De Sade’s thought exercise, whereby he called upon a
posse of his libertines to think of the most disgusting thing they could, then
conceive of something more emetic, then something still more revolting than
that – the conclusion being, following Ecclesiastes, that of the making of many
sadisms there is no end.
And yet the impression a concerted viewer of the ‘Hell’ series has
is not of the singularity of any one outrage, nor the infinite series implied of
them, but above all of a terrible busyness – frenetic but purposeless – and
a complete absence of privacy. ‘There’s lots of pushing…’ Dinos explained.
‘And in a sense to get that chattering naffness of humans into this thing was
really important […] This jostle is just going on interminably, they have been
doing this forever, so for them [the horror] isn’t being chopped up – they’ve
been chopped up a million times before [and] they just keep coming back;
so it’s not the torture that’s the horror, it’s the fact that it doesn’t stop – what
is it...?’ He gropes mentally for the hackneyed Sartre quote that is, for once,
entirely apt: ‘…Hell, hell is other people.’
‘It’s also,’ Jake enjambs ‘that they haven’t lost the will to bicker, and
this is the lowest existential claim they can have over their existence.’ But if
Hell was busy, and Fucking Hell was busier, with The End of Fun the hubbub
of these mannikins seems almost audible. ‘There’s more of everything,’ Jake
admitted. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce recapitulates a
bravura hellfire sermon, and the preacher concludes his cataloguing of Hell’s
torments thus:
‘Consider finally that the torment of this infernal prison is
increased by the company of the damned themselves. Evil
company on earth is so noxious that even the plants, as if by
instinct, withdraw from the company of whomsoever is deadly
or hurtful to them. In hell all laws are overturned: there is no
thought of family or country, of ties, of relationships. The
damned howl and scream at one another, their torture and
rage intensified by the presence of beings tortured and
raging like themselves. All sense of humanity is forgotten.’
If the ‘Hell’ series takes its sense of timing and its psychological
enactment from Christian eschatology, then the same can be said for the
artworks’ plan – their physical topography. True, it is the syncretizing of
Virgil’s Aeneid with the Gospels that gives us Dante’s Inferno ; but consider
this, Dante’s Hell is nothing if not exhaustively mapped – and this at a time
when the actual world within which the poet operated was less than perfectly
15
known. From at least the 1300s on, then, Hell has this character of being
delimited and knowable. It can be overlooked, and under-looked and gazed
through – much in the way, say, that a model encased in glass might be cut
away to expose a stygian pit full of cloned Hitlers. Indeed, this quality of being
simultaneously small-scale and filled with a jostling multitude is precisely what
gives The End of Fun and its forerunners their hellishness, for without being
delimited, Hell cannot avoid expanding indefinitely into the realms of metaphor,
when the whole point of it is that it be a specific place where specific bad things
happen to people who have behaved in specifically bad ways.
Certain elements of the Hell depicted by the ‘Hell’ series have
crept in from the Christian vision literature that inspired Dante – whether
actively decided upon by its creators or subconsciously annexed. Most salient
in The End of Fun is the bridge; this seems to play a similar role to the one in
The Vision of Tundale (dated 1149 and written by an Irish monk), which is a
thousand steps long but only one foot wide, and spans a deep and foul
valley. From this plank the proud and the ungenerous tumble. Dinos Chapman
said of theirs: ‘The first Hell had a modest bridge construction over the
mountain, but this has just expanded exponentially […] it goes round and round
in circles a lot [while] the entrance and the exit are disproportionately small
compared to the number of people that are on it.’ Tundale, who is visiting Hell
for admonitory reasons (the term for the living undertaking such a sightseeing
tour is ‘harrowing’), also sees a mountain with fire on one side, ice and snow
on the other – but actually most of the sets and props of Hell were installed
by the time of the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England (731),
which includes two visions of Hell (Furseus’s and Drythelm’s) whose
protagonists are jointly exposed to a stock diorama of thorny woods, lakes of
blood, sulphurous pits, red-hot iron ladders, chimerical demons – and so on.
A discussion of the terrible jostling on the bridge in The End of Fun
led Jake Chapman to expound on the use of flow dynamics in the design of
shopping malls: ‘They do that laminar flow thing, don’t they, they analyse
molecules in certain shapes, they can anticipate turbulence and that’s how
they treat flows of people. The same people who did Bluewater are the same
people who did the Tate.’ (Bluewater is large mall on the outskirts of London)
‘There’s a buttress there, and a cappuccino bar there and people react
molecularly – obviously they do.’ This unforced – even unthinking – comparison
between the piece and the stygian flows of contemporary consumerism,
whether of evanescent aesthetic experiences or consumer durables, found an
echo in Jake Chapman’s further remark that The End of Fun was ‘like Ibiza taken
16
over by the Nazis’; which itself seemed to recast Hunter S. Thompson’s line
in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that ‘Circus Circus is what the whole hip
world would be doing if the Nazis had won the war.’
But while the essential features of the ‘Hell’ series come from Hell,
and the incorporation of consumerist icons Ronald McDonald and the snowman
(crucified as only slaves and heretics were under Roman law) suggests an
ulterior anti-capitalism, the styling of the ‘Hell’ series – which reaches, for now,
a baroque apogee in The End of Fun – is egregiously filmic. The most obvious
movie references are to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979);
Elem Klimov’s startling child’s-eye view of the Nazis’ Operation Barbarossa,
Come and See (1985); and of course Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future
(1985), which supplies not much in the way of set dressing – only the
occasional trashed DeLorean sports car – but frames the wider panorama of
The End of Fun ’s warped chronoclasm (to freely adopt John Wyndhams’s
coinage for a time-traveller’s alteration to the past that cannot occur without
wholesale ramifications in the present). By enjambing this movie styling with
a stock collection of structures – the concentration camp, the Lutheran
church, the shattered factory, and so forth – the viewer is prodded first
towards an abominable fancy, thence to an understanding of what exactly it
is that provokes such dreadful mirth.
There are, of course, many descriptions of the Nazi death camps –
let one suffice, this, from Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness , her pen portrait
of Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka. Sereny interviewed Stangl
extensively, and since he was one of only four men to have commanded an
extermination camp as opposed to a concentration camp, her book is a key
text for the understanding of the genocide. In the following, Sereny’s words
are italicised:
‘When do you think you began to think of them as cargo?’ […]
‘I think it started the day I first saw the Totenlager in Treblinka.
I remember Wirth standing there, next to the pits full of blueblack corpses. It had nothing to do with humanity – it couldn’t
have; it was a mass – a mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said, ‘What
shall we do with this garbage?’ I think unconsciously that
started me thinking of them as cargo.’
‘There were so many children, did they ever make you think
of your children, of how you would feel in the position of
those parents?’
‘No,’ he said slowly, ‘I can’t say I ever thought that way.’ He
paused. ‘You see,’ he then continued, still speaking with this
17
extreme seriousness and obviously intent on finding a new truth
within himself, ‘I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always
as a huge mass. I sometimes stood on the wall and saw them
in the tube. But – how can I explain it – they were naked,
packed together, running, being driven with whips like…’ the
sentence trailed off.
In the ‘Hell’ series the tables are turned – in the occult sense – and
it is late-20th and early-21st century gallery-goers who are standing watching
the Nazis being driven with whips along the tube. The artworks all depend,
crucially, on the fraught juxtaposition of the particular and the general – the
individual and the ‘huge mass’. Dinos Chapman spoke to me of ‘the worm’s
trails’ formed by the noses of viewers on the glass of the vitrines as they track
from one micro-atrocity to the next. Even in their construction the pieces
have mimicked the improvisatory character of the Nazis’ Final Solution; when
I asked the Chapmans how they went about planning the works, Dinos said,
‘You don’t have to because it takes so long […] If something takes two years
to make you can’t get it wrong. It’s like a tortoise will never trip up – it’s moving
so slow it can always see what’s in front of it, and also there’s something quite
nice about not trying to plan it, so that it makes itself.’
Again, here we see the queasy opposition between the mass and the
individual: the artists’ finicky progression as they glue an extra head on a
mutant, insert a vulture’s beak in a wound, or place artefacts that will never
actually be seen deep within the bowels of the piece is to be counterpointed
with the viewer’s delirious saccade. I put it to them that it would be a bizarre
method with any other visual artwork to simply begin at an arbitrary point on
a blank canvas, or an amorphous render. Jake Chapman replied: ‘If you’re
drawing a life model it’s imbecilic to start at the eye, because obviously
you’ll have this distorted anamorphic sketch… but in a sense the point about
this work is that it’s exactly that, it operates at a constant local level, because
part of the purpose of the work is that in its locality it overwhelms its total
image.’ And the same is true, of course, vice versa: the total image of the work
as a boxed Hell overwhelms its countless immoral singularities.
I queried earlier whether the Chapmans can be said to have a
conventional political – or even moral – engagement in their work; it was by
no means a facetious or rhetorical inquiry. The ‘Hell’ series demands of its
conscientious viewers that we interrogate our own abominable fancy which
depends, in turn, on the Nazi perpetrators’ status as uniquely blameworthy,
uniquely evil – behind this, of course, lies the theory of German exceptionalism
18
developed by some historians, most notably Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, in his
book Hitler’s Willing Executioners . My contention is that the Chapmans are
attacking the notion of the Nazis as uniquely evil – are wilfully subverting this
– and that au fond the ‘Hell’ series is an assault not just on the monism of
art and life, but the monism of Judaeo-Christianity and its successor creed:
Humanism. The panoply of Nazi-on-Nazi crimes, rendered so as to be static
and – barring the occasional warehouse fire – eternal, places this burden on
its viewers: either indulge unconstrained in your abominable fancy, or else
interrogate it: if the Nazis are the damned and we are the saved, on what basis
have we been so blessed? Humanism sets itself up as a supremely rational
belief system, and in so doing it makes of the irrational its own Untermenschen
– and what can be more irrational than to perpetrate the Holocaust? (At least
with the benefit of hindsight.)
There is a third possible reaction to The End of Fun , which is simply
not to engage at all – after all this is an artwork, there is no danger that by
engaging with it will, like a genocidal dictator, be appeased . Moreover, it is
not unreasonable to consider the Hell scenes in early Christian apocalypses
– written and visual – as forms of self-righteous pornography, and if we’ve
got through this phase once, why torturously recapitulate it? The answer is that
the Chapmans’ ‘Hell’ series calls our attention, in the last analysis, not to the
pornography of violence, but to the pornography of model-making. When I
asked the Chapmans if we – i.e. the viewers – were the gods who had
created The End of Fun they were dismissive. I left the further question of
whether they themselves were god-like in relation to the work unanswered –
because it was superfluous.
Naturally the Chapmans are the gods of the ‘Hell’ series, gods who
have created a world that is utterly and irrevocably corrupt – a world that in
its rejection of monism necessarily implies Manichaeism. For all its coupage ,
its chopping up and interleaving of different media, its pained elision of
scenes from the Siege of Münster with stoned fantasies, The End of Fun is
emphatically a pre- rather than postmodern work, and for that reason all the
more heretical to all parties, whether religious or secular.
19
Token Pole 1997
10
CHRISTOPH GRUNENBERG
Attraction–Repulsion Machines:
The Art of Jake and Dinos Chapman
Meaning in visual art develops in the temporal interval between initial optical
impression and the gradual intellectual digestion of those sensations,
conditioned by the internal memory bank of past perceptual experiences,
cognitive conventions and internalised expectations. The work of Jake and
Dinos Chapman, with its copious utilisation of sexually explicit and gruesome
imagery, seems to privilege the immediacy of the visual as a means of
attracting attention and establishing instant engagement. The sensory carpetbombardment with genitalia and wounds, the vivid evocation of physiological
processes and scatological transgressions, and the apocalyptic scenarios of
destruction have created a repellent frenzy of the visible beyond which few
dare to venture. The visual shock tactics and excesses of representation
provide a pleasurable surface in which the viewer may indulge resistingly but
which also functions as a distracting tactic removing true significance by
several degrees. As this protective screen of externalised horror collapses,
truths are revealed which are far more uncomfortable than instinctive visceral
reactions to exposed private parts, mutilated bodies and extreme feasts of
torture.
1 Quoted in Douglas Fogle, ‘A Scatological
Aesthetic for the Tired of Seeing’, in
Chapmanworld, London, Institute of
Contemporary Arts, 1996, n. p.
2 Georges Bataille, Eroticism, trans. Mary
Dalwood, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2001,
p. 144.
The intense nature of the Chapmans’ work is founded on more than just an
overdeveloped will to provoke and to shock. Their art is one of ruptures that
challenge the homogeneity of the human body and, by extension, the idea of
an ordered and enlightened world ruled by logic and reason. Jake and Dinos
Chapman have declared: ‘When our sculptures work they achieve the
position of reducing the viewer to a state of absolute moral panic… they’re
completely troublesome objects.’1 This ostensibly hyperbolic statement should
be read less as a manifesto to shock and awe in the time-honoured tradition of
the avant-garde than as a genuine insistence on the need to cross established
boundaries of morality and taste in order to achieve true insights. Georges
Bataille pointed at the sheer boundless capacity of human invention in the
evasion of true self and the recognition of erotic urges in particular. Spectacle
as a strategy becomes a necessity if art is to produce a level of engagement
that goes beyond merely titillating pleasure and mild amusement. It is a
means of breaking down the barriers of civility and reason: ‘Fear and horror
are not the real and final reaction; on the contrary, they are a temptation to
overstep the bounds’, Bataille stated, significantly in a chapter on the subject
of ‘Beauty’.2 Degradation, the violation of taboos, perversions and sexual
aberrations, incest, defilement and violence are all mechanisms of
transgression which are conjured in order to facilitate the traversing of the
threshold into the realm of the real. And it is only by overcoming these
divisions that our foremost desire will be fulfilled and we will achieve our
destiny, which includes the ultimate knowledge of the unknowable – death, as
horrifying and disturbing as this might be. ‘Spectacle, or representation in
11
general,’ Bataille argues, function as a necessary ‘subterfuge’, ‘without the
practice of which it would be possible for us to remain alien and ignorant in
respect to death, just as beasts apparently are. Indeed, nothing is less animal
than fiction, which is more or less separated from the real, from death.’3
The most intriguing art works are generally described as those which manage
the perfect coincidence of visual form with expressive intent. The Chapmans
have defied this ideal of straightforward symbolic representation and instead
fold content into an unsettling visual form, or (to quote Jacqueline Rose on
Freud on being challenged by Leonardo da Vinci), ‘[an] artistic practice
which sets itself the dual task of disrupting visual form and questioning the
sexual certainties and stereotypes of our culture’.4 It is the shifting balance
between captivating form and complex iconographic content resisting facile
reading that distinguishes their art. In formal terms, their creative arsenal
revolves around the resurrection of discredited techniques of representation
that include polychrome figurative sculpture, a faithful realism bordering on
the obsessive, the miniature tableau and various forms of the grotesque,
frequently imposed onto skilful emulations of children’s art. Visual
appearance has taken a similarly regressive shape as their subject matter,
Jake Chapman confirming that their work ‘parasitically, or vampirically,
depends upon all the forms of art production which should under the
conditions of progressive modernity and liberal humanism, have been buried,
being Luddite or non-teleological. So our excavation of all these zombified art
techniques visits the healthy, vital, modernist body with all the diseases which
give it its momentum.’5 The vampire narrative stands for ‘metaphoricity gone
wild (it represents too much)’, as Judith Halberstam has argued, an
appropriate analogy as the artists promiscuously feed on outmoded past styles
and are nourished on suspect historical and contemporary iconographies.6
Theirs is an art that proudly subscribes to an aesthetics of excess, not just in
exposing the invisible and that from which we consciously avert our eyes, but
also through its insistence on a surplus of entropic disintegration, a
superabundance of detail and the scratchy nervousness of their peripatetic
drawn and etched lines.
Bataille described the world as ‘purely parodic, in other words…each thing
seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form’.7 The
Chapman brothers have created an alternative reality through the radical
exaggeration and distortion of familiar forms of figuration that both mimic and
mock the illusionary comforts of realism. They play with visual and verbal
correspondences, create hilariously vulgar and impenetrably obscure
associations, layer images onto existing historical imagery and cyclically
reconfigure motifs that reappear in different guises. They employ word
games, visual puns, illogical anachronism and time leaps, biological shifts and
moral conundrums, unexpected variations in scale and sudden alterations
between media to create both amusing and unsettling ambiguities. Obscene
laughter, the radical desecration of sanctified ethical principles, extreme
horror and graphic representations of violence and sexual activity of all kinds
are techniques of transgression employed to challenge received ideas and
moral beliefs. Titles are essential and range from the plain silly to the cryptic.
Their series of endearing paintings of cats unsubtly plays on the colloquial
double entendre with the female genitals, as, for example, Pussy in the Middle
2001, presenting an anthropomorphic conflation of a saccharine calendar
picture of kittens with a vagina. Thanks to their imagination we know what a
‘fuck face’ might actually look like, and Two-faced Cunt 1995 is a rather literal
12
3 Georges Bataille, ‘Hegel, Death and
Sacrifice’, in The Bataille Reader, ed. Fred
Botting and Scott Wilson, Oxford and
Malden, MA, Blackwell, 1997, p. 287.
4 Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of
Vision, London and New York, Verso, 2005, p.
226.
5 ‘Jake Chapman on Georges Bataille: An
Interview with Simon Baker’, Papers of
Surrealism, 1, Winter 2003, p. 8.
http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications
/papers/journal1/index.htm. See also
Christoph Grunenberg (ed.), The Uncanny
by Mike Kelley (Liverpool, Tate
Liverpool/Cologne, Walther König, 2004) on
the history of polychrome figurative sculpture
and its suppression in nineteenth- and
twentieth-century art.
6 Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic
Horrors and the Technology of Monsters, Durham,
NC and London, Duke University Press,
1995, p. 156.
7 Georges Bataille, ‘The Solar Anus’, in idem,
Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939,
ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl, Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press, 1985, p. 5.
interpretation of the Janus myth with a vagina sandwiched between two
faces. Disasters of yoGa 1997 is a wonderful example of the truthful
visualisation of an idiomatic phrase (‘with his head up his own arse’) while
paying homage to the early sceptic of the Enlightenment, Goya. Some of the
shocking content derives from the transfer from one representational medium
to another, the translation of motifs from Goya’s etchings into threedimensional miniatures and life-size representations in all their glorious gory
detail. The Chapmans’ ‘improvement’ of Goya’s celebrated (posthumous)
print series contains, like all successful parody, elements of reverential
homage and mocking ridicule, exaggerating the grotesque and repulsive
elements of his visual manifesto against the cruelties of war while
simultaneously turning it into a circus sideshow. The titles of these works,
Insult to Injury 2003 (followed by Injury to Insult to Injury 2004) and Like a dog
returns to its vomit 2005, perfectly capture the artists’ ambivalent attitude
towards the master of horror and the psychological implications of this serial
preoccupation with recurring themes and motifs. Freud diagnosed ‘hysterical
vomiting’ as a sign of repression, and the regurgitation and the subsequent
consumption of ejected matter suggest a continuous cycle of resurfacing and
suppression of bottled-up traumas, memories and desires.8
8 Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality: II. Infantile Sexuality’, in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 7, London, The
Hogarth Press, 1953, p. 182.
9 David Falconer, ‘Doctorin’ the Retardis’, in
Chapmanworld, n. p.
10 Allan Stoekl, ‘Introduction’, in Bataille,
Visions of Excess, p. xii.
What is really disturbing in Jake and Dinos Chapman’s art are not the
outward provocations of nudity, disease and violence but the underlying
psychological meanings – the attack on the whole body, the blurring of
gender lines, the revulsions of the abject, the insinuations of sadism and the
moral offences. While their sculptures, paintings and prints function perfectly
on a visceral level without theoretical superstructure, particular figures,
motifs and images can always be traced to specific textual and visual
references. At the heart of their work is the creative conversion of
psychological processes, symptoms and disorders into convincing material
form. They have been called ‘official iconographers’, producing ‘quite literal
translations – or perhaps “embodiments” – of a Freudian, pre-conscious,
polymorphously perverse, undifferentiated, noumenal “beyond”’.9 Penis envy,
the fear of castration, Oedipal complexes, narcissism, hysteria, paranoia,
neuroses, sadism and masochism, scopophilia, the uncanny, the death wish,
abjection, totems, taboos and their violation all make appearances and are
variously given sculptural, painterly and graphic form. Nietzsche, Freud,
Bataille, Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari are the godfathers of this
kindergarten of deviation, perversion and science gone wrong. Bataille’s
evocation of the ‘pineal eye’, for example, with its obvious reference to the
penis (‘a final but deadly erection, which blasts through the top of the human
skull and “sees” the overwhelming sun’), is faithfully rendered in a number of
works, such as Seething Id 1994, evoking male vision of an essentially different
kind.10 The artists not only display an acute historical awareness of
psychoanalysis, philosophy and critical theory but continue a productive
dialogue with past masters that extends from ‘primitive art’ and the
apocalyptic visions of Goya and Blake via Rodin and the Surrealists to more
recent proponents of psychological terror and trauma, such as American
West Coast artists Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, with whom they share an
interest in staging psychological scenarios and unfolding repressed traumas.
There remains, however, always an impenetrable subtext, an undiscovered
hermetic reference or inane private joke constructing a final layer of
resistance withstanding the forensic deciphering of motifs and meanings. This
final act of defiance facilitates a deliberate extension of the perceptual and
13
interpretative act, rejecting the assumption that a momentary impression and
grasping of the visual appearance of an art work will instantaneously reveal
its meaning in a kind of illuminating epiphany, or that a careful iconographic
exegesis will lead to a complete unravelling of the complex web of allusions
and references.11
I shall consider some of the recurring themes and techniques of
representation, provocation and engagement throughout the Chapmans’
career by means of five works or groups of works ranging from 1993 to
2003–2004. Little Death Machine (Castrated) 1993 stands at the beginning of
the artists’ sculptural oeuvre and in a long tradition of erotomanic machines,
from the wondrous automatons of the Enlightenment to Roussel’s Locus Solus,
Jarry’s Superman, Duchamp’s bachelor machines, Picabia’s bio-mechanical
sex devices, Giacometti’s sadistic contraptions and Bellmer’s fetishistic
puppets with their mechanical interior life. Little Death Machine builds on the
responses of these precursors to the machine’s invasion of the territory of
human labour, with its subjugation of the body to relentless demands of everincreasing efficiency, productivity and endurance in the service of maximum
profit. Le petit mort is, of course, the evocative French circumlocution for the
male orgasm. In its post-coital state the now dysfunctional (‘castrated’)
machine is forever arrested in its pleasure-producing rhythm and rehearses a
continual masochistic deferment of wish-fulfilment. The masochist, as Slavoj
˘ ˘ has observed, ‘finds satisfaction in the tedious, repetitive game of
Zizek
staged rituals whose function is to postpone forever the sexual passage à
l’acte’.12 Ultimately it remains unclear whether we are dealing here with the
dynamics between a desiring subject and its object of desire, with one brain
stimulated into reflex expressions of longing by the repetitive blows of a
hammer while the other serves as the receiver of this sexually aggressive
attention. We might also be encountering the autoerotic self-involvement of
the narcissist, or, perhaps, a literal representation of the psychotic split of
consciousness as it occurs in schizophrenia. Or are we confronted with a
diagrammatic representation of the ‘“automatization” of the superego’,
society’s implementation of regulatory mechanisms to control the ego, as
practised in totalitarian systems which subsume the individual body and
consciousness under the rule of repressive authority?13 Walter Benjamin
detected in the ‘uncovering of the mechanical aspects of the organism…a
persistent tendency of the sadist. One can say that the sadist is bent on
replacing the human organism with the image of machinery’, supporting a
reading of the Chapmans’ machine as a Fascist apparatus.14 The Fascistic
imagination dreams of the human body as a ‘totality-machine’ which, unlike
Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring machines, controls and replicates the
production of desire: ‘Within the machine “instinctual life” is controlled and
transformed into a dynamic of regularized functions; it is devoid of feeling,
powerful; its desiring-intensities take the form of the “velocity” of
“explosion”… it flows liberated only if individual components overwhelm and
explode. This machine is propelled by an engine that kicks, sparks, blacks out
– motor charged… kick, spark, black out… and so on.’15 In the sadisticFascist mindset sexual pleasure is replaced with violence (here represented
by the repeated hammer blows) with castration (the isolated phallus) and
death (the breakdown of the machine) as its ultimate destiny.
The rather crude contraption of the Little Death Machine might also stand as a
figure for the mechanistic interpretations of psychoanalysis, with its Oedipal
14
11 Jake Chapman has expressed his
reservations about the immediacy of visual
arts as opposed to literature: ‘I’m intensely
suspicious about prioritizing occularity: the
idea that the world can be just reduced to
sight… Part of my phobia about imagery and
my romantic attachment to literature is the
idea that literature makes different claims on
the reader. The viewer comes to expedite this
massive Kantian assumption about imagery
and aesthetics: Kantian machines, walking
eyes that don’t blink. Whereas with someone
who reads a text, the relationship with a text
is a very physiological one, it’s very different
to looking at art.’ ‘Jake Chapman on Georges
Bataille’, p. 5.
˘ ˘
12 Slavoj Zizek,
Organs without Bodies: On
Deleuze and Consequences, New York and
London, Routledge, 2004, p. 30.
13 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A
Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, New York,
Vintage Books, 1955, p. 85.
14 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans.
Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin,
Cambridge, MA and London, Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 368.
15 Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies II: Male
Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, trans.
Chris Turner and Erica Carter in
collaboration with Stephen Conway,
Cambridge, Polity Press, 1989, p. 198.
Little Death Machine
(Castrated) 1993
16 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, AntiOedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R.
Lane, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota
Press, 1983, p. 329.
17 Ibid., pp. 6–7.
fetishisation of positivist logic and coherent narratives, human behaviour
reduced to an expression of the interaction between pure ‘ego’ and ‘sexual
instincts’ as represented by the disembodied brain and phallus. Emotions and
desires are stripped down to a perfunctory mechanism with the opposing
forces of attraction and repulsion framed within the context of the economic
system of psychoanalysis, with its repression of the threatening libidinal
forces of the ‘desiring-machine’, in which ‘one sees the same catatonic
inspired by the immobile motor that forces him to put aside his organs, to
immobilize them, to silence them, but also, impelled by the working parts that
work in autonomous or stereotyped fashion, to reactivate the organs, to
reanimate them with local movements’.16 The makeshift form of the Little
Death Machine, arranged on a presentational platform, points to a failed
improvised experimental model or, perhaps, to a table constructed by a
schizophrenic mind, as described by Henri Michaux: ‘it has been desimplified
in the course of its carpentering… As it stood it was a table of additions,
much like certain schizophrenic drawings, described as “overstuffed”…
There was something stunned about it, something petrified. Perhaps it
suggested a stalled engine.’17
15
Exposed organs without bodies were followed by the so-called Anatomies, a
tribe of smooth-bodied mannequins in varying states of mutation and overendowed with organs. Unlike the dismembered bodies of Bellmer or the
liquidised corpses of Dalí, the Chapmans’ Anatomies are disconcertingly
continuous and inherently logical creatures. Happily sharing extremities with
the bewildering biological logic of contented Siamese twins, the girls’ and
boys’ bodies naturally morph into each other with the effortless elegance of a
Henry Moore sculpture, always with the promise of suddenly jumping apart
and becoming whole again. They display all the generic anatomical
characterisation of androgynous shop window mannequins, just close enough
to the human model to be convincing but not detailed enough to offend the
consumer’s desiring gaze. The amorphous, inoffensive bodies are primarily
constituted of air-brushed skin – pure surface without structure or depth onto
which illusionary dreams and wishes can be projected: ‘The body without
organs, the unproductive, the unconsumable, serves as a surface for the
recording of the entire process of production of desire, so that desiringmachines seem to emanate from it in the apparent objective movement that
establishes a relationship between the machines and the body without
organs.’18 The otherwise naked child mannequins sport identical brand-new
Nike, Fila, Adidas or Reebok trainers as poignant cultural signifiers of the
homogenising force of global consumer capitalism, which does not balk at
manipulating and seducing children. Children’s ‘unproductive’ existence
makes them the ideal consumers, with their uncompromising narcissistic
demand for satisfaction that refuses to even contemplate denial. During the
1990s, trainers became the ultimate must-have fashion accessory for
teenagers and a much-discussed symbol within a moral panic decrying the
escalation of youth consumerism and competitive status anxiety. The shoes
fulfil an ambivalent symbolic function as objects of desire and safeguard
against pollution, protecting the children’s clean and uncompromised bodies
from the dangers of the base materialism of the earth they wander.
In Tragic Anatomies 1996 the Garden of Eden has been transformed into Dr
Moreau’s Island, populated by frolicking child mutants in a variety of
metamorphosed pairings, with multiple heads circling an anus, a girl growing
erect penises as horns, a profusion of vaginas and a number of hermaphrodite
deviations. ‘What are children if not animals becoming human’, Bataille
asks,19 and the Chapmans’ repertoire includes variations on the mythological
figure of the centaur (without its horse’s body), as in the ancient myth at
home in what is supposed to represent a wild, uncultured landscape. Other
tragic mutations seem to be temporarily arrested in a moment of unfortunate
genetic acrobatics with differently aged children morphing into novel
creatures. Zygotic acceleration, biogenetic, desublimated libidinal model (enlarged x
1000) 1995 is the most ambitious of the Chapmans’ Anatomies, with a circle of
children re-enacting the complex symmetry of the DNA structure, with its
helix of interlocking pairs of chromosomes interrupted by the occasional
mutation of an upside-down gene. The curvaceous flow of the moulded
plastic bodies is upset by over-defined anatomical details breaking out in the
most unlikely places like terminal skin disease – realistically rendered erect
penises proudly substituting for noses and sculpted vaginas emerging in
between adjoining girls’ faces.
18
19
While responding to contemporary debates surrounding the limits of medical
progress tested by cloning, genetic manipulation and biotechnology, the
16
Ibid., p. 11.
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay
on General Economy, Volumes II and III, trans.
Robert Hurley, New York, Zone Books, 1993,
p. 65.
Tragic Anatomies 1996
Fuck Face 1994
17
Anatomies are foremost playful hybrids that integrate scientific and biological
change into cultural and psychological discourse.20 The mythical state of
childhood is crudely disturbed by pronounced outward signs of sexuality,
with fully developed organs in obvious states of excitement. Penises and
vaginas as secret signs of uninhibited sexual compulsion appear significantly
in the most disturbing and visible place – on the children’s faces, with their
expressions of beatific innocence and incorruptibility. Bataille quotes
Leonardo da Vinci on the ‘paradox of ugliness and beauty in eroticism…:
“The act of coition and the members employed are so ugly that but for the
beauty of the faces, the adornments of their partners and the frantic urge,
Nature would lose the human race.’21 The bizarre appearance of private parts
thrust into the face of the public also relates to Freud and Melanie Klein’s
notion of the ‘partial object’, externalised signs of an ‘organ that resists its
˘ ˘ has described the concept.
inclusion within the Whole of a body’, as Zizek
‘The eroticized (libidinally invested) part of the body [is] incommensurable
with the Whole of the body, sticking out of it, resisting its integration into the
bodily Whole.’22 Partial objects also represent the absent father and mother
through parts of their bodies which in early childhood, for example during
breast-feeding, are experienced as indistinguishable from the child’s own body.
The liquid malleability of the Anatomies reflects the fragmentation of the
child’s nascent ego, with the mental delineations of the body remaining fluid
until a distinct body awareness has developed. The body-ego grows, as
Margaret Mahler established, through the ‘progressive development of
libido…from the inside of the body (in particular from abdominal organs) to
the periphery of the body’.23 Ultimately, the priapic protrusions symbolically
announce the cycle of life and death: ‘Beings only die to be born, in the
manner of phalluses that leave bodies in order to enter them.’24 Delusional
notions of the assumed innocence of children collide here with the reality of
pre-adolescent sexual development, in particular during the so-called ‘period
of latency’, and a capacity for ruthless aggression that transcends adults’
tendency towards violence.25 The Chapmans’ children are as morally
ambiguous as they are sexually indeterminate, simultaneously immaculate
and corrupted, sexually immature and in the full bloom of adolescence.
‘Normal’ sexual development seems to be interrupted by random bouts of
retrogression with impulsive outbreaks of exterior signs of mature sexuality.
The myth of purity and assumed asexuality is blasted and childhood is
revealed as a social construct and symbolic condition, as much dependent on
collective pressures, rituals and fashions as on biological development.
20 Freud argued that psychological processes
have their ultimate origin in older, biological
phenomena. See, for example, ‘On
Narcissism: An Introduction’, in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14, London, The Hogarth
Press, 1957, pp. 78–9.
21 Bataille, Eroticism, p. 140.
Under the polished skin of innocence are seething unreleased desires and
unknown horrors. Black Nazissus of 1997 further exposed the revulsions of
abjection by juxtaposing a whole body with the surface of the earth erupting
into heaving piles of intestinal matter and rivers of blood. Black Nazissus
typically weaves multiple references ranging from literature, art history, film
and, of course, psychology, teasing and twisting the ancient myth into a
bewildering, history-distorting scenario offending sanctified racial and moral
standards. The title is, of course, a play on the classic Powell and Pressburger
melodrama of repressed erotic longing and unfulfilled desire ending in tragic
death, Black Narcissus of 1947. While the work takes its basic composition
from well-known depictions of Narcissus, such as in Caravaggio or Salvador
Dalí’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus, the youth of ancient mythology has here been
transformed into a black boy incongruously dressed in a Hitler Youth uniform.
The absurd configuration of the Black Nazi is not without precedent and has
18
˘ ˘
22 Zizek,
Organs without Bodies, p. 175.
23 Margaret Mahler, On Human Symbiosis and
the Vicissitudes of Individuation, Volume I,
Infantile Psychosis, New York, International
Universities Press, 1970, p. 36. Quoted in
Theweleit, Male Fantasies II, p. 216.
24 Bataille, ‘The Solar Anus’, p. 7.
25 For a short summary of the argument see
Sigmund Freud, ‘Moses and Monotheism:
Three Essays’, in idem, The Origins of Religion:
Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism and Other
Works, ed. Albert Dickson, trans. James
Strachey, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985,
pp. 317–18.
Zygotic acceleration, biogenetic de-sublimated libidinal model (enlarged x 1000) 1995
19
Black Nazissus 1997, ICA Boston Gothic
Michelangelo da Caravaggio, Narcissus c.1598-99
Salvador Dalí, Metamorphosis of Narcissus 1937
20
been employed to comic purpose in a number of film comedies, enhanced in
Black Nazissus by projecting this comic farce onto an innocent child.
Narcissus is more than just a self-involved youth lost in the admiration of
beauty; he also reveals an obviously conflicted personality of contradictory
desires, identities and drives: ‘Narcissism is never the wrinkleless image of
the Greek youth in a quiet fountain,’ Julia Kristeva has stated. ‘The conflicts
of drives muddle its bed, cloud its water, and bring forth everything that, by
not becoming integrated with a given system of signs, is abjection for it.
Abjection is therefore a kind of narcissistic crisis…’26 Narcissus’ loving
contemplation of his image in the pond reflects a doubling of personality, a
split which since Nietzsche has been interpreted as a struggle between
Dionysian and Apollonian forces. Black Nazissus does not behold his perfect
reflection but is confronted with his alter ego, a grotesque distortion of his
original self in a white face with a pronounced expression of libidinal thrust.
The fuck face rising from below penetrates the mirror surface of the still pond
in a ‘moment of narcissistic perturbation’ as subconscious desire enters
consciousness.27 The border between imagined reality and truth, regression
and consciousness, inside and outside, is broken down and the abject emerges
in the shape of intestines, rotten flesh and excrement and blood trickling
down from the putrid boil that has broken out on the skin of this natural
paradise. The earth, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is a body without
organs, which in Black Nazissus erupts into a formless mass of internal organs
without body.28 As in Dalí’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus 1937, the morphing of
the figure into a geological formation points to (as Freud described it) the
‘conservative’ impulse, the ‘tendency inherent in organic life to seek the
restoration of an earlier, ultimately inanimate state of things’.29 Narcissus’
attempt to return to the child’s state of primary narcissism is an expression of
his suicidal inclinations and a variation on the death drive. Lost in the
admiration of his mirror image while kneeling on a mobile slab of landscape
featuring stratified skulls and bones, Nazissus fails to see his ultimate destiny,
obscured by the surface vegetation of flowers and plants, which he will soon
join as he himself is turned into a narcissus plant.
26 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on
Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York,
Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 14.
27 Ibid., p. 15.
28 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Brian Massumi, London, Athlone
Press, 1988, p. 40.
29 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure
Principle’, in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Vol. 18, London, Vintage, 2001, pp. 37–8. See
also David Lomas, ‘The Metamorphosis of
Narcissus: Dalí’s Self-Analysis’, in Dawn Ades
and Fiona Bradley (eds.), Salvador Dalí: A
Mythology, London, Tate Gallery Publishing,
1998, pp. 78–100.
30 Georges Bataille, Blue of Noon, trans. Harry
Mathews, New York, Urizen Books, 1978, pp.
151–2.
Once again, Bataille might provide one possible reading through the final
climactic moments of his novel Blue for Noon. Written in 1935, but not
published until 1957, it presents a lucid premonition of the impending
disaster facing the world and contains many of the elements featured in Black
Nazissus. Following the painful separation in a train station from his lover
Dirty/Dorothea, the protagonist encounters a Hitler Youth band performing
like animated marionettes controlled by an evil puppet-master (‘hateful
automatons…with doll-like faces’), conjuring painful visions of impending
war and legions of fallen soldiers. The drum major’s stick is ‘held obscenely
erect, with the knob at its crotch, it then looked like a monstrous monkey’s
penis that had been decorated with braids of colored cord’. Bataille paints a
deliberately histrionic spectacle, the staccato rhythm of the music turning into
‘bloody salvos of artillery’. The only possible reaction to the absurdity of
mindless murder and mass hysteria is obscene laughter, ‘filled with black
irony that accompanies the moments of seizure when no one can help
screaming’.30 Like Bataille’s delirious vision, Black Nazissus presents a
similarly bizarre snapshot of history in which the structured course of events
is disturbed and the persecuted becomes the perpetrator of evil.
21
Narcissus is an emblematic modern figure, reflecting the self-absorbed
delusions of the desiring individual and the wider crisis and alienation of the
modern self. The story of Narcissus also reveals a deeper tragedy of human
existence: the recognition that humanity is no longer the centre of the world
and has lost its control over it – to rationality, to science and to hidden
psychological forces of desires and instincts.31 The conflict between libidinal
drives and competing identifications has been uncovered as a primary source
of aggression. Narcissus remains trapped in an early developmental phase in
which normal object relations are directed towards the subject’s own ego,
preventing a full development of the individual, which instead seeks
definition through outside forces. Lacan identifies ‘aggressivity’ as ‘the
correlative tendency of a mode of identification that we call narcissistic’,
inherent in the early mirror stage of the child’s development. Lacan further
describes the ‘secondary identification’ with the imago of the parent, the child’s
rival, with the ‘energy for that identification provided by the first biological
upsurge of genital libido’. The genital libido is responsible for the
supersession of the individual and ‘its sublimating effects in the oedipal crisis
lie at the origin of the whole process of the cultural subordination of man’.32
These authorial forces shape the (male) subject, while at the same time he
fears those who might challenge his masculinity. The black boy looking at his
distorted white mirror image reveals these inherent power relations of the
classic master/slave dynamic that have not been overcome in a postcolonial
world, Black Nazissus being as much contemplating subject as object of
observation (Other). The identification with evil implies his subjugation to
the superego, to the Fascist authority of the father which appears as his
mirror image and presupposes Narcissus’ eventual punishment and death.
If Black Nazissus signalled the first emergence in the Chapmans’ work of the
epitome of evil as represented by National Socialism, it found its most
pronounced formulation in the installation Hell 1999-2000.33 The form of
Hell itself presented a moral challenge, literally ‘belittling’ the horrors of the
concentration camps. The grandiose tableau of torture, mutilation and
destruction was presented at the reduced scale of models and dolls’ houses,
the ‘diminutive world of childhood’ – the product of an enormous degree of
effort and labour with loving attention paid to every detail.34 Miniatures
bring history to life and provide the viewer with an opportunity to observe a
scene with god-like omniscience and nostalgic retrospection. They conjure
the closed fantasy world of play, rather than reality, in which the observing
subject will be consumed by a simultaneity of action and overwhelming
narrative complexity. The form of the miniature is by no means innocent,
however: its intensive mode of production and reliance on the verbose
proliferation of minute details entails a threat of losing oneself in an inanimate
illusion of reality. With its eternal stillness and hermetic interior logic, the
miniature tableau always contains the promise of death, marking ‘the pure
body, the inorganic body of the machine and its repetition of a death that is
thereby not a death’.35 The compulsive obsessions of the model maker also
find their equivalent in the deadly bureaucratic efficiency of the Nazis, with
Eichmann as the paradigmatic figure of the normality of evil.
While the work lost itself in the minutiae of an extravagantly staged drama,
Hell was also Baroque in its panoramic inclusiveness. Invisible to the viewer
drawn into the particulars of the dramatic tableau, the sculpture itself formed
an emblematic representation of the subject, with the nine display cases
22
31 ‘Narcissism is what is responsible for our
resistance to the sort of truth which makes us
appear wandering and lost in a nature
deprived of this center in love with itself.
Narcissism is what resisted Copernicus’
discovery, since it resulted in the fact that we
would no longer be the physical center of the
universe; and narcissism was also responsible
for the resistance to Darwin’s discovery,
which stripped us of the title of masters of life;
finally, narcissism was what resisted
psychoanalysis itself, when it taught us that
we were not even masters of our own domain.’
Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations:
Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde, London
and New York, Continuum, 2004, pp. 184–5.
32 Jacques Lacan, ‘Aggressivity in
Psychoanalysis’, in idem, Ecrits: A Selection,
trans. Alan Sheridan, London and New York,
Routledge, 2001, pp. 21, 25, 26.
33 The work was destroyed in a London
warehouse fire in 2004.
34 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of
the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the
Collection, Durham, NC and London, Duke
University Press, 1993, p. 43.
35 Ibid., p. 69.
arranged in the shape of a swastika as a hidden symbol and ambiguous
advertisement of evil. While the sprawling whole appeared as a spatial and
temporal continuum without beginning or end (possibly how we would
imagine hell – or heaven), there were different sections as well as a clear
centre: a lone square plinth functioning as the axis of the extending
rectangular spokes of the wheel. A train station, death strips and gas
chambers were complemented by a church, hospital and temple, completing a
fictional universe in which religious belief, altruistic care and enlightenment
had become obsolete concepts. A volcano erupted in the centre, spewing
waves of SS soldiers out of the earth’s decaying wound like infectious pus,
utilising another familiar Baroque trope of the imminent breakdown of
rational order and impending apocalyptic doom signalled by a momentous
natural catastrophe. Hell signifies a complete disintegration of civilisation,
‘allowing our horrifying savageness to appear in the interstices, revealed in
these fissures just as hell might be in the chasms opened by the earthquakes,
whose revolutions in the cosmic order sunder the fragile skin of the earth’s
circumference and momentarily bare the fire at its centre’, as Michel Leiris
wrote, anticipating the horrors of the Third Reich. ‘Not a day passes when we
don’t notice some premonitory sign of just such a catastrophe, so that
although we are not dancing or standing on a volcano nevertheless we can
say that our whole life, our very breathing, is in touch with lava flows,
craters, geysers…’36
36 Michel Leiris, ‘Civilisation’, in Encyclopædia
Acephalica, ed. Robert Lebel and Isabelle
Waldberg, London, Atlas Press, 1995, p. 93.
In the ‘The Solar Anus’ Bataille also uses the
image of the volcano expelling unwanted and
contaminated matter: ‘The terrestrial globe is
covered with volcanoes, which serve as its
anus. Although this globe eats nothing, it
often violently ejects the contents of its
entrails. Those contents shoot out with racket
and fall back, streaming down the sides of the
Jesuve, spreading death and terror
everywhere.’ Visions of Excess, p. 8.
37 Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How
Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil, New York,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995, pp. 224.
38 Bataille, ‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice’,
p. 289.
39 ‘Sheer Hell’, Apocalypse Royal Academy of
Arts Supplement, Time Out, September 1997,
p. 14.
40 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus,
p. 118.
In recent years, the idea of evil has regained currency as a moral recourse and
tool of political demagogy. A metaphorical vacuum has developed around the
common experience of evil and the lack of a symbolic language to represent it
(except in the most simplistic dichotomies or superficial spectacles of horror).
As Andrew Delbanco points out, this representational void ‘leaves us in our
obligatory silence, with a punishing question: “How,” in the words of one
literary critic, “is the imagination to compass things for which it can find no
law, no aesthetic purpose or aesthetic resolution?”’37 Hell posed a deadly
serious question about the nature of evil and its punishment, graphically
imagining a place of eternal punishment, sacrifice and no redemption. The
installation built on a long tradition of apocalyptic genres reaching from the
Last Judgement, the Massacre of the Innocents and the gruesomely literal
depictions of the suffering of saints to secular representations of battles and
anarchic crowd scenes. In Hell, the uniform and perfectly synchronised mass
of the Fascist army turned into an incoherent chaos of evil, a gigantic version
of Dante’s inferno and apocalyptic orgy of pain in the spirit of Jacques
Callot, Hogarth, Goya and Pasolini. However, there was no charismatic
Führer seducing the unknowing populace, and there were no recognisable
individuals; just a heaving and teeming mass of perpetrators, a schizophrenic
multiplicity of disintegrating bodies as soldiers mutilated and cannibalised
each other: ‘The feeling of sin is connected in lucid consciousness to the idea
of death, and in the same manner the feeling of sin is connected with pleasure.’38
Hell condemns the Nazi armies to an eternal ritual of mutual sacrificial
punishment, realising Fascism’s destiny of eternal war and providing a
perverse wish-fulfilment of fantasies of masochistic torture.
Hell signalled the total failure of the project of Enlightenment and, as the
artists have provocatively stated, its succession by ‘the Age of Light
Entertainment’.39 According to Deleuze and Guattari, ‘[c]ivilization must be
understood in terms of social repression’.40 Invoking Nietzsche, they disavow
23
The Shape of Things to Come 1999-2004
24
25
Hell 1999-2000 (detail)
26
the debt system of sin and punishment and instead celebrate pain in a
primitive ‘theater of cruelty’, which needs an eye ‘that extracts pleasure from
the event (this has nothing to do with vengeance): something that Nietzsche
himself calls the evaluating eye, or the eye of the gods who enjoy cruel
spectacles, “and in punishment there is so much that is festive!”’41 The viewer
of Hell became complicit in this spectacle of pain, surveying the scene from
his or her elevated status as giant disembodied eye from behind the safety of
the glass vitrine. A sign reading ‘Kunst Macht Frei’ welcomed those doomed
to death as they passed through Hell’s death camp gates. Have the artists
themselves been absolved from sin by their creative labour of love on the
tableau for over two and a half years? In one of the Disasters of War etchings
coloured smoke rises from the chimney of Tate Modern, which is surrounded
by fences and watchtowers, the post-industrial temple to modern art
transformed into a concentration camp devoted to education and the
betterment of the population through the appreciation of art. The prehistorical version of hell, Hell Sixty-Five Million Years BC 2004-5, populated
by painted dinosaurs in the style of children around kindergarten age, plays
with these expectations of the therapeutic value of art and the channelling
of children’s negative energy and aggression into creativity as a solution to
political, economic and social problems. Jake and Dinos Chapman’s art
ironically reflects on the missionary zeal with which, in particular, New
Labour has attempted to utilise art and creativity while stripping culture of
its true subversive potential. Their work vehemently resists the idealistic
instrumentalisation of art and performs a direct attack on an insipid and
mediocre culture through an apparent suspension of critical discourse and
the rule of excess, frenzy and shock.
41 Ibid., pp. 189, 191.
42 Ibid., p. 329.
43 Bataille, Eroticism, pp. 45, 56.
Possibly more than any other work, the series of sculptures Sex I to III
2003–2004 exemplifies the dynamic between attraction and repulsion. Sex
continues the rehearsal of different forms of disgust as an essential element in
transforming distanced observation into direct visceral engagement, superb
formal handling and deeply nauseating subject matter in a constant interchange.
The mutilated and castrated soldiers from the original treatment of the motif,
Disasters of War in 1993, are now in an advanced state of decay, swarming
with oversized flies, bugs, caterpillars, spiders, worms, maggots, snails and
snakes. Sex epitomises death as ‘the body without organs repels the organs
and lays them aside: no mouth, no tongue, no teeth – to the point of selfmutilation, to the point of suicide’.42 The process of putrefying decomposition
is rendered in great detail and with exquisite artfulness. Sex exhibits the
decorative opulence of a jewel-encrusted reliquary and the seductive
materiality of the heavily embellished surfaces of Art Nouveau or Symbolist
sculpture, the aesthetic enjoyment turning into physical repulsion once
recognition of its true nature sets in. Just as it is difficult to avert the eyes
from a rotting cadaver lying on the side of the road, so we are irresistibly
drawn to the intricacies of surface treatment and multiplicity of life
proliferating on the putrid corpses in Sex. The violated corpses generate an
ambiguous response to the horror of death and violence while, at the same
time, ‘an element at once solemn and terrifying fascinates and disturbs us
profoundly’. This perverse attraction reminds us not only of the presence of
death but also of the fact that ‘its stinking putrefaction [is] to be identified
with the sickening primary condition of life. For primitive people the moment
of greatest anguish is the phase of decomposition; when the bones are bare and
white, they are not as intolerable as the putrefying flesh is, food for worms.’43
27
The disintegrating skeletons are not dead but are crawling with life, animated
by nature feeding on past life. Most importantly, the head impaled on a
branch has eyes (actually only one), the essential sign of consciousness,
ecstatically grinning the distorted smile of the tortured, ‘unhappy’ clown. The
work is indeed not without humour and small details, such as the faint
imprint of ‘China’ giving away the country of origin of the skeleton used for
casting, destroy the careful illusionism of the exaggerated realism and confirm
the sculpture’s status as pure artifice. Similarly, the scar on top of the skull of
the figure tied to the tree trunk alludes to the place where the pineal eye once
broke through, its vertical thrust in defiance of ‘the horizontal system of
normal ocular vision… like the eye of a tree or perhaps like a human tree. At
the same time this ocular tree is a giant (ignoble) pink penis, drunk with the
sun and suggesting or soliciting a nauseous malaise, the sickening despair of
vertigo.’44 There is a tense restlessness in the surface treatment that
encapsulates a state of constant metamorphosis and anxious paranoia, not
unlike the tension produced by the push and pull of attraction and repulsion,
leading to ‘intense nervous states that fill the body without organs to varying
degrees’.45 ‘Abjection is above all ambiguity’, Julia Kristeva has written,
exemplified in the power of Eros to transcend the repellent horrors of the
corporeal and base materialism representing Thanatos.46 Sex is the ultimate
‘desiring-machine’, with ‘repulsion…the condition of the machine’s
functioning, but attraction…the functioning itself’.47 The state of
schizophrenic confusion triggered by horror, disgust and transgression
suspends programmed inhibitions and conditioned responses to create a state
of moral uncertainty of a force that allows a glimpse into another, more
inclusive reality. It is a crisis triggered by the extreme artifice of art, one that
attracts us through the sophistication of its workmanship and opulence of its
colours and repulses us through its evocation of the real – that is, death and
decay brought on by the lowest forms of animal life. Sex provides as much
pain as it gives pleasure through the beauty of an art which is ecstatic in its
intensity.
The dymamics of attraction and repulsion are at the basis of social structures,
sacred and civilising forces interacting in establishing a system of taboos,
rituals and values. Attraction and repulsion are not static but ‘mobile’ entities
and their shifting associations are essential ‘in the transformation of a
depressive content into an object of exaltation’. Art has a mediating function
and through horror, disgust and laughter (‘the doubling of tragedy by
comedy’) it can push those powerful unconscious processes which are at the
heart of human existence to the surface, ‘in a sort of swirling turbulence
where death and the most explosive tension of life are simultaneously at
play’.48 Freud once denigrated the impact of art as limited to a ‘mild narcosis’,
which ‘can do no more than bring about a transient withdrawal from the
pressure of vital needs, and is not strong enough to make us forget real
misery’.49 With their art, the Chapman brothers have abruptly interrupted the
artificial sleep of this narcosis, addressing both topical as well as fundamental
questions about human existence and identity, radically challenging orthodox
moral parameters and biological truths while a fantastic and, at times, vicious
sense of humour carefully probes the gravity of this undertaking.
28
44 Georges Bataille, ‘The Pineal Eye’, in
Visions of Excess, p. 84.
45 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 19.
46 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 9.
47 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus,
pp. 329–30.
48 Georges Bataille, ‘Attraction and
Repulsion I: Tropisms, Sexuality, Laughter
and Tears’, in The College of Sociology (1937–39),
ed. Dennis Hollier, trans. Betsy Wing,
Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press,
1988, p. 111; idem, ‘Attraction and Repulsion
II: Social Structure’, in The College of Sociology
(1937–39), pp. 121, 114, 123–4.
49 Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and its
Discontents’, in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Vol. 18, London, Hogarth Press, 1961, p. 81.
Sex I 2003
29
Machines in the Bronze Age / Bronze in the Machine Age
SIMON BAKER
Sculpture, which is so idealistic in its aims, is controlled by
terrestrial laws of matter, and above all by the law of gravity…the
weight of bronze, marble or granite adds to the weight of the
corpse that a statue purportedly perpetuates, to the burden of
the rotten brains of allegory…the allegory of bronze situates itself
on the plane of metaphor, as image, as poetic fiction…
Robert Desnos, ‘Pygmalion and the Sphinx’1
22
In Paris between the wars, bronze was already living on borrowed
time; its age was almost at an end. The outrageous proliferation
of statues on streets, squares and boulevards, known at the time
as ‘statuemania’ provoked increasingly vitriolic and reactionary
responses. Statues were compared with poisonous mushrooms
that appeared overnight: unexpected, unwanted and best
avoided. Bronze, it was alleged, was like ink; too much flowed.2
This most prestigious of sculptural materials was finally being
disabused of its cachet, dragged down from its pedestal and
stripped of its patina. The poet Robert Desnos wrote what might
stand as its eulogy, ‘Pygmalion and the Sphinx’, underlining what
he called the ‘very relative immortality conferred by bronze’ by
imagining an alternative future for sculpture: giant household
objects, X-rays, and films ‘with colour, sound and relief’. There
was a serious side to Desnos’s text too, though, a radical
materialist inter vention in the philosophical and aesthetic
debates of the time. Bronze, Desnos implied, had been so
thoroughly overused and abused that it could no longer be
properly relied upon to represent the things whose forms it was
given. And nowhere, he claimed, was this more evident than in
those sculptures that attempted to depict things that were,
essentially, impossible to sculpt: ‘dust when the wind swept it,
or a balloon when it tried to rise.’ These marvellous aberrations,
usually overambitious late-nineteenth-century flights of fancy,
infected their neighbours, undermining the gestures, expressions
and poses of long-forgotten plinth-bound heroes. Desnos’s
‘allegory of bronze’ was one where the material substance
slipped away from its content: form and medium curdled, until
statues represented nothing more than the fact that bronze
could no longer be relied upon to suspend disbelief, and instead
relentlessly signified the dumb fact of its own materiality. Ten
years later, with Paris occupied by the German army, Desnos’s
allegory was completed when the municipal authorities were
asked to identify which of the city’s bronze inhabitants would be
rendered as metal contributions to Hitler’s war effort.3 Desnos,
imprisoned in Auschwitz, Buchenwald and finally Theresienstadt
(where he died), had no way of knowing that the statues to which
he had attributed ‘a peculiar life’ were being used to fight the
very people whose antipathy they had suffered for so long.
It is in Desnos’s idea of an ‘allegory of bronze’, where the
material is somehow divorced and liberated from its
representational function, and raised onto the metaphorical
plane as an autonomous ‘poetic fiction’, that the coincidence
with Jake and Dinos Chapman’s bronze machines lies. For if,
when Desnos was writing, bronze had yet to be as thoroughly
discredited as a sculptural medium in the studio as it had in the
street, the same cannot be said of the present day. Twenty-first
century artists can no longer cross their fingers and hope that
when the mould is broken, the sad homunculus that emerges
will be some iterative descendent of Alberto Giacometti (rather
than Henry Moore). Bronze today is a trap; a nightmarish tar
pit into which too many dinosaurs wander, never to re-emerge.
This (admittedly glib) association between bronze as a material
and prehistoric time finds an alibi in the Chapmans’ practice:
from the fugitive bronze dinosaurs so easily mistaken for their
cardboard cousins in Hell, 65 Million Years BC, to the title of
When Humans Walked the Earth.4 Indeed, the latter (and its more
recent, high-coloured revision, Little Death Machines) could
be said to constitute the brothers’ most direct engagement yet
with the politics of what could be termed ‘media post-medium
specificity ’. 5 ‘Medium specificity ’, the critical term that
acknowledges any tendency to restrict practice to the qualities
inherent in a particular medium (such as the flatness in painting
valued by Clement Greenberg), has had a half-life of everdiminishing returns through and beyond the influences of
minimalism and conceptual art. Across a range of media – in
painting, photography, film, sculpture, installation, (and even the
less tangible phenomena of ‘virtual’ art) – claims for value
attached to specific or inherent qualities have (largely) been
retrenched, in favour of assertions of irony, disinterest,
detachment and post-conceptual lassitude; or paradigm-shifting
claims about substances, processes or concepts as media.6
If cast bronze could be traced through this history and into the
present day, it might most accurately be located in persistent
attempts (by artists as different as Anya Gallaccio, Damien
Hirst and Gavin Turk) to confuse and conflate a proud heritage
of monumentality and redundant expressionism with a contractfabricator's aesthetic of fetishistic verisimilitude.7 Bronze today,
it could plausibly be argued, is more or less where Desnos
imagined it would be, desperately trying to cling to the inherent
significance of ‘bronzeness’ while leaving the iconographies of
the objects into which it is cast completely at liberty. The
resulting sculptures, which are often finished in such a way as
to completely disavow their own material constitution, are still,
nevertheless, resolute in their attachment to bronze; why else
would they have been made in the first place? And there is
something perversely democratic about this state of affairs.
23
At the turn of the last century, small interest groups of wellmeaning citizens would collect money to raise street-level bronze
effigies of heroes or heroines that would (in theory at least)
endure into posterity and beyond.8 Today’s artists, by contrast,
have the means at their disposal to bequeath to the future tons
and tons of their bronze musings, and yet, terrified, one suspects,
by the ghosts of Rodin’s studio, contrive to channel this
productivity through the least auspicious thematic content, and
away from the ignominy of civic commissions.
Jake and Dinos Chapman are by no means exceptions to this
situation: on the contrary, their recent work in bronze (as with
much of their practice, in different ways) reflects a complex
engagement with the relationships between content, material
and process that epitomises the current state of sculptural
play.9 When Humans Walked the Earth (commissioned by Tate
in 2007) consists of ten large-scale bronze assemblages with a
‘natural’ bronze patina, while Little Death Machines, their 2008
reworking, presents the same bronzes ‘un-naturally’ coloured.
Both sets, however, derive from one of the brothers’ early works:
a small 1993 construction called Little Death Machine (Castrated).
This original contraption, intended (apparently) as a ‘protocybernetic libido machine’ consists of motors, hammers, juicefilled prosthetic penises and rubber brains, set on a work bench,
beneath which sit bottles of putrefying gunk. But it is not just that
the first (castrated) Little Death Machine was a tragic, pathetic
object, unworthy of a single bronze doppelgänger (let alone a
vast panoply of bronze versions, elaborations and complications)
that makes the Chapmans return to it so interesting. Nor the fact
that this object choice reflects terminally on the status of so many
other things selected for the (dubious) honour of a bronze
edition: sculpture will, no doubt (having already outlived so
many idol worshippers and animal fetishists), survive the shame
of association with bronze dildos and bronze rubber chickens.
There is, however, something distinctly aggressive, even punitive,
about the Chapmans ‘improvements’ to pre-existing images
and objects, a tendency in their work to which their own Little
Death Machine is just the latest to fall victim. Just as Goya’s
Disasters of War has endured colouring-in, over-painting,
correction, inflation, cartoon versions and joke-shop reconstructions
at the brothers’ hands, so here, unsurprisingly perhaps, the
most pathetic, impoverished, tragic-comic excuse for a sculpture
(a pointless, dysfunctional, seized-up machine) has been
condemned to live out eternity (or at least its long-term future)
through an elaborate series of bronze extrapolations.
24
It seems almost as if the only rational thing to do to Little Death
Machine (Castrated), and to bronze, was to put them both out
of their misery by uniting them forever.
When Humans Walked the Earth reimagines and reanimates the
marvellous impossibilities of Desnos’s allegory of bronze by
deliberately engaging with the ‘less than figurable’ realm of
mechanical activity. All manner of bronze components argue with
their own constitution and facture just like their unfortunate
ancestors, struggling in situ on the streets of Paris. The machines
themselves, more Dr. Seuss than Henry Ford, add new strain to
the concept of the labour-saving device, having been designed
to be incapable of achieving pointless tasks: a grossly inflated
rubber-glove balloon rises to the ceiling despite the ‘constraints’
of its rubber-chicken counterweight; a re-born Little Death
Machine fails miserably to move along an ill-balanced see-saw
towards a severed pop-eyed head; and a counterweighted
hammer never finishes banging a nail through the eye of another
chicken hung from a gibbet on a trolley that cannot roll on four
balls of wool. What is true of these works is essentially true of
every bronze statue: nothing moves, nothing lives, and nothing
works: every promise of activity already having been arrested in
advance. And yet, as Desnos also insisted, it is the relentless
insistence that these works will, somehow, at some level,
overcome their own material condition (a potential that they are
destined to embody in perpetuity) that constitutes their perverse
and irrational triumph.
The Chapmans’ subsequent gambit, replacing the traditional
patina permitted When Humans Walked the Earth with the
entirely inappropriate paint job foisted on Little Death Machines
can also be read as a deliberate, aggressive move against
bronze and its ruined reputation. 10 After all, if movement,
animation and dynamism are the first-order fallacies of any work
cast in bronze (particularly a machine), then the claim that
they might somehow be made to appear even more ‘life-like’,
takes the material delusion to another level entirely. As they get
gradually closer to simulating the potential of real machines,
smuggling their bronzeness beneath a cheery veneer, as they get
ever-closer to the impossible dream of movement, the more
acutely (and tragically) static they become. It may be worth
mentioning in this context, by way of a conclusion, that Desnos’s
essay ‘Pygmalion and the Sphinx’ conceals its own internal
paradox in its title. By replacing the love interest in Ovid’s
‘Pygmalion and Galatea’ with a man-eating monster, Desnos
implies that his mythical sculptor is desperately engaged in
trying to give form to a beast that might well kill him if he
succeeds in bringing it to life.11 In order for Pygmalion (described
pointedly by Desnos as a ‘clumsy magician’) to survive, his own
libidinously engendered little death machine has to fail; its
obdurately inert form destined to endure as an object lesson on
the pitfalls of successful sculpture. In any normal circumstances
this enigmatic, totemic remainder could be described as being
‘sphinx-like’: embodying and preserving both its secret riddle and
the threat that it poses. The extent to which a (failed) sculpture
of a sphinx can, nonetheless, be described accurately as being
sphinx-like is itself something like an account of the way that the
Chapmans’ bronze machines might actually work.
Notes on the author:
Simon Baker is Lecturer in Art History at the University of Nottingham, and a
member of the editorial group of the Oxford Art Journal. He writes on surrealism,
photography and contemporary art, and co-curated Undercover Surrealism at
the Hayward Gallery in 2006.
‘Pygmalion et le Sphinx’ was published in Documents 1 in Paris in 1930.
A full English translation of Desnos’s text, from which all extracts used here
have been taken, is online at:
www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal7/index.htm
On the Documents see D Ades and S Baker, Undercover Surrealism: Georges
Bataille and Documents (Hayward Gallery, London and The MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2006).
2. The idea of bronze flowing like ink is attributed to René Bazin in J
Hargrove, The Statues of Paris (Vendome Press, New York 1990),
pp.255–259; the allusion to poisonous mushrooms was made by R Strauss in
G Pessard’s Le Statuomanie Parisienne (Paris 1911), pp.5–6.
3. The call for reusable metals was made in the Journal Officiel (the
mouthpiece of the collaborating French authorities) on 11th October 1941.
Remarkably, many of the ‘reclaimed’ statues were photographed by Pierre
Jahan as they were being taken to be melted down: these images were later
published, with texts by Jean Cocteau in the form of La Mort et Les Statues
(Les Éditions du Compas, Paris 1946). For a full discussion of this material
and its relation to Desnos’s text, see S Baker, Surrealism, History and
Revolution (Peter Lang, Oxford and Bern, 2007).
4. Another admittedly non-bronze point of reference here is the Chapmans’
2007 sculptural commission for the courtyard of the Royal Academy: three
huge dinosaur cut-outs in Corten steel, entitled The Meek Shall Inherit The
Earth But Not The Mineral Rights.
5. Or perhaps ‘post-specific mediation’.
6. There are still practices and critical tendencies that make the concept of
specificity to a medium a compelling concept (Christian Marclay’s use of
copyright-free fragments of film being an obvious example), although even
once rigorous site-specific practices have begun to unravel under the
pressure of endless invitations to ‘respond’ to the places that can afford
them – consequently often seeming to involve little more than artists
exporting and installing their own baggage/convictions.
7. For example: Anya Gallaccio’s painted bronze trees; Damien Hirst’s
polychrome bronze sculpture Hymn (2000); Gavin Turk’s painted bronze Bag
12 (2003); and the Chapmans’ 2001 works Sex and Death. In each case,
the fabricated touchstone obviously being invoked is the work of Jeff Koons.
Although Koons hasn’t used bronze to duplicate inflatable objects since the
1980s (and even then it was as bronze in works like Aqualung), Koons has
produced a number of highly finished polychrome aluminium works that
deliberately play with the properties of the subjects: tied balloons, inflatable
toys, etc.
8. For more on this, see Maurice Agulhon, ‘La Statuomanie et L’Histoire’ in
Histoire Vagabonde I (Gallimard, Paris 1988).
9. For an extended argument about this aspect of the Chapmans’ practice,
see S Baker, ‘Quartered, Drawn and Hung (Chapman, Chapman, Condo and
McCarthy)’ in J Harris (ed.), After Bad Taste (Liverpool University Press,
forthcoming, 2008).
10. Bronze is what you get for coming third, the brothers have rightly pointed
out.
11. Desnos’s Pygmalion is as unhinged as Dr Frankenstein or Lovecraft’s
Herbert West.
1.
25
Jake and Dinos Chapman Biographies
Jake Chapman was born in 1966 in Cheltenham, Dinos Chapman in 1962 in London. They live and
work in London. They have exhibited extensively, including solo shows at the Song Eun Art
Space, Korea (2013) Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev (2013); The State Hermitage Museum, St.
Petersburg (2012); Museo Pino Pascali, Polignano a Mare, Italy (2010); Hastings Museum, UK
(2009); Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover (2008); Tate Britain, London (2007); Tate Liverpool
(2006); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2005); Museum Kunst Palast Düsseldorf (2003); Modern Art Oxford
(2003) and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2000). Group exhibitions include ‘Art under
Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm’, Tate Britain (2013), The 1st Kiev International Biennale
(2012); the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010); Meadows Museum, Texas (2010); ‘Rude Britannia’, Tate
Britain (2010); Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2010); Hareng Saur: Ensor and Contemporary Art,
S.M.A.K,Ghent (2010); National Centre of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2009); Kunstverein
Hamburg (2009); British Museum, London (2009); Palais des Beaux Arts de Lille (2008); Haus der
Kunst, Munich (2008); ICA, London (2008); ‘Summer Exhibition’, Annenberg Courtyard, Royal
Academy of Arts, London (2007); ARS 06, Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA, Helsinki (2006)
and Turner Prize, Tate Britain (2003).
BELSTAFF ANNOUNCES SUPPORT OF JAKE AND DINOS CHAPMAN:
COME AND SEE AT THE SERPENTINE SACKLER GALLERY
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 2013: Belstaff is pleased to announce its support of Jake and Dinos Chapman:
Come and See, the new exhibition by British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman at
London’s Serpentine Sackler Gallery.
“For Belstaff, the Chapman brothers encapsulate the rebel sprit of Belstaff in their work
and in their lives. Jake and Dinos are modern day daring adventurers.”
– Damian Mould, Chief Marketing Officer, Belstaff
Jake and Dinos join the ranks of other notable ‘Belstaffians’- fans of the brand that
include, T.E. Lawrence, Che Guevera, Steve McQueen, Jay Z and David Beckham.Jake
and Dinos Chapman are true pioneers in their field.
The exhibition opens on November 29th and runs until February 9th 2014. Belstaff will be
closing the exhibition with the presentation of their women’s Fall/Winter 2014 collection
and a cocktail party in the Serpentine Sackler Gallery on February 15th 2014.
Jake Chapman was born in 1966 in Cheltenham, Dinos Chapman in 1962 in London.
They live and work in London. They have exhibited extensively, including solo shows at
the Song Eun Art Space, Korea (2013) Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev (2013); The State
Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (2012); Museo Pino Pascali, Polignano a Mare, Italy
(2010); Hastings Museum, UK (2009); Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover (2008); Tate
Britain, London (2007); Tate Liverpool (2006); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2005); Museum
Kunst Palast Düsseldorf (2003); Modern Art Oxford (2003) and PS1 Contemporary Art
Center, New York (2000). Group exhibitions include ‘Art under Attack: Histories of
British Iconoclasm’, Tate Britain (2013), The 1st Kiev International Biennale (2012); the
17th Biennale of Sydney (2010); Meadows Museum, Texas (2010); ‘Rude Britannia’,
Tate Britain (2010); Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2010); Hareng Saur: Ensor and
Contemporary Art, S.M.A.K,Ghent (2010); National Centre of Contemporary Art,
Moscow (2009); Kunstverein Hamburg (2009); British Museum, London (2009); Palais
des Beaux Arts de Lille (2008); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2008); ICA, London (2008);
‘Summer Exhibition’, Annenberg Courtyard, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2007);
ARS 06, Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA, Helsinki (2006) and Turner Prize,
Tate Britain (2003).
SERPENTINE GALLERIES
The Serpentine is two Galleries: the Serpentine Gallery and the new Serpentine Sackler
Gallery designed by Zaha Hadid. Based in Kensington Gardens a five-minute walk from
each other, the Serpentine Galleries build on the Serpentine’s 43-year history of
championing contemporary art and architecture. Jake and Dinos Chapman: Come and See
is the second exhibition in the new Serpentine Sackler Gallery
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Belstaff is a global British luxury lifestyle brand steeped in its heritage and spirit of
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Belstaff was bought in June 2011 by the Swiss luxury brand leader, Labelux Group
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Today, Belstaff is headquartered in New York and London with showrooms in London,
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Media Contacts
Kate Bartle, Communications Director, Belstaff
Kate.bartle@belstaff.com