Okay everyone, it gives me a great pleasure to welcome Jake Chapman here. Fantastic to have him here. I'm going to run through, I know you all know a lot about him, but I'm going to run through some of his key moments as an artist. Interestingly, we start off with an early rejection from the slave, I'm very interested. And Chelsea. And Chelsea. He went to a North East London colleague. He then went to the Royal College of Art and graduated in 1990. He started collaborating with Dinos, his brother, and they were assistant in 1991.
They were also, at the Royal College, they were assistant to Gilbert and George. he participated in a lot of shows which I'll go through including Sensation and he made a number of things and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2003 his famous piece or their famous piece, Hell which they made in 2000 was burned in the famous Saatchi event I remember that piece as quite astonishing some of the key exhibitions since he's been showing regularly since 1990 and White Cube he's part of the White Cube gallery
he showed it was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2003, he showed at Tate Liverpool in 2006 in the Hermitage Museum in Russia in 2012 in Seoul in 2013 at the Serpentine Gallery in 2013-14 and he's been really active in defending the arts through letters and charities and he was also in The Bad Art for Bad People at Taylor so anyway very much, very big welcome he's going to show, I'm going to say another thing he's going to show some films
and then he's going to be opening, opening for questions and we don't actually have a microphone to move around the audience so you're going to have to talk very loudly when you ask him a question he has a microphone but can you try and speak really loudly ok Jay, welcome we're just going to show I'm going to show a couple of films one is called Sacrificial Mutilations and Death in Modern Art, which is a very old film. And the second one is an episode two from a miniseries that I just shot for Sky Arts. I'm not sure if anyone's seen it. It's a 20-minute second episode.
And I guess the thing is that hopefully it will summon some kind of questions from you and I'll answer them. So, shall we? Yeah. It's very much open to you all to ask questions, but I've got just a couple of questions. One is if you could say something about when you make these films, you and Dinos work together, how that dynamic works, and also, because you obviously agree about a lot, and it's very interesting to hear that, because quite a lot of people do work together here. The The other question I want to know is quite a lot of your work has involved bodily distortions, which I find very interesting. I wonder if you could say something about that. Sure, okay.
Is this working? Yes, it's working now. It's not working now, is it? Is it working now? Yeah, can you hear at the back? Okay, cool. Yeah, working together. I think when we left Royal College, I think in 1990, I think my brother had already worked for Gilbert and George for about seven years as their assistant, and I got a job there. We worked for another year before we got fired. They asked for a pay rise. What was interesting about watching them work was that they, as two people who make one body of work, they operate very symbiotically, So they work as though they are kind of absolutely integrated.
There's no divergence from the idea. There's no argumentation. But I think what we learned from that was that the idea of working together didn't mean to say that we had to agree. that the discourse, that if the work originated from discourse or from conversation, it would be better if the conversation was at least critically orientated or at least kind of, you know, argumentative. So, having said that, there's no kind of methodology for how we work. I mean, Dinos always says that it's the first person in the studio that gets to make the work they want to make. And also, thinking about these films,
I mean, I directed these films, he did some of the music on them, but the film comes from a novel that I wrote about 10, 15 years ago. So, we have separate activities which don't include each other. Dios makes music and, as I said, I write. What's the second question? The second one's about quite often your work features some kind of bodily distortion about bodiliness as well. Yeah. You could say something about that. Sure. Well, I suppose that you're kind of referring to some of the Siamese twin sculptures, the mannequin sculptures. And even the head here. Yeah, yeah. You know, quite a lot of... That's true. The big head. The great big head.
Well, I suppose, you know, the Talmud Mandragoros is the epitome of the kind of aristocratic, you know, the anemic aristocrat who lives on top of the volcano. You know, I suppose that, you know, the idea that, I suppose the idea of bodily distortion is, you know, we're interested in the idea of how things are idealised. So one of the objections to some of the work we made before that was the Siamese twin pieces was that they were referred to as being defamation. as being things which were aberrations or things that even, you know, it's ridiculously explained as perversity or, you know, something which, an index of child abuse or...
And I think the thing is, is that what we were interested in is the notion of saying that if you produce a sculpture which has no referent in the world other than itself, then it can't be an aberration. It's a perfection of itself. So I think that, you know, in a sense, it's not so much an interest in aberration but it's an interest in what stands as being an aberration I think also the first sculpture we made that was in a sense it was the child mannequin with the penis for the nose and the title of the work was Fuckface the origin of that was we were trying to think and I think this may be a core issue or a core struggle in our work is how do you produce a work of art which can't be redeemed?
How do you produce a work of art which can't be re-appropriated to the logic of positivity? What I mean by that is to say that you could produce a painting or a sculpture which depicts something of horror of some kind of terrible act of violence and there's always a way in which it can be recuperated to some kind of use value, some positive use value in the sense that all bad things get transformed through the prism of ethics into good things. So we were thinking if you made a sculpture, well how would you make a sculpture that could not be appropriated to that logic? And so we kind of thought, well fuckface is a kind of really interesting word because there's no way you could kind of appropriate that to some kind of message about the positivity of the world.
So, and I suppose in a way that we were trying, a lot of our work is about trying to avoid the noose of a certain kind of Christian inheritance in a sense, the notion that the idea of something which depicts something violent can always be turned into something positive. So Little Mannequin called Fuckface was born and I think that in some ways it kind of it began a sequence of works that then became more and more outrageous by title. I think Fuckface led to Two-Face Cunt,
which was essentially a mannequin with two heads and a vagina between the two faces. I mean, the idea of what we were interested in doing was trying to produce works of art which had zero autobiography and zero cultural content. There was no way in which you could look at that thing and extract some kind of ideal... The work of art would not edify the viewer. The viewer would see this thing and learn nothing from it. That in a sense its meaning was as superficial as its surface. I suppose at that time we were kind of at least influenced by people like Jeff Koons. The New York Now show was at the Saatchi Gallery. So when you saw those, I mean, this is very early days of Jeff Koons,
seeing these shiny sculptures where there was no point of human contact with these things because the surfaces simply reflected everything around them. So in that sense, they were devoid of content. And, you know, I suppose... Yes. I was wondering if in the last time you showed, Is the reason you had sterile in titles in that film as another example of work that can't be the game? Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, I mean, it's, I think, I think there's the idea of, you know, reducing things to kind of generic, you know, kind of a very, you know,
that if you want to make a happy painting, it's a smiley face. If you want to make something horrible, then it's a swastika. that you start to use these impoverished terms to actually elicit complex it's very interesting to see that you can make a sculpture like Hell that has thousands and thousands of little tiny toy soldiers doing awful things to each other and you can actually somehow extort compassion from people people will look at that thing especially when you show it in Germany people can get upset by these little people will have compassionate associations with things which don't deserve that level of human input. So I think we're very interested in the idea of how you can kind of get people to have
empathetic responses to things that don't deserve it. I don't think that upsets me then. In what way? Well, like, I don't know, like in that film, having like the islanders, that might have been somebody that way. Yeah. Or a swastika, a film that's done, is there anything that has that effect in you? I'm trying to think. Well, I mean, I just, I suppose in a sense, you know, it would be kind of, it would be saying that you know if you drew a stick person with a dagger sticking out of his head you know in terms of how that would cause an expression an expression of anxiety on a viewer would be
an index of their psychosis so so if what we're trying to do what we're interested in is trying to say well what's the you know how do you get humans to think about stuff how do you get people to have you know sentimental feelings about things which kind of like slightly you know how do you How do you get people to connect with things which are inappropriately empty? I suppose in a way it's a way of trying to define the points at which human notions of expression are kind of mediated by the most moronic terms. To be upset by a load of 30,000
soldiers doing horrible things to each other is to somehow provoke a magnitude of expression which is undeserved of material. And I guess that's the question of this is what does a work of art do? How does it function? How do you get someone to have a reaction to something which is, you know, does a work of art, can a work of art communicate? And how does it communicate? So going back to the film, Mr. McGorry is, is it? Can you speak very loudly so people can hear your question? So the guy with the big head in the film has kind of this passing resemblance to a
of Lloyd Grossman. Do you remember that? And so I guess I'm getting towards how does humour kind of come along with your work and what kind of influences you have? Yeah, well I think humour opens up a kind of schism between thought and its it's, you know, there's a point at which kind of the moral framework where you identify what you think and how you think you should think, it opens a schism between the two things. And, you know, it's the point at which language fails, collapses, falls apart.
and it's a kind of it's also a point at which the unconscious makes itself present so yeah humour is very important very serious about humour yeah yeah yeah yeah that's true yeah yes it is And also it's a way of, it kind of makes a compensation for things which are horrific. I mean, there's the idea of, it's a kind of, yeah, it's a kind of abysceral reaction to something which is uncomfortable. But I don't know if that's necessarily redemptive, it might be just a kind of, an open-ended expression.
It doesn't necessarily recuperate some kind of moral work by laughing at something. And in a sense, the idea of laughing at inappropriate things defines humour. It's an inappropriate reaction. You laugh at a dead person or a feature of something that's awful. It's the point at which your reaction has become abstract, rather than defined by a reasonable outcome. It's an unreasonable response to something that is just... But isn't the toy soldiers acting out they were funny but because they're toy soldiers isn't that an appropriate reaction? Or is it more
I don't know. I suppose the idea of what humor does it's an interesting thing about the moral parameters of humour. The idea of telling a horrific joke, racist, sexist, horrific joke, doesn't mean to say that the person who tells the joke is racist or sexist. So the idea of laughing at something which is transgressive shows that humour doesn't serve moral purposes. so what happens the idea of if you have someone who tells a very
challenging joke it's only if we say right which is the funniest joke what's funny why did the chicken cross the road to get to the other side it's not that funny but why did the chicken kill itself to get to the other side it's a bit funnier or Or what's great about fucking 28-year-olds? There's 20 of them. That's a bit more funny. But it's only funny because it's horrible. And so the increments of whether how something is funny veers towards the inappropriate. I should go.
working from if you have no context? I don't understand why no context. I think you were saying like Oh, content, yeah, not content. Well, I think, you know, we made a sculpture of Stephen Hawking on a big rock. And just the notion that, you know, in a way, there was no context given to the sculpture, other than the fact that it was a kind of almost hyper-realistic sculpture of this person in a wheelchair. stuck on this rock. And the thing about the notion of employing the means of portraiture
to someone who has an imperfect body, in a sense provoked a reaction that was the assumption that it was an inappropriate subject for portraiture. Without anything that we had said, obviously given the context of our work it was probably a good guess that that was the aim. But what's What's interesting about it was the notion of saying that if portraiture in itself as a representational form has a presumption that the subject of it should be ideal, that the idea of actually then making a sculpture without any kind of deformation of them, a kind of hyper-realist sculpture, that actually intrinsically within the representational means that we employed, that it somehow falls short of what the expectation of the representational
mode required. The portraiture portraiture has a presuppositional idealism to it. And so I guess this is one of the things that we're interested in in producing work is that is a work of art something about does it edify the world? Is it a necessary condition, a precondition of a work of art to say something better about the world than the world had before it was there? you know and I suppose that what we're interested in because I suppose in a sense what we're kind of interested in is the idea that if you extrapolate the notion of aesthetics, beauty, sublime you end up with a kind of a moral gradient going towards some idea of teleological perfection so some of the questions that we're
interested in is to say what is it if you make a work of art that has no interest in positivity, no interest in edifying the viewer no interest in presenting something in the world where all it's trying to do is to suggest something better or at least, you know, how do you make something which is irredeemable that is just simply, you know, in some kind of culturally void way in and for itself Following on from that I'm wondering it makes me think about Mark Quinn then and did sculpture on the flip and he was kind of applauded for kind of doing the sculpture of the disabled. That's right. Do you think then the public thinks he is morally kind of pure and you and your brother are morally corrupt?
Well, absolutely. I mean, I think it's an interesting kind of, you know, you misheard me say content and context, but you're right. I mean, the idea of kind of, you know, it would be ludicrously disingenuous if I kind of shoveled in a kind of a Stephen Hawking sculpture and sat back and went, you know, what do you think? Without the expectation that the context of the rest of our work should make it quite clear that it's not straightforward, and that we're not kind of suggesting that the representational means of sculpture should accommodate people who are supposedly not perfect. whereas I think what Mark Quinn is is doing exactly that what he's doing is that he's kind of
he's redeeming sculpture for the purposes of making it serve the purpose of something which is so in a sense what's happening is that he's idealising people who are supposedly unideal thus applauded so in a sense what he's doing is that he's kind of reconfiguring the notion of idealised portraiture to simply accommodate a new version of idealism, of the ideal form. What if this logic is wrong? Sorry? What if this logic is wrong? It seems that all the initial motivation is based on you to invert this logic. What if this logic is just your interpretation,
it's your version, it's wrong, it's not intrinsically... There's no issue with a truth in it. It doesn't really apply to the art. It's very difficult to discuss a work of art without discussing its kind of qualitative relation to the notion of beauty. I mean, nobody walks into a studio and says, it's really great, it's ugly. And so that means that there are some inherent values which are presuppositional. And I would say that a work of art, or at least a critical project, would be to try and undermine those values, or at least to suggest that they are things which propel the work of art before the artist has even made the work. If the notion of aesthetic beauty or aesthetic worth is a value which inhabits the notion of historical art,
then you can be sure that its momentum precedes the production of the work of art that you'll make tomorrow. But it means to say that actually the terms are kind of pre-given. So that means to say that a work of art isn't that free. It means to say that that work of art has a set of values which are pre-attached to it before you start making it. And surely it's the job of a work of art to actually challenge and to analyse the conditions of its production, or what it means, how it means. What would that be like?
I'm confused by what you're saying. I didn't really say I didn't want to no I didn't say I didn't want to reference anything I didn't say that Do you like the work of art? Oh, no, I think all works of art should look like other works of art. Should work look like. I mean, I don't think you can produce a work of art that doesn't look like another work of art. It's impossible to do it.
I mean, it's like, you know, because paint looks like paint. You know, the work of art is already in a process of production when you go to the shop to buy your paint. You know, that's not just kind of linguistically, but that's just kind of, you know, the order of materials. So it's not possible to have things which are or are not referential. You know, any meaning that any work of art has has been delivered by the history that precedes it. So there's no way, you know, there's no way of producing work of art. I mean, I think this is also one of the interesting things about the notion of novelty in art, is the notion that somehow you can produce a work of art that will be the new work of art, the last work of art, the end of work of art, the work of art that will be the end of all art because you won't need to make art anymore
because you've solved the problem of art. because it's so new and unlike any other art that you don't need to do anymore. And I think there are certain moments of art history where you can see the high apex of modernity, the flattest painting, where you can actually see that kind of belief in almost the solving of the problem of art. It's like the end of history or the end of art or the end of philosophy. We have one last question. I just wanted to ask a quick question about your Goya print drawing over the... Are you Spanish? No, I'm not. Okay. I'm single-dise with the Spanish. Yeah. Don't you find it disrespectful? I find it completely disrespectful.
Yeah, but would you... If I did it, I'm nobody. If somebody did it, I'm no worries. Well, I think it's an interesting thing. how could someone who draws on someone else's work be concerned by the notion of respect? Surely by its very nature it's a disrespectful act. You don't care about that one? No, I really care about it, but I really care that I'm being disrespectful. It's a purposeful act. It's not a thing that I kind of draw on it and slap myself in the face and say, oh shit, what have I done? I know what I'm doing. You know, I did come to one of your exhibitions and actually a piece of stuff. throw something at it I've got a really good recommendation for you always draw on someone's work is dead thank you