Chapman Brothers interview (How Sick Is Your Art, 2003)

World is in Uganda in half an hour. First in a new series, Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder. Thank you.

The world simply gets divided up into things that are beautiful and things that are not. and it's the job of a work of art to provide the world with examples of a kind of transcendent beauty. Now those ideas were being attacked and challenged by conceptual art. I mean, it was asking why, what do these things mean, what does transcendence mean, what is beauty?

The thing that creeps in with the YBA post-conceptual art is this notion that it's okay to express yourself again, but as long as you do it within the idioms of a conceptual, cool-type-looking art. So when you actually start talking to some YBAs, they actually start talking about their work as though they're making expressionistic paintings. Still the same kind of romantic notions about self-expression, the same kind of engagement with ideas of self-examination, which precedes any kind of political or wider cultural debate about the nature of how art works. The celebrity status has become more interesting than the work itself, so the work becomes a kind

of a trace element of the trajectory of famous people, rather than a question of thinking about what the work means. Most of the interest is in the person and not the work. But I think a lot of those artists believe that that's the correct way in which the work should be analyzed, then first, then the work. They treat the work as though the work's a symptom of their kind of, you know, their ego. The kind of scene of some debauched, kind of frenzied, wild, fantastic sex, and that's why the pillow is so hard, the pillow just got torn in two. So people can read it different

ways, I think there's different interpretations. You know, a very good question would be for someone who comes to that gallery, sees an unmade bed and says, well, I, you know, that person says, well, I get out of bed every morning and I make an unmade bed what distinguishes that as an experience of beauty from this one in this in this gallery and it's because the artist has been so reified and fetishized that their work has now attained the value of a work of art beyond any kind of critical self-consciousness on the part of the artist to be able to explain why that's the case It's an amazing idea that so many people are concerned about the death of painting, death

of figurative painting, that's interesting. There's a nice one of two dead children in hell, and hell, I said hell, no heaven, I I think, maybe. Playground in the skies. Of course. It's quite terrifying to find yourself swimming in the shoal of Prozac-infested old ladies. There's something so saccharine about all of the kind of pathos and of the nature and the paintings of ethnic people and unemployed people and tramps and you know it's just it's quite quite miserable I think

it's a fantastic juxtaposition here between Margaret Thatcher and a kind of a rusty rustic image of industrial entropy I think that one's Kim Howells it's good Kim Howells and a tit I was chairman of the panel of judges of not the Turner Prize which was which is interesting It was really interesting. There was a lot of discussion about technique. There was a lot of discussion about subject matter. But I think most important of all, it was about endeavour. I'm looking for people that generally have a certain level of craft. Some of the paintings, I feel that you could go up and touch the person

or that they're going to walk out of the picture towards me. One of the things that seems quite self-evident are the number of pictures that take photographic images as their source. I mean, unless this person here really knows Jack Nicholson, it seems quite odd that someone would want to make a painting from a photograph. The problem with art is that it seems to be reducible to eyes, to looking, which really it's not. It's nothing to do with looking, or a very small part of it has to do with looking. It's mostly to do with thinking, I think. It's a simple criteria that if something looks like something then it's good, if something doesn't look like something then it's bad. I mean once you accept the notion that technique is everything then there's no need to really ask any other questions about the work.

I think attacking the Turner Prize and replacing it with a kind of, you know, the most conservative art form possible I don't think is a very legitimate way of unpicking the problems. I've seen some of the entries for the Turner Prize, and I really was quite appalled. Oh, a light flashing on and off in the room. Deceased animals in particular. I think there was bits of cows or sharks floating around. An unmade bed. Dangling light bulbs. Photographs of fruit being speeded up, showing decay. It seems like the criterion for the Turner Prize is one of the criteria is you mustn't be able to understand the work. that's how you become nominated because if you understand it

oh hang on, sorry you're not allowed you can't pass this threshold I feel as though they've set themselves as an elite it's the only good picture in here I think Essentially, this is what Prozac does to a culture. The neurosis in this work is completely hidden. They're attempting to hide it behind the surface of an incredibly beautifully detailed, you know, in a molecular domain. Whereas, you know, us lot, you know,

we're the organ grinder's monkey in terms of the kind of psychological demonstrations of our illness. I mean, this work is completely suppressed. But that's not to say that there aren't forms of psychosis and neurosis rippling away beneath those beautiful surfaces. I mean, in a sense, the painterly twitchings are a little bit like those tigers in the zoos that rock. I mean, once you get into that kind of repetitious thing, you can lose your sickness by turning it into some kind of movement. And this kind of painting thing is exactly that. You're kind of painting yourself out of the sickness. The train painting is quite amazing. I'm quite happy that that person is dedicating that much time to making that painting. I think otherwise they'd be chopping people up, I think.

Kind of an absolute index of a psychopath, I think. You can imagine that when those people paint those pictures, that they're painting them with some sense of revenge. You know, there's some world that needs another painting of a tiger. You know, it needs it. It's going to get it. It's going to be the best one, best. It's going to be so real that it's going to leap out and scratch someone's eyes out. I mean, the level of competence required to view those paintings is the same level of competence required to read the Daily Mail, which is virtually nil. I mean, you can be a single-cell organism. Maybe you need to kind of group with two or three others in order to actually, you know, form an eye. form an eye and then look at it you know I mean I think that you can look at the

work of David Falkner and Nigel Cook because their attempt is to produce something which is anti-progressive I mean there's something kind of wrapped up in that work which is deeply conservative and reactionary but done for incredibly cynical and active political reasons. The work I've been doing uses casts of dead mice, dead rats, really. It's the idea of the proliferation of the Burman. of the burman you have to look at it and initially be conned into thinking that it's that it's real

i mean the detail is really important because it's it kind of gives an intensity to the work and it's kind of curious thing that you get that when you cast something you kind of like notice the detail more than you would in the object before In the images I make, there's a vast expanse of blankness like a wall, and then there's a ground leading up to it, which is populated with various kinds of debris. on the one hand you're looking at a museum scale painting but then you're also saying

that there's this level of information which you're expected to engage with the same as you would if you were looking through a medical manual what is interesting for me is that you might mix all of those things up and have a piece of work which seems entirely familiar but then because of the familiarities being put together, the whole thing becomes incredibly remote and alien. In a sense, what they're presenting is all of the antitheses of modernity, like kind of theatre, ridiculous detail, you know, incredibly vulgar pictorial representation,

and then packing them with tactical and conceptual ideas. This art is like really excessive, determinedly excessive, and it has like an uncool kind of devotion to production. It's kind of an aggressive gift in a way, in a way, rather than being this kind of like reluctance to play the game, it's kind of like playing the game excessively, you know. The truth is that, you know, you can have as many severed heads on the floor as you want. People find the meaning in the fact that you've painted it really well or very laboriously

or in a very intense way of some sort. I don't think the work is necessarily overtly interested with skill. I think it's interested in the notion of time. What's subversive about their use of time is that they are producing these works which, after all their struggles, after all their labour, they produce something which virtually didn't need to be made.

You can still see the aesthetic tactics operating in the work in the Saatchi Gallery, but there are things there which are trying to soften the blow for people who may be unfamiliar with the notion that a work of art shouldn't necessarily be pleasurable. So you get things like gold frames, you get things that are trying to kind of smooth the edges between the edge of the work and the walls, so you're getting this friendly atmosphere rather than ambivalent atmosphere. You could say within that kind of slightly domesticated environment, slightly ornamental environment, that the work starts to dissipate because you can't work out you know the difference between the edge of one painting, the edge of one sculpture and the kind of ornamentation that creeps up the wall. But in a certain sense, I mean Saatchi is becoming slightly

artistic about his hang. I mean much of it is anecdotal which is kind of problematic we have a line of cows with a little angel looking down so there's a kind of mortality and in the immortality you get these kind of very anecdotal metaphysical games going on in the hang but the thing is you have to remember is it's just simply an expression of one man's ownership I think the best strategy for that gallery would be to put every single piece of art that Charles Saatchi owns in, so that it is an absolute entanglement of different work, so you don't get this sense that you are supposed to try and see one thing separate from another.

I think it should be completely, completely, you know, like a junk shop. It don't matter who you know, because this is real life, real life, real life, real life, real life, real life, real life. You can see things occurring both at the Saatchi Gallery and at Tate Modern which are bending, swerving towards a pain with the lowest common denominator which could have a very negative effect on the production of art itself. The County Hall Gallery and Tate Modern are symptomatic of an increased sensitivity to a wider public audience.

The downside with that is that it de-skills the potential of serious discursive art. The Tate Modern is a monument to absolute cultural saturation. I mean, it's brazen about parasitically adopting this old turbine factory. So even from the outside, it's demonstrating the shift from industrialisation to this kind of leisure time culture. It's brazen about that. It doesn't mind the association. The architecture has been produced so that you get this kind of huge concussive effect

as you walk down the ramp. You feel very small in face of the magnitude of this cathedral. It sends messages for miles. This is important. This is a sacred place and everything in here is sacred and things that are sacred aren't questioned. And that's the problem. I think the idea of just ramming people up escalators to see art in this kind of pacified way just makes looking at art reducible to looking and not thinking. I mean, I'd rather go to Alton Towers and go on a theme park rather than go and look at some Rothko paintings. You have to kind of be able to describe why these things are interesting, not just kind of push people in front of them and say, you're entitled to it to go look at it.

That seems a really dumb thing to do. And yet what the tape modern does is it kind of tries to give you this idea that it's all legitimate. It's so legitimate that there's no bad questions about anything. I think maybe there are people that haven't kind of, you know, walked through the tape and seen the Carl Andre bricks and given it a second thought. you still read it as something which can only be determined as something beautiful well it's a given I mean if something's in a gallery it is beautiful it's that's the overriding feature of it is that you know Carl Andre bricks are essentially aesthetic and I

think I think the problem with it is that you know I don't think they are well I mean what What are Carl Andre's bricks attempting to do? I think in part they're trying to de-aestheticise the act of looking at art. And I think what's happened is that bricks are now beautiful. I mean, if you trace back every YBA artist to their granddaddy or grandmother, they're following along in the same footsteps, but kind of having replaced the brain with the eyes. Certain artists have attempted to jam the efficiency of the term beautiful.

I mean, for instance, Paul McCarthy's Rocky video. Could you say that's a beautiful work of art? The Paul McCarthy video deals essentially with... With death and decrepitude and entropy, motorbikes going past, but predominantly it's about laughter, a very specifically sadistic form of laughter. And that form of laughter is used to counteract the ability for the work just to be perceived as being some kind of beautiful work of art, isn't it? Well, it's trying very, very, very hard to not fulfil any idea of a good work of art on those terms.

In the caption next to the video, it says something like, it's an expression of the artist's inner turmoil or a kind of capturing violence in culture. I mean, there's an attempt to kind of recuperate it back to some kind of positive message. I think that essentially that reclassification by the Academy is a very fearful one. I mean, it is terrified of accepting that at the heart of all art is kind of a huge vacuum into which, you know, a few people have actually very bravely kind of thrown themselves. The problem with the idea of beauty is that no matter how one attempts to demystify it or unpack it,

it still gets reintroduced. It's still the predominant way in which art is deciphered. I think generally there's a kind of a feeling that art is good for you, but it's kind of being sold as something that's not only good for you but actually very easy to swallow. Why is a work of art called a work of art? Because it's hard work. The thing about a work of art is just simply a series of problems offered to someone to solve.

You know, what does this mean? Why is it here? Where is it going? What does it say about the world? What does it say about me? What does it say about the person who made it? I presume those are the questions you're supposed to ask. Maybe one requirement for a work of art is that it could be stimulating. It could intensify the relationship between the viewer and the work. It'd be nice to get a bit of paint on these ones. No one's going to drop dead from looking at art. But then at the same time, nobody's going to run around tearing their clothes off,

thinking they've seen something that's going to change their life forever. But midway between that, it might be nice to think that you could intensify the experience. It's kind of an interesting activity, art, because it kind of operates in some kind of very weird spaces, in some very weird territories and zones between things. Maybe all one can say about a work of art is that it just intensifies life. More art next week when John Ronson goes mad for Randy Newman, his portrait of the singer-songwriter at 7.30. But next up tonight, Unreported World investigates the disturbing role of child soldiers in northern Uganda.

Thank you.