Every single thing we make is in progress and it's always the same idea. That's what artists do. They get obsessive and they're concerned with one thing or two. One of the reasons we're interested in Ronald is that he has this messianic value to him that in a sense that when Ronald first appeared, he existed in a world that was motivated by the idealism of industrialisation, the idea that actually, in some senses, he was kind of messianic because he was offering cheap food for people who couldn't afford it. There was something kind of libertarian about him, something egalitarian, something idealistic about the proposition of McDonald's feeding people
who couldn't afford to be fed. and we're interested in how that trajectory from the futurism of industrialization being something positive ends up being a pariah, becomes the clown who lost his humor and also responsible for the end of the world. Suddenly now we're in this zone of self-doubt where suddenly we realize that the trajectory of industrialization may have actually caused our own extinction. So the idea of everything which we thought was positive about this human technological innovation has actually become everything bad about being human. It's kind of very interesting, quite funny. It's quite an interesting time in as much as we can now contemplate and examine the last convulsive spasms of industrialisation and the possible end of the human race.
One of the ideas about working on Goya is the idea that here is one of the most revered artists and he's revered because he is in a sense the emergent sort of the emergent emblem of modernity. He's the first artist he begins to express. So in some ways these images are kind of feverish, they're delusional, they're delirious, They're very imaginative. It's kind of, in some ways, the first artist that begins to grapple with the idea of what it is to be tormented internally, rather than images of the church, of Christ on the cross, things which serve very particular purposes.
Suddenly, here's this artist investigating this kind of chaos of what it is to be a person. And I think on a basic level, on a very brutal level, our working on Goya is to ridicule the notion that this angst is believable. In a sense, what we do is that we convert the pathos of Goya into something much more pessimistic and cynical and much more brutally undermining. So we're kind of saying, well, you know, if you add funny sort of puppy dogs over an image of someone being tortured, in a sense what we're doing is we're asking whether the pathos of the Goya work can be taken seriously. One of the things that we're interested in is using the currency of representation,
Working out whether a smiley face is a possible form of representation which adequately expresses the idea of happiness. Or whether a swastika or a Nazi adequately expresses the idea of evil. We're taking these generic iconographic terms, these values, and twisting them to the point where they break. It's like a metallurgy, the idea of saying you can work out the tensile structure of metal by bending it until it breaks. And only at that point do you know what its capacity is. And I think in this sense we are overloading these symbolic icons to the point where they can no longer say anything.
The assumption is that a work of art should be something you might like to look at. And this is because of the obligations of entertainment, the idea that you go to a gallery because you want to see something that's edifying or nice or looks nice or you want to have some positive experience from looking at work of art. And I think that in a sense we certainly oppose that idea. We think that a work of art should not necessarily be a nice thing to look at. It should have some other kind of secondary effect. We see it as being about offending taste rather than creating taste.