Hello, welcome to BAPtalk. It's a great, great pleasure for us to present you and have a discussion with Jake Chapman, who is with us today. Hello, Jake. Hi there. Nice to see you. Thank you so much. It's a dream come true because during our plans we were hoping to have your work here, but we didn't think that you'd be able to come over to Bangkok. It's absolutely my pleasure. It's been fantastic to be here. And you've been to Bangkok before, of course. I think I've stayed over. I was here kind of in name rather than, you know, in anything more.
But that was more holiday and... Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it will be the first time that you show in Thailand or in Southeast Asia? Yes, absolutely. Oh, fantastic. So it's a great honor and excitement for us. In terms of the choices of the works. We work with Nigel Hurst, who has kindly become one of our curatorial teams. according to the theme of our exhibition, Chaos Calm. We managed to come up with a few of your outstanding works. Can you tell us a little bit about the choices of the works?
Yeah, you have a set of etchings called Disasters of War, which are a reworked idea taken from an original set of etchings made by Francesco Goya, who's been a constant source of return in terms of our interest in that original work of art. So that's a piece from, do you know, I don't know where that is, that's quite an early one of ours. There's another set of Disasters of War, again ruminating on the Goya original Disasters of War, in vignette form. It's small model soldiers formed to take on each image taken from the etchings of the original Goya.
Sorry, this is very inarticulate. And the third element to our participation in the show is an artist's vest jacket, which is kind of a... It bears relation to the idea of a thing that happens, I'm not sure anywhere else, but perhaps maybe only in Britain, where the government, when they go to war, they often find it in their hearts to actually award an artist to go and illustrate. Oh, wow. So you become a war artist. We were once offered to go to Iraq. Both of you.
Such a bad choice of artists. But yes, that works kind of, I guess, in honor of that kind of bad decision on the part of the British government. Did you go? I had no intention of going, but I went along with the thing. I mean, you know, thinking that, you know, the idea that you bomb people, then you get artists to draw them. It seems to me a kind of a double. Well, they must have thought that both of you fit well with the theme. Or it was a kind of a soft assassination attempt. Now going back to the disasters of war, we learn a lot in our lessons of art history of Goyer's dramatic pieces, macabre, nightmarish, that relate to works of William Blake. Blake, this kind of return of the nightmare in the forms that even through series when
he was dead. But the pieces were bought and then you retouched them or you added? We have worked on a number of Goya's original etchings. The ones in the show are a completely redrawn version that we've kind of produced ourselves without actually, they're in direct relation, but they're not working on the original etchings. We have worked on the originals. Again, the thing about the Disaster of War, the reason we return to it, is because it's heralded or has become iconic in terms of its representation of the relationship between art, atrocity and humanity,
and such claims as the fact that it depicts man's inhumanity to man. Our reading of it is actually quite the opposite of that. What it depicts is a kind of an integral relationship between the idea of atrocity and morality, that without any sense of transgression there is no morality. So in a sense the work kind of operates in the interstices between morality and violence. It's often a work that's recounted as being a work of art dedicated to a kind of a pacifist view of the world. But in fact, if you look at the drawings in any kind of close way, the degree of libidinal intensity in terms of the drawing in areas of castration and violence, they exceed any sense of moral kind of closure.
They are in actual fact more suspiciously fatalistic than an institutional reading of the work would like to claim. So in many ways, it reflects different areas of humanity where the horrors and the destruction and the stupidity of mankind is almost cyclical. It comes round and round again, even the times of Goya or even the times of Russia and Ukraine. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I think, I guess that notions of morality are extrapolated from atrocities, that in a sense that we're kind of, we are somehow morally bound to violence in a way in which is not made explicit. And certainly in Goya's Disasters of War, there's a sense in which the violence in the work,
which ostensibly is there to depict horror in its worst form as a sort of kind of warning against it. it. The problem is the forms of violence in those drawings exceeds that warning such that the forms of violence might be for violence in and for themselves rather than for some kind of utilitarian purpose. So the problem is in that work is that institutionally, historically, they're often framed as being pictures which depict violence as a humanist point of view, but in actual fact they're works which have a more, well a dark underbelly in terms of Goya's kind of interaction or his perception of violence and indeed a more kind of I guess a more psychologically troubling sense in which kind of violence is kind of perhaps not oppositional to morality but in
in fact completely focused within it that the two things are aligned. But what what do not appear in Goyle's original is the humor. In your works there is this humorous and almost something that you look at the horror but at the same time there's another glimpse of something that is there lurking. Well you know I guess the thing about you know that if you see that in some senses a kind of a feeling of political impotence can often be somehow subverted by humour. For example in Britain we have a terrible joke, a kind of a child's joke that says why
did the chicken cross the road and the answer is to get to the other side. And another version of the joke is why did the chicken kill itself to get to the other side. Now the thing is is that one is kind of innocent and one involves violence, and the only one that's funny is the one that involves violence. Because it kind of opens up a schism in terms of what can be called funny and what can be called morbid. It seems to me that the humor, humor which is somehow kind of sort of, you know, Protestant humor is kind of normally quite inert and benign and ultimately not funny. The kind of humor that seems to really work the humour that tends towards kind of morbidity. But that seems to be, could I call it the trademark of the Chapman Brothers, where morbidity
and humour seem to be overlapping and intermixed. Yes, yes, absolutely. I suppose, again, going back to Goya, that even in the sense in which one of the generic, The most famous image is a tree with three figures hanging from the tree. And in a sense, there's a sort of a kind of strange oscillation between the fact that that what this kind of alludes to is some sort of Holy Trinity, some kind of Christian notion of a kind of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, three figures hanging. Except in this image, there is no redemption. The figures are not going to be redeemed. That actually what will happen is that they will drip into the soil. The only sort of kind of supernatural force that will affect these bodies once they're dead is gravity.
So that in a sense, the Goya's kind of playing around with the heresy of non-redemptive existence. So that when the body dies, there's no redemption for the body. The body merely just kind of dissolves into dirt. And that's kind of humorous and also kind of astonishingly heretical, given the time it was made. I recall in 1994 or 5 when I first encountered your work in Venice Biennale. You must have been on the verge of becoming so renowned, but those works were inspired by Saint Sebastian or the martyrs.
I mean, again, it was the reworking of The Great Ds Against the Dead, the particular picture from God. I think the point about our repetitious return to this thing is almost as if somehow it's going back to a body and making sure it can't be resuscitated. Our acts of violence against this image is to make sure that this image itself can't be redeemed, so that in a sense we're drawing any lifeblood from it. And that particular sculpture you're talking about was one in which we we reproduce the image of the three figures hanging from the tree but in life-size and the only thing you know instead of actually making a representation of it we decided to use kind of
shop mannequins so that there was nothing invented in the in the imagery and also that the shop mannequins are so devoid of life that you know that this this sculpture would be dead before it was even made. Now you talk about size. With your sculpture works displayed here, the size is decreased to the point where they become miniature-like. And you have to really go and scrutinize in such a way that you have to bow down and look at the details. at the details and once you find the details again the message punch in your face humor and morality and horror but you know like Ronald McDonald you know he he appeared regularly but in the context
of consumerism commodity but he's no longer the friendly guy no you know well I think I think the idea of reducing the figures down is on the one hand to refer to the idea of childhood child play So that you're kind of, I think the point is to demean death and take, rob death of its true scale, its true magnitude, so that it becomes reduced. And that your view of it becomes omnipotent, so that you're looking upon something. And in some senses by being omnipotent you can't have, you can't, you're detached from the event that you're looking at. looking at. The idea of Ronald McDonald was, I think, we kind of see or kind of analyze Ronald McDonald as a sort of messianic figure in terms of his early
sort of presentation of cheap food for poor people, you know, and in a sense what's interesting about that trajectory is they begin with this kind of, you know, the notion of modernity having a kind of an emancipatory sort of trajectory to it And that what happened is that in terms of actually feeding the masses, feeding people cheap meat, was that it became kind of apparent that the deforestation of masses of land in order to actually feed the cows, to feed the people, became the end of the planets, the end of the world. You go from this clown who wants to joyfully feed everyone to this litiginous clown who's lost his humour,
who becomes a kind of a miserable, nasty, sort of un-ecological sort of pariah. Sort of Joker image. Yeah, I think you can actually plot the rise and fall of Ronald McDonald as being the rise and fall of the West. It's completely consistent. It's the same graph. It's the same X, Y. It's the same, you know. Yes, yes. And the jacket, do you wear it? I can't lift that jacket. That jacket is bronze. It takes two people to lift. No, I mean, I think that was the idea. This is one of a series, and the other series are, there are five or six other vests, and they're all bomb vests. And the point being, you know, that I think we were interested in the idea
of something like bronze being a kind of monumental sort of material used to sort of, you know, memorialize sort of heroes and people for, you know, for immortality. And I think that the idea of a person who blows themselves up in a bid for immortality, the kind of the collision between those two ideas was the point of the work. These pieces were called Monuments to Immortality. And that you get this kind of contradiction between the notion of a kinetic point of explosion and something which is there to last forever. They're both as ugly as each other.
Memorials are as ugly as it is kind of. And in many of your works, there certain glimpses of images like swastika or even leaders like Adolf Hitler. Yes, yes. Well I mean I guess that any sort of archaeology of the 20th century and even the 21st century, given the fact that even the most, you know, the kind of slide in terms of Europe's shift towards the right and the neo-Nazi right, this is is not just simply a kind of libertarian right. It means to say that that archaeology is not done.
It still has to be dug up and looked at. It has to be analysed and sort of examined. And the processes by which something like industrial genocide differentiate themselves from things like perpetrated violence in a sense. The idea of thinking, well what's the connection between the enlightenment and logic and rationality and something like a death camp, which actually produces the perfect model for industrial labor. And how that kind of, how do we, given the fact that those industrial mechanisms still remain in place, are kind of sort of stirring those things up or causing or problematizing those things is a way of actually trying to kind of engage with why those things are,
or ask the question as to why those things still perhaps persistent in our culture you know yeah great we have great anticipation when the audience comes to your works when you open in a few days time and i'm sure it's going to be absolutely fantastic because you have a lot of fan clubs oh well i'm great i mean the show looks fantastic i'm really i mean marina abramovich pieces i mean it's fantastic to see so i think there's a lot of things that they can enjoy. And one last thing, do you like Christmas? I love Christmas. This is a setup, right? I'm not a fan of Christmas. I think Christmas is a very humorless time of year. Humorless.
Humorless, yeah. You ever thought of doing some work related to Christmas? Oh, you have done it? I'm sure we have. I can't remember. I'm blanking it out because I find it such a horrific point. It's just one of those times when I suppose I'm a fully paid-up modernist, up modernist and anything which kind of is stuck in sort of a pre-modern sort of tradition i can't really it just doesn't make sense to me it's so ugly i mean i'm not a fan of beauty either but you know christmas is so awful okay yeah jack chapman thank you so much thank you so much thank you