Full transcript of Jake and Dinos Chapman interviewed by Matt Lippiatt

Part 1: Dinos Chapman interviewed by Matt Lippiatt at Jake and Dinos Chapman's studio in London, 15/09/05.

 

Dinos Chapman: (Reading from a text on one of the Los Caprichos etchings by Goya that are in the studio) A lamentable abuse of early education to cause a child to (fear the bogeyman more than) his father, and so make it afraid of something that doesn’t exist. That’s quite – (laughter) I mean, really you should look at what they were like before.

Matt Lippiatt: ‘Cause that was my favourite one (The Bogeyman etching).

DC: Because they’re already quite absurd, the real problem is that you can actually make them less interesting. So it’s like you really have to give them (inaudible). They’re different to the Disasters (The Disasters of War etchings by Goya) because we’ve actually coloured the whole thing, it’s not just the faces. They’re much more like little vignettes.

ML: There’s quite a lot of horses heads.

DC: There are a hell of alot of horses heads. I’ve already done a few of the horses heads. I’ve got a real thing about doing them. (pointing to etching 1) That’s the self-portrait. Number one in there. (laughter) Turned him into a monkey.

ML: When you start, do you just look at it and go?

DC: Yeah, well it depends. Some of them are really obvious. Some of them just scream out to have something done to them, and some of them just sit there. There’s a few of them that I look at every day and think, “not today,” “not today,” and I know they’re going to be the ones at the end that I’m going to have real problems with.

ML: What are you looking for? ‘Cos when you did Disasters of War loads of people said, “Oh, they’ve made them even more brutal, they’ve made them even more horrible,” but I didn’t really see that.

DC: I think we made them look stupid.

ML: Really?

DC: Well, you know. Putting – I think it was that they became ridiculous, whereas these already started out ridiculous, so you’re kind of moving sideways more with these ones. I think what it is, I think in each one there’s more of a narrative than the Disasters. In the Disasters there’s a stark little scene, pretty much the same thing in each one. Sort of, rape, pillage or murder. Not much else. A bit of poverty. Whereas these – well, that (pointing to an etching) is already – it’s a real effort to do anything more to that. So it just makes them a little bit more absurd. (inaudible, indicating one of the modifications made to an etching) Hyronimous Bosch, anything, just kick it around a bit.

ML: What’s that children’s illustrator who did Where The Wild Things Are?

DC: Sendak.

ML: Maurice.

DC: Yeah, Maurice Sendak. I read a really funny thing. Someone was asked, I think it might have been – someone French – Jemima French was in one of the back pages of the Evening Standard, and she was asked who her favourite artist was. She said Maurice Sendak.

ML: But they really scared me when I was a kid.

DC: Yeah, when you were a kid! (laughter)

ML: I think he gives lectures now. I think he theorises about it.

DC: I think that’s ridiculous, isn’t it?

ML: Really, you dont - ?

DC: Well, I think they’re really cute. When I was a kid I always liked the drawings that used to scare me. I mean, childrens’ stories essentially are cautionary tales. If you strip them down to the bare bones of what they’re trying to say, it’s essentially sort of, “Be good children, or die.” I think the drawings occasionally mirror that. Some of them are very very dark.

ML: I remember at school there’d be a game to see if you could put your face up to the drawing, to look at it.

DC: Yeah.

ML: But then, the game always seemed to be, ‘as if the world was that horrible, but it’s not really.’ Whereas now I look and think that the world is more horrible.

DC: I think alot of the Victorian childrens’ illustrators definitely were of the opinion that the world really actually is really horrible, and children have absolutely no right to think of it as anything other than really horrible. You see some of those drawings and they’re really wicked. I think a terrible thing has happened recently where people have started to make children’s drawings. Drawings for children. I think Maurice Sendak’s kind of going that way. I don’t like things that are for children.

ML: Children don’t like things that are for children.

DC: Of course they don’t. They love things they’re not supposed to love. You always look at the worst things you can find.

ML: I think there are things on the internet now which I would’ve looked away from. I wouldn’t want to go there.

DC: Oh no, I find those places. I look for them.

ML: Would you go on rotten.com?

DC: Yeah. That’s one of my favourite sites.

ML: And Jake too?

DC: Yeah. There’s worse ones. There’s much worse ones.

Gregory Baker (photographer): How does it get worse?

DC: Erm, well there’s movies that are really really unpleasant. But I think you can get addicted to them. I quite often plunder rotten.com for images and ideas. The funny thing is that the further away from you horror and death and decay is put, the more interesting it is, simply.

ML: So how is it put away from you?

DC: You don’t see the things that happen. The whole world is full of awful disasters, but you never see – The newspapers are very circumspect about what they’ll actually show people.

ML: And then there’s the black market of video footage –

DC: Which is where, I mean, rotten.com is like an adjunct to all the newspapers. It’s like a rubbish bin where they scoop away the images that they’ve actually taken, but they can’t put in the newspapers.

ML: Have you seen Faces of Death?

DC: I have, yeah. It’s all fake.

ML: It’s not all fake.

DC: Most of it’s fake.

ML: That’s what I like though.

DC: That’s what’s nice about those things. I think those videos were from a period where we were all a bit more stupid. We were easily conned. It’s like the thing about the alien. You know, the little grey man being cut up on a slab. I mean, how the hell was anybody convinced by that?

Gregory Baker: I was, when I was about seven.

DC: Exactly! But that’s the thing. I’m actually really interested in the fact that when I was alot younger I was actually really believing these things, and then you look at them. The first film that ever terrified you. I deliberately didn’t watch The Birds again, because it was the first film I saw that absolutely nearly made me shit myself. I saw it really really recently. I kind of avoided it, because I wanted to keep it as that weirdly hyperreal kind of memory. I remember, as a kid, kind of imagining that somebody had had their genitals pecked out, and they haven’t. (laughter) I don’t know where I got that from. But I watched it recently, and it’s a brilliant film, but my memory of it is far superior than the actuality. My horror of the sparrows was hugely more powerful than any image of birds being thrown against a wall ‘cos they won’t fly in a room. So, I think the power of memory and imagination is enormous. It’s almost like you have to retain its power by not trying to pin it down.

ML: Because it’s a pleasure, isn’t it?

DC: Absolutely.

ML: When you’re a kid, to scare yourself.

DC: It is when you’re an adult

ML: I don’t know. I think you have to work to find it. Do you know Anne Tallentire?

DC: No.

ML: Anne's my tutor at college. I said to her, “I’d love to make something that’s scary like when you’re a kid,” and she said that when she was a kid in Ireland, what was scary was policemen stopping your car, and it wasn't fun.

DC: Yeah. But that’s different. Yeah, that’s what I’m saying here. When you have horror around you, you don’t fetishise it, because it’s there as part of your everyday existence. But yeah, exactly, in our lovely cushy middle-class world where granny gets put in a coffin before you’ve seen her. It’s different. I mean, it doesn’t surprise me that, while there’s all this stuff going on abroad, or in other places, or even at home, all the bombs and things, you get an incredibly – unless you’re actually sitting on the tube and you actually see this thing happening. They don’t want you to see – they want you to see enough to make you angry, but they don’t want you to see enough to get...

ML: I can’t work out those things. Like the stuff in Iraq on the television yesterday. I hate it when politicians say, “obviously we all feel...”

DC: Yeah, ‘cos we don’t.

ML: No.

DC: No, absolutely. I’ve just had a run in with a newspaper. I was supposed to be doing a column for them which has all gone absolutely tits up, because there’s a divide between what a newspaper can do and what an artist can do. Basically we tripped before the first hurdle, and we had to admit that it couldn’t possibly happen.

ML: Just because of things you wanted to say? They couldn’t even publish as an opinion?

DC: Well, no, it was a picture based thing, but it’s interesting that you have this really really seemingly – a newspaper can have an opinion, but it’s actually really really prescribed. You’re not allowed to do this that and the other. I did a very very insulting picture of George Bush. However much everybody might hate the guy, or despise him, you’re not allowed to insult him that much. Well, why not?

ML: What was so bad about it?

DC: I just made out that he was actually quite pleased that alot of black people had drowned in Louisiana.

ML: But in stand-up comedy...

DC: You’d get away with it. Yeah, absolutely. The argument I had with the editor, it was all very friendly, there was no real argument, it was just an interesting difference of opinion about what you can do and what you can’t do. Exactly that, you can do it in a cartoon, it’s fine, you can knit it, it’s fine, but use photographs or film and then suddenly it’s not fine, and that was an absolutely breaking point for me.

ML: I’m quite surprised – without seeing it I can’t say – but it sounds like an extreme, but not perverse opinion.

DC: You’re right, it is an opinion that is held by alot of people, but there’s a certain politeness that pervades our way of dealing with the world. Occasionally you just want to break through and say, “No, fuck ‘em. I want to make him look really really bad.” You have people who say, “Well, I think you’ve gone too far.” It’s like, well, shooting him, maybe, would be going too far, but to accuse him of not caring, or being quite happy that people who didn’t vote for him, who he has no power over whatsoever, all drowned in a flood, and then he turns up ten days later to kind of smile inanely at the receding water line. I think it’s a fair comment.

ML: Do you hate him?

DC: I don’t hate him, I despise him.

ML: What’s the difference?

DC: I don’t hate anybody. I despise a lot of people.

ML: What’s despise?

DC: It’s less – hating someone gives them a huge amount - implies they’ve got a lot of your headspace. Despising, in my opinion, it’s not so – he doesn’t wake me up in the night.

ML: It’s not like a physiological...

DC: No. Hate is a physiological thing. I think des – what is the?

ML: Despise-ure (laughter)

DC: No, I think if he came here I’d certainly not be very nice to him.

ML: I find it hard to judge anyone like that, because – I guess, in a philosophical way, I find it difficult to make those value judgements. I think when I see something happening in front of me, that’s different.

DC: Well, no, I think as a symbol, I despise him. A person who sets themselves up, or allows themselves to be set up as a figurehead for a regime, can be despised.

ML: And you think things could be better? People could be better?

DC: Definitely. I despise Blair aswell. I despise anybody who sets themselves up in that position.

ML: What position would you prefer?

DC: I find it quite difficult to believe – that anybody believes that these politicians have anything other than a rabid desire for power as a prime mover. Their desire to stay in power overrides their desire for fairness or – the fact that Blair can single-handedly decide, although atleast 65% of the population decided that they didn’t want to go to war on Iraq, he turns around on public telly and says, “I have to turn to my conscience.” It’s like, “hold on a minute. You’re not being paid to have a conscience, you’re being paid to represent the people that voted you in.” And then later on, to say that the terrorist attacks on London have got anything to do with Iraq is a nonsense, I mean, that is a nonsense.

ML: The religious element disturbs me aswell.

DC: Yeah, absolutely. But it’s as fundamentalist as any Islamic fundamentalism, and it works using exactly the same methods.

ML: When I was reading the introduction Jake wrote to Insult and Injury, talking about the demise of religion, which I always do read and think, “Yeah, that’s happened.” Except...

DC: It’s all come back in a new – I think it’s a tool, isn’t it. It works. If it didn’t work they wouldn’t use it, they’d use some other aspect to insure that they stay in power. The amazing thing is that if this fundamentalist Christianity is as powerful as I think it is, the Americans must be sitting there thinking God doesn’t love them anymore.

ML: Fuck knows what they’re thinking.

DC: Well, they’ve had flood. I mean, they’re going to get plague after this, definitely. (laughter) In Biblical terms, two out of – plague, pestilence – fire. They’ve had fire, when the planes hit the World Trade Centre. Yeah, locusts.

Gregory Baker: Or the slaughter of the first born.

DC: Yeah, they’ve gotta be frightened. They’ve gotta be thinking, “Hang on a minute, we’ve done something wrong.” What’s happened in Afghanistan and then Iraq, it’s not working for them, is it?

ML: It’s funny though, because I would’ve thought that someone like Julian Stallabrass – they’re his despise-figures aswell.

DC: He doesn’t own them. (laughter)

ML: Yeah, but isn’t he exasparated by you’re response? Because he really bitches on about you in that High Art Lite book.

DC: I think he’s one of these people who harks back to a kind of nostalgic view of how things used to be, and I don’t think they ever were like that. There was somebody on the radio this morning – two people discussing the trafalgar square sculpture, and the arguments are just so, they’re not even worth talking about.

ML: What are they?

DC: About craft. I mean, Stallabrass uses craft as a big hammer to bludgeon – what is it? – Art Lite. It’s kind of a non-starter.

ML: Matthew Collings said something about him wanting – now he (Stallabrass) doesn’t mind if it looks like that, as long as it’s against capitalism.

DC: Yeah. To imagine that art’s got any other relationship than hand-in-glove with capitalism is stupid. It’s the cherry on the cake of capitalism. It’s pure excess value. You make things from nothing, you sell them for huge amounts of money to people who have huge amounts of money who essentially re-sell those things and make even more money, so it’s kind of like you can’t extricate yourself from that cycle.

(Dinos goes to get some tea)

ML: When you’re doing these (Los Caprichos etchings), how’s the labour shared?

DC: Jakes been working on the big prints (The Chapman Family Collection prints) recently, so I’ve been working on these. It’s just split however. What needs to be done gets done.

ML: Do you have styles that come out?

DC: I think we do, but I don’t think anybody else would notice. I don’t think anybody else would see a difference. Jake and I can definitely spot – I think the first time ever, not so long ago, I was looking at a drawing that I thought Jake had drawn it, and I’d actually drawn it, which was quite odd.

ML: So it’s not like a deliberate thing?

DC: I think the thing is, you should be able to draw in different styles anyway. It’s not that difficult.

ML: But if you’re just coming up with things when you look at these pictures, if you psychoanalyse it then what you come up with is very significant.

DC: Probably. (laughter) I don’t want to go any further with that one. (laughter) No, I think the thing is, we try and adopt other people’s styles anyway. With these, there’s a conscious decision to try to employ as many different styles as possible.

ML: When you say styles, you mean specific other artists?

DC: And graphic styles. In some of them there’s very obvious cartoon elements. (indicating an etching) This is like a – ever heard of The Shmoos? It’s a 1950s American magazine. They’re these animals who’s one ambition in life was to be eaten. They had these big floppy rabbit ears and long noses. There’s actually nothing in these that’s me or Jake, it’s all appropriated.

ML: Does it feel like going for the same thing as you did...

DC: No. Totally different. I mean, they’re much more self contained. Each one has a much more focused event. This one is just, how much can you actually destroy the original image and make it as stupid as possible? The Disasters were alot more straight-forward. All the visible victim’s heads turned to puppies, clowns. In the second set there was more kind of Lovecraft-ian monstrosities. In this one it’s even more opened out to – basically just looking at the pictures and thinking, what could you do to that to make it not like it is now?

ML: Is laughing still really important?

DC: Always. Always.

ML: I don’t know if I’d laugh at these. It’s more like that childlike fascination. I guess we did laugh as soon as we saw them.

DC: I think some of them are quite hysterical.

ML: I laughed at the hanged man.

DC: Yeah, having his teeth pulled.

ML: Why do we laugh though?

DC: Because they’re ridiculous. They’re absolutely ridiculous. The idea of getting a set of hallowed prints by a great master and then proceeding to... I don’t know what.

ML: Doodle?

DC: Doodle. Yeah, doodle on them. It’s a gross insult. It absolutely demeans the original thing.

ML: It’s not what Brian Sewell was saying when he was rhapsodising about your work on the Turner Prize.

DC: No. Well, he’s a surprising – I wouldn’t say fan, because I think he’s bigger than liking everything a person does. Yeah, he did like these. He actually came and saw these (Los Caprichos etchings) the other day. I thought he’d hate them, but I think he liked them.

ML: I saw a video of that (The Turner Prize 2003) and Patricia Bickers was kind of reading that gesture as a send-up (Jake and Dinos Chapman did not agree to appear on the programme to discuss their work, but strapped a camera to their dog's head while it ran around the studio, and allowed art critic Brian Sewell to describe their etchings), and asking how many levels of irony can you play with before you balls it up and lose the point. I have to admit, without meeting you, I do think you cut an intimidating, difficult to read persona, or personas –

(Jake calls on the telephone)

ML: I was nervous about this.

JC: Why?

ML: I guess because I read Stallabrass who really bought the kind of amoral, nihilistic, media-savvy –

JC: But the problem with that is, I don’t really understand why that’s always portrayed as a negative thing.

ML: What, media-savvy?

JC: No. Nihilistic, or cynical, or all these things. The accusation is always, “Ah, you’re too smart.” Well what do you want? Dumb shambling artists who don’t know what they’re doing? Who someone like Stallabrass can say, “Actually, Dinos, mate, this is what you’re doing.” And we can say, “Thank you very much, Sir. Because we didn’t know what we were doing.” It’s a nonsense that is propogated by artists who prefer not to be held accountable for what they’re doing, by saying that you actually need these people to corrall you into – I think sometimes what people would fire at us as criticisms, we take as positive things. I don’t see any problem with being cynical. Cynical is an inescapable fact of the state we live in. To not be able to look beyond the initial layers of things, and kind of take them apart, see what’s really there. I think anyone who doesn’t do that is kind of living a half life.

ML: Do you think it has to do with being really consistently close to the centre of that kind of cyclone of ambition –

DC: Yes.

ML: - and neurosis –

DC: Yes.

ML: - of the art world? Well, not the art world.

DC: Well, I think it helps to be on task pretty much all the time. You get good at something. This is why I couldn’t do the job at the newspaper, because I’m too good at not listening to my instructions. I think it’s quite interesting that the moment you get good at what you’re doing you get criticised for being good at it. If you were a musician, and you were a good musician, you wouldn’t get criticised for that. But being an artist, well partially I think, would be about being able to unpack things. If you do become good at unpacking the things that make your culture tick, it tends to show up other people’s inability to do that, and these are the people that have actually titled themselves as the un-packers, and I think they find that very troubling.

ML: Debunking. Painful for the person who’s myth is debunked.

DC: Yeah, exactly. If the artists get better at it than the critics, then God help the critics. I was saying this morning to the newspaper editors, I should’ve thought more carefully about the consequences of getting involved in a terribly terribly proscribed environment. There’s absolutely no way they’re going to allow me to accuse George Bush of being a murdering ...

ML: What do you think is at stake for them?

DC: They’re not very good at dealing with things when the shit hits the fan, whereas I think as an artist, that is what you are primarily good at. Make a show that hopefully does something. You sit there and just (inaudible). Whereas the newspapers, they’ve so... (laughter) they’ve so got their hands tied behind their backs by whoever’s paying for the newspapers to be made. It must be an awful...

ML: Do you feel atall that you’ve got limitations set by galleries, or anything like that?

DC: No. I think we’ve constantly battered against those limitations. That’s been our stock-in-trade, is to say, “Why can’t we do that?” That’s what we want to do. That’s what makes it interesting. I think the environment makes you brave. You expect the worst, and you do it anyway. You don’t make a mannequin with a penis on it’s face, take it to a gallery and expect everybody to stand around clapping politely. That would be stupid.

ML: Don’t they kind of do that now though?

DC: We trained them to do that.

ML: What did they do the first time? Victoria Miro –

DC: She put a cloth over its head, and took it out of the room when anybody came in. We’ve said it a million times, it’s potty-training for the middle-classes. Put things there that they want, but they don’t want. You’re not going to give them the thing they want, you’re going to give them the thing they don’t want disguised as a thing they want. (laughter)

ML: I really love American Psycho.

DC: Hm.

ML: Almost what’s really exciting about it, including him (Brett Easton Ellis) - I haven’t read his latest stuff – is that you can look around and accept and analyse what’s wrong, and then still make a huge success of yourself in this kind of shower of shit. Sometimes I think it’s not only liberalism and lefty idealism, it’s also kind of jealousy and fury at, ‘how can you get up every morning and be that?’ You have everything that the worst people would want, to a certain extent.

DC: What do you mean by that?

ML: Like, the people that allow things to get shitty are probably desiring wealth, attention, fame. So, if you seem to have alot of those things, and at the same time you’re acknowledging the shit, it seems like you’re having your cake and eating it.

DC: I think if, by your early forties, you haven’t got yourself in that situation, you’re in the wrong job. (laughter) Listen, I know alot of people who are constantly bitching that they’re in the wrong job, and you just want to say, “get out of it then. Do something else.”

ML: Did you and Jake ever have what appears to be Damien Hirst’s thing of wanting to be famous in a certain way?

DC: I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t say that that is a prime mover, but I think of course, yeah, it’s in the background lurking. Everybody loves to be something more than they are. But I think we were always more interested in making art. Making art that was of consequence. Not great art works, but things that would have an effect, do something, distort the envelope a bit. I think that’s the nice thing about being in the art world. You don’t necessarily have to pimp yourself out as much as in any other world, to a certain extent. I don’t feel very famous. The art world is, like, ten people in the world know about it. You get a picture in a magazine, and it’s like, “Who’s that? What are they doing there?” It’s a by-product. I think we earned – we’ve worked hard for everything we’ve got. I think the interesting thing is people begrudge artists who achieve a certain amount of success, because they have this funny idea that artists are naturally altruistic, and are happy to live in squalid conditions. Nobody wants to live in a student flat for the rest of our lives, that’s ridiculous. Nobody else is expected to.

ML: Is it because there’s a ‘artists should want to make the world a better place’?

DC: Yeah, which is a ridiculous thing to expect. Some of the best artists are the ones who make it a worse place, definitely.

ML: But if you despise George Bush and you feel motivated to do something in response to that, is that –

DC: Contradictory? Um, yeah. There’s nothing wrong with contradictions. I wouldn’t describe myself as a very - as a singular person. There are things that I can deal with outside my persona – I mean, I’m a dad, I’m a this, I’m a that, and I’m different in all those guises. I don’t behave like I do in the studio when I’m in the cinema. I’m a cinema-goer at that point in my life. I sit very quietly and watch the film. (laughter)

ML: I can’t even remember where the idea of ‘making the world a better place’ came from.

DC: I think it depends what you mean by ‘better place’. You can’t seriously contemplate the idea of making the world a better place, living where we live, because we live where we live at the expense of everybody else. And that’s knowing. If one day everybody woke up and said, “Oh my God. The reason we have it so good here is because everybody else has it so bad. We must do something about it.” That would necessarily mean you’ve got to stop living in a nice place, and I think we’re far too – we won’t give these things up easily. That’s the problem, and I think it’s ridiculous, all these charitable things, Live 8 and all those things. They make so little difference. The main result of those things is to make alot of superannuated pop-stars feel wanted, and the people who go to see those things – I mean, a ticket for one of those things is how much? 50 quid, whatever, I don’t know. They want to get something for their 50 quid. When you hear people talking about it, and they say, “Oh, I saw U2 and they were brilliant.” It’s like, yeah but? So, any notion of charity, I think, is a nonsense. If you actually do want to do something about third-world poverty, basically you have to give up all the things we have now, because what’s happening everywhere else in the world right now is an absolute direct consequence of what we have now, and it’s deliberate, and it’s been set up over centuries to be that way, and I don’t think - a bunch of liberal people turning round saying, “I want to help,” is – it’s a luxury.

ML: To say you want to help?

DC: Yeah. Because you want to help as much to assuade your liberal guilt as anything else. Wanting to fix things – fix what? What are you trying to fix? You’re not actually trying to fix anything. You’re trying to keep the status quo. You’re trying to ensure that your lifestyle isn’t going to be compromised. We live in this fantasy that you can elevate other peoples’ lifestyles with no loss to your own. That’s patently not possible. Iraq, for example, has happened entirely because the West needs oil. It’s not an honest war. If George Bush had said, “Excuse me, we need to invade the middle-east to get their oil supply because in 10 years we’re going to run out of oil and the whole West will go down the pan.” There’s reason in that, but to actually turn round and say it’s a moral war, and that this needs to be done because the poor people in Iraq are suffering under a brutal dictator. You only have to look at the news everyday to realise that they’re suffering more now, generally each person in Iraq is suffering more then when Saddam Hussein was there.

ML: But even within not putting yourself out, that there would be some art work that exacerbates the kind of behaviour here that creates the problems elsewhere.

DC: Explain that a bit more.

ML: People who are doing overtly, conventionally political work might say that there’s a difference between work which is all about having fun over here, and work that provokes thought and changes votes and all that.

DC: I think that’s as much a smoke-screen and a luxury as anything else. To actually have time to be sitting in a studio and make work. How much more luxury can you take? Most – not most people, ‘cos it isn’t most people anymore – normal, working people are too busy working to think about trying to change the world with some soppy art.

ML: It’s funny that you mention ‘normal people’. Recently they polled a few thousand outside the National Gallery or something, and the favourite artist was Rolf Harris. Also, on television at the moment they have celebrities –

DC: Artschool. I haven’t seen it because I’m always at work. They’ve put it on too early. I’m never home before 6. I shall watch the omnibus edition. I think there’s a terrible kind of insistence in this society that everybody should be interested in art. People shouldn’t be interested in art. It’s a terrible thing to be so interested in art when you get nothing from it yourself. Think about the YBA thing. This was a bunch of kids, basically, who realised that there was no place for them to be involved in the conventional art world so they started doing it on their own. Consequently they started making work that didn’t feel it had any necessity to engage with the outside world, so it became very nihilistic self-referential work. It was made under circumstances that allowed it to mutate as much as it wanted to, because there was noone saying, “Why are you doing that?” Pretty soon that became the academy, and at the same time there’s an insistence that the general public should be interested in art. Art galleries should be free so that everybody can go and see art, why? You pay to go and see a film, you pay to go and listen to music.

ML: Isn’t everybody really interested in art, it’s just television art, or movie art?

DC: If you went to galleries – if you go on sunday to Tate Modern, there’s loads and loads of people wandering round. Their relationship they have with the art establishment is the same relationship they used to have with church. You have to go to church on a Sunday. You don’t necessarily want to. You don’t really know why you’re there. You don’t understand what’s in there, but there is this insistence that you do go there. You go round the Tate gallery, and you see the same bemused faces kind of shuffling around in confused awe.

ML: Or John Humphries saying, “I want the last three hours back.”

DC: Yeah. I don’t really see that turning art into a national past time – it doesn’t help art, and it doesn’t help the rest of the country.

ML: What I find hard to understand is what makes it different from people watching television or...

DC: They’re actually enjoying watching television.

ML: People enjoy Chapman brothers shows though don’t they? They have a laugh.

DC: I think maybe we’re a special case because our stuff goes out of its way to be attractive, to be (inaudible) with its public. You know, Damien’s shark is a great piece, but why would anybody want to go and see a rotten old shark in a case of formeldahyde when they can go to the Aquarium and see a live shark? Because they’re only going because they want to see a shark. It’s the wrong audience. There’s nothing wrong with Damien’s shark, but it’s not – going to see Damien’s sculpture isn’t about seeing a shark.

ML: What is it about?

DC: You tell me. It’s not about sensationalism. It’s not about seeing a ferocious beast, cos it’s not a ferocious beast.

ML: I would think it was an intellectual celebrity –

DC: That’s what it’s become. I don’t think that’s really much to do with the artists. I think that’s something that’s been layered on top. Because it’s the only way that you can entice people into a gallery is to say, “This is that girl that swears on telly.”

ML: She’s really earnestly seeking –

DC: Exactly, but the work itself doesn’t give away any of those things. It’s impoverished scratchings.

ML: Tracey Emin’s are impoverished scratchings?

DC: Yeah, deliberately so. She’s not pretending to be anything other than that, but I think everybody knows the story about Tracey. The apocryphal stories about Tracey. It’s a bit like – sometimes it feels like people visiting totemic shrines. You’re not going there to look at something, you’re going there to be in the presence of something.

ML: To invest meaning into something. You know that old cliche about shopping centres being churches?

DC: I don’t think they are.

ML: I think there is a way that people invest meaning, taking cues from –

DC: I think they’re told. I mean, there’s enough programmes on television now telling people that you should love art. They’re not putting programmes on telly that say you should understand it. It is this mindless slack-jawed appreciation that culture wants. It doesn’t really want people to be able to stand infront of something and say, “What the fuck is that? Why is it here?” An uneducated approach to art sometimes throws up really interesting questions that would never ever be asked by a middle class audience. A middle class audience would file past all this work that is screaming to be questioned, and they won’t ask the questions. Then you get somebody in there who’s somehow found their way in by mistake, and they may ask that question that the sculptor is actually asking to be asked. I think it’s – I don’t see any great advantage to having thousands and thousands of people troupe through galleries.

ML: When I saw these people last night on telly, particularly John Humphries, being generally incredibly uptight: “It looks great, what I’ve just done with this rolling pin, but anyone could’ve done it so I don’t think it’s any good.”

DC: Is it worth watching?

ML: No, probably not. But in a way it does remind you why there is an impulse to shake someone like that and say, “Look at stuff. Relax.”

DC: No, I prefer not to. I prefer to leave those people alone. Really stupid example, football clubs. A seat in a football stadium is expensive. They’d dearly love to have the venues totally packed every week, but they know that there’s absolutely no point in having people there who don’t like football. What’s the point of having a bunch of people who are going to be not understanding the game, or not interested in any way in the game? There’s a form of elitism that’s allowed to happen elsewhere that is absolutely not allowed in the arts. What’s wrong with not many people going to a gallery? If it’s about numbers, you wouldn’t be making these works of art.

ML: So what do you think Saatchi is doing with his gallery?

DC: Erm. What do I think he’s doing?

ML: Do you meet him often?

DC: No. I think he’s trying to entice the great unwashed into his cultural cathedral. Why? I don’t know. I think he’s got – he has the ad man’s approach to everything he does. Numbers are everything. The more people you can get into the galleries, the better – it makes more money aswell, I guess, but also, I think he’s been forced into a situation where he can’t achieve recognition in the normal art world. He’s been totally spurned by...

ML: Really?

DC: Well, if he hasn’t, I think he feels that. For a long while he had the best gallery in London. Then along comes Nick Serota and decides he’s going to make exactly the same gallery but bigger, and suddenly Charles Saatchi can’t do that anymore. He can’t play second fiddle to Nick Serota’s white space, so he has to move on. It’s almost like he’s been pushed in a corner to make this Kafka-esque Hogwarts shambles of a gallery that nothing looks good in. (laughter) I think his mistake is that he allowed himself to be intimidated. It’s like when you’re herding sheep, the sheep have to think that they’re escaping into a pen, and that’s what’s happened to Saatchi. He’s bought a white elephant and now he’s doing his best to make it look like something else.

ML: It makes it sound like the desire for status is a big motivating force.

DC: Well, I think everybody’s ego demands status.

ML: You know when you go to an opening and it seems like there’s loads of people, so it must mean loads of people must love this stuff, and then it turns out that everyone’s an artist or a writer or...

DC: Worse than that. It’s free beer. You go to an art opening anywhere else on the continent or in America where they don’t have an excessive amount of alcohol available, there’s about two people standing there scratching their beards.

ML: I think it’s like a storm, even with an eye to the storm – there’s something so attractive about the idea that you could get lots of attention, but genuinely be expressing a response to experience, just doing something that’s not dumb, basically. Not just getting your tits out. Being smart, and everyone’s liking it.

DC: But you are getting your tits out, intellectually. It’s the same thing, isn’t it. You’re all bloody showing off. The whole point of being artists, they’re show-offs, otherwise you wouldn’t feel the need to do it. They’d be gardeners or something.

(first tape ends)

DC: We’ve amassed quite a large collection of children’s colouring books. We’ve used them quite alot on previous print things. There’s something quite weird about some of the images. These are images that are given to kids to colour in but there’s something so – I mean, give that to a kid to colour in. There’s something very very wrong already. It’s actually quite – It’s like Louisiana, it’s kind of got tree-moss, it’s got no subject matter. You have these really strange images that just – that children are expected to slavishly colour in for no purpose, but actually they’re quite odd. Already they’re – why is he crossing his legs, why is she sitting that way? (two children in a tree, girl straddles branch) What’s this? (Rumple in trouser crotch suggests a penis) They’re just absolutely asking to be tampered with, because they’re actually drawn by adults for children. Somebody’s obviously said to them , “These are for children, so make them kind of childish.” So what they do is that. (laughter)

ML: Some of them are so shittily drawn aswell.

DC: That’s the amazing thing. (inaudible) We did a whole set of prints, I’ll show you them, that were made from (inaudible) so the show is basically, it’s seven sets of prints and the Goyas, so it’s actually the first graphic show that we’ve done. These, we just took some colouring in books, and obviously we didn’t colour them in properly.

ML: I saw one online, but I don’t think it had colour in it.

DC: Was it a little kid with a hardhat and a pile of sand?

ML: Yeah.

DC: That comes from a set that’s never ever been published, I don’t know how that person’s got hold of it.

ML: They were selling it.

DC: They can’t have it. There’s absolutely no way they can have it.

ML: It looks like it’s an online gallery thing.

DC: Yeah, ‘cos I checked it out last night, and they’re selling other stuff they can’t possibly have access to. They’re selling a mannequin that they can’t possibly have ‘cos there aren’t any available. This is the first set we did with the colouring books, and obviously they’re all completely wrong. The new set we actually –

ML: I think I saw these in black and white.

DC: Yeah, there is a black and white set of these. But the new ones, there’s less of our drawing in them. There’s more just stuff that’s already in them, and we just collaged loads of these things.

ML: If these were in college by some girl with super-heavy eyeliner, listening to heavy-metal music, I’d just go – I wouldn’t give them a chance.

DC: But that’s interesting, because I was looking at, you know Felician Rops? He was a symbolist painter from Belgium, and he did these incredibly perverse images, satanic women. There’s one whole set about witches being raped by the devil, and they’re really kind of, you look at them and go, “That’s a bit off.” And the amazing thing about them is that they have absolutely no contemporary outlet apart from heavy-metal covers. I’m really interested in the fact that there’s this kind of fall from grace. This decadent man in 1900 (inaudible) these unbelievable impoverished images, you know, Slayer. I think they’re brilliant.

(a delivery arrives at the studio)

ML: I love how quiet it is here.

DC: It’s not. It’s normally very stampy. Normally I have to have really loud techno-music on.

ML: But when you did that (Sex, sculpture shown in the Turner Prize exhibition 2003) did you have loads of technicians running around?

DC: No. Well, we had about 4 technicians when we were doing that. That’s basically why we got this place, so that we could have some peace and quiet. It’s alright. It’s fine.

Gregory Baker: What is it upstairs?

DC: They sell tickets to events. (gestures that you can tell where their footsteps are falling.) If you had a shotgun you could get them like that. (indicating the colouring-in book prints) I mean, some of these are just really straight-forward. They’re just appropriations of two separate images, put together in ways that they don’t really belong.

(a second delivery arrives at the studio)

ML: Do you like James Ensor?

DC: Yes. Yeah. These were quite difficult, they were so close to where they come from that you sometimes think maybe you’ve gone too far with not fiddling with them. Normally we kind of throw them around alot, so it’s kind of really difficult working with them.

ML: There’s alot gone into them compared to just appropriating them.

DC: But it doesn’t feel like that when you’re making them. You have this kind of awful – I mean, that. (indicates a print) When we were working on that one we were, “we can’t be doing this. It looks like a crappy cartoon from a newspaper.”

ML: “Have we just coloured it in?”

DC: “Have we just coloured it in?” But the thing is, then you think, “Hold on a minute, it’s actually quite complex. It’s a dinosaur watching a caveman making a painting of a policeman being terrified of a martian, so it’s this kind of huge circle of – a time cycle that’s completely wrong.

ML: I think if I looked at it though, I might almost just read it as types of image.

DC: Yeah.

ML: You know with Neo Rauch paintings, I never think, “Oh, there’s a woman with a cooker looking at a ...” I just kind of see it.

DC: Yeah, but that’s what’s interesting with these things I think, when you make them you have to put one bit of your intelligence aside and just do it, and allow it – you know, the idea of a little caveman painting – what he was painting originally, there was no dinosaur – no, was there a dinosaur? There was. There was a dinosaur behind him and he was painting a little byson on the cave wall. And it was just like, well that’s wrong, there’s a temporal thing going on there –

(second tape ends)

 

Part 2: Jake Chapman interviewed by Matt Lippiatt at Jake's home in London, 22/09/05.

 

Matt Lippiatt: Honey (Honey Luard, press for White Cube gallery) told me you’re hardly doing any interviews for this show -

Jake Chapman: Yeah.

ML: - so to make it a good one. (laughter)

JC: She’s a task master.

ML: It made me wonder, what would they most want to say about it?

JC: About the new work?

ML: Or about the whole show.

JC: I don’t know really. It’s difficult to – we’re so intensely connected to the work, it’s difficult to have a sort of overview. I don’t know really. The inexorable draw toward the opening of the show – I think the work is so intensely concerned with its own thinking, its own process, I think the show is something that happens despite our ambitions really. I think the only thing that we can control, the only thing we can have confidence over is the intensity of the work, so that hopefully renders itself sort of hard-wired, and the show is just the terminal point, or – The thing is, when you’re our age, making shows and – “our age,” that sounds terrible, but – you know, the idea of every so often doing exhibitions, you know, the Promethean task – Promethean? No, Sysiphian task of producing work pretending that there’s this great reason to do it. It’s difficult to generate that kind of optimisim to do it. Our work isn’t very optimistic anyway.

ML: I was looking at it in the studio though, and it seemed like a really pleasurable process. Like starting with those children’s colouring books, that’s a kind of thing where it’s like, “Give me a blank one and I’ll have a go.”

JC: Sure, yeah. I think that again it’s a process that we’re sort of quite used to. That sort of parasitic adoption. You take a relatively intact body and then you disentangle it and put it back together in the wrong parts, in the wrong connections. I think the most, the only thing that I can have confidence about is again, you know, the concentrated levels of commitment that we have when we make our work.

ML: When you’re doing it –

JC: I mean, I think it’s 200 - 370 prints.

ML: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JC: It’s huge.

ML: They actually look quite different –

JC: Yeah.

ML: - to the things –

JC: They are.

ML: - I’ve seen before.

JC: They are.

ML: Especially the big –

JC: Yeah.

ML: - Family Collection etchings.

JC: Yeah. They are. You know, I’m curious to see what it’s going to look like. I mean, obviously, when you work on something – especially if you work on something graphics, two-dimensional works, you know, once it’s flat – you don’t ever get a really good –

ML: No.

JC: - idea of what it’s going to look like when it’s on the walls.

ML: Or even, because it’s flat then it has a different relation to all its reproductions.

JC: Mm. That’s right.

ML: I was e-mailed a few, and of course the files are huge so then you’ve got them on a screen, only able to view a section.

JC: And also, there are repetitions, aswell, in the work. (inaudible) start to vibrate with different sort of, different kind of games going on.

ML: When you said in something that I read, about the theory and the work being sort of each other’s buffoon, I was wondering where, sort of, life comes in with that relationship between the two? I mean, like, is it possible to think about your new baby in terms of Bataille’s world?

JC: Oh yeah. A general economy, yeah, ofcourse. Of course, because I wouldn’t think that a theoretical position or a practical position were – I mean, I think if I said that it was done with a certain amount of – I can certainly say one’s the buffoon of the other is to say that one isn’t the prime. The theoretical position isn’t maintained in order to justify the work in any kind of way –

ML: Which is what -

JC: - because any theoretical position we’ve ever taken on our work is also as deranged as the practical activities.

ML: Yeah.

JC: And infected.

ML: Deranged?

JC: Yeah. I mean deranged in terms of its – sort of, you know, kind of, well, I mean hopefully deranged. I don’t mean deranged in an expressionistic sense. I mean in the sense of avoiding the tendency to rationalise, the tendency to use a theoretical approach to produce a kind of epystomology to aesthetic work. To give it a justified mature armature.

ML: See, when I think about – when you say deranged – so much of what I guess goes in ‘theory’ that I read, I find so difficult –

JC: Mm.

ML: - to hold on to all the threads of their argument –

JC: Mm.

ML: - and yet really fascinated by it.

JC: Mm.

ML: So then I think, well, my reading is going to be really nuanced by how much confusion...

JC: Depends on which writers you’re talking about. There’s definitely a whole sway of writes who have attempted to maintain that sense of confusion as an active ingredient in making, sort of, philosophical writing, or theoretical writing not be possessive, not be sort of concerned with an application of power. Certainly people like Deleuze and Guattari, they’re writing is specifically deranged, because it’s active on the presuppositions that exist prior to their writing, so that the way that they write – I mean, they go back to this thing – they’re obviously influenced by writers like Nietzsche, who, his whole position, his whole attempt to re-think Kant’s writing was also to infect logocentric thought with rhetoric, so that his writing sounds as though it is deranged, as though it’s written by someone’s who’s kind of schizophrenically multiple, rather than sort of – so I think –

ML: But he did end up insane?

JC: Well, going back to that question about whether there’s a distinct division of labour between theory, practice and life I don’t think that there is a trajectory where Nietzsche starts off being really sane and ends up insane, and that the writing follows this – you know, you can trace this, sort of – I think it would be ridiculous to think that his writing was insane. I would say deranged, yes. But insane, no.

ML: Ecce Homo’s pretty wild though.

JC: It’s amazing. It’s amazing.

ML: Yeah.

JC: I mean, amazing in terms of its modernity.

ML: Mm.

JC: Amazing in terms of its modernity. in the way it pre-empts, kind of, you know, I mean even – it pre-empts people. I mean, the existentialist solipsistic writing. Sartre and Camus writing these kind of philosophical novels of the individual over-whelmed by their burgeoning alienation, but these sort of evidenced through novels, I mean, Nietzsche sort of pre-empts that by Zarathustra. This kind of ridiculous, biblical figure accompanied by a buffoon.

ML: Yeah.

JC: That’s why there’s always been a sort of, I guess, a problem with Anglo-American philosophy and Continental philosophy, because Anglo-American philosophy is so concentrated around the idea of some sort of positive logic and rationality that it could never get to grips with a writer like Nietzsche because that’s his very attack. He’s attacking the notion that philosophical writing should be concerned with the notion of logic. In order to destabilise the rigours of logic he’s using rhetoric. And certainly that’s taken up by writers like Deleuze and Guattari.

ML: Do you think there are, sort of, strategies in common with the way you would make a piece of work and that kind of writing?

JC: Yeah, I mean, I think the beginning of – I can’t remember, A Thousand Plateaus or Anti-Oedipus – I think they start off writing about, you know, first there’s Deleuze, second there’s Guattari, and these being already more than two egos, so their idea of writing together is to multiply the agencies involved to produce – I mean they term their critical writing as schizo-analysis rather than philosophy, and I think that Dinos and I were heavily influenced by that possibility. That one of the inherent problems, or assumptions about being an artist is that you produce things that exist in the world as these kind of consolidated expressions of latent ego. That the artist is the demonstration par-excellence of egotistical production, and that what’s interesting is that if you have two people making work then it completely explodes that sort of, that kind of potential. You know, the idea that a work of art can be reduced to the productive output of a single person, we have two people making it, and the way in which we talk about our work it means to say that our production, our output, is hinged not upon the expression of two people’s egos attempting to (inaudible) be one, but upon a notion of historical understanding of art. We’re sort of concerned with the idea that a work of art is made possible by the history that produces it, produces its meaning, and that artists, whether they’re singular, multiple, whatever, are just simply components.

ML: But it doesn’t actually mean that in the studio you make a conscious decision that you can’t work on things on your own?

JC: No, no, not atall. The variables and permutations are endless. It’s not, I mean, I think also that once you’ve made work over a period of time, that the idea of – I mean, we’ve always said that – we’ve always been interested in the idea that any particular concept, idea, project has tolerances that are as equally pressing upon the project as our influence upon the project.

ML: Sorry, I...

JC: Well – that was really badly articulated (laughter). No, just that, you know, if you have an idea about making a particular work, it would be narrow-minded to think that that work didn’t come with a set of its own pressures involved inherent in the project. That’s to say that – I suppose what we’re trying to – you know, in a cack-handed way of explaining it – is trying to sort of resist thinking about art as an intentional activity. That’s not to say that it’s an unconscious activity, but it’s an anti-intentional activity. I think the most interesting thing about a work of art in its demonstration, in its paradoxical nature, in terms of what it’s taken to represent usually, or eventually, is that while an artist sits down and says, “Right, I’m gonna make a painting and it’s going to, my intentions are, my ambitions are, for it to mean this,” -

ML: Mm.

JC: - what’s invariable in anyone’s experience of a work of art is that it completely forfeits, the artist has to forfeit his or her ambitions in the production of the work of art, because the work of art does, in the final instance, reject the ambitions. So, while art is given to be the most – an exemplar of intentional activity – all histories surrounding all artists can’t help but reduce the meaning of the work of art to the intentions of the artist. It seems to me that that’s actually completely incorrect, because when you produce a work of art, a pragmatic condition is that, you know, “I want this to represent that.” And what happens, always, every single, every single event, the work of art exceeds the ambitions.

ML: Exceeds?

JC: Exceeds the ambitions, absolutely. There’s no way of producing a work of art that can ever fulfill the intention that produced it, otherwise an artist would make one work of art and finish.

ML: Couldn’t he just have a new intention?

JC: He could have a new intention, but I would say that it’s better to think of, you know, a series of works of art as being a sort of cascading set of solutions to a problem that always alludes solving. And so on the one hand we have a conventional reading of a work of art as being, you know, I guess that behind that I’m trying to sort of produce a sort of anti-humanist approach to thinking about how a work of art is made.

ML: See, that was one of the big things on my notes.

JC: Yeah.

ML: Why anti-humanism?

JC: Because I don’t think humanist accounts of production of any kind are very valuable.

ML: So what would be the humanist account of the production of art?

JC: That a work of art represents human intentions. That there are, sort of, ambitions that can be, sort of, you know, deduced from a work of art. I don’t think a work of art has anything to do with intentions.

ML: So when you start, you have an intention but you know it’s not going to...

JC: (laughter) It’s not gonna get (inaudible). It’s not gonna get expressed.

ML: I mean, is it like an enabling fiction? Kind of, something you need to begin with?

JC: Well, I think – Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely. I think it’s a – yeah. It’s a magnetising fiction. I mean, it’s something that urges people to produce. But I think that’s the really interesting thing about art is that it always fails expectations, or it produces different kinds of expectations, you know, there’s no work of art – I mean, I think, I guess, you know, one of the reasons, I suppose, that, you know, we try to produce this kind of opposition is because there’s something – the idea of art presents this teleology, this idea that, you know, that art has some (inaudible) direction to it, and this is determined by the idea that, you know, there is some sort of ambition on the part of human culture to achieve the most civilised form of culture possible, and this is in science, technology, you know, that science is moving towards this inexorable point where it can solve all problems for all time and then science can sort of cure the problem of science, that it will kind of end. It’s the same sort of assumption in art. That one day there will be a work of art so perfect that no art will be able to – will be needed.

ML: Do you think there are artists today that you could identify and say, “There’s a terrible case of humanism”?

JC: I think most artists. I think –

ML: Really?

JC: Yeah.

ML: Can you see it in their work though?

JC: Well, I think yeah. ‘Cos I think art, probably more than most discourses at the moment, is still rummaging around in the delapidations of humanist thought. I don’t think science does so much, or atleast there are kinds of scientific discourse that are not still concerned about the kind of, “I think, therefore I am,” kind of, still sort of concerned with identity. Art is somehow still sort of so retarded. It’s still so sort of concerned with the notion of – I mean, ultimately because it’s so bourgeois, it’s so sort of concerned with the assertion, “I am,” you know, “I think.”

ML: Yeah, it’s true actually. But it’s funny how –

JC: I mean, noone – there aren’t many people who produce a work of art that’s concerned with the world before it’s concerned with the utterance of the artist’s opinion about the world.

(long pause)

ML: But how I experienced your work – everything that you said, actually, that you’re kind of resisting, it’s true. It’s succesfully resisting it. But something else comes in where, a kind of coolness, and Dinos mentioned the accusation of being too smart, but it’s not only that. There’s some kind of – I may be using the word wrongly, but – arch. Knowing.

JC: Yeah. It’s –

ML: Knowing. And yet I never kind of knew what –

JC: I know exactly –

ML: I don’t know what they know, but they know something.

JC: I know exactly what you mean. I think, because one of the ways – one of the standard measurements of artistic legitimacy is the idea that the artist is a kind of case history, is a kind of demonstra – that an artist exhibits symptoms, and that – because, again, this is the inheritance of psychoanalysis, that the artist is almost the subject of a psychoanalytic examination on the part of the audience, and so there’s something – what the audience, as the analyst, does is to try and discriminate whether this person is canny, or whether they are, you know, whether their traumas are legitimate and authentic, because there’s nothing worse than finding yourself in analysis with someone who actually really is aware of the conditions of analysis, because it means to say that their illness isn’t unique. Well not – isn’t first-order. It isn’t trustworthy. So there’s nothing worse than an artist who has, who’s slightly proficient with the mechanisms of examination, ie: theoretical understanding, because it means to say that they’re not shedding sypmtoms. That what they’re doing is they’re being tactical and strategic about their actions, and so in that case they’re untrustworthy, and their art is therefore illegitimate. It’s the art of somebody – it’s artistry, rather than art. It’s somebody who’s being devicive, who’s being manipulative, who’s aware of – who’s actually reversing the power relation, because, you know, I think – yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it’s – and again, when you have two people making the work, that really produces a kind of, an automatic illegitimacy, because it must mean that you can’t be making spontaneous, expressive, legitimate, sort of, direct art. There must be some kind of contrivance. You’re almost ganging up, as two of you.

ML: Yeah, that’s a big part of it.

JC: Yeah, no, I think the idea of intelligence on the part of the artist is a really interesting idea, or an audience, or a certain kind of critical response to the work could be that the work is criticised because it’s displaying too much intelligence. I mean, really what that demand for is for, you know, is for a certain kind of, you know, stupidity on the part of the artist. People expect artists to be sort of, you know, expressive without sort of, you know, without reserve.

ML: Maybe it’s a kind of – being attracted to the vulnerability or –

JC: Yeah, absolutely.

ML: You know the side of people that comes out –

JC: Absolutely, yeah.

ML: - in reality –

JC: Yeah, but that –

ML: - celebrity reality –

JC: - but –

ML: - when they’re kind of –

JC: - but that’s not to say that, you know, because Tracey Emin tells us all about her past and her, you know, misfortunes, or her fortunes, biological problems, molecular problems, that those, that the way that she exhibits those expressive outbursts are not in themselves formally structured, you know, that they strut themselves along the axes of various expressionistic mechanisms that we can detect, so in a sense, it’s a double, there’s a double sort of bluff really, that however much people want their artists to be, sort of, honest, you know, there’s still a kind of formal drama being played out between the artist and the audience, because the less – expressionistic art looks like expressionistic art. If she made a sculpture of a block of wood and said, “This represents my abortion,” it wouldn’t work, so there has to be – you know, formal understandings of expression are actually as rigid as, and unspontaneous, as perhaps looking at Dinos and my work, which is, you know, self-claiming its inexpressiveness.

ML: So, when you put the viewer in that position –

JC: Yeah.

ML: - how come it still works in terms of logistically getting people opening books, looking at pictures, talking about works. I mean, what do you think’s... ?

JC: Well because I think, I think that – I mean, I think – I think, you know, again, the viewer and artist division is actually false aswell, because artists are viewers aswell, not least of their own work, but of other people’s work. They’re producers, but they’re also passive aswell. They’re consumers. I can't, sort of, help but argue for complexity. I can’t help but argue for an audience that has a completely diverse and complex understanding of all sorts of stuff – you know, and the looking at, the reading of art – I mean, if it’s condemned to this really conventional notion of a work of art as, you know, just this window into the artist’s soul, then I don’t think too many people really go for that anyway. I think, because if you look at – I remember walking to Whitechapel gallery to look at Franz Kline, and knowing that this stuff is in the pantheon of Modernist culture, it’s the highest form of Abstract Expressionism possible, yet simultaneously it looks like a monkey’s painted it, so it has this kind of paradigmatic shift between being the highest demonstration of cultured activity demanding the most sophisticated form of response from the most intellectually profoundly sharpened audience, and then simultaneously it’s ridiculous. It ridicules the whole sophistication that it requires from an audience. So the thing shifts between the two – You know, I walked in and I saw there was a family who’d wondered in who were standing there laughing at these things, and I looked at them and thought, “You fucking philistines,” but then I thought, “Well, no, ‘cos this is the point. This is the -”

ML: Yeah.

JC: It’s not to say that the work is – that the reason these paintings are great is because they’re paradoxical, but then, you know, there must be something to do with the fact that when you stand infront of a Rothko painting, or a Pollock painting, or Picasso painting, or any sort of great painting, it’s very difficult to describe its greatness. It’s very difficult to even describe why it’s of cultural value, unless you produce a kind of historical, chronological account that embellishes from cave paintings through to abstract modernity, which is a kind of half-arsed argument to make anyway, and so that’s why I think art is kind of interesting, ‘cos it sort of, it exceeds the descriptions made of it.

ML: Exceeds and fails?

JC: Yeah. Yeah.

ML: What do you think of the whole, I guess Rolf Harris approach of, enjoy art by making art?

JC: Well, I don’t think that what we do is any different from what Rolf Harris does, in as much as, if you, you know, if we have attempted to discredit the teleological point of art, that’s to say, its progressive, enlightened trajectory, you know. If we’ve tried to discredit the notion of the work of art as synonimous with some kind of general cultural move towards some higher representation of cultural agency, purpose, whatever, then I think what we’re left with is the notion that a work of art expresses basic instincts for pleasure, so I can’t see that Rolf Harris’s reasons for making a work of art is any different to ours. They just fulfill, and they stimulate at different levels. I would simply say that Rolf Harris’s work doesn’t produce complex enough puzzles to be solved, whereas an Art & Language work of art does, and that’s just simply the difference. I’m not really interested in talking about things like quality, because I don’t really understand how one could have the criteria for judging the difference between the quality of a Rolf Harris painting and a Picasso painting. I would say that all that happens is there’s a different, sort of, set of – there’s a difference in complexity. I mean, all a work of art is is a set of puzzles to be solved, really.

ML: What do you think people are doing when they reduce the complexity to a ‘shock’ reading?

JC: Oh, shock.

ML: ‘Cos that word comes up so much with your work –

JC: Yeah.

ML: It does feel like –

JC: It’s a kind of hand-me-down from sort of avant-guardist claims that a work of art is great because it’s new, because it’s iconoclastic, because it undermines a set of dominant principles that then become, you know – It really is an orphaned term, really, because it doesn’t really know how it’s being applied. I mean it’s also intensely journalistic, aswell. I mean, it’s when critical discourses around art are handed over to journalists, I think because galleries and artists were more interested in column inches than they were in any critical response to their work, so in some senses art –

(first tape ends)

it’s loaned itself to entertainment, and so entertainment values apply. Shock. I mean, thing is, when it’s applied to our work I’m always slightly surprised, because – I think it’s a way of making the work melodramatic.

ML: Calling it that?

JC: Yeah.

ML: Isn’t it melodramatic to begin with, though?

JC: No, I don’t think so. I think that the kind of person who would be shocked by our work – see, I can’t even imagine. I can’t imagine what kind of person would be. Well, I can imagine that they might be a person who was alienated, disorientated, and probably, well I guess those two things would probably apply to looking at a Munch painting, or looking at a flat Robert Ryman painting, and I think those terms are probably something to do with class exclusion. They’re not to do with some sort of physiological problem, of looking at a work of art that’s got a cock in the wrong place and being shocked. Because I think that when you look at our work you can instantly think of something worse, instantly. Instantly. I always, kind of – you know this – tackle the term shock, I’d say, well look, you know, “If you look at our work, you know, there’s two people who’ve made it, if you think this is the sum total of what two people can think of to be the most shocking things they can come up with, it’s pretty impoverished,” so then that can’t be the reason that the work’s being made. It is not the congealed, sort of, imaginings of two people who intend to produce the most deviant work ever.

ML: Are you ever tempted to do that?

JC: No, because I think, I mean, Marquis de Sade has this great sort of Libertine technique, think of the worst thing, no, shut your eyes, concentrate, think of the worst thing, then think of something worse, now think of something worse, and it’s infinite. There’s no end to that point. You can’t think the worst thing. There is no the worst thing. There’s an infinite range of profanity and abhoration. Monstrosity doesn’t have an upper-limit.

ML: I think what happens, or one of the things that happens, when you go through that process, whether it’s think the worst thing, draw the worst thing, write the worst thing, is that really quickly you become aware that you are only thinking.

JC: Yeah, but also you become bored, as you do with any thing. You become bored of the project. You know, basic desires like wanting to eat and shit and piss and do sort of very basic stimulating activities suddenly come into play. That’s what’s interesting about reading 120 Days is that, however much it has these kind of – the content is sort of quite foul, the whole point about it, I think, is that the physiological element of the book is not the content. It’s not the shock – the nausea you get from reading the content, but the nausea you get from having to get through this massive thing. So instead of its physiology being one of shock, and abhoration, and illness, it’s almost boredom. It’s an enyclopedia of boredom rather than sort of some kind of existential description of the possibilities of violence. It’s nothing to do with that, I don’t think.

ML: It is very boring.

JC: It’s extremely boring, but what a fantastic idea; to reduce violence to being boring.

ML: And sexuality aswell, eroticism.

JC: Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s just mundane, and it’s just – it just...

ML: Because you don’t go for that boredom though.

JC: No.

ML: It’s about laughter.

JC: Yeah. I think most of our work is funny. I think it’s predominantly funny. And I think that, you know, I mean, laughter – I would say that if one doubts the possibility of a critical intention of a work art, or the critical intention of radical subversive culture, which is severely (inaudible) now, then I think that what one can do as a form of action, as a form of activity, given that political acts are redundant, given that critical acts are redundant because they’re too readily –

ML: These things are given, then?

JC: For me, they’re given. I think that the problem for me with the notion of critique is that it just simply reinvests the object of critical attack with a higher form of critical response. It’s kind of like a RNA. You just simply offer a dominant mode a better mode of absorption, so this is why any form of critical attack is pointless. Or, in fact, it’s not a matter of it being pointless. It’s actually, sort of quite, you know, it’s to be avoided like the plague.

ML: And humour comes into it how?

JC: Well, humour, I think, is probably perhaps the only way of avoiding any kind of positivised assertion, that what humour does, quite clearly, is it shatters the silence. It shatters equilibrium, but doesn’t replace it with anything, other than its embarassment. You know, it’s a kind of, it doesn’t produce idealistic models of human behaviour or, you know, there’s, you know, someone tells a sick joke, but what’s interesting about it is that there’s – humour – laughter comes off without being contaminated.

ML: What could it be contaminated by?

JC: Well, it could – I mean, it can’t be turned to use-value. It can’t be turned to any kind of production of moral value.

ML: Does that make it an accursed share?

JC: Yeah.

ML: A physical accursed share?

JC: Yeah, I think in as much as – I mean, I think, Bataille’s project, when he talks about violence, is that he’s saying that even violence can be recuperated – well, you know, the best kind of violence one can speak of is characteristic of an insane schizophrenic’s violence, because it has no (inaudible) recuperated back by its (inaudible) state, that even violence can be – you know, it’s all about Jamie Bulger being taken away and murdered by two little kids, and then, you know, it’s re-appropriated, re-absorbed back in to use-value by offering up the biggest social services shake-up for years –

ML: Mm.

JC: So, you know, if – I mean, I guess, you know, if one, you know, if you’re trying to think up a purpose to make art, as something other than just something for ornamenting bourgeois interiors with prettiness or ugliness, as some sort of radical potential, then (inaudible) think along these lines. How do you produce a work of art that can’t be appropriated to a discursive – well, to a power-base. How do you avoid making a work of art that doesn’t offer itself up as another, sort of, icon of bourgeois self-criticism? How do you do that? How do you make a work of art not submit to the notion of progressive libetarian humanism? I don’t think it’s possible to.

ML: You don’t?

JC: No, I don’t think it is. Well, I think – No, I think that’s just inevitable. It’s an inevitable consequence of culture.

ML: But I am really interested in how various things that get called nihilistic so often do seem to have humour in them, and in a really sort of banal interpretation you could say that laughter becomes so attractive simply because you can’t invest value in other forms of pleasure, like the pleasure of logic.

JC: Mm. Well, I think – the other – I mean, if you think about what the ambitions of Romantic artists in the eighteenth-century would produce images that were not just merely beautiful but images that were sublime. I mean, certainly Kant’s use and understanding of the word. I don’t think – I mean, the thing is is when you read Kant you realise that – I mean, especially in retrospect, someone like Freud, Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s re-reading of Kant, you understand that Kant’s understanding of sublime is alot more death-driven than it’s given credit for. That beauty is this kind of thing that can be attached to sort of moral readings. You know, (inaudible) beauty to produce things like idealism, morality, goodness, categorical imperatives, you know, and yet something like the sublime is more of an experience of – where reason, where absolute reason becomes almost consistent with an idea of nihilism. Your experience of the sublime is an experience of reason, but without bounds. It’s not on an order, or a magnitude, of some cosmic scale –

ML: Mm.

JC: - and so even our understanding of things like reason are slightly, kind of, pedestrian.

ML: Well, yeah, I mean –

JC: And that laughter isn’t opposed to reason. Laughter, in a sense you could say – like the sublime, laughter is a kind of, an expression of the possibilities and the potentials of language in language. The psychology of language. You know, word games, jokes, they’re not – they, in a sense they present themselves – to be able to make a joke with, by punning with words, in a sense the pun is already in the sentence, is already latent in the language –

ML: Mm.

JC: It doesn’t take – it’s not a kind of – it’s not external to language, so you say that one – I mean, it’s kind of like a faux pa, when you say something that you shouldn’t say, that there’s a kind of combination of possibility of language and alloyed with a, kind of, weird psychological outburst, a psychological desire, almost a libidinised fatalism, that makes you say the thing you shouldn’t say, but in a sense it’s not really you saying it, it’s the possibility of language that makes you say something that you shouldn’t say, and you’re shocked by your own utterance. It’s not, you know, you – and that’s a really interesting idea, that you can be actually sort of – say something which seems completely reasonable, in as much as it’s not an unreasonable conjecture –

ML: Mm.

JC: - but at the same time, it’s kind of like language expressing itself through you. You become a kind of slightly dumb cipher for this quite elaborate libidinal sort of, you know, utterance. And I think art is kind of like – I think it sort of – I think it settles itself up into these kind of secretions that exceed the very small-minded ambitions of the people who produce it, artists. You can produce a work of art and then, you know, and its – you can’t produce the complexity of the work. The complexity is inherent in all of the possibilities, in all the conditions of experience that make that thing possible.

ML: Do you think that would – I’m thinking of people saying, “Oh, you can put anything in a gallery, and people will call it art.” Do you think that it’s true that any arbitrary –

JC: Yes. Yes, absolutely. I don’t think that discriminates between a good or bad work of art atall. I mean, you can work these things backwards. You can say, you know, do an ink Rorschach test. Do a blot of ink and show it to someone and say, “What does that look like?” Now, the same idiot who would argue that that’s a stupid thing that a work of art – it shows how crap art is that if anything can go into a gallery it can be a work of art – you could show that to the very same person and say, “What does this look like?” and they’ll look at it and say, “It looks like –

ML: Yeah.

JC: So, if they’re – if they can, you know, if you can be drawn to think that an accidental ink blot can have representational significance because, you know, really all we’re saying is that despite whether the object’s been made by a monkey or been put in a gallery by someone with fallacious intentions, true intentions, or whatever, a work of art is just something that simply lends itself to the examination and interpretation of a viewer. If I’m happy to think of this as a work of art, it’s not intrinsically this object’s job to defend itself, and explain why it is a work of art, it’s my job to analyse why it’s interesting. It’s not a question of whether it is or whether it isn’t.

ML: Is this something that people are constantly aware of, and then somehow on top of that –

JC: But I think alot of these arguments are wrapped up with political arguments, like, you know, the sort of (inaudible) adverts where somebody walks in and starts looking at this thing –

ML: Oh, yeah.

JC: You know, these arguments are alot to do with the sense of people being disenfranchised by elitist bourgeois, you know, culture, which is kind of fair enough. You know, I’ve always sort of said, you know, there are two kinds of arguments, two kind of questions that you get in the face of Carl Andre’s bricks. One is, you know, this sort of, you know, absolutist assumption that these things are something to do with beauty. You walk round and say, “Yes, that’s beautiful, Carl Andre’s... ” or the other person walks in and says, “What the fuck are these doing here?” It seems to me that one question is just the presumptions of bourgeois thinking, which probably would respond to any object in a gallery and enquire along the lines of whether it’s beautiful or not, whether it’s shocking or not, or whether, you know, whatever terminologies are current. And the other is to ask sociopolitical historical questions about an object in a context, “What is that doing here?” Of course, the way that - most people who were offended by the brick sculptures were kind of quite, you know, sort of angry about how they suggested that question, but nonetheless, that question is the most important question. “Why is it here? What is it doing? What is it doing in relation to this bloody great big museum?” These are questions that are important.

ML: Well, yeah, I think that’s where the anger comes from, and I don’t –

JC: Yeah.

ML: - think it’s generally very –

JC: Well, I –

ML: - forceful anger, but isn’t it slightly embarassment and fear –

JC: Yes.

ML: - of a ritual that they feel –

JC: But think about how art has been – is – has been, you know, protected. I mean, even, you know, in the eighteenth century, they spoke mostly about questions of sensibility. You know, there were no – I mean, it’s only sort of post-Marxist analysis of art that says we should be thinking about the historical conditions that produced this work of art, not like some intuitive, divine, sort of, you know – I mean, that’s the way most works of art are still disseminated now, as though they’re the products of genius. What is genius? Well, it’s –

ML: Mm.

JC: - it’s a metaphysical concept that can’t – that has no material substance. That one is a genius, or you are either a genius or you’re not. A work of art is either the product of a genius or it’s not. Well, why is a work of art a masterpiece? Well, because the person who made it is a genius. These endlessly mystifying terms which have been there, been used, and are constantly used to obfuscate and defend really, sort of, quite fundamentally capitalist interests. You know, to simply, sort of, produce this kind of mythologising around works of art. In order to –

ML: What’s capitalist about it?

JC: Well, I mean, you could say that a work of art is the highest form of capital, because it has no use-value, it doesn’t function in any way, but it’s actually pure currency, you know, and if you have a syndicate of 500 people who decide that a Jasper Johns painting is worth more than a Robert Ryman painting, that’s how its currency is achieved. There’s no, sort of, litmus test you can do on a work of art that will give you a, kind of, definitive, categorical, you know, value to it, so the value is produced by scarcity value, it’s produced by a set of specialists who are nothing other than the financiers who will decide the currency value of a particular work of art. I mean, that’s not to say that these things are not connected to cultural value, and the meaning value of these things, but, you know, we should also be very careful to not be mystified by concepts of genius, because they serve interests, and those interests are not really to do with the explications of the works of art, the work’s meaning, more to do with, sort of, securing the conditions of sale.

ML: Mm.

JC: So I think – and I think you can see this in the way lots of artists work. How they, sort of, they often defend the, kind of, sort of, mystification of their own work. I mean, a good example would be when Hell was burned. So many artists came out and said their work couldn’t be re-made, which is what? That’s really bizarre. I mean, specially because alot of those artists, their work, you know, tents, rudimentary paintings of dots, things that didn’t really require too much material, sort of, practical labour to produce, I mean, to their benefit. I’m not atall – I’m saying that the reason that Tracey’s tent is good is because it’s a kind of dematerialist work of art. It’s kind of playing around with the idea of what’s needed in order to make – in order for something to be a work of art. In order for it to be expressive enough to exist as a work of art, or not. And yet here she was saying that this thing was so unique that you couldn’t re-make it. So, on the one hand utilising these really, kind of, sophisticated arguments about, “Yeah, well anything can be a work of art,” and then suddenly, when the shit hits the fan, all the flames go up, suddenly pretending these things have some kind of scarcity, which is really really absurd, and because the way in which lots of artists think about their place, their status, I don’t mean celebrity status, I mean their status as creators, they think they inherit this great kind of value, this great kind of, this, this sense of genius, this sense of difference, this sense of sort of solipsistic divinity that other mere mortals don’t have, and this is evidenced through the rarity of their work.

ML: Mm.

JC: So, however much we talk about, sort of, you know, Romantic discourses being a bit sort of, “Nobody really thinks that,” actually they are fully fully fully present. They’re fully compelling.

ML: Mm.

JC: Right now.

ML: The other weird thing about her response to that was her appearing on television saying that she was really shocked and appalled that the public were making fun of it, which was odd because it was tabloid journalists making fun of it, not the public, but –

JC: But even so –

ML: It seemed like a really willful misunderstanding –

JC: It’s a really willful –

ML: - of the fuck-off relationship to –

JC: But also, to not understand the sensitivities, to not understand that part of the problem with an artist who maybe has a political, sort of, conscience, a political understanding of the relationships between the bourgeois world that you inhabit, because that’s where art exists, and yet trying to produce a politically active practice, and understanding conditions of alienation whereby, you know, that – you know, you have to argue both sides against the other, and you have to say, “Well, look, you know... ” – I mean, there was a great cartoon in Private Eye where it showed this industrial vista with two figures, looking at this industrial vista, both cloth-capped, a father holding his son, saying, “One day, son, all this -” all these chimneys belching out smoke, “One day, son, all this will be art galleries.” (laughter) And it’s genius, really fantastic. You can’t possibly fail to recognise the political and social injustices that art, as a product of bourgeois life, is being used to smooth over. I mean, certainly in the construction of something like Tate Modern, you know, this idea that suddenly art can now demonstrate the kind of taste-value judgements of this new demographic social group, moving higher and higher up the perceived evolutionary ladder, towards some point of what? Some kind of aesthetic enlightenment. Well, what’s it going to do? Is it going to make people change their curtains? No longer MFI, but IKEA?

ML: Yeah, yeah.

JC: These are just taste – this is reducing artistic activity to just, sort of, simple taste mechanics, and without being too vulgar, you can see that it’s becoming part of the state apparatus, it’s becoming part of a kind of, a way of congealing social formations. You know –

ML: What about –

JC: Producing a middle-class country. New Labour, new equity. Which is dangerous, because it’s not like the kind of consciousness that people would move into is one which produces critical questions about their very conditions, but it just masks all of those things with notions of genius and beauty, you know, aesthetic terms which are, at best, entertaining and, at worse, they obscure real social structures, real political structures.

ML: What about at two doors down at Saatchi’s gallery? I mean, maybe not the painting thing now, but – I don’t think people go round the original lay-out, when it had all the YBA stuff, talking about genius.

JC: No, no. They talk about eccentricity, and they talk about, you know, the artist as the sort of oddball. People walk around as though it’s – you know, “These people must lead these kind of strange lives.” They look at these things – you know, the art in there is all about novelty. You know, it’s all about the artist, the unbridled individual, allowed to make self-images of Sid Vicious. So I don’t think there’s much, there’s not much explanation as to why a work of art exists in parallel to all other forms of cultural activity. I mean, given that a work of art almost exists completely out of, you know - some weird vacuum, so each work then is just seen as the next oddity. The next, sort of, kind of, strangely surreal object that has no sort of basis in thinking, no basis in, sort of, you know, and so in that sense it just becomes a kind of, you know, a sort of, kind of, random bit of (inaudible) poetry.

ML: It really reminded me of pop culture, much more than the actual amount of press generated by Sensation, somehow seeing that Saatchi gallery, it seemed so much like a CD collection of greatest hits.

JC: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Tired old, sort of, iconic (inaudible) flogged to death.

ML: Or even, not necessarily tired, kind of cool, but in that really personal – you know when you think a rock-star’s really cool, but you know it’s between you and their image.

JC: Yeah.

ML: It has that kind of attraction.

JC: Yeah.

ML: I mean, when you saw all – ‘cos they did a whole load of your work, didn’t they?

JC: Yeah.

ML: What did you think or feel going round that?

JC: I’m not really concerned about – I don’t – I feel very detached from my work once it’s out. I don’t really – It doesn’t really – It’s like when Hell burnt. You know, I don’t – I think we’re so sort of geared into thinking (inaudible) I mean, even down to the basic dynamics of when someone comes and gives you the money.

ML: Mm.

JC: It’s not yours anymore. That’s that.

ML: There’s, like, a copyright.

JC: I’ve never exerted copyright.

ML: No?

JC: I’m not interested. I think it’s an interesting enough activity to not worry about things like that. I think that the things that are interesting about it are exactly not those things. I think it’s interesting because – I get really sick of the professional artists. I get really sick of the people –

ML: What’s a professional artist?

JC: Well, just people who are so – people who suddenly become entitled to their self-justification that they are important. They start, kind of, worrying about where their work is showing.

ML: Don’t you think, though, that people, especially if they never meet you, and they see the galleries that your with, the Turner Prize, all of these things, would think that you must be, if not focused on that, atleast very skillful at –

JC: No, I think we’re very aware of, you know, how to do stuff, what it should be like, but I don’t think we’re too – I think if you talk to anybody, you’d probably find we’re the easiest people to work with. Because we’re not – I just really don’t like the idea that it suddenly becomes – I really can’t stand that idea of self-important artists. Really can’t stand that. It really – because I suppose I still can’t get over the idea that any artist can actually believe in what they do in such dramatic ways. I mean, I don’t believe in what I do, atall.

ML: You don’t believe in what you do?

JC: No. Because I think – because I can see what I do as being so infinitely more interesting than my beliefs in it. You know, it’s -

(tape ends)