Jake & Dinos Chapman

Interview by William Furlong

Dinos & Jake Chapman respond to questions on their work 'Zygotic acceleration, biogenetic, de-subliated libidinal model (enlarged X 1000)' at the Victoria Miro Gallery.

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 15 Number 3, 1995

Transcript

The interview starts with Dinos and Jake Chapman responding to a question which proposed that the tension and resonance in their work, Zygotic acceleration, biogenetic, de-sublimated libidinal model (enlarged x 1000) at the Victoria Miro gallery, was created through a complex interrelation of opposing values, definitions and readings. In responding, the artists claimed that the oppositions in the work set up a physiological oscillation, so the reading never really becomes one or the other; either a conscious rationalisation of an idea or merely an expressionist discourse. The work comprised mannequins of children placed in an oval configuration, joined, Siamese-twins like, with re-located genitalia.

William Furlong: This piece, Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic, De-sublimated Libidinal Model (enlarged x 1000), which is the long title, comprises 20 figures of children between the age of 8 and 12, I imagine, with relocated genitalia, and they are joined together in an oval configuration. I have felt quite disturbed looking at this piece, and I thought that what I responded to was a tension generated through combinations of opposites. The grotesque and the extremely matter of fact, the surreal and the real, pleasure and revulsion. I know that you’ve talked about the object not being the thing that’s important, but the discourse that surrounds the object. Can you elaborate on some of those readings?

Jake Chapman: One of the points about setting an object up that has certain values placed in opposition to each other is that they don’t necessarily neutralise each other but they set up a kind of physiological oscillation, so the reading of the work never really becomes clear. I think we were interested in the point at which the object could almost make itself absent by an overburdening presence. These are oxymoronic statements. But it was the way in which we could make an object ambiguous but also ambivalent; I mean that in its psychoanalytic sense. When we said we were not necessarily interested in the objectness of the object, it was a way of trying to decide how a work of art functions, how it operates in terms of the spectator, how it operates in terms of the intentions that almost become possessive about an object. And it seems to me the most interesting thing about a work of art is that it dispossesses intentions. So in some senses the object becomes a residue of all of the things it fails to do. We wanted to make that happen in terms of its materiality but also its otherness.

WF: There’s something that the majority of us feel we own, when we look at imagery of young children, but the interventions that you’ve made contradict that sense of ownership and familiarity. You’ve created alienation where normally there is bonding.

JC: in some ways it’s an attempt to produce a kind of love object, but in order for that object to be a love object it would have to be a hate object at the same time. In order to be a perfect desiring object it would have to be simultaneously very spiteful to the viewer, because that in a sense is how desire is negotiated.

WF: It is also negotiated by a kind of reconciliation between the two tendencies: that of destruction and of construction that you seem to embody within one object here.

JC: I think masochism and sadism are constitutive of sexuality, so in order to produce an object which is a perfect vehicle for libidinal projection, that object would have to be simultaneously masochistic and sadistic. So, I think that’s the experience of viewing the thing, a sense of ambivalence. Having to sort out the moral and ethical content of the work and a collapse of that framework into something amoral, which is laughter. We were not trying to indicate some dignified discourse. We weren’t necessarily making work to promote some theoretical response that would be commensurate with our notions of what we do, but the work becomes a kind of confessionary object, an object almost to incite self-suspicion. The response to the work becomes an index of repression, so the more vehement the reaction, the more that reaction indicates something about the instability of that moral disgust. So that moral disgust becomes a kind of physiological pleasure, but a pleasure that can’t call itself by its proper name. Again the work alienates and dispossesses us. We know a work is finished when it gives us the sense that the work has no personal connection to us. In that sense the reason for us making the work is to challenge the idea that you have some control.

WF: You’ve used the term ‘the comodification of desire’. That presumably could refer to the work here.

JC: I understand desire to be already a relation of power. I suppose there’s a tautology or a contradiction in saying ‘the comodification of desire’, because in some senses desire doesn’t exist before a comodification. So I think we make a parallel between comodification and iconicity, in as much as we’re interested in representation – after all, we’re artists. But we’re trying to think of objects of desire rather than objects which represent desire. Our work obviously has a representational reality, that reality is undermined by its own means.

WF: Is there any narrative that the piece explores?

JC: Instead of narrative it becomes permutation. It becomes a means of exhausting a proposition. I think we’re interested in the idea that each work we make is merely placing things in a different order, which accounts for a different proposition for the spectator. I suppose the work seems to entrap a certain leading element in which a narrative or an ethical content is looked for. It’s interesting that people should raise questions about whether this is an object of abuse or whether this relates to some real dysfunctional situation.

Dinos Chapman: Any figurative sculpture implies some kind of narrative, but it’s not intentional that that should be read in any way. They are just there. Going back to the child abuse thing, that’s a narrative that has to be placed on top of the sculpture anyway. I think there’s no narrative other than what the viewer imposes on it.

JC: The way in which we make reference to the body is perhaps how it functions as a dysfunctional set of desiring propositions which are not necessarily at home with each other. So I think the work is already pathologically involved with a definition of what the body is not and is at the same time. So it’s not a question of representing of the body but it’s a question of understanding how the body can’t possibly represent itself.

WF: In a piece by Julie Burchill in the Sunday Times she writes: ‘At the end of the century the visual arts are moving irretrievably to the right. What we see in the galleries these days is simply the no-holds-barred, the ultimate representation of right-wing nastiness.’ She goes on to talk about child abuse, racism, misogyny, fascism and so on, and she links you with those tendencies. Do you see that as a spurious connection?

DC: The person being called a fascist can’t answer back because it’s such an ideologically sensitive question. I think we are only representing the conditions of desire in our time. If our work is fascist, it’s because desire is already fascist, and involves a certain terrifying of the subject. It’s an ideological question, and a question that would almost require us to redeem our own work, which we’re not interested in doing.