Chapman Brothers Abjection Sustained No Pix

Chapman BrothersAbjection Sustained: Goya, the Chapman brothers and the Disasters of War
Philip Shaw
University of Leicester
ABSTRACT
Today the title the Disasters of War refers to at least three works. The first a set of engravings etched
by Francisco Goya, c. 1810–20, published posthumously in 1863 as Los Desastres de la guerra, the
second and third are a set of miniature dioramas and a suite of engravings produced by Dinos and Jake
Chapman in the 1990s. All three works take as their subject the horrors of war. Goya's is based on his
first-hand experience of the sufferings of the Spanish people during and immediately after the
Napoleonic occupation. The Chapmans' are born out of a desire 'to virally infect or be contagious to' the
artist's 'association with humanism'. These latter Disasters attempt, in other words, to reanimate the
founding trauma of Goya's work, to reveal the indivisible remainder, the abject object, that art criticism,
wedded as it is to the ideology of humanism, seeks to repress. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, this
essay takes a critical look at the nature and significance of this desire, asking whether or not the
Chapmans' fascination with the founding trauma of Goya's Disasters of War marks a reinvention of,
rather than a retreat from, the ethics of humanism.
________________________________________
Today the title the Disasters of War refers to at least three works: the first a set of engravings etched
by Francisco Goya (1748–1828) from around 1810 to 1820 and published posthumously as Los
Desastres de la guerra in 1863; the second and third a set of miniature dioramas and a suite of
engravings produced by Dinos (b. 1962) and Jake (b. 1966) Chapman in the 1990s. All three works take
as their subject the horrors of war: Goya's is based on his first-hand experience of the sufferings of the
Spanish people during the Napoleonic occupation and its immediate aftermath; the Chapmans', which, in
the first instance, take the form of a three-dimensional copy of Goya's sequence, is born out of a desire
'to virally infect or be contagious to' the artist's 'association with humanism'.1 The latter Disasters are
attempts, in other words, to reanimate the founding trauma of Goya's work, to reveal the indivisible
remainder, the abject object, that art criticism, wedded as it is to the ideology of humanism, seeks to
repress.
Eschewing 'man' for matter, imminence for transcendence, the monstrous for the sublime, Dinos and
Jake Chapman, like many of their generation, regard Goya as a strong precursor of 'new neurotic
realism', a radical nihilist for whom the affirmation of man remains, at best, a symptom of civilized
fallibility, at worst a manifestation of mass, psychotic breakdown. What the Chapmans 'affirm' therefore,
with their 'infection' of Goya, is the failure point of civilized, democratic society, the indigestible or non-
dialectical core which humanism strives to put to work. To revivify the disturbance of this indigestible
core, which is the abject by any other name, one must reposition Goya's images outside the humanist
framework; we must, in effect, repeat Los Desastres de la guerra in another form so as to reactivate
their critical difference. The form, in other words, becomes critical, lending ironic counterpoise to
existential angst; displacing the fecundity of etching, lavis and drypoint, in the case of the sculptures,
with the hyper-reality of fibreglass, resin and paint; intensifying the violence of Goya's vision, in the
case of the later engravings, through a perverse overdetermination of Los Desastres' primary medium.
Buoyed along by their schooling in post-Nietzschean critical theory (Bataille not Breton, Deleuze not
Derrida), together with their instinctive appreciation of the shock tactics of abject art (from Piero
Manzoni to Mike Kelley) and the faux naturalism of mannequin art (from Hans Bellmer to Charles Ray),
the Chapmans recreated Los Desastres'with the intention of detracting from the expressionist qualities
of a Goya drawing and trying to find the most neurotic medium possible, which we perceived as models.
It gave us a sense of omnipotence to chop these toys up.'2 To 'detract' from the darkened knowledge of
1810 requires some nerve. To admit an investment in a medium that is neurotic, with all the
connotations of flight and fancy that this entails, could be judged flip but in a way that conveys, however
perversely, a seriousness of intent.
But, first, why humanism? What lies behind the Chapmans' ire is a rich tradition of art-historical
commentary, dedicated to the re-visioning of Goya's horror from a rational or ethical perspective. In the
exhibition catalogue for the Hayward Gallery's touring exhibition of war-related works by Jacques Callot,
Goya and Otto Dix, Juliet Wilson-Bareau states that Los Desastres de la guerra provide insight into 'the
cruelty within all human nature, the desire for dignity and the betrayal of a people's sense of its own
humanity'.3 The work is properly described as humanist, therefore, to the precise extent that it compels
the viewer to take up a moral stance against war. But as anyone who has looked closely at Los
Desastres will attest, the unstinting portrayal of rape, genocide, torture and ritual mutilation, the abject
at its most insistent, is at odds with the transcendental aspirations of humanism. When Goya is located
in a continuum with Callot's Les misères et malheurs de la guerre (1633) and with Dix's Der Krieg
(1924), the effect is particularly acute: at what point does the representation of war find relief in a
certain kind of libidinal pleasure? Does the enjoyment of disaster qualify the raising of a moral
perspective? Thus Jake Chapman: 'to take a moral stance on violence you have to engage with it and
show it. We've used Goya's work in our own because it illustrates that paradox. Moral taboos are
normally demonstrated through utmost transgression.'4 If the taboo, in this case, is the injunction
against barbarism, then it is possible to see how Goya's engagement with the abject object, be this in
the shape of the maimed and dismembered body, or the eruption of excremental matter, should arouse
critical suspicions.5 A culture may sustain Los Desastres, in the sense in which a body sustains a
wound, but wounds may become malignant, beyond the point of endurance. In the light of this reasoning,
Jake and Dinos Chapman are surely right to focus on the 'unconscious values' at the heart of Los
Desastres' critique of war.6
The problem, however, is that this notion is far from startling. It fails, moreover, to take into account the
possibility that humanism might already have anticipated the force of the non-dialectical remainder.
Once this possibility is grasped, the abject object may no longer be regarded as the negative other of
identity, but rather as its foundational trauma. Here, as elsewhere in this essay, I am guided by Slavoj
Žižek's neo-Hegelian revision of poststructuralist theory. Žižek's commentary on the 'night of the world'
passage from Hegel's 'Jenaer Realphilosophie' is especially relevant to this discussion:
The human being is this night, this empty nothing that contains everything in its simplicity – an unending
wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him – or which are not present. This
night, the interior of nature, that exists here – pure self – in phantasmagorical representations, is night
all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head – there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here
before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the
eye – into a night that becomes awful.7
As Žiz�ek continues, the 'unity the subject endeavours to impose' on this night 'is always erratic,
eccentric, unbalanced, "unsound", something that is externally and violently imposed on to the
multitude … every synthetic unity is based on an act of "repression", and therefore generates some
indivisible remainder.' At the risk of leaping too quickly to the analysis of Goya's night, it is worth noting
that his Desastres engravings portray a related concern with the '"unruliness" of the subject's abyssal
freedom which violently explodes reality into a dispersed floating of membra disjecta'.8 Goya depicts the
Romantic imagination at its most violent, disrupting passivity and continuity in the name of pure
invention. Whether the cause is enlightenment or autocracy, the outcome is the same: the creation of
hideously sensuous remainders. Yet, in another sense, the serial depiction of the wounded and
dismembered body does not so much exceed the civilizing agenda of humanism as provide confirmation
of its necessary involvement with that which cannot be redeemed or laid to rest. This brings Goya
closer, perhaps, to the Freud of Totem and Taboo than Jake and Dinos Chapman, with their 'basic
household knowledge of psychoanalysis', might allow.9
Leaving aside, for now, a detailed account of this aspect of the Disasters, there is something about the
Chapmans' refocillation of Goya that leaves me wondering whether it is as clear-sighted, as post-
modern, or for that matter post-Romantic, as the artists would like us to assume. To what extent, in
other words, do Los Desastres anticipate and address the 'unconscious values' that the Chapmans
supposedly 'tease out … within the work'?10 Could it be that, contrary to the prevailing view, Goya has
already brought to light the irrationality that is at the core of the humanist tradition? And beyond this,
might it be appropriate to suggest that Goya provides a properly ethical response to the elegant
sardonism of Jake and Dinos Chapman, one that might prompt contemporary audiences to reassess
their understanding of the relations between violence and representation?11
In response to these questions let us look more closely at Goya's recent critical reception. To anyone
familiar with the trajectory of theory over the past thirty years or so, the notion that the affective
charge of the Desastres is neutered by its association with humanism might seem quaint, to say the
least. Consider, as example, Gwyn Williams's Goya and the Impossible Revolution, published in 1976.12 In
this Marxist classic, the reader is guided through a series of fraught personal and historical oppositions,
with Williams emphasizing throughout the sense in which Goya's personal relation with his subject
matter is conditioned and informed by historical processes (the touchstone here is Marx's preface to his
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [1859]). Goya's social being is mapped out thus: with
social origins in the pueblo (Goya's father was a gilder) and intellectual stakes in the pro-French
ilustrados (during the occupation he swore allegiance to Joseph Bonaparte and received the Napoleonic
'Royal Order of Spain'), the artist was torn between competing impulses: on the one hand, an ideological
commitment to the principles of Gallic modernization, and thus to liberal ideas of 'normal change', and
on the other a deep-seated engagement with the atavistic, pre-political urgings of the Spanish
populace.
For Williams, the dialectical struggle in Goya's life and times is manifested, most vividly, in The Third of
May 1808 (Madrid: Prado). As an act of historical representation the painting documents the brutal
suppression of the Spanish pueblo who, on 2 May 1808, had risen up against the Imperial occupation in
defence of the Bourbon monarchy. The executions precipitated a mass revolt against the French, a
struggle that would turn into a lengthy 'war of independence', directed not only at the external threat of
imperialism but also at the internal forces of liberal constitutionalism, which were working insidiously to
drag Black Spain out of a pre-political feudal past and into a secular, democratic future. In this sense
the painting attests to the persistence of certain key elements of the pre-political: the traumas residing
at the core of liberal modernity. What is specifically traumatic about this conflict, however, is the way in
which it runs against the crude perception of war as a binary opposition between a pacific domestic
sphere and a belligerent foreign other. Since, in Spain, the antagonist is both within and without the
social fabric, a tension that becomes especially marked following the withdrawal of France in 1812, it
becomes almost impossible to sustain any kind of positive consistency; both sides, the forces of
reaction and the forces of reason, must confront the fact that the negative, disruptive power of the
other, which is menacing their identity, is simultaneously a positive condition of it. The Spanish war of
independence is thus best characterized as a struggle for (mis)recognition: a civic as well as a defensive
war in which both parties, the atavistic supporters of monarchy, Catholicism and feudalism on the one
hand and the liberal, bourgeois ilustrados on the other, battle for ontological consistency.
Evidence of the tension, as Williams notes, is detectable in a number of prints from Los Desastres de la
guerra. In Los Desastres 2 (plate 1.1), for instance, the artist's sympathies appear to be with the people;
the detailed rendering of the patriot's defiance in the face of anonymous cruelty arguably lends
credence to the idea of Goya as an instinctive supporter of the people. The effect is qualified, however,
by the ambiguity of the caption: Con razon ó sin ella (with or without reason, rightly or wrongly, for
something or for nothing). It is left for the viewer/reader to decide whether the positive terms of these
statements apply to the attackers or the defenders. In either case, the ideological opposition of
beleaguered patriotism and ruthless imperialism is undermined by the tension between image and text.
1.1 Francisco Goya, Los Desastres de la guerra, 1810–1820, plate 2: Con razon ó sin ella (With
reason, or without). Etching, lavis, drypoint, burin and burnisher, 15×20.9 cm. Copyright © British
Museum Department of Prints and Drawings.
As the sequence progresses, category distinctions become increasingly strained. Thus, as the neo-
Freudian critic Ronald Paulson observes, enmity becomes 'anonymous and undifferentiated', with 'no
distinction between French and Spanish, men or women' or, one might add, between the heroic
defenders of the fatherland and the barbaric supporters of the old regime.13 What emerges, towards the
end of the sequence, in the visual blurring of pueblo, priests and kings, is again reiterated in the ironic
verbal 'play' of the captions. In Los Desastres 16 (plate 1.2), for instance, the text runs 'They help
themselves', although, as Williams notes, the Spanish is ambiguous, Se aprovechan could mean 'they're
of use to each other', 'they equip themselves', or even 'they're learning'.14
1.2 Francisco Goya, Los Desastres de la guerra, 1810–1820, plate 16: Se aprovechan (They
help themselves). Etching, burnished lavis, drypoint and burin, 16×23.7 cm. Copyright © British Museum
Department of Prints and Drawings.
To this list one might also add the connotations of good eating, a level of sense that chimes well with
Paulson's emphasis on the oral and anal eroticism in Goya's prints. The idea that Spain consumes its
dead, putting the corpse to good use as sustenance in its bid to re-establish itself, is suggested here
together with the mordant sense in which the transition from infant incapacity to 'the assumption of the
armour of an alienating identity' entails the repression, and hence the inevitable return, of the
fragmented body.15 Although not mentioned by Paulson, Lacan's theorizing in his paper on the 'Mirror
Stage' is explicit on this point. For Lacan, the earliest, most primitive experience of the body is one of
dispersal. The 'cut-up body', or corps morcelé, is thus prior to the alienating assumption of synthetic
unity and coherence. Whilst the assumption of wholeness may be a necessary precondition of entry into
the symbolic order, remnants of this fragmented body return in the form of imagos'constituted for the
instincts themselves':
Among these imagos are some that represent the elective vectors of aggressive intentions, which they
provide with an efficacy that might be called magical. These are the images of castration, mutilation,
dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body, in short, the imagos that
I have grouped together under the apparently structural term of imagos of the fragmented body.16
To strip the enemy of its psychic 'armour' is to engage the ego in the fundamental process of 'death-
work', a mode of repetition 'in which the unified self continuously sees itself undone – castrated,
mutilated, perforated, made partial'. Once again, the compulsion to mutilate the body of the other is
given symbolic coherence via the master trope of abjection; incorporation and projection, ingestion and
excretion are the means by which the threatened totality endeavours to gain control over 'the
fundamental process of unbinding'.17
In Los Desastres the waste of war thus returns as disgorged matter (Los Desastres 16 [plate 1.3]),
undifferentiated body parts (Los Desastres 10, 18 [plate 1.4] 21, 22, 23, 24, 30) and, crucially, the
excremental (Los Desastres 28, 68). The obsession with incorporation and projection thus locates the
sequence in the realm of the imaginary, the zone in which the infans gains its first experience of
mastery and which precipitates the illusory image of totality. That the sequence continually returns to
this primal scene suggests once again the extent to which narrative progression is stalled by the
compulsion to repeat. As Lennard Davis suggests, such a compulsion may well have, as its root cause, a
fascination with the erotics of dismemberment; in this reading, incorporation and projection become the
means by which castration and its symbolic recuperation alternate in accordance with the pleasure
principle. Goya's interest in the opening up of the body, in the disruption of the skin as a metaphor for
unity, wholeness and completion, is particularly apposite in this respect. In those plates in which the
body is stripped of its covering, the eye/I is invited to partake in a dialectic of attraction and repulsion,
seeing in those unheimlich depths an imago of its own fundamental incompletion. If the civilized ego is
born out of the repression of this body, then war may be regarded as an attempt to project the fear of
unbinding onto the body of the enemy.
1.3 Francisco Goya, Los Desastres de la guerra, 1810–1820, plate 12: Para eso habeis nacido?
(Is this what you were born for?). Etching, drypoint, burin and burnisher, 15.9×23 cm. Copyright ©
British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings.
1.4 Francisco Goya, Los Desastres de la guerra, 1810–1820, plate 18: Enterrar y callar (Bury
them, without a word). Etching, burnished lavis, drypoint, burin and burnisher, 16.3×23.7 cm. Copyright
© British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings.
At the same time as such projections introduce an element of the erotic into displays of aggressivity,
the suggestions of castration, which occur throughout the sequence, together with gestures towards
anality (Los Desastres 3), female abjection (Los Desastres 30 [plate 1.5]) and the return to corporeal
indifference (Los Desastres 27), prompt a more general meditation on Goya's fascination with negation.
Whilst negativity is undoubtedly a key facet of the visual impact of Los Desastres, its effect is
redoubled by the semiotic disturbance of the commentaries. Plate 69 (plate 1.6) depicts a corpse
surrounded by the skeletons of beasts and men scrawling a simple, pithy message: 'Nothing. That's what
it says.' When, in 1863, Los Desastres de la guerra was first published by the Royal Academy of Fine
Arts in Madrid, the editors, disturbed by the implications of Goya's atheistic commentary, altered the
caption to 'Time will tell.' For Williams, as for Paulson, the message is bleak but not incompatible with a
form of negative humanism, one that looks the negative in the face and endeavours transcendence. Like
the good men of the Royal Academy, in other words, the men of Marx and Freud maintain faith in social
progress, in a vision of humanity which takes into account its investment in waste and ruin.
1.5 Francisco Goya, Los Desastres de la guerra, 1810–1820, plate 30: Estragos de la guerra
(Ravages of War). Etching, drypoint, burin and burnisher, 14.1×17 cm. Copyright © British Museum
Department of Prints and Drawings.
1.6 Francisco Goya, Los Desastres de la guerra, 1810–1820, plate 69: Nada. Ello dirá (Nothing.
Time will tell). Etching, burnished aquatint, lavis and drypoint, 15.5×20.1 cm. Copyright © British
In the wake of the Lacanian critique of the negative, however, we might well wish to query this
approach. If 'it' says 'nada', as Goya's commentary helpfully explains, then it seems reasonable to
assume that plate 69 marks the point at which symbolization fails. In this sense, nothing comes of
nothing; like the distended skull in Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors, the corpse's message defies
dialectical recuperation. At the end of the sequence, there is no more play, no semiosis in excess of
visual sense. Instead Goya leaves his viewers with a glimpse of that which, to adapt a further Lacanian
formulation, 'sticks in the throat' of identification, an untenable subject position made all the more
impossible by the failure of the commentary to wrest the negative from the grip of extinction. Seeing
oneself from the point of view of this 'it', which in itself is nothing, entails succumbing to 'that other
point where the subject sees himself caused as a lack by [objet] a, and where [objet] a fills the gap
constituted by the inaugural division of the subject'.18 In figuring objet a as nothing, no longer even the
negated 'thing' of abjection, Goya presents the viewer with a fitting image of the lure on which
symbolization depends; the idea that the subject is sustained by its relation with an other which fills in
the gap of that 'impossible' object, the 'Real', around which identification clusters and towards which it
is fatally attracted.19
To explain this idea more clearly it is worth spending some time thinking about the significance of plate
39 (plate 1.7), perhaps the most shocking of all Goya's Desastres. The plate is entitled Grande hazaña!
Con muertos!, which translates as 'What a feat! With dead men!', or 'Great deeds against the dead', and
it is conventional to take this statement as an unproblematic expression of bleak irony, directed against
the forces of barbarism. What is shown here is abjection at its most unsettling: the dismembered body
as the formlessness to which society returns when the lawless brutality of the Real is allowed to
overflow into reality. But this description doesn't exactly capture the transgressive effect of Goya's
image, for there is something wilfully excessive, even contrived, about Goya's composition, which
qualifies the integrity of its moral stance. With sacrificial, ritualistic over- tones, the image depicts three
castratos draped from a tree, three figures echoing the crucifixion, their absurdly suggestive poses at
odds with the solemnity of death. The notion is underscored when we meditate on the ironic contrast
between the leaf-laden tree, symbolic of the cyclical economy of nature, and the unregenerate mortality
draped and skewered on its branches. The tableau convulses the taboo that offers the loathsome
corpse as a counterbalance to sacrifice; instead of differentiating the abject and the sacred, Goya
succeeds in a kind of violent yoking, suffusing the abject with sacrificial meaning whilst subjecting the
sacred to sadomasochistic defilement.
1.7 Francisco Goya, Los Desastres de la guerra, 1810–1820, plate 39: Grande hazaña! Con
muertos! (Great deeds against the dead). Etching, lavis and drypoint, 15.6×20.8 cm. Copyright © British
If sexuality is founded in contradiction, in the division and divisiveness of meaning, then Goya's image is
disturbingly erotic. And certainly this is the aspect of Goya's particular disturbance that attracts the
gaze of Dinos and Jake Chapman. In view of the anguish that accompanies the erotic in Goya's vision,
however, it is a salutary experience to turn to the suave neutrality of the Chapman brothers – for there
is perhaps no better way to describe their work. But I want to suggest that something of the Real is
evoked here as well, though it may not be where we expect to find it. But to start at the beginning: like
many people, I first saw Dinos and Jake Chapman's recreation of Grande hazaña! Con muertos!, re-titled
in English as Great Deeds Against the Dead 2 (plate 1.8) at the well-publicized Sensation exhibition in
the autumn of 1997. The piece had been displayed before: at Victoria Miro in 1993; at Andrea Rosen,
New York, in 1994; and then again at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1996.20 With
Sensation, however, the Chapman brothers, along with fellow 'Young British Artists' Damien Hirst, Sarah
Lucas, Tracey Emin, Gavin Turk, Mark Wallinger and Marc Quinn, brought their concern with abjection to
a mass audience. Death was suddenly de rigueur, as was the 'pop' fascination with immanence, surfaces
and the repetition of outmoded forms – from the sub-Duchampian readymades of Emin and Hirst to the
belated hyper-realism of Wallinger (after Stubbs), Turk (after Warhol) and the Chapmans (after Goya).
1.8 Dinos and Jake Chapman, Great Deeds Against the Dead 2, 1994, Mixed media with plinth,
277×244×152 cm. Copyright © Jay Jopling/White Cube Gallery, London.
But talk of reanimation, as if the expressionist qualities of Goya's vision could be brought back to life,
does not exactly capture the intention and effect of the Chapmans' work. Announcing that they 'were
interested in making a dead sculpture. Dead in content and dead – or inert – in materiality',21 the artists
set out, with self-conscious verve, to create a non-dialectical, non-utilitarian and ultimately post-
humanist object. The effect of this transformation is certainly arresting. Where Goya suffuses his image
with violent juxtapositions, jolting the viewer back and forth between competing attitudes and
experiences, here there is no emotive contrast, no chiaroscuro from which to derive significant affect.
Stripped of darkness, drained of life (witness the absence of any foliage on the supporting tree), the life-
size fibreglass sculpture, unlike the plate, is perversely two-dimensional; its deadness is total. The
Chapmans' figures are standardized, they could be storeroom dummies, or surgical models – in either
case the effect is brutally estranging. Where Goya challenges the viewer to probe into a wound that is
dark, unfathomable and thus paradoxically imbued with obscene vitality (see, for example, the dark stain
that takes the place of the face of the central figure), the effect of the Chapmans' plasticized wounds is
to nullify the gaze. In this latter vision everything is open to the gaze, yet curiously the object fails to
generate sustained attention. If, as Lacan claims, 'The objet a in the field of the visible is the gaze', then
the status of the gaze as symbolic of the central lack of desire has been transformed into something
altogether more deadening: not the gaze as objet a, but rather as the emptiness, the void or gap that
objet a stands in for.22 In short, what we see when we gaze at Great Deeds Against the Dead 2 is the
Lacanian Real.
The artists have spoken of their desire to produce an object with 'zero cultural value', 'to produce
aesthetic inertia'.23 Unlike many of their peers in the world of abject art (for example, Mike Kelley,
Andres Serrano, John Miller), they are savvy enough to realize that abjection is precisely what feeds the
contemporary art market, converting the excremental into so many affirmations of the sanctity of art.
Where death is marked in the Chapmans' work, it does not serve the interests of the sacred. The banal
texture of Great Deeds suggests instead a kind of neutrality, or suspension of desire, perhaps even a
convulsion, 'one that reduces the moral certitude of Goya's critique to a position of hysterical,
uncontrollable laughter'.
This last statement comes from Douglas Fogle, an art critic with a keen interest in concepts of
transgression. It's worth reading on:
Neither the intentionality of conscious meaning (the stock in trade of conceptualism) nor the moral
vicissitudes of humanism hold sway here as Goya's litany of aesthetic outrage is misdirected by the
Chapmans into a spectacle of failed artistic transference which de-magnetizes the moral compass,
leaving the viewer in an ambivalent position oscillating between the binary poles of abject disgust and
perverse delectation.
Specifically, Fogle argues that 'in ritually sacrificing Goya', the artists have
performed a kind of scatological clearing … which allows them to exorcise the venerable sanctity of the
Romantic theology of the artist, replacing it with a notion of the sacred more aligned with its
scatological origins, thereby freeing them to make work which … might 'shake' [the oedipal corpus of
liberal humanism] to its foundations.24
The artists themselves are somewhat more circumspect than Fogle. In presenting themselves as 'always
already … functions of discourse', as the 'servile' labourers of a failed 'cultural climax', the notion of
libidinal transgression remains, at best, a fantasy. The assertion of 'a scatological aesthetic for the tired
of seeing' remains subservient to the culture industry on which it feeds, as does their faith in the old,
Dadaist notion of art as 'an attack on conscious meaning'.25 What Fogle misses, therefore, in his
approach to the Chapmans' work, is the emphasis placed by the artists themselves on the limitations of
libidinal transgression; an aesthetic that aims 'to occupy a de-territorial space' is just as likely to
succumb to the logic of cultural sublimation as it is to exceed it.26 For all its laconic perversity, the
work of the Chapmans is 'buttered on both sides', its 'deconstructive imperative' serviced and
constrained 'according to the rules of an industrial dispute'. In light of this Saatchian pact, could it be
that Dinos and Jake Chapman are more serious, that is, more Hegelian, than their supporters would
wish?
This notion becomes clearer when we consider two related pieces of work, both dating from the early
1990s. In 1996, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the brothers exhibited Great Deeds alongside
eighty-three smaller-scale replicas (Great Deeds Against the Dead 1), and a group of finely crafted
dioramas, each depicting in miniature a plate from Los Desastres (Disasters of War, 1993, plate 1.9).
Like the models on display in the later Apocalypse exhibition at the Royal Academy, there is something
about the Chapmans' work in miniature that runs against the facile shock value of their larger work.
Fashioned in what Jake Chapman calls 'the most neurotic medium possible',27 these small-scale
Disasters were a concerted attempt to stage a flight from reality, or rather to attach the self to 'a
different piece of reality', in this case the serial reproduction of mutilated toy figurines, 'from the one
against which it has to defend itself'.28 Since, as Lacan points out, neurosis is essentially a defence
against the reappearance of the non-symbolized in the Real,29 could those models turn out, after all, to
be a 'reaction formation' to an underlying trauma? And, were this to be the case, might one conclude
that the retreat from Romantic expressionism and the embrace of 'hysterical laughter' is less
transgressive and more defensive than the artists might allow?
1.9 Dinos and Jake Chapman, Disasters of War, 1993. Mixed media, 130×200 cm. Copyright ©
Tate Gallery, London.
But what exactly are the Chapmans afraid of? I'd like to propose that what is Real or traumatic in the
Chapmans' sculptures is not the encounter with the fragmented body. For, unlike Goya, when the abject
is displayed in their work, the effect is camp, dull, even boring. Here one could easily invoke Baudrillard's
distinction between the discourses of poetry and psychoanalysis as a means of justifying the coolness
of the work of the Chapman brothers. In Baudrillard's thesis, where 'the psychoanalytic signifier remains
a surface indexed on the turbulent reality of the unconscious', the poetic, by contrast,
diffracts and radiates in the anagrammatic process; it no longer falls under the blows of the law that
erects it, nor under the blows of the repressed which binds it, it no longer has anything to designate it,
not even the ambivalence of the repressed signified. It is nothing more than the dissemination and
absolution of value, experienced, however, without the shadow of anxiety, in total enjoyment.30
The repetition of Goya, that is, drives Los Desastres to the point where there is no longer a 'dream
thought' or libido to testify to the productive economy of the unconscious. In accordance with
Baudrillard's thesis, meaning in the Chapmans' work is no longer tied to a signified. And the effect of all
this, as the artists insist, is fundamentally comic.31 For Baudrillard, invoking Freud's gloss on Kant,
('[The comic is] a tense expectation that suddenly vanished, [transformed] into nothing'). In other words:
where there used to be something, now there is nothing– not even the unconscious. Where there used
to be some kind of finality (albeit unconscious), or even a value (albeit repressed), now there is nothing.
Enjoyment is the haemorrhage of value, the disintegration of the code … In the comic, the moral
imperative … is lifted.32
The comic, however, does not account fully for the actual effect of the Disasters, for there is, it seems
to me, an elegiac, even Romantic, aspect in the Chapmans' work that runs against the slick excesses of
the simulacra. That this revision of the Chapmans' schema should entail a further reversal of
Baudrillard's comic exchange should come as no surprise. For as much as the mutilated figurines in
these works speak of the banality of castration and the impossibility of profundity, so too do they testify
to a form of lyric longing: for the obscene enjoyment that is the product of radical transgression, there
being no other form of enjoyment in the absence of the law. Rather interestingly, therefore, it is this
marking of the banality of horror, in the absence of the moral law, that causes the viewer to reassess
trauma, not as some burgeoning, insistent event, as a violent memory say, which continues to impinge
on normal life, but instead, in the later Lacanian sense of the 'missed encounter'.33 Such work is pitiful
precisely because it forces the viewer to measure the distance, quite literally so when overlooking the
miniatures, between trauma and recovery, the abject event and its postmodern dematerialization. In
measuring this distance, the viewer is introduced, inevitably, to the bar of repression, and thus to the
resurrection of value.
The reproduction of catastrophe, contrary to the official tenets of postmodernism, thus creates its own
form of disjunction. Like Jeff Wall's Dead Troops Talk (1992, plate 1.10), a massive Cibachrome
transparency depicting the harrowing aftermath of a conflict in Afghanistan, the work of the Chapmans
is a calculated affront against the very idea that viewers can imagine what war is really like.34 When we
gaze at Great Deeds are we not made aware of the extent to which technology sanitizes images of the
utmost suffering, to the point where we long, perversely no doubt, for contact with the fecund,
palpitating body of Los Desastres? It is worth thinking that the Chapmans produced these works against
a background (the artistic reference is appropriate here) of international conflict. Like Goya, they are
self-proclaimed war artists, but the war, as well as the means of its reproduction, has changed. To the
Western observer, what distinguishes the military interventions in Iraq, the Balkans and Afghanistan from
the wars of the past is precisely the lack of direct encounter. Unlike previous campaigns, where armies
clashed in face-to-face combat, the violence of modern conflict is projected outwards to such an
extent, aided by the development of 'smart' weapons and 'stealth' technology, that the belligerent
subject is unable to recognize itself in relation to the desire of the antagonistic other.35 By a strange
irony, the notion of the Real as a violent or catastrophic event, figured in images of extreme suffering,
becomes the fantasy that protects this subject from the knowledge of its 'dehumanization'.36
1.10 Jeff Wall, Dead Troops Talk, (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol near Moqor,
Afghanistan, winter 1986), 1992. Cibachrome transparency in lightbox, 229×417 cm. Copyright © Jeff
Wall, image courtesy of the artist.
The force of this statement is worth dwelling on. Where Baudrillard triumphs in the end of the
unconscious and the liberation of enjoyment, Žiz�ek registers a humanist concern with the death of
tragedy. If, in recent conflicts, the deployment of 'smart' and 'stealth' technology represents in some
way the dominance of the symbolic order over the imaginary chaos of war, then one can see how
nostalgia for the fragmented body takes shape as postmodern fantasy. As Lacan noted in the 1950s,
'the coming into operation of the symbolic function … ends up abolishing the action of the individual so
completely that by the same token it eliminates his tragic relation with the world.'37
The waning of that tragic relation is, it seems to me, manifestly represented in the work of Jake and
Dinos Chapman. Look again at the wounds on display in Great Deeds Against the Dead 2 (plate 1.8).
Despite the Chapmans' insistence that 'the segmented mannequin … incite[s] a fear of castration',38
the scene of castration is not the traumatic element in this sculpture. What is missing here is the
provider of symbolic authority, otherwise known as 'the Name-of-the-Father, the prohibitory
"castrating" agency that enables the subject's entry into the symbolic order, and thus into the domain
of desire'.39 Unlike Goya's horrifying vision of the commingling of violence and desire, and here it is
worth noting that dismemberment is the subject of at least two images from the same cluster (Los
Desastres 33 and 37 [plates 1.11 and 1.12]), the Chapmans' sculpture is disconcertingly bland, dead to
any kind of prohibitory demand. In connection with this effect, mention should be made here of an
installation entitled Little Death Machine (Castrated), 1993, recently on display at Tate Modern.
Formerly entitled Little Death Machine, the work, which comprises two cast sculptures of the brain, one
of which is bashed by a hammer while a prosthetic phallus ejects synthetic semen onto the other, was
decommissioned by the Tate when the conservators found traces of botulism in the milk bottles used to
contain the 'semen', making it a danger to the gallery-going public. The Chapmans state that 'When our
sculptures work they achieve the position of reducing the viewer to a state of absolute moral panic …
they're completely troublesome objects.' Yet, as Jennifer Ramkalawon notes, the work is not so much
'castrated' as impotent; the 'viewer/voyeur feels cheated of the experience and is left dissatisfied, like
an unfulfilled partner.'40
1.11 Francisco Goya, Los Desastres de la guerra, 1810–1820, plate 33: Qué hai que hacer
mas? (What more can be done?). Etching, lavis, burin and burnisher, 15.7×20.7 cm. Copyright © British
1.12 Francisco Goya, Los Desastres de la guerra, 1810–1820, plate 37: Esto es peor (This is
still worse). Etching, lavis and drypoint, 15.7×20.8 cm. Copyright © British Museum Department of
Prints and Drawings.
[Normal View]
Ramkalawon's observation may be extended to Great Deeds Against the Dead 2. Is this sculpture not,
despite its horrifying features, an indication of the futility of postmodern abjection? Well, no doubt. But it
is worth adding, again with a glance towards the unexpected seriousness of Jake and Dinos Chapman,
that the expression of futility might not be without purpose. In gazing at these objects, what the viewer
longs for is precisely the reactivation of desire: for the signifying bar, for the repressed, for the
traumatic Real that is the origin and tendency of all jouissance. What one longs for, in short, is the
return of Goya. The trauma that Dinos and Jake Chapman assume is veiled by the redemptive ideologies
of humanism emerges, then, as that Thing (das Ding), the fundamental emptiness that comes into being
with an object's loss. In Lacan's revision of Freud, das Ding is not a thing in the physical sense but
rather the emptiness fashioned from the loss of the object. Nothing in itself, the Thing must necessarily
be represented by something else.41 Pathos in the art of the Chapmans is thus brought about through
the endeavour to represent Goya's loss. It seems that the attempt to 'bypass disembodies notions of
aesthetic enjoyment'; to expose 'the psychoanalytic text's fixated attempts' to curtail pleasure is
doomed from the start.42
In 1998 the publisher Edward Booth-Clibborn invited Jake and Dinos Chapman to produce a portfolio of
prints. The resulting Disasters of War (1999) mark a return, as Ramkalawon notes, to the artists' ongoing
dialogue with art history, and place renewed emphasis on the role of drawing in their work. As
Ramkalawon goes on to explain, Booth-Clibborn arranged for the artists to work with the printers Simon
Marsh and Peter Kosowicz at Hope Sufferance Press in South London. Using a variety of techniques,
including drypoint, aquatint and soft- and hard-ground etching, the Chapmans worked quickly to
produce eighty-three prints, the entire process taking no longer than thirty days. The prints come in
four editions: black ink on a white background in an edition of fifteen, plus three artists' proof sets; ten
sets printed in white ink on black chine collé; three sets juxtaposing pictures from a child's colouring
book with the original prints; and two hand-coloured sets. The artists signed all the plates.
These new Disasters take Goya's sequence as departure point, rather than copy text, transforming the
original with apocalyptic imagery drawn from the Holocaust, contemporary world conflicts, and the
realms of pornography, Surrealism and science fiction. The impulse to mutate rather than repeat is
evident too in the drawing style, which veers precariously from the edgy intensity of Antonin Artaud to
the comic grotesquery of Dix, and then again from the wandering line of Andre Masson to the
biomorphic strangeness of Alfred Wols (plates 1.13 and 1.14). The overall effect is child-like, naïve and
at times deliberately amateurish, with little or no sense of governing intention.
1.13 Dinos and Jake Chapman, Disasters of War, 1999. Etching and aquatint, 12.3×14.8 cm.
Copyright © British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings.
1.14 Dinos and Jake Chapman, Disasters of War, 1999. Etching and aquatint, 13.3×19.2 cm.
A commitment to the contingent is echoed in the conditions of production. Instead of transcribing the
images from preparatory drawings, the artists drew directly onto the plates: 'They were supplied with 83
plates (one per image) and would request which technique they wanted or thought suitable.'43 The
prints, then, were no longer the work of a single individual but rather of a collective. The frenzied pace
of production, together with the collaborative approach, had the interesting effect of enabling the artists
to 'expel', as Jake Chapman explains, 'all of the anxieties that a single person has in the production of
their own work'. In the absence of any clearly discernible bar to contain the 'pleasure of … the process',
the prints would seem then to meet the requirements of a pure scatological aesthetic. With the
repressive ego 'initiated into a process', the work is free to make spectacular play of the constraints
normally associated with the excitement and maintenance of 'a certain kind of libidinal pleasure'.44
In this manner, as Jake Chapman goes on to claim, the prints 'intensify' Goya's own tendency constantly
to exceed 'the limits of prohibition'. And for the artist, the devil, as always, is in the detail:
We started to notice certain solarized areas in [Goya's] images which were often the points of extreme
violence, (for example) an area of castration becomes heavily drawn. So the process of drawing
becomes a form of intensification of certain areas.45
In a redrafting of plate 36, Not(in This Case) Either (plate 1.15) the smiling French soldier is replaced by
a crudely executed Siamese twin (plate 1.16). Where in Goya's version mirth is prompted by satisfaction
at having violated a taboo, the expressions in the Chapmans' print are essentially without shame. The
latter image is disconcerting precisely because it fails to include any reference to the censoring
mechanisms that distinguish the perverted pleasures of adulthood from the pre-oedipal satisfactions of
infancy. Freed from the consciousness of sin, the double-headed figure is free, too, of the commitment
to individuation. Its being, like its pleasures, proliferates without reserve. In the absence of any signifying
cut, the burden falls on the viewer to re-establish the divisions between laughter and profundity,
insanity and identity, which the print effectively suspends.
1.15 Francisco Goya, Los Desastres de la guerra, 1810–1820, plate 36, Not (in This Case)
Either. Etching, burnished aquatint, drypoint, burin and burnisher, 15.6×20.5 cm. Copyright © British
1.16 Dinos and Jake Chapman, Disasters of War, 1999. Etching and aquatint, 13×19.3 cm.
When the artists return to Grande hazana! Con muertos! (plate 1.17), the emphasis is once again on the
attempt to 'bypass disembodied notions of aesthetic enjoyment'.46 The effect of the scrawled swastika
is unsettling enough, conjuring as it does an association between the atrocities of the French invasion of
Spain and the Nazi holocaust, and there is something here, too, of the interest in détournement
characteristic of Situationism and the late 1970s British punk movement, but what is perhaps more
disturbing is the way in which the image – a meticulous reversal of the original Disaster– resembles a
printing block, a device for producing an unlimited series of Great Deeds. As such, the image might be
said to invite the viewer to recall the relations between pleasure and production, which condition the
work as a whole.
1.17 Dinos and Jake Chapman, Disasters of War, 1999. Etching and aquatint. 14.4×19.4 cm.
But to what extent do these images assist in the desire to move beyond an amoral fascination with
suffering? The British Museum holds both the Disasters of War, 1999, and Los Desastres de la guerra,
1863. When the works are compared, the thought occurs that the consciousness of the relations
between pleasure, pain and prohibition is no less marked in the Chapmans than it is in Goya. In so far as
the Disasters encourage viewers to take a close look at the dependence of ethics on what Bataille calls
'the (regulated) transgression of taboos', it is tempting to conclude that the Chapmans' 'viral infection' is
indeed a serious attempt to expose the structural perversities of liberal humanism.47 Where the
Chapmans might be said to fail, however, is in their reluctance to progress beyond this exposure. Faced
with such unrelenting nihilism, the viewer must work hard to re-establish the grounds for an ethical
critique of the representation of war. Thus where an artist such as Jeff Wall (plate 1.10) invites viewers
to regard themselves not merely as passive consumers of horror, but as potential agents of change, the
Chapmans seem content merely to wallow in tragic futility. When Great Deeds Against the Dead 2 and
The Disasters of War are viewed alongside Dead Troops Talk it is hard to see how the Chapmans' post-
oedipal fantasies, their embrace of the simulacrum and their contempt for the human can take us any
further in dealing with the brute realities of war. Humanism, as Wall acknowledges, may well be traversed
by the desire for 'shock and awe', but it is also capable of providing thoughtful and intelligent
commentary on its internal contradictions. In times like these, the ability of art to condemn the
fascination with abjection must surely be sustained.
While remaining suspicious of humanism, the Chapmans' latest intervention in Goya's sequence comes
close to fulfilling this role. In 2001 the artists purchased an historically significant edition of Los
Desastres de la guerra. Issued in 1937 as a protest against Fascist outrages in the Spanish civil war, the
edition includes a frontispiece showing a photograph of bomb damage to the Goya Foundation. As such
the work offers confirmation of the force of art, its ability to resist and triumph over the ravages of war.
What the Chapmans have done to this edition appears at first to be a violent affront to this force. Re-
titled Insult to Injury, the prints have been 'rectified', to use the artists' description, by the addition of
ghoulish clown and puppy heads, drawn on every 'visible victim' in all eighty plates (plate 1.18). The
complete set of engravings was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, in an exhibition entitled
The Rape of Creativity (12 April–8 June 2003).48
1.18 Dinos and Jake Chapman, Disasters of War, 1999, Insult to Injury. Etching, burnished
acquatint, lavis, drypoint and other media, 15.5×20.1 cm. Copyright © Jay Jopling/White Cube Gallery,
London.
Jake Chapman describes his own and Dinos's intention in producing the work:
[Goya]'s the artist who represents that kind of expressionistic struggle of the Enlightenment with the
ancién regime, so it's kind of nice to kick its underbelly. Because he has a predilection for violence
under the aegis of a moral framework. There's so much pleasure in his work. To produce the law, one
has to transgress it. Not to be too glib in the current conditions, but there's something quite interesting
in the fact that the war of the Peninsula saw Napoleonic forces bringing rationality and enlightenment to
a region that was presumed Catholic and marked by superstition and irrationality. And here's Goya,
who's very cut free from the Church, who embodies this autonomous enlightened being, embodied as a
gelatinous dead mass without redemption – then you hear George Bush and Tony Blair talking about
democracy as though it has some kind of natural harmony with nature, as though it's not an ideology.49
The parallels drawn between the 'enlightened' annexation of Spain and the recent 'humanitarian'
interventions in Iraq are nicely highlighted in this account. But it is the work itself that provides perhaps
the most compelling testimony to the artists' intent. As Jonathan Jones notes, 'the clown heads and
puppy faces are astonishingly horrible. They are given life, personality, by some very acute drawing, and
so it's not a collision but a collaboration, an assimilation, as they really do seem to belong in the
pictures.' In this defamiliarized version of Los Desastres, the Chapman brothers' obsession with the
amoral and unredeemable taps directly into an aspect of Goya that humanist readings tend to neglect.
As Jones suggests, by adding Insult to Injury, Jake and Dinos Chapman respond to 'the most primitive
and archaic and Catholic pessimism of [Goya's] art – the sense not just of irrationality but something
more tangible and diabolic'. These rectified images are thus not so much a violation of the sanctity of
art – for in a very real sense, there are no properly 'original' sets of Los Desastres–'as an extension of
Goya's despair'. The Chapmans themselves claim that they prefer to be denounced as 'banal anti-
humanists than praised piously as humanists', yet there is something in these latest Disasters which
verges on the profound.50 By a strange reversal, in an age where Anglo-American troops hold fire on
enemy forces sheltering in holy sites, whilst routinely subjecting city-dwelling civilians to missile attack,
an act of desecration becomes a way of telling the truth. This is to go beyond the mere revelation of
internal contradictions; it is to despair at the very idea of human progress. In this sense, the Chapmans
are perhaps closer to Goya than most critics would allow.
Footnotes
1 Jake Chapman, 'Jake Chapman on Goya: Drawings from his Private Albums', Hot Tickets, no. 41, 23
February–1 March 2001, p. 41.
2 Martin Maloney, 'The Chapman Bros.: when will I be famous', Flash Art, no. 189, 1996, p. 64.
3 Juliet Wilson-Bareau, 'Goya: The Disasters of War', Disasters of War: Callot, Goya, Dix, London: South
Bank Centre Publications, 1998, p. 37.
4 Chapman, 'Jake Chapman on Goya', p. 41.
5 See Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez, New York,
1982. Abjection, pace Freud, is presented here as a dual process of projection and incorporation – an
expulsion of that which threatens the integrity of the self, and an introjection of a taboo object or
impulse into the self so as to defend against it. The abject stands therefore as the perverse material
core of synthetic identification.
6 Elsewhere, in conversation with Jennifer Ramkalawon, Jake Chapman states that what fascinates the
artists is 'the extent to which the practical application of making a work of art to enforce a certain
prohibitive, repressive or ethical point i.e. that murder and death is bad necessarily descends into the
most excessive forms of demonstration, most excessive forms of spectacle and relieves itself of a
certain kind of libidinal pleasure and libidinal economy in order to actually communicate some form of
disgust'. See Jennifer Ramkalawon, 'Jake and Dinos Chapman's Disasters of War', Print Quarterly, vol.
18, no. 1, 2001, pp. 64–77, 69.
7 G.W.F. Hegel, 'Jenaer Realphilosophie', in Frühe politische Systeme, Frankfurt, 1974, p. 204; trans.
quoted, from Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel's Recollections, Albany, NY, 1985, pp. 7–8. See Slavoj Žiz�ek,
The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London and New York, 1999, pp. 29–30.
8 Žiz�ek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 33.
9 Klaus Biesenbach and Emma Dexter, 'Foreword', Chapmanworld, London: ICA Publications, 1996, n.p.
11 Mention should be made here of the critical reception of the Chapman brothers' work. The artists'
contributions to the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy (18 September–28 December 1997)
provoked an ongoing debate on the worthlessness of contemporary British art, ranging in tone from the
anarcho-Christian moralizing of Paul Virilio's The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner, London and
New York, 2000 to the neo-Leavisite scepticism of Julian Stallybrass's High Art Lite, London and New
York, 1999 and, most recently, Anthony Julius's Transgressions: The Offence of Art, London, 2002. By
way of contrast see Chapmanworld. The calculated impenetrability of Nick Land's contribution to this
catalogue of the artists' works is presented as a challenge to 'rationalist' appropriations of the artists'
work.
12 See Gwyn Williams, Goya and the Impossible Revolution, London, 1976.
13 Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789–1820, New Haven and London, 1983, pp. 336–7.
14 Williams, Goya and the Impossible Revolution, p. 8.
15 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, London, 1977, p. 4.
16 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 11.

17 Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, London and New York,
1995, pp. 118–20.
18 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,
Book XI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, London, 1979, p. 270.
19 To desire a little piece of the real is, in effect, to dally with the lack which constitutes the inaugural
division of the subject. Hence the desire for further accumulation of partial objects in an endless bid to
heal the primal wound. Elizabeth Roudinesco discusses Lacan's revision of Bataille's parte maudite
(doomed or accursed part) in Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and a History of a System of Thought,
trans. Barbara Bray, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 135, 217. See also Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, p. 270.
20 Tate has since acquired the piece for its permanent collection.
21 Maia Damianovic, 'Dinos and Jake Chapman', Journal of Contemporary Art, 1997, p. 5:
http://www.jca-online.com/chapman.html.
22 See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 105.
23 Robert Rosenblum, 'Dinos and Jake Chapman', Artforum, no. 1, 1996, pp. 100–101.
24 Douglas Fogle, 'A Scatological Aesthetics for the Tired of Seeing', in Chapmanworld, n.p.
25 From the Chapmans' anti-manifesto, We are Artists. The full text, in letraset, was imposed over
brown painted smears on a wall of the Hales Gallery, London, in 1992. The work is reproduced in
Chapmanworld, n.p.
26 Douglas Fogle, 'Interview with Dinos and Jake Chapman', laap op de avond, no. 9, 1995, pp. 1–4, 3:
http://www.vpro.nl/data/laat/materiaal/chapman-bros-interview.shtml.
28 Sigmund Freud, On Psychopathology. The Pelican Freud Library, Vol. 10, trans. James Strachey,
compiled and ed. Angela Richards, London, 1979, p. 226.
29 Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses, 1955–1956. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III, ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg, New York, 1993, pp. 86–7.
30 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, London, 1993, p. 227.
31 Thus David Falconer: '[the Chapmans'] art attempts to bypass disembodied notions of aesthetic
enjoyment: it is about pleasure in that it spectacularises the psychoanalytic text's fixated attempts to
circumscribe it, as well as being a calculated attempt to arouse a visceral response (whether it be
expressed as amusement or disgust).' From D. Falconer, 'Doctorin' the Retardis', in Chapmanworld, n.p.
32 Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 230.
33 For Lacan, the fantasy of engaging with dismemberment is a lure, designed to conceal the truth that
'reality … can no longer produce itself except by repeating itself endlessly in some never attained
awakening.' The real must therefore 'be sought beyond the dream – in what the dream has enveloped,
hidden from us'. See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, pp. 53–60, passim.
34 Susan Sontag discusses this image and other related war images in Regarding the Pain of Others,
London, 2003.
35 Though as I write (25 March 2003), the nature of the conflict in Iraq would appear to qualify this
thesis.
36 Slavoj Žiz�ek, The Fragile Absolute or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London and
New York, 2000, pp. 76–8.
37 Lacan, The Psychoses, 1955–1956, p. 168.
38 Fogle, 'Interview with Dinos and Jake Chapman', p. 3.
39 Žiz�ek, The Fragile Absolute, p. 75.
40 See Fogle, 'Interview with Dinos and Jake Chapman', and Ramkalawon, 'Jake and Dinos Chapman's
Disasters of War', p. 74.
41 See Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book
VII, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter, New York, 1992, p. 63, p. 119.
42 Falconer, 'Doctorin' the Retardis'.
43 Ramkalawon, 'Jake and Dinos Chapman's Disasters of War', p. 69.
44 All quotations are from Jake Chapman, from an interview with Jennifer Ramkalawon, 'Jake and Dinos
Chapman's Disasters of War', p. 69.
46 Falconer, 'Doctorin' the Retardis'.
48 As reported in the Guardian, 31 March 2003, p. 11.
49 Quoted by Jonathan Jones in a special feature on Insult to Injury printed in G2 section of the
Guardian, 31 March 2003, pp. 2–4.
50 Jones, in G2, p. 4.
Inspired vandalism
The Chapman Brothers have not just defaced Goya, says Richard Dorment - they've enhanced him
Richard Dorment
Published: 12:01AM BST 30 Apr 2003
The Chapmans' doctored version of Goya's Disasters of War
As we have just seen from the yawns evoked by the pornographic carryings-on in XXX at the Riverside
Studios, it takes a lot of hard work to provoke us jaded critics to even the faintest flicker of moral
indignation. But in a new work entitled Insult to Injury, the brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman have
managed to raise the hackles of art historians by violating something much more sacred to the art world
than the human body - another work of art.
In a considered act of artistic vandalism, they have re-worked a complete set of Goya's etchings, The
Disasters of War, adding comical and grotesque faces to the original figures with the apparent intention
of trivialising one of the most profound works of art ever made. That the set of etchings on which the
Chapmans worked was printed as late as 1937 doesn't mitigate the crime. It would be just as shocking
had they destroyed original prints by Chris Ofili or Michael Landy.
And yet, standing in front of the retouched etchings in the Chapmans' new show at Modern Art Oxford, I
have to admit that the result is extraordinarily powerful. I hope they aren't setting a nasty precedent
here, but, as always when the Chapmans are on form, the absolute conviction they bring to their work
sweeps the viewer along with them, even if we find ourselves kicking and screaming as we go.
Art - or a lot of it, anyway - has to do with a heightening of sensation, with creating a new awareness
of familiar things. With the first stroke of the Chapmans' pen on the first of Goya's prints, you feel
acutely the unique, irreplaceable status of an original work of art. In daring to make even a single mark
on that pristine impression, the Chapmans have enacted the ultimate artistic transgression. But look
again, and you see that the delicacy of their draughtsmanship is anything but disrespectful. Every line is
an act of homage to a revered Old Master.
What's more, their solemn concentration on the meaning of the images actually enhances the horror of
each print, because the perkiness and indifference of the mask-like faces serve to bring out the
obscenity beneath the violence. Still clutching a crucifix, a monk in a Mickey Mouse mask suffers the
garrotte. A clown's face on a hanged man calls attention to the trousers dropped around his ankles, as if
to say, "Whoops! I've been castrated!"
The question remains: to what purpose have the Chapmans gone to all this trouble? It naturally occurs
to us to find some pattern in the choice of figures to which they have given the faces of comical mice
or grinning skeletons. Did they single out for this treatment all the victims depicted by Goya, while
leaving the perpetrators untouched? If so, the project would represent a profound analysis of Goya's
imagery, for as we progress through the series, we become aware of how difficult it is to differentiate
between victim, perpetrator, accomplice, and mere onlooker. But to think like this is to think more
rationally, more like grown-ups, than I think the Chapmans do. As far as I can tell, there is no rhyme or
reason to their interventions - aggressors and victims receive equal, indiscriminate attention.
I long ago reached the conclusion that the Chapmans are genuinely strange people, two grown men
arrested in early adolescence. And yet, they are also technically accomplished artists who have thought
long and hard about the nature of Goya's art. In Insult to Injury, they suggest that Goya's preoccupation
with rape, castration, torture, evisceration, disembowelment and mass murder is not in its essence so
very different from the idle fantasies of a schoolboy doodling in the margins of his notebook during a
boring history lesson. But that is simply another way of saying, with Baudelaire, that genius is the ability
to retrieve childhood at will.
The centrepiece of the Chapmans' show at Oxford Modern (otherwise consisting of relatively
conventional drawings, sculptures, and paintings of only so-so interest, and not particularly well lit or
displayed) is an installation called The Rape of Creativity. A broken-down camper, its grungy interior
papered with images torn from porn magazines and its larder stocked with weapons of the sort favoured
by the Michigan Militia, announces that we are standing on sacred ground: backwoods America, setting
for films such as Deliverance and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Sure enough, across the turd-strewn yard by the white picket fence, we spot a stuffed dog (in fact, a
mutant, with the head of a sheep) carrying in its mouth a severed human hand. Possibly this limb
belongs to the amateur sculptor who has been hacking away at a tree trunk with an axe, trying to carve
out the figure of a buxom young woman, a sort of giant wooden sex toy. Even the lowest forms of pond
life have artistic aspirations.
That the pond (and the trailer) is the domain of the Chapmans themselves is not in doubt, for clay
models of their own sculptures are still on the kitchen table, and an art book about the German sculptor
Georg Baselitz (not the reading of your average redneck) lies on the floor. Cowering under a rough
blanket inside the trailer is a frightened figure with staring eyes, masturbating. Oh - and the ultimate
horror, Classic FM is playing on the radio. The artist's studio has been conflated with the lair of the
Unabomber.
The title of the piece, The Rape of Creativity, suggests that the Chapmans are taking contemporary
art's obsession with nastiness to its logical conclusion by combining in one tableau every cliche of
recent modern art. And so, we peek voyeuristically into the camper in exactly the same way that we
view the spreadeagled nude in Marcel Duchamp's Etant Donne. There are echoes, too, of Robert Gober,
the king of meticulously crafted body parts, and purveyor of pornographic wallpaper. The German
sculptor Gunter Forg works with taxidermy, grafting the heads of sheep on to the bodies of dogs, as the
Chapmans have done here.
You could call the whole tableau a tribute to the Californian installation artist Mike Kelley, who
specialises in hilariously exposing the culture of the American underclass; and, once you associate the
crudely hacked sculptures of the German Baselitz with the attentions the axeman here has paid to the
half-carved tree, you can't get the image out of your mind. Speaking of axe murderers, step forward
English artist Abigail Lane, queen of contemporary schlock horror installations. And don't those cast
bronze turds, glistening with shiny brown paint, remind you of Gavin Turk's bags and boxes?
What I've identified as parody and quotation has a point, and it's not so very different from the one the
Chapmans make in The Disasters of War. Art flourishes in muck. Out of the darkest parts of human
experience the most powerful creations emerge - and so does a lot of the blackest humour.
All this silliness may not be the Chapmans at their most imaginative or original, but it is still pretty
entertaining. After their panoramic, three-dimensional assemblage Hell, shown at the RA in 2000, and
last year's superb parodies of African sculpture, The Chapman Family Collection, the boys really are on
a roll.
• The exhibition is at Modern Art Oxford (01865 722733) until June 8.
Christopher Turner on Jake and Dinos Chapman

Jake and Dinos Chapman
Detail of Sex I 2003
All images courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube (London) © Jake and Dinos Chapman. Photo: Stephen
White
Painted bronze
246x244x125cm
Jake and Dinos Chapman obsessively return to Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes’ gore-filled The
Disasters of War series. Jake himself describes their studio floor debris as, ‘a sediment of Goya
pictures.’ Christopher Turner surveys the brothers’ “rectification” of the great Spaniard’s work and
how they have overwhelmed even Goya’s original with their own distinctive brand of pornographic
Surrealism.
Context:
'Jake and Dinos Chapman: When Humans Walked the Earth' at Tate Britain 30 January - 10 June
2007'Jake and Dinos Chapman: Bad Art for Bad People' at Tate Liverpool 15 December 2006 - 4 March
2007Works by Jake and Dinos Chapman in the Tate Collection
"Christ, they've really done a job on this place," remarked the police officer who visited Jake and Dinos
Chapman's Peckham studio after it had been burgled. Though there had been a break-in, the mess that
caught the officer's eye was, in fact, the normal state of the studio floor: "A sediment of Goya
pictures," as Jake Chapman described the scattered debris, "heaped in layers." According to the art
critic Richard Cork, the Goya books that the brothers had carved up and scattered around to make their
disorderly image library were all "smeared and splashed with blood from cuts in the Chapmans' fingers
as they worked on the images with scissors, razors and paper knives".
The Chapman brothers, fresh out of the Royal College of Art, had become obsessed with Goya's gory
ouvre - to the point, as Jake Chapman told me in a phone interview, that they later even considered
changing their surname to Goya. They were especially haunted by the famous series of etchings known
as The Disasters of War, in which Goya portrayed the atrocities he had witnessed in the Peninsular War
between Spain and France (1808-1814) with a visceral horror. In his book on Goya, Robert Hughes
claims the series is "the greatest antiwar manifesto in the history of art". Goya's sardonic titles offer a
cumulative sense of terror: "This is bad," warns the caption to a picture of a monk stabbed through the
heart by a French sabre; "This is worse," reads one of a Spaniard who has been impaled on a tree from
his anus to his throat; "One can't look," declares another, beneath a group pleading for their lives as a
cluster of bayonets appears through the edge of the frame. The Disasters of War was deemed too
horrific to be shown in Goya's lifetime, with the prints being published for the first time in 1863 - 35
years after his death.
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes

Plate 39 from The Disasters of War 1810-1820 (first pub. 1863)
© The Trustees of the British Museum
Etching, fine and large grain aquatint, hatching
15x20cm
Goya's use of art as a provocation has inspired the Chapmans, who are well known for their aggressive
use of shock tactics, to create works of "vertiginous obscenity", as they term them, from their earliest
days. Returning to The Disasters of War repeatedly for more than a decade, they have adapted Goya's
example for contemporary impact. To the Chapmans, his unflinching aesthetic was ahead of its time;
they praised him as "the first Modernist artist; the first who had psychological and political depth".
"Goya is the black source of the grim stream," wrote the art pundit Matthew Collings. "He's at one end
and Jake and Dinos Chapman are at the other."
Other artists, such as Jeff Wall, who made a composite photograph called Dead Troops Talk in 1992,
have been inspired by The Disasters of War, but the Chapmans have appropriated it almost as
obsessively as Picasso did Manet's once controversial Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Picasso made 157
drawings, 27 paintings, six linocuts and five sculptures after Manet's painting). "Our work proceeds more
by compulsion than by inspiration," says Jake Chapman. He offers as an example the story of Beckett's
Molloy, who moves stones from pocket to pocket, sucking each one as he goes. "As he circulates these
stones, all kinds of complex patterns emerge; meaning emerges out of all the combinations and
variables." In a piece entitled All of Our Ideas for the Next Twenty Years (1997), the Chapmans included
their own reworking of Goya. You might say that if you understand their use of Goya, you will
understand their work as a whole.
In 1993 the brothers re-created The Disasters of War as a series of miniature tableaux. They melted
down toy soldiers, twisting, maiming and painting them to resemble Lilliputian versions of Goya's prints,
each intricate and bloody scene enshrined on its own little island of mossy green. The following year
they re-created plate 39 of The Disasters of War - Great Feat! With Dead Men! - on a larger scale,
using nylon-wigged mannequins. Great Deeds Against the Dead (1994), which was their contribution to
the legendary 'Sensation' exhibition at the Royal Academy, depicts three naked male bodies bound to a
tree; blood dribbles from the crotches of these shop dummies where their genitalia would have been, if
they'd ever had them. One victim's arm dangles by its fingers from the makeshift gallows alongside the
carcass of his torso, the severed head skewered on a branch.

Great Deeds Against the Dead 1994
Photo: Stephen White
Mixed Media
277x244x152.5cm
The Chapmans once told the art critic Robert Rosenblum that Great Feat! represented a secular
crucifixion, "because the body is elaborated as flesh, as matter. No longer the religious body, no longer
redeemed by God. Goya introduces finality - the absolute terror of material termination". There is
something troublingly artful about the arrangement of the figures. They have been posed by their
murderers - as a warning to others - in a gruesome echo of the classical statue of Laocoon and his two
sons writhing in the coils of a huge serpent. Robert Hughes wrote of Goya's macabre trio: "They remind
us that, if only they had been marble and the work of their destruction had been done by time rather
than sabres, neoclassicists. would have been in aesthetic raptures over them."The Chapmans realise
the fragmented classicism hinted at in Goya's print in the heroic scale of their sculpture, but they mean
the magnification to assault rather than uplift the viewer.
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag wrote that, unlike most images of mutilation and torture,
Goya's The Disasters of War "cannot be looked at in a spirit of prurience" - it is devoid of pornography.
The Chapmans, who have endlessly returned to Great Feat! with a rubber-necking insistency, would
disagree. "I don't think that there's an opposition between a salacious interest and a noble one," Jake
Chapman says. For them there is a "convulsive beauty" in the violent image, and they are wedded to
the Surrealists' avant-garde belief that such shocks and jolts can wake us from the dream-state of a
commodity culture by, as Jake puts it, "shocking the viewer from the edifice of comfort". (The brothers'
work might be collectively titled The Disasters of Capitalism.) "He's defended as a humanist," Jake
once said of Goya's prints, "but there are moments of pleasure. They have an intensity, a humour and a
tendency to undermine their own dignity."
Their first work to arouse controversy, Great Deeds has become something of a trademark for the
Chapmans, even though it refers to a work by another artist, and they have frequently quoted it in their
subsequent art. For example, Hell (1999-2000), an apocalyptic scrum of 5,000 miniature figures, included
an explicit quotation of Great Deeds. (Almost too fittingly, perhaps, Hell was destroyed in the Momart
warehouse fire in May 2004. It is being rebuilt, seventeen per cent bigger.) In one of the Chapmans'
doodles of Fuck-face (1994), a figure with a dildo nose and a sphincter for a mouth made the same year
as Great Deeds, the figure no longer wears a t-shirt emblazoned with the artists' manifesto - the first
line of which reads: "We are sore-eyed scopophiliac oxymorons" - but one with a logo version of Great
Deeds. The Chapmans point to Goya as a forebear to their more disturbing sculptures, like this one,
almost as if to justify their assault on the aesthetic sensibility of the viewer.

Detail from Hell 1999 - 2000
© Jake and Dinos Chapman. Courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube (London). Photograph: Stephen White
Glass fibre, plastic and mixed media
In Year Zero (1996), whose title is the name to which Pol Pot gave his genocidal dream for Cambodia,
Goya's gallows tree becomes a climbing frame for three children, naked except for clumpy trainers. One
of these prepubescent mannequins, who is related to the Chapmans' other Hans Bellmer-like
aberrations, hangs upside down so that her long hair almost touches the floor in an obvious allusion to
Goya's headless piece of meat. In their disturbing Disasters of yoGa (1997) - a "dyslexic disruption" of
Goya, in their own description - a genetically mutated mannequin bends back into itself and seems to
give birth to its own head.When Great Deeds Against the Dead was first shown, the police paid a visit to
the Victoria Miro Gallery in answer to a visitor's charge of obscenity. They were appeased with startling
ease when they were shown that the Chapmans' chamber of horrors was based on Goya's print. "They
left with an image of the Goya," Jake recalls, "so it was historical authenticity that gave us licence."
(Anthony Julius has referred to this strategy as the "canonical defence" of shock art; another defence,
as Matthew Collings remarked in relation to this sculpture, is to insulate the work with "ironic discourse
goo"- quoting from Bataille and Kristeva to make it "cool rather than just horrible".) But Great Deeds
is, if anything, more kitsch than shocking - Goya meets Jeff Koons.

Gigantic Fun 2000
Photo: Stephen White
Etching from a portfolio of 83
37x42.3cm
In 1999, in a series of 83 etchings plainly titled Disasters of War, the Chapmans began to take on Goya's
masterpiece in his own medium (hadn't Goya, after all, copied Velázquez in his first etchings?). In their
first graphic version of Great Feat! Goya's print has been amateurishly traced and a swastika carved
into the plate over the image. The result resembles the famous SDP anti-Hitler election poster of 1932,
which shows a worker crucified on the wheel of a swastika. But in this case, the image is reversed in
printing, so that the Goya appears as if in a mirror, and the swastika - an ugly neo-fascist desecration -
has been transformed into the Hindu symbol of peace ("Indian for have a nice day," as Jake Chapman
puts it). In a tinted version, made in 2000, a crowd of silent witnesses looks on, casting long shadows up
to the blood-spattered group; in Gigantic Fun (2000) the print has been overlaid with a picture
plundered from a child's colouring book featuring some malevolent-looking cats in a bath. In 2001 the
decapitated head is overlaid with a painted one with goofy ears, a red nose and the sort of grimace that
the cartoonist Steve Bell might have given Tony Blair.

Disasters of War 1993
© Jake and Dinos Chapman. Courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube (London)
Mixed Media
Variable dimensions
All these variations on a theme were a rehearsal for Insult to Injury (2004), for which the brothers
bought a series of The Disasters of War for £25,000 - printed in 1937 from original plates - and
systematically defaced it, adding the heads of Mickey Mouse and grinning clowns to the figures, covering
Goya with a graffiti of gas masks, bug eyes, insect antennae and the ubiquitous swastika. (They later
created a similar work using Goya's Los Caprichos series, called Injury to Insult to Injury.) The
Chapmans were condemned in some corners of the press for this act of vandalism. They answered their
critics with the "canonical defence", this time citing Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing
of 1953, for which the artist asked de Kooning to donate a valuable drawing so that he could create a
new work by erasing it, to justify their attempt to eclipse Goya.
The Chapmans' "rectification", or "improvement", as they termed their adaptation, revealed their
ambivalent relation to the master; they mocked their endless return to Goya in the title of an exhibition
of these works, 'Like a Dog Returns to Its Vomit'. It is as if they couldn't shrug off his influence,
however hard they tried, and where this was once reverence, they had been haunted by Goya to the
point of iconoclasm. When asked if he'd have liked to have met his mentor, Dinos Chapman replied: "I'd
like to have stepped on his toes, shouted in his ears and punched him in the face."
Almost a decade after their first Great Deeds Against the Dead, the Chapmans created another version.
They seemed finally to have made Goya's image their own, unpicking it and transforming it into a
seething mass of decomposition. Sex I (2003) resembles the extravagant images of death that are
constructed in papier mâché in Mexico to celebrate the Day of the Dead. It shows Goya's three rotting
victims being licked clean by an army of insects and slithery creatures that come in waves of
putrefaction; a swarm of maggots, snails, flies, rats and spiders, each one a prop acquired from a
Halloween shop and individually cast in bronze. A sated raven sits menacingly at the top of the tree.
After years of battling the image, they appear to have overwhelmed Goya's original with their own brand
of pornographic Surrealism. Indeed, now the Goya they refer to is the one they have already reinvented:
a rotting severed head rudely spiked on a branch, the only patch of flesh still to be eaten, has been
given Spock ears, a red nose, horns and a deathly grin.
'Jake and Dinos Chapman' at Tate Liverpool, 15 December 2006 - 4 March 2007.
'Jake and Dinos Chapman' at Tate Britain, 29 January - 10 June 2007.
Christopher Turner is an editor at Cabinet magazine. His Adventures in the Orgasmatron will be
published by Harper-Collins next year.
Torture for the masses
The shock-artists Jake and Dinos Chapman believe the public should be 'means tested' for intellectual
suitability before being allowed to see their new show. Emily Bearn meets the brothers grim
By Emily Bearn
Published: 12:01AM GMT 29 Oct 2002
Previous
1 of 2 Images
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Brothers in arts: Jake [left] and Dinos Chapman
Over the years, the work of Dinos and Jake Chapman has caused some bewilderment. Take Fucking
Hell, a compilation of 30,000 mutilated plastic soldiers arranged in the shape of a giant swastika (the
centrepiece of the Royal Academy's Apocalypse show).
Then there was the set of life-sized nude mannequins with sexual organs for faces; and the three-
dimensional version of Goya's Disasters of War, which included multiple decapitations and manglings.
The brothers' contribution to the opening exhibition of the Tate Modern at Bankside, on the other hand,
depicted a hammer through a brain, connected to a limp male organ. (The Queen was gently steered
away from it at the official opening.)
They deny that their intention is to shock, but their work resonates with a clear desire to do so. And -
in an industry in which a lot of people are struggling to do the same thing - it's paid off. Sylvester
Stallone is a fan; Charles Saatchi paid £500,000 for Fucking Hell; they are represented by the
unimpeachably fashionable London gallery, White Cube - a new show opens this week - and, over the
past 10 years, they have gained enough column inches to make a giant papier-mache penis.
Their profile has been bolstered by a reputation for volatility (Jake was once evicted from the Groucho
Club for behaving in a "threatening and intimidating manner") and, before meeting them, one of their
representatives at White Cube cautioned me that they are terribly sensitive.
I am not to write about any of their new work, as they do not want to foster "pre-conceptualised" ideas
about their new exhibition - billed as "an extraordinary assemblage of rare ethnographic fetish
objects . . . including trophies from the former colonial regions of Camgib, Seirf and Ekoc". (Spell them
out backwards: most amusing.).
We have arranged to meet at 2 o'clock at their studio in east London. They are not there. Someone
from a neighbouring studio eventually tracks them down on their mobile telephone, and I am instructed
to turn left and go to "the cafe on the corner". There is no cafe on the corner, so I return to the studio
and find them outside on the pavement.
I get the feeling that they would just as soon I hadn't found them at all. For though polite, they seem
nervous, almost reticent. Both are handsome, though Dinos - who is dressed in goofy black glasses and
camouflage combat trousers rolled up to his knees - looks sweeter. (At 40, he is the elder by five
years.)
Their voices are almost identical (both are well-spoken), but Dinos points out that I can distinguish them
on tape by the fact that "Jake will talk and I won't". They are in fact both verbose, though Jake is more
so. For every word Dinos talks, he probably speaks 100, most of them many-syllabled and all of them
disgorged with such fluent rapidity that you wonder how his tongue can keep pace with his brain. (Or
vice versa.) It is all, loosely speaking, about art, and much sounds like babble.
Here, for example, is how they describe one of their works: "Drawing upon Munch's famous existential
image of the screaming man, this digital design is the iconic residue of humanity after science and
technology has had its wicked way: a multi-nucleated progeriac, an inflamed encephalitic Cartesian
organ fighting for survival in an increasingly hostile, non-organic world."
We are sitting on high stools in their cavernous, freezing studio, surrounded by discarded gas heaters,
empty Snapple bottles, bits of bicycle, slices of tree trunk and enough indistinguishable-looking rubble to
fill a scrapyard. As Jake points out, any of it could be a work of art. Most of it looks like rubbish. A
collection of finished work (the content of their forthcoming show) is visible through a door, but, as they
remind me four times, I'm not to mention it.
On the table next to us is a work in progress, upon which I am allowed to comment. It consists of
mutilated human figures, some of them hanging, some of them in what look like torture devices, all
contained within a church (possibly gothic), which is shaped like a swastika. "It's about petrified death
and dead religion," explains Jake. "We've always been religiously childish. We still are."
Any discussion of their work is difficult, as they dismiss most of my questions as "reductive", "not
mystical" or "inappropriate". They clearly have little esteem for their audience, and have suggested the
public should be "means tested" for intellectual suitability to view their work: "Galleries should not seek
to be redemptible spaces for bourgeois people to pay their dues to culture," explains Jake. "Some
people need to be alienated."
He denies, however, that their intention is simply to make people recoil: "Nothing in a gallery is
repulsive. There should not be an assumption that art should idealise people's lives. Some people might
have problems with a composition of genitalia, but sometimes shock is merely a Pavlovian response."
"We're not irreverent," adds Dinos. "Our work is only irreverent in that it allows certain people a little
frisson."
In some of their work the artistic merit is elusive. The giant glass-fibre sculpture of Stephen Hawking in
his wheelchair, balancing on the edge of a cliff, the mock Bible filled with images of sexual organs, and a
video depicting one woman pleasuring another with the penis-nose of a beheaded dummy, all spring to
mind.
They are, however, skilled draughtsmen, as evidenced in Disasters of War, a recently published book
containing 83 of their hand-painted etchings, which were inspired by Goya's prints of the same title (the
book is a highlight of this weekend's Artists Book Fair at the London Institute).
Each image is executed in painstaking detail, and most are fairly arresting: one picture features a cluster
of bodies, beneath the caption: "Look. 36 penises, 16 vaginas, 6 anuses. It must be a girl!"; another
shows a penis-like finger gouging an eye, while a few pages on you find a large insect balanced on a
testicle and a man gorging on a human limb.
The etchings were made in 1999 and quickly sold out. Priced at £15,000, complete sets in black-and-
white were bought by institutions such as the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum in New
York.
Wherever their inspiration lies, it does not seem to be in art. They cannot name a painter they like, and
appear to hold most in disdain: Francis Bacon's work is "retarded 1950s English existentialism"; Freud's
is a "drab kitchen-sink drama"; the National Gallery is "full of rubbish" except, perhaps, for the Goyas,
which are "quite good for a deaf Spanishman".
They are childishly irreverent - the Prime Minister is "a fascist"; Simon Rattle is a "twat". It's good for
publicity, and publicity is part of the game: "The domain of making art has seeped into all forms of the
media," explains Jake, kicking at his bar stool.
"The manipulation of the press is an expansive domain of the work of art. A work of art doesn't end at
the door of the gallery. To be an artist in the 21st century you have to be aware that the 21st century
is about informatics."
The brothers' enthusiasm for information has limits: they deflect personal questions with convoluted
art-speak. Their father was an art teacher, their mother an orthodox Greek Cypriot; they were brought
up in Cheltenham; moved to Hastings where they attended a local comprehensive; enrolled at the Royal
College of Art ("shit", "a complete waste of time" and "full of people tickling oil paint around"); and
started working together soon after graduating.
"We're not joined at the hip," explains Jake. "Our lives are very different. We didn't merge our work
because we were brothers. We did it because our ideas converged." They say they would consider going
their own ways only "if things get boring".
For the moment, they appear settled. Dinos lives with a textile designer and has two children who "play
an active part in taking on the misanthropic lineage"; Jake has a girlfriend; and both remain resolutely
loyal to each other: "I make my work for Dinos and Dinos makes his for me," explains Jake.
"That's right," says Dinos. "We work for each other." They have a wider audience and - though they
can charge upwards of £30,000 for one piece - are airily dismissive about money: "We are not idealistic
about the world," says Jake. "It's a shitty place in which capitalism and the production of art are not
separated."
The Chapman brothers seem almost overwhelmingly arrogant - after an hour in their company you long
to stick a pin in them to see if they'll deflate. But beneath all the bravado, they give the impression of
being rather shy.
They thrive on publicity but, the more they get, the more elusive they become: "People sometimes
confuse us with the work, but no work of art has ever been personal," says Jake. "We are allergic to the
idea that art is a manifestation of personality."
"That's right," adds Dinos. "It's not that we don't have emotions; it's just that we don't think people
would be interested in them." Instead, they have set out to interest people in mutated plastic figurines.
And the fact that they have succeeded says more about the vagaries of our art market than it does
about the Chapman brothers.
For publishers wishing to reproduce photographs on this page please phone 44 (0) 207 538 7505 or
email syndicat@telegraph.co.uk
About • Room guide • Visiting info • Events & Education • Further resources 30 January – 10 June 2007
Free Entry

When Humans Walked the Earth 2006
View of this exhibition at Tate Britain
Photo © Tate 2006
Jake and Dinos Chapman (born in 1962 and 1966 respectively) are among the most significant and best-
known contemporary British artists working today. Together they have created an exceptional body of
work which draws from all areas of culture including art history, philosophy, artificial intelligence and
cybernetic theory.
To coincide with their mid-career exhibition at Tate Liverpool (15 December 2006 – 4 March 2007) they
have created this installation especially for Tate Britain. Taking their sculpture Little Death Machine
(Castrated) 1993, now in the Tate Collection, as a point of departure, the Chapmans have created a
series of improbable machines that emulate human functions such as breathing, thinking or sexual
intercourse. In their subversive wit and black humour, the works recall the disturbing sexual fetishism
and fascination with dismemberment of the Surrealists.
When Humans Walked the Earth 2007 contests the distinctions we make between man and machine and
assumptions about historical progress. Cast in the traditional medium of bronze, these objects evoke
the heroic tradition of monumental sculpture. However their scatological imagery, subversive intent and
complex associations suggest a sense of impending collapse
Entry to the exhibition is free. It is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue, produced by Tate Liverpool
which is the first publication to take an overview of the Chapmans' work to date, and includes working
drawings and installation shots relating to the new work.

When Humans Walked the Earth 2006
View of this exhibition at Tate Britain
Photos © Tate 2006
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.
Jake & Dinos Chapman

Esto Es Peor
––fRom–now=on–theRes–just–hell–being–ReheAteD––[1]
'The molding machines are noisy and hot. The air is filled with a strong chemical smell. I have to repeat
the same motions, over and over' [...][2]
The commandeering of increasingly vast budgets for the development and promotion of toy lines
sufficiently intense to compel juvenile 'consumption machines'[3] to 'catch em all' exerts unprecedented
economic pressure on the side of production. From every province of the Middle Kingdom flows of
deterritorialised labour are sucked into the circuits of virtual lilliputian realms, to minister to the molding,
assembly and decoration of their exquisitely imagineered and highly speciated plastic fauna. Passing
through the remains of razed farmsteads now irrigated with rivulets of toxic effluent, the 'biggest
movement of people in human history'[4] streams towards the dark satanic happy-mills pushing through
the blasted earth of the Pearl River Delta. Young female workers, for years at a time, make the barbed-
wired high-security industrial compounds their rudimentary home. Anxious, exhausted , haunted by
'guolaosi'[5] and tales of the 'many young people returned home from the factories with disfigurements
and strange illnesses',[6] they troop daily between the new workshops of the world and their annexed
bunker-dormitories, where tiny part-objects swim in the feverish half-light of their unquiet dreams: The
bionic arm of a robot soldier clutching a diminutive AK47; the dismembered torso of a powder-pink
infant; the bobtail of a happy red bunny; a hamburger with a mask and a cheesy grimace ... Shards of
simulacra from an imaginary whose remote-controlled reproductive organs they have become.
'The air in the spraying and colouring department was filled with paint dust and smelled sourly of
chemicals – acetone, ethylene, trichloride, benzene – and hurt her throat [...] she had to paint one every
7.2 seconds – 4,000 a day [...] the air was fuzzy with fibrous dust and the smell of burning plastic.'[7]
Severed from family and culture, economically immobilised, plagued by toxic allergies, headaches and
blurred vision,[8] circumscribed by a battery of disciplinary injunctions, they sweat fear and resignation
as they anticipate another day decorating the assault vehicles of imaginary armies under the minutely-
attentive gaze of their uniformed supervisors. Passing beneath the gates of the manufacturing
compound, they cast an uncomprehending but rueful glance at the emblem that arches overhead: A
candy-coloured rainbow topped by two bulbous, maniacally-grinning cartoon slapheads: CHAPSBRO™ –
'Making the World Smile.'
We are not necessarily in the realm of the childs toy, but that of a demographic ostensibly responsive to
different criteria. When, in 1997, Hornby's Great British trainset empire, which had blossomed thanks to
postwar distaste for the finely-engineered and formerly hegemonic German brands,[9] evacuated their
Margate factory (now slated for redevelopment as a 'heritage centre') to shift production to China, they
reinvested the cost-savings in 'more quality and detail and [...] more product' for their now 70 percent
adult customer base.[10] 'We have to [...] give them a product that is clearly acceptable as an adult
purchase and doesn't trivialize the interest. So the dimensional accuracy and the decoration and so on
has to be absolutely spot on – they're very discerning.'[11] 'Fucking Hell' is precisely a collectable for
the discerning, a Franklinstein for the Minted; But also an H0-gauge branch-line for Bataille's locomotive
whose wheels and pistons give parodic expression to the perpetual, frenzied motion of a world defined
by 'two primary motions of rotation and sexual movement'[12] (the terrestrial orb as a 'fucking hell').
'There have been countless conflicts in which large swathes of urban cityscapes have been reduced to
hardcore. Representing them in model form has always been a challenge. Using Exactoscale brick
papers, it shouldn't be too difficult to make quite a number of damaged buildings.'[13]
The eagerness with which, before the ashes of 2000's oven-ready 'Hell' had cooled, work began on this
new model dwarfing its predecessor in scale, ambition, and sheer futility, only attests to the inevitability
with which every serious hobbyist's quest for 'every conceivable detail ... super-detail ... superb
realism ... intricate detailing ... Intricately detailed beyond ... wildest dreams'[14] continually menaces
'real life' with its cancerous little empires. 'There is an old saying in the hobby that a model railway
layout is never finished ... there is no end to what you can do ... Newcomers to the hobby soon find out
that layouts and models, even in the relatively small 00 gauge, take up more space than they
imagined.'[15] After only 30 man-years of labour on the part of their long-suffering assistants, it goes
without saying that announcement of the 'completion' of CHAPSBRO™'s latest work is somewhat
arbitrary. Nazis vs mutants – 'The whole subject is infinitely interesting, with endless ramifications and
applications.'[16]
Already in works such as the compendious 'All of Our Ideas For The Next Twenty Years' (1997)
CHAPSBRO™ souped up the combinatorial engine of cryptozoological inanity evidenced in the sketches
of Bosch,[17] as he extrapolates the tragic anatomies, rudely-fashioned prosthetics and ambulatory
contrivances of quadriplegic tinkers into enough new lines of slavering hellspawn to furnish the covers
of Slayer albums for years to come. CHAPSBRO™'s demons,assembled from a contemporary imagination
well-stocked by two centuries of ever more refined atrocity, are deployed in their garden of delights
with little allegorical ceremony. Pace the enigmatic symbolism of Bosch's hellscapes, this universe of
pain has nothing to tell us; It aims at an infinite intensification of the plague-logic recorded by
CHAPSBRO™ spar Goya: 'Rightly or wrongly – the same; one can't tell why – nor in this case; I saw it –
and this too; they don't like it – neither do they – nor do these ...' Ironic, amplificative or conjunctive, the
impassive iterations cross over physical, social and partisan lines, and from horror into horrified laughter,
indicating that behind Goya's edifying pageant of atrocities lurks a Sadean fascination with the
senseless fury of which it affords a glimpse.
Breaking through negation as a 'partial process' compromised by its submission to military directive or
natural law and binding the violent act to some projected refecundation, Sade's ultra-violent
appropriation of the Kantian theory of Ideas has the cold light of reason tease the libertine with a
'primary nature' of the purest violence, tantalisingly unattainable through mere local infractions unless,
possibly, through a concerted 'apathetic repetition' that would 'reverberate' to infinity.[18] 'Fucking Hell'
represents 'a further effort' towards the perpetration of such a 'perfect crime' in miniature, a listless
vision of eternal return as the perpetual motion of total war gone loco, counteracting indefinitely any
congelation on the 'political' plane. This is worse.
It is also a crime against art, the relentless pursuit of the hobbyist's petty mania on an industrial scale
continuing a campaign against the hygienic narrative of modern art, by toying with the venerable notion
of the readymade. Dismembering, reconfiguring and painstakingly painting tens of thousands of miniature
bodies, CHAPSBRO™'s production-line for 'extreme rectification' elevates a parodically zombified form
of what Duchamp denounced as the 'olfactory masturbation' of the 'stupid painter'[19] into an artisanal
Apocalypse Now (I love the smell of Humbrol in the morning). Where the campaign against the 'retinal'
subordinated eye to decisive mind, here a simultaneous 'scopophilia'[20] and 'phobia of ocularity'[21]
employs every signifier of intensity to assemble a crawling-all-over nullity - Gluesniffing noses no longer
pressed up against the glass of the 'shop window' looking for 'proof of existence of the world outside'
art[22] in the shape of 'real' (authentically functional) objects – a shovel, a bicycle wheel, a bottlerack –
to give a hand up in the world; For there is only outside=inside, selections made from a virtual multitude
pullulating in a bacterial dance of zygotic acceleration upon an 'inorganic and disorganised [...]
labyrinthine skin',[23] a moebian rollercoaster, a delirious modulation of miscegenated phyla opposing
itself to the 'closed theatre' of 'the representative [white] cube'[24] and its 'critical' debates. Duchamp's
'infra-thin' passage from virgin to bride,[25] consummated by the institutionally-sealed name of the
artist, gives way to an 'ultra-thick', labour-intensive combinatorial explosion, seeking only to make things
worse, to bring them down in the world. An accelerated and interminable product development cycle
detached from all economic imperatives auto-bricolages new, abominable conjunctions, materialising
'dyslexic disruptions' and gruesome bad jokes. The name comes only at the end: No longer misreadable
as heralding a portentous portrait of the underworld, it is outburst not moral orientation, expletive rather
than nominative. Here too, it is 'the viewer who finishes the work', with an exclamation: 'Fucking Hell!'
A crime against interpretation: 'This shit doesn't make sense, it's impossible to read'. Between the two
of us, art in the third person is of no significance. It already involves a crowd (What a mistake to have
ever said 'the' Chapmans). CHAPSBRO™ (multiple-it) is decomposed of viciously deformed matters,
distributed according to a scatter-logic that is 'radial'[26] or 'at least lattice rather than linear',[27]
relayed 'more by compulsion than by inspiration'[28] in the manner of an exquisitely-accelerated
corpsing between terms whose duplicity affords the product an 'automatic illegitimacy.'[29] Its use of
the gallery as a 'control environment'[30] for experiments in heteromorality nourishes the suspicion that
some invidious contrivance, some unnatural assemblage is at work. Well known for working over subjects
which disagree with it, it is too clever by half, refuses to shed symptoms, neither exhibiting nor soliciting
shame or guilt. In general, a problematic charge whose account of its parentage is contaminated by
horror flicks and incontinental theorising.
CHAPSBRO™'s assemblage of readymade virtual part-objects offers up absolutely no 'raw facts' for
psychoanalytical grilling. And since both constitute self-legitimating integral productions of their own
reflexively-processed delirium, unverifiable through any external referent,[31] the artwork cannot be
'judged' by psychoanalysis, whose principles it has in any case long since absorbed and variously
rectified. Terminating their 'interminable reciprocal deconstruction'[32] entails foregoing any therapeutic
'working through' in favour of a point-by-point 'heuristic parallelism' operating through 'loose couplings'
between singular points of the two heterogeneous series. CHAPSBRO™ clearly aligns itself in such
'couplings' with (1) librarian Bataille's expulsion for shit-stirring the surrealists by refusing to anticipate
any revelation/revolution (id has nothing to tell us) and collapsing Breton's puerile oneiroscape into the
horrors of base materialism (Big Boss's attempted 'cure': you-think-you've-escaped-but-thinking-
belongs-to-Kuntrol) (2) Schizoanalysis[33] of an heterogeneous unconscious that is no longer
subjective, but machinic, libidinal, social, transhistorical, and in the process of being catastrophically
decoded by Kapital. No less than Koons' (1999-2000) 'Easyfun-Ethereal' assemblages of 'Hair with
Cheese' (themselves channelling Ernst's inconscience-fictional collages prophesying that 'les images
s'abaisseront jusqu'au sol'),[34] CHAPSBRO™'s marauding mutant hordes generously assemble and offer
up for guilt-free enjoyment aspects of the bourgeois imaginary usually simultaneously satisfied and
disavowed. Where Koons unwraps kitsch from its prophylactic wrapper of irony, CHAPSBRO™ offer a
playground of ultra-violence without didactic value, modelled on subcultural products (horror film, death
metal, fantasy wargames) distinguished mostly by their zero cultural cachet, tastelessness and relish for
violence. But despite CHAPSBRO™'s conviction that the kind of images that adorn the covers of
schoolboys' exercise books and metal albums also inhabit the 'Lurid Dreams of my Bank Manager'
(1999), they offer no redemption, no solution but only an intensification of the problem. No utopian
reconciliation with our disavowed dreams (Koons unashamedly Cheerios™-venerating future aristocracy).
For CHAPSBRO™'s invitation, not content with ushering in banality, more problematically exposes and
espouses the cohabitation of banality with our precious moral touchstones.
A crime against morality: CHAPSBRO™-Goya's first merger, 1993's diminutive 'Disasters of War', along
with its death-size counterpart 'Great Deeds Against the Dead', indicated this path, one which diverges
significantly from 'Insult to Injury's (2003) masked intensifications. In the 1993 'Disasters' Goya is
belittled and inertialised, the obscene imagery broken out of its reverential art-historical frame and
reduced to a miniature technicolor diorama. The orgiastic representation lavished on these minutely-
detailed setpieces 'suggests' nothing, determination down to the last millimetre creating a brittle
carapace of intensity wrapped around a rotted-out core. 'The commander and wounded crewman are
[...] beautifully sculptured [...] note the extra tears added to the trousers by the author'.[35] As moral
force is asphyxiated under the weight of detail, prurience is at once exposed and frustrated, leaving you
asking what it was that you wanted more of, and reaching for shock to comfort yourself.
The macroform of 'Fucking Hell' perfectly encapsulates the dynamic: The swastika, which runs through
the cultural unconscious like writing through a stick of seaside rock, a shorthand emblem for the
holocaust – itself 'a token that permits rapid concord',[36] a cipher for the compact that binds us in
moral solidarity, standing for the common knowledge that we have all 'learnt our lessons' ('as if mass
death were a morality play')[37] – it engenders an anticipation of something agreeably salutary, a further
prop for the cult of self-satisfied memorialisation. But no – there is nothing, or too much, to see. 'We
have such sights to show you'.[38] Rather than using the rubrics of historical singularity and
incomparability to 'block perception',[39] 'Fucking Hell' overloads it with an excessive yet vacuous
slaughter. Something vaguer, diffuse and portentous, would have been more welcome. But rather than
monumental mausolea and palaces of remembrance, CHAPSBRO™'s mourning is modelled on that of the
child survivors of year zero drone violence who, after the fall of Khmer, turned the notorious Tuol Sleng
prison into a hot tourist spot, bricolaging gaudy souvenirs out of collected human skulls, cheerful
reminders of genocidal absurdity more apt than any number of starchitected, tastefully-conceptual
holocaust edutainment centres.
Supplying enough to whet the appetite for a good compassion-workout in other people's misery (but, as
it continues to ask, how much would not be enough?), CHAPSBRO™ refuses to follow through either
with elevating conceptual gestures that would serve as conduits for token exchange of 'deeply-felt
compassion', or deliciously suggestive chiaroscuro that would allow us to indulge our fantasies. (You
could try photocopying the catalogue photos again and again until, lost in inky blackness, you could
almost believe the bodies were real ... You get a bit of what you wanted). But no matter how neurotically
inert the presentation, or how unreal the landscape upon which we are invited to exercise the
imagination, its reception, so it seems, only repeatedly attests to the überbrands' power to hair-trigger
the moral reflexes. Ultimately CHAPSBRO™'s invitation is one we cannot take up: As concord crashes
and burns, our autopilot turns kamikaze, the promise of liberation is converted into a convulsion, moral
identity exposed as problematic tension by the ensuing laughter. Geology of Morals: The molten core
beneath the physiologically-encrusted character-armour of civilized consensus boils up in seismic
waves, ejaculating lava that immediately cools into uncomfortable scabs that we can't help scratching
and scratching and scratching until they bleed again.
Van Driessen: Y'know, this could be a really positive experience for you guys. There's a wonderful and
exciting world out there waiting out there when you discover that we don't need TV to entertain us
Butthead: Huhuhurrr ... he said 'anus'
Beavis: he, heheheh ... entertain us, anus.
Van Driessen: Have you guys heard a word I said?
Butthead: Uuuhhh ... yeah: anus.
– Beavis and Butthead do America[40]
Professor: Name two pronouns.

Student: Who, me?
Professor: According to the market, you are right.
– Economist's joke
A crime against critique: As Picarseholé's 1937 strip 'Dreams and Lies' vied with the Spanish civil war
reprise of Goya's 'Disasters', Turing was busy tinkering with his little machines, infinite ticker-tape
nightmares whose 'states of mind' are recorded by a 'computer' = 'person working in a desultory
manner', a tireless idiot juggling zeros and ones, the warp and weft that in its fateful collision with the
abstract general equivalent would accelerate the Locke-in of a 'second nature' for which too much is
never enough, the unhooking of markets from utility. There Will Be Blood, count on it. 010101 recarpets
the tungsten-carbide stomach,[41] making for a surface more conducive to slipups and bad jokes than
to a firm footing.
Dare you to enjoy the jokes, refuse to learn your lessons or grow up ... Adhering to the letter of the
masochistic contract whereby the artist repeatedly nails its pinhead audience by assaulting them with
more and more shit, on the understanding that they will have been improved and edified by licking it up,
CHAPSBRO™ leaves us to fabricate our own legitimations (or to consume them readymade from the
Tate's white labels). But it leaves open another choice: Refuse the supposedly predestined process
through which 'disgust [...] shame and the claims of aesthetic and moral ideals'[42] ensure the economic
subordination of the infantile to organic adult destiny, as reproductive-historical 'end-pleasure'
transcends the enjoyment of what is now retroduced as 'fore-pleasure', an 'incentive bonus'[43]
orienting us towards the demands of perpetuity. If the reasonable demands of everyday neurosis,
endemic depression and culturally-sanctioned habitual child-abuse must necessarily cast perversion
retrospectively as a 'peculiarly archaic'[44] throwback to a 'primaeval period'[45] or 'prehistoric
epoch'[46] (see CHAPSBRO™ playset 'Hell Sixty-Five Million Years BC' [2004-5]), conversely every
good pervert must betray history and finality, fail critique, and relapse, playing with his toys in
debasement of Geist, continually bringing things down whilst refusing to help with the foundations. Just
as two-faced kunt Karl found his better half – old bearded prosecutor Marx – unable to finish his case
against Kapitalism, unable to achieve the critical coupling with excitable little-girl Marx, unable to put to
death 'the polymorphous perversity of capital' in order to give birth to 'child-socialism':[47] He pursued
the prosecution interminably, endlessly playing with himself and toying with the defendant.
Finally, to resist or 'critique' the absurd theatre of the art-world itself would be just more risible vanity.
'No need to do a critique of metaphysics (or of political economy, which is the same thing), since
critique presupposes and ceaselessly creates this very same theatricality; rather be inside and forget it,
that's the position of the death drive.'[48] No question of 'testing the limits' or sneaking near enough the
engine of redemption to piss in its fuel tank. If there is only outside=inside, then it is a question neither
of averting nor assuring recuperation. Nor of entryism, since the institution is a perfect host body, with
a tungsten-carbide stomach, always hungry, never afflicted by indigestion. Legitimation by the
progressively-minded trustees of culture=neurosis is only ever a matter of time, and the shock-
absorbing metabolic memory-core always has time on its side. Sad forebodings of what is to come:
'Fucking Hell' will Frieze over. As collectable, it conforms to the criteria it systematically exposes as
neurotic dissimulations of the cruel, dismembering virtuality of childs play, prehistoric delirium of
hyperkapital. Desperately clinging to any excuse to carry on playing the game whilst protesting it's all
educashunal, the lobsters squeal to the broth: 'Tell us what to think next'. And CHAPSBRO™, on new
orders from 'the organic body, organized with survival as its goal against what excites it to death',[49]
retools the factory of the unconscious to churn out a million high-quality 1:87 scale fully-posable
action-packed varieties of feculent hellspawn.
ENDNOTES
[1] Nick Land, 'ziigothiC–==X=CoDA==–(CooKing–lobsters–with–jAKe–AnD-Dinos)', in 'Chapmanworld'

(ICA, London 1996)
[2] 'Toys of Misery: A Report on the Toy Industry of China', National Labor Committee, Jan. 2002. At
[3] E. Clark, 'The Real Toy Story: Inside the Ruthless Battle for Britain's Youngest Consumers' (Random
House/Black Swan, London 2007), p.211
[4] Ibid., p.253

[5] Ibid., p.211
[6] Ibid., p.258
[7] Ibid., p.267, p.270
[8] Ibid., p.258
[9] C. Ellis, 'The Hornby Book of Model Railways '(Navigator Guides, Melton Constable 2007), p.13 [10]
E. Clark, 'The Real Toy Story', p.284; 'Model Executive Puts Hornby Back On Track', 'The Guardian', 21
December 2007
[11] Clark, Op. cit., p.176
[12] G. Bataille, 'The Solar Anus', 'Visions of Excess', trans. A. Stoekl (University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis 1985), p.6
[13] P. Allen, 'Hitler, Stalin and Brickpaper', 'Wargames Illustrated', 246, April 2008.
[14] Ellis, 'op. cit.', p.23, p.49, p.91, p.110
[15] Ibid., p.vii
[16] Ibid., p.11
[17] See C. de Tolnay, 'Hieronymous Bosch', trans M. Bullock and H. Mins (Methuen, London 1966): pp.
314-16
[18] See P. Klossowski, 'Sade My Neighbour', trans. A. Lingis (Northwestern University Press, Evanston,
Ill. 1991); G. Deleuze, 'Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty', trans. J. McNeil (Zone, New York 1989), Ch. 2
[19] See T. de Duve, 'Pictorial Nominalism', trans. D. Polan (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
1991)
[20] 'We Are Artists', 1991: 'We are sore-eyed scopophiliac oxymorons'
[21] J. Chapman & S. Baker, 'Jake Chapman on Georges Bataille: an Interview with Simon Baker',
'Papers of Surrealism', Winter 2003
[22] M. Duchamp, 'à l'infinitif / in the infinitive', trans. J. Matisse, R. Hamilton, E. Bonk. (the typosophic
society, 1999), p.5
[23] J.F. Lyotard, 'Libidinal Economy', trans. I.H.Grant (Athlone, London 1993), p. 4
[24] Ibid., Interpolation mine
[25] See T. de Duve, Op. cit, Ch. 2
[26] L. Head & D. Barrett (ed.), 'New Art Up-Close 3': 'Jake and Dinos Chapman '(Royal Jelly Factory,
London 2007), p.7
[27] Chapman and Baker, Op. cit
[28] Jake Chapman, 'I'd Like to have Stepped on Goya's Toes', 'Tate etc'. Issue 8, Autumn 2006.
[29] Jake and Dinos Chapman, M. Lippiatt interview, at
[30] Chapman and Baker, Op. cit
[31] de Duve, Op. cit., p.7
[32] de Duve, Op. cit., p.37
[33] See G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, 'Anti-Oedipus:Capitalism and Schizophrenia', trans. Robert Hurley,
Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1983)
[34] 'La femme 100 têtes,' 1929. On CHAPSBORO™ and Ernst, see P. Osborne 'From Whole to Parts
and Back Again: The Chapman Brothers' Surrealism, Reworked and Improved', C. Townsend (ed.), 'The
Art of Jake & Dinos Chapman', Thames and Hudson, forthcoming
[35] N. Petroni, 'Last Stand at Stalingrad', 'Model Military International', Issue 24, April 2008
[36] W. Sofsky, 'The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp', trans. W. Templer (Princeton University
Press, Princeton, NJ 1996), p.6
[37] Ibid., p.5
[38] 'Hellraiser', New World Pictures 1987, Dir. Clive Barker
[39] Sofsky, Op. cit., p.9
[40] Paramount Pictures, Dir. Mike Judge, 1996
[41] 'Modern society is a stomach carpeted with tungsten-carbide a very expensive stomach where
discourses and figures are used up turn to dust come to reinforce the barrier they claimed to erode [...]
the stomach turns your words and your images into commodities an identity critique even hate are
incorporated' J.F. Lyotard, 'Dérive à partir de marx et freud '(Union Générale d'Éditions, Paris 1973),
p.31
[42] S. Freud, 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality', J. Strachey (trans. J. Strachey, ed. A.
Richards) 'On Sexuality' (Penguin, London 1977), p.93
[43] Ibid., p.118
[44] Ibid., p.118' [45] Ibid., p.88 [46] Ibid., p.91 [47] Lyotard, Op.cit., pp.97-8 [48] Ibid., p.3 [49] Ibid.,
p.2Text from 'Fucking Hell', published by Jay Jopling / White Cube, (London), 2008

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Chapman BrothersAbjection Sustained: Goya, the Chapman brothers and the Disasters of War

4 Chapman, 'Jake Chapman on Goya', p. 41.

8 Žiz�ek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 33.

10 Chapman, 'Jake Chapman on Goya', p. 41.

14 Williams, Goya and the Impossible Revolution, p. 8.

15 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, London, 1977, p. 4.

16 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 11.

22 See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 105.

27 Chapman, 'Jake Chapman on Goya', p. 64.

32 Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 230.

37 Lacan, The Psychoses, 1955–1956, p. 168.

38 Fogle, 'Interview with Dinos and Jake Chapman', p. 3.

39 Žiz�ek, The Fragile Absolute, p. 75.

42 Falconer, 'Doctorin' the Retardis'.

43 Ramkalawon, 'Jake and Dinos Chapman's Disasters of War', p. 69.

45 Ramkalawon, 'Jake and Dinos Chapman's Disasters of War', p. 69.

46 Falconer, 'Doctorin' the Retardis'.

47 Ramkalawon, 'Jake and Dinos Chapman's Disasters of War', p. 72.

48 As reported in the Guardian, 31 March 2003, p. 11.

The Chapmans' doctored version of Goya's Disasters of War

Christopher Turner on Jake and Dinos Chapman

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes

Jake and Dinos Chapman

Jake and Dinos Chapman

Jake and Dinos Chapman

Jake and Dinos Chapman

Brothers in arts: Jake [left] and Dinos Chapman

Jake and Dinos Chapman

Jake and Dinos Chapman

Jake & Dinos Chapman

Jake & Dinos Chapman

Professor: Name two pronouns.

[1] Nick Land, 'ziigothiC–==X=CoDA==–(CooKing–lobsters–with–jAKe–AnD-Dinos)', in 'Chapmanworld'

[4] Ibid., p.253

[6] Ibid., p.258

[7] Ibid., p.267, p.270

[8] Ibid., p.258

[11] Clark, Op. cit., p.176

[14] Ellis, 'op. cit.', p.23, p.49, p.91, p.110

[15] Ibid., p.vii

[16] Ibid., p.11

[24] Ibid., Interpolation mine

[25] See T. de Duve, Op. cit, Ch. 2

[27] Chapman and Baker, Op. cit

[29] Jake and Dinos Chapman, M. Lippiatt interview, at

[30] Chapman and Baker, Op. cit

[31] de Duve, Op. cit., p.7

[32] de Duve, Op. cit., p.37

[37] Ibid., p.5

[38] 'Hellraiser', New World Pictures 1987, Dir. Clive Barker

[39] Sofsky, Op. cit., p.9

[40] Paramount Pictures, Dir. Mike Judge, 1996

[43] Ibid., p.118

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