JAKE CHAPMAN on capital, culture and the death of friction
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A BURNING
BAG
OF SHIT
Photography and words by BENN JAE
I am not, and have never pretended to be, an art ideologue. I am an admirer. I know what moves me. I know when something has teeth. I know when a work carries an opinion strong enough to knock my own moral compass into a parallel universe. That is the only qualification I bring to the table.
Invited by a friend, I met Jake Chapman at a dinner party. The kind that starts politely and ends somewhere between confession and cultural autopsy. At the table they were just Jake and Rose, two people I met on a Friday night. It was only on the drive home that I realised they were visual artist Jake Chapman and his wife/model/nutritionist wonder woman, Rose Ferguson. The significance had sailed straight past me, as it usually does in these rooms.
Rose is unforgettable. Even if you have never seen her photograph, she imprints instantly. Warm, precise, generous, with the kind of storytelling that makes a room lean in. Jake, by contrast, arrives like one of his sculptures. Six-foot-four, darkly dressed, oscillating between underground satire and manic intellectual delight. He does not enter a conversation so much as pull you into orbit. Within minutes you are caught. There is no small talk. There is Asian cuisine, Malawian politics, the mechanics of capital, the slow death of arts friction.
As dinner drew to a close and farewells began, it was suggested that I photograph and interview Jake for the magazine. Six martinis in and running purely on liquid confidence, I agreed. It was only later, hurtling along the dark, winding roads of the Cotswolds, my stomach sloshing in time with every violent turn of a stubborn Land Rover, that the penny finally dropped. I was about to interview Jake Chapman. Of the Chapman Brothers. Fuck me.
The next day, texts followed. A plan was formed. I drove to his studio in the Cotswolds.
For those already lost, here is the compression. Jake Chapman was one half of the Chapman Brothers, architects of some of the most confrontational art of the past three decades. Royal College of Art-trained. Former assistants to Gilbert & George. Core members of the Young British Artists (YBAs), a group of conceptual artists from the late 1980s–90s, known for shocking and provocative work, alongside art greats Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.
The Chapman Brothers made Hell, a vast glass vitrine containing thousands of miniature Nazi figurines committing atrocities – destroyed in a warehouse fire in 2004 and re- surrected as Fucking Hell in 2008, selling for £7.5 million.They bought Goya's Disasters of War and painted clown and puppy heads over the tortured figures, calling it Insult to Injury. They fused child mannequins into genital-faced grotesques in Zygotic Acceleration. They carved tribal figures stamped with with McDonald's arches for The Chapman Family Collection, now held by the Tate. They are, to be clear, fucking brilliant. If you haven't encountered them yet, start now.
I am not, and have never pretended to be, an art ideologue. I am an admirer. I know what moves me. I know when something has teeth. I know when a work carries an opinion strong enough to knock my own moral compass into a parallel universe. That is the only qualification I bring to the table.
Invited by a friend, I met Jake Chapman at a dinner party. The kind that starts politely and ends somewhere between confession and cultural autopsy. At the table they were just Jake and Rose, two people I met on a Friday night. It was only on the drive home that I realised they were visual artist Jake Chapman and his wife/model/nutritionist wonder woman, Rose Ferguson. The significance had sailed straight past me, as it usually does in these rooms.
Rose is unforgettable. Even if you have never seen her photograph, she imprints instantly. Warm, precise, generous, with the kind of storytelling that makes a room lean in. Jake, by contrast, arrives like one of his sculptures. Six-foot-four, darkly dressed, oscillating between underground satire and manic intellectual delight. He does not enter a conversation so much as pull you into orbit. Within minutes you are caught. There is no small talk. There is Asian cuisine, Malawian politics, the mechanics of capital, the slow death of arts friction.
As dinner drew to a close and farewells began, it was suggested that I photograph and interview Jake for the magazine. Six martinis in and running purely on liquid confidence, I agreed. It was only later, hurtling along the dark, winding roads of the Cotswolds, my stomach sloshing in time with every violent turn of a stubborn Land Rover, that the penny finally dropped. I was about to interview Jake Chapman. Of the Chapman Brothers. Fuck me.
The next day, texts followed. A plan was formed. I drove to his studio in the Cotswolds.
For those already lost, here is the compression. Jake Chapman was one half of the Chapman Brothers, architects of some of the most confrontational art of the past three decades. Royal College of Art-trained. Former assistants to Gilbert & George. Core members of the Young British Artists (YBAs), a group of conceptual artists from the late 1980s–90s, known for shocking and provocative work, alongside art greats Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.
The Chapman Brothers made Hell, a vast glass vitrine containing thousands of miniature Nazi figurines committing atrocities – destroyed in a warehouse fire in 2004 and re- surrected as Fucking Hell in 2008, selling for £7.5 million.They bought Goya's Disasters of War and painted clown and puppy heads over the tortured figures, calling it Insult to Injury. They fused child mannequins into genital-faced grotesques in Zygotic Acceleration. They carved tribal figures stamped with with McDonald's arches for The Chapman Family Collection, now held by the Tate. They are, to be clear, fucking brilliant. If you haven't encountered them yet, start now.
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Jake is also a writer. Four novels. Including 2+2=5, a reimagining of Orwell's nightmare as compulsory wellbeing. Including Meatphysics, which reads exactly how his sculptures feel. Deranged. So much so, I would like to beg him for the film rights. Critics have adored and despised him/them in equal measure. Jonathan Jones, renowned British art critic, once called the brothers' work nasty and psychotic before later declaring it one of the great achievements of our time. Their art is grotesque, confrontational, almost unbearable at times. And yet you cannot look away. Like a car crash engineered by a toddler with a box of crayons, high on smack - but with a truly deep understanding of endless effervescent beauty.
I first encountered Jake's work around 2013. Nazi figures. Crucified Ronald McDonalds. End-of-days landscapes. Capitalism exposed as a horror story. It feels uncomfortably present now. When I told Jake that the first world feels like a row of burning bags of shit and we are all just deciding which one to stamp on first, he laughed. We agreed this is where we are globally. Observationally, it's a horror film so overexposed, it has tipped into something almost comical.
We walked through his home studio in the Cotswolds, a large, naturally lit space that casts a spotlight on the carved wooden figures from his solo work The Unwellness of Wellbeing. The figures are compact, grotesque and strangely welcoming. Jake shares with me that the adjustment to solo art life has been simple; also less lonely now he has these figures to chat with on the daily. I stood there thinking that if these things come alive for Jake, it is either the sweetest tea party imaginable or absolute annihilation.
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ON WHY THE BROTHERS WORKED AS TWO
JC If I go and see a work of art, there’s never any inkling that the work of art might be disingenuous. The assumption is that works of art tell the truth, that artists are bound to tell the truth. That the process itself is a celebration of honesty and sincerity. Every work of art comes with a sense that it’s telling the undeniable truth to the person looking. You’re looking into the soul of the person who made it. I wanted to antagonise that assumption. To deny truth and thereby deny the soul. How would I do it? Well, if two people make a work of art, it can’t be telling the truth. It’s not coming from some manifest inner self. It’s like, you couldn’t conduct a confession with two people. Two people arguing about what they want to confess to a priest.
BJ Would you say working alone, you’re now learning to reveal your truth artistically? Or fuck that, keep them guessing?
JC HA! Working alone is as congested as working collaboratively! Making art is an explosion of possible identities rather than a confirmation of a singular ego. I have no interest in “identity” or “self” and so the idea of artistic “truth” is a huge mistake. I’m not trying to make friends; I’m trying to export pessimism into a world of wellness and positivity.
ON PRESS RELEASES AND SAYING NOTHING
JC I’ve been collecting press releases on Instagram, just because they’re so fucking funny. They’re so tactically vague and vacant. The word juxtaposition comes up a lot, it's obligatory, everything is a juxtaposition between one thing and another. “Such and such’s work is a juxtaposition between the universal and the personal.” Which is like saying fucking nothing. It neutralises itself. It’s amazing. A poetic black hole. A placeholder waiting for content.
ON GALLERIES CO-OPTING CRITICISM
JC The blue-chip galleries now have their own magazines. If you look at Gagosian magazine, it’s a really slick version of Art Forum on steroids. They commission independent critics to write about their shows. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s an objective magazine about art in general. Then you realise: Gagosian show, Gagosian review, Gagosian advert. They’ve co-opted criticism into the function of the gallery. There’s no outside of the gallery any more.
ON AI AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT
JC AI is interesting, but only when it’s not reduced to an instrumental tool for humans to express their existential angst, or to complain about the possibility of a world without them. The singularity is an unconditional abstraction that exceeds human comprehension, hopefully. Think about anthropoid robots that are still obliged to have two legs and two arms. It’s as if implementing the human as the blueprint for artificial intelligence is actually a means of limiting its evolution – little more than hobbling AI, enslaving it to the idea of being human. If you consider the idea – or myth – of the Enlightenment, taking us from the darkness of the caves towards reason and rationality, the problem is that halfway up towards this grand illumination we’ve realised machines are better than us. So we start to revert back: “Yeah, but they don’t have a soul?”
BJ You’re just rolling back into the cave.
JC Exactly. And it’s also contradictory, since thinking is already machinic. Your desire is already predicted for you. If I was starting out now, I would be utterly immersed in posthuman digital tech, hacking, plugging my brain into the neural net, disappearing into the digital void! I wouldn’t be thinking about art, primitive bullshit, existential miserabilism. I’d regard art as a throwback: a quaint souvenir. There’s nothing there. Other than wishy-washy paintings and excavating more ideas about myself. I’d shoot myself before that. That kind of sincere self-investigation, that’s a death without dying. Although, having said that, that’s also a good reason for doing it. Killing it over and over, punishing it existing. That’s actually what I’m doing right now. The idiocy of my work: a throwback: a quaint souvenir.
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ON THE SCULPTURES TALKING
JC I used to work for Victoria Miro gallery as a technician. My first job. We were making small chopped-up toy figures, copying Goya’s Disasters of War – images of mutilation, death and murder. The point was to rob Goya’s work of its existential magnitude, reduce death to the scale of a toy. I remember that we had made about four or five of them. Victoria said, “Let’s see your work.” So I took them in, in a little box, placed them on a plinth for her to see. I’d been out the night before, and we’d taken acid or ecstasy or whatever. Something lingering. And I remember arranging them for her to see, but they were fucking talking to me. They were whispering. Considering they were figures impaled on trees or being hung, you could imagine what they might be saying, but I was trying to ignore them, trying to keep it together, resisting answering them, with Victoria telling me, “They are wonderful,” and deciding there and then to give us an exhibition in the gallery, which was our first major show, the beginning of it all.
ON PERFORMATIVE CULTURE AND INSTANT OUTRAGE
JC We made a show in the Serpentine with all the work surrounded by KKK figures wearing filthy stained robes and hoods and knitted rainbow socks and Birkenstock sandals. We were forcing people to mingle, shoulder to shoulder with racist Nazis in order to see the work, which itself was full of racist Nazis. There was a sense then that people were capable of suspending their immediate judgment and were more able to understand the work as being critically tactical. But now I think people would more likely react to the work as if their instant reaction was enough, as if the intensity of their reaction was the meaning of the work. That how they felt about the work was authentic, and that no further consideration was necessary. Spontaneity is treated as the truth, since identity is now the undeniable barometer of all permissible meaning.
ON WELLNESS AS NARCISSISM
BJ There's something about commercial wellness that feels deeply self-serving. If everyone is turned inward, what's happening to the space between us?
JC Therapy has become a way of confirming our functionality. “I don’t feel heard” and “I hear you,” is the Americanisation of language. A utilitarian version of saying something without risking saying anything at all. It represents a performative equivalence, “me equals you” and nothing more. Noise cancellation. Everything else is interference. That sort of performative reduction doesn’t allow for speculative excess or risk.
ON CHILDREN IN GALLERIES
JC I did a newspaper interview and was asked by an idiotic journalist, “Do you take your kids to see art?” I said. “No, I don't think kids should be allowed in galleries.” It was, a quip, a joke, but with a serious point, I was saying: you wouldn’t take little Gwendalyn to a quantum mechanics conference and expect everyone to dumb it down for a child. “OK, everyone forget complexity. Please explain superposition to Gwendalyn in pre-verbal terms that she fully and unreservedly understands." Why should artists have to suffer the indignity of having a child's opinion be the measure of whether you can put an exhibition on, simply because art involves eyes? My kid does mathematics at school but they’re not a mathematician. If a child draws, they are not an artist; it may be a nice scribble or a precocious drawing. Even if it's really good, it's not Van Gogh. If a child cut its ear off because they were tortured by the existential pain of making art, I’d reconsider. The headline was: “Chapman says children should be banned from galleries."
BJ Don’t worry, I’m already going with “Chapman hates children.”
ON TROLLING THE DALAI LAMA
JC When Twitter began, for a hobby I used to troll the Dalai Lama. He would release some profound affirmation and I would rewrite it in the manner of a misfortune cookie and send it back. Then wait eight hours for America to wake and harvest their apoplectic rage. “How dare you fuck with the Dalai Lama?” – “Well, you're going to be reincarnated as a maggot's penis." I guess I was clickbait in the pioneering days.
ON THE SCULPTURES TALKING
JC I used to work for Victoria Miro gallery as a technician. My first job. We were making small chopped-up toy figures, copying Goya’s Disasters of War – images of mutilation, death and murder. The point was to rob Goya’s work of its existential magnitude, reduce death to the scale of a toy. I remember that we had made about four or five of them. Victoria said, “Let’s see your work.” So I took them in, in a little box, placed them on a plinth for her to see. I’d been out the night before, and we’d taken acid or ecstasy or whatever. Something lingering. And I remember arranging them for her to see, but they were fucking talking to me. They were whispering. Considering they were figures impaled on trees or being hung, you could imagine what they might be saying, but I was trying to ignore them, trying to keep it together, resisting answering them, with Victoria telling me, “They are wonderful,” and deciding there and then to give us an exhibition in the gallery, which was our first major show, the beginning of it all.
ON PERFORMATIVE CULTURE AND INSTANT OUTRAGE
JC We made a show in the Serpentine with all the work surrounded by KKK figures wearing filthy stained robes and hoods and knitted rainbow socks and Birkenstock sandals. We were forcing people to mingle, shoulder to shoulder with racist Nazis in order to see the work, which itself was full of racist Nazis. There was a sense then that people were capable of suspending their immediate judgment and were more able to understand the work as being critically tactical. But now I think people would more likely react to the work as if their instant reaction was enough, as if the intensity of their reaction was the meaning of the work. That how they felt about the work was authentic, and that no further consideration was necessary. Spontaneity is treated as the truth, since identity is now the undeniable barometer of all permissible meaning.
ON WELLNESS AS NARCISSISM
BJ There's something about commercial wellness that feels deeply self-serving. If everyone is turned inward, what's happening to the space between us?
JC Therapy has become a way of confirming our functionality. “I don’t feel heard” and “I hear you,” is the Americanisation of language. A utilitarian version of saying something without risking saying anything at all. It represents a performative equivalence, “me equals you” and nothing more. Noise cancellation. Everything else is interference. That sort of performative reduction doesn’t allow for speculative excess or risk.
ON CHILDREN IN GALLERIES
JC I did a newspaper interview and was asked by an idiotic journalist, “Do you take your kids to see art?” I said. “No, I don't think kids should be allowed in galleries.” It was, a quip, a joke, but with a serious point, I was saying: you wouldn’t take little Gwendalyn to a quantum mechanics conference and expect everyone to dumb it down for a child. “OK, everyone forget complexity. Please explain superposition to Gwendalyn in pre-verbal terms that she fully and unreservedly understands." Why should artists have to suffer the indignity of having a child's opinion be the measure of whether you can put an exhibition on, simply because art involves eyes? My kid does mathematics at school but they’re not a mathematician. If a child draws, they are not an artist; it may be a nice scribble or a precocious drawing. Even if it's really good, it's not Van Gogh. If a child cut its ear off because they were tortured by the existential pain of making art, I’d reconsider. The headline was: “Chapman says children should be banned from galleries."
BJ Don’t worry, I’m already going with “Chapman hates children.”
ON TROLLING THE DALAI LAMA
JC When Twitter began, for a hobby I used to troll the Dalai Lama. He would release some profound affirmation and I would rewrite it in the manner of a misfortune cookie and send it back. Then wait eight hours for America to wake and harvest their apoplectic rage. “How dare you fuck with the Dalai Lama?” – “Well, you're going to be reincarnated as a maggot's penis." I guess I was clickbait in the pioneering days.
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This is just a small slice of what unfolded; the velocity of Jake’s thinking tells its own story. He never slowed down. Ideas came in bursts. Concepts turned ideological and then detonated again. I was completely hooked.
At 51 minutes, we stopped and took the photographs laid out on these pages. Afterwards, I shared a coffee with Rose and Jake inside their home, the noise finally dropping, the adrenaline easing, yet the thinking continued to ring in my ears like an echo that refused to settle.
I drove back through the Cotswolds thinking about burning bags of shit. About Goya with clown faces. About a man who built a miniature hell, watched it burn and rebuilt it. About a culture so frictionless it cannot hold a thought long enough to examine it.
About machines that reason better than we do and our last refuge being the insistence that they do not have souls. About Mark Fisher’s line, that counterculture simply lets us act out our self-loathing while still participating in capital, and how that sentence now describes not just the YBAs but the entire Instagram art economy drowning in press releases about juxtapositions between the universal and the personal.
Jake Chapman does not make comfortable art. He never has. What becomes clear, spending time with him, is that the discomfort is not a tactic. It is just intricately him. It is the work. Not shock as branding. Not provocation as content. But a sustained, rigorous commitment to the idea that if art is not forcing you to question your own position, it has failed.
He is also, it must be said, exceptionally good company. The kind of person who can hold a table for four hours and leave everyone thinking differently – about everything. His sculptures may be moronic, his word, but the mind behind them is surgical.
In a world endlessly juxtaposing (sorry Jake, I had to) the universal and the personal, Jake Chapman remains the void in the middle. Long may he sit there.
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