Jake Chapman and Tim Marlow in conversation (transcript)

Participants
TM = Tim Marlow, Interviewer
JC = Jake Chapman, Interviewee

Recording starts

TM: So I’ve given my view of the two of you starting to work together but still we have to deal with the issue of how do two brothers, how does that creative process operate?

JC: Every work of art comes from the point of view of a conversation about the work of art before the work of art’s made, so that it means the work is, by its very nature, the consequence of a discursive approach rather than an autobiographical approach. I wanted to make art that was strategically engaged with the world rather than something to do with our innate expressive output.

TM: I mentioned the Gilbert and George connection a little bit, that Dinos had worked for Gilbert and George. I said that you had, I didn’t say it was for very long. But Gilbert and George never appear separately but you’re here as Jake Chapman. Are you here as Jake Chapman just as Jake Chapman, or are you representing Jake and Dinos Chapman? Or does that thing not really matter?

JC: So the thing about Gilbert and George, which I think in some senses offered us negative influences for how we wanted to work, or what would be the most appropriate way for us to deal with the things that we were interested in, was that they offered themselves as a kind of symbiotic entity that’s very impenetrable. However, on the one hand, they seem to present themselves as being completely gregarious and open and honest, in fact it’s quite the reverse.

TM: You’re calling them liars, are you?

JC: Cheats.

TM: They’re very polite.

JC: They’re very polite – you try working for them! No, I think their whole attitude is a strategic kind of performative… Their work is performative inasmuch as they pretend they have this notion that they are the sum total of one artist, whereas I think me and Dinos, the thing that interested us in the consequences of two people making the work was that it would be a fractious activity. It would be something that arguments would have to be hard won. The arguments for making some work rather than others would have to achieve some kind of intellectual and conceptual edifice. I really absolutely don’t believe in that but it sounded good.

TM: From edifice to orifice I think. We’re not going through all the slides but this is a good point to bring this in now. I dealt briefly with the idea that, inevitably, people try and apply a kind of biographical … they look at this and, as I said, brutally, think you must have had a kind of traumatised childhood, which is not the case, and you’ve also made it clear that actually you were anti the biographical approach; it was a kind of detached critical position. When the two of you started to make these mannequin pieces in the early nineties, obviously you were aware of the kind of issues of potential outrage or transgression that may have resulted. Were you surprised though by potential biographical readings of this? Were you expecting that, or was that a surprise?

JC: Yeah, there was this tendency towards some kind of realism whereby a figure with 15 legs, 6 heads, 20 arms and all sorts of different genitalia could be reduced down to a singular sex and a single identity. So there’s a tendency on the part of the viewer to try and produce some kind of humanistic realism, whereas in actual fact, these things are quite patently inhuman.

TM: You’ve written a book, it’s a piece of romantic fiction, it’s called The Marriage of Reason and Squalor. Why did you focus on the notion of romantic fiction? Because you could argue that that’s a slightly soft target.

JC: My ethos is pick on the soft targets first and work your way up! The book is about a writer who’s absolutely hopeless. He’s a very odd shape and he lives on top of a volcano in the middle of a lovely blue ocean, and he falls in love and they forge a kind of slightly grotesque relationship. Every single person in the book is grotesque. In order for him to gain his affections with her, he employs …… She can’t get home, she’s stranded. In order for him to kind of somehow get under her skin, he asks her to be his personal secretary. There’s a point where she suddenly comes across the manuscript which he guards with his little life and in some fit of rage, he’s disappeared somewhere and then she looks at the manuscript which she’s promised him she’ll never look at, and the manuscript is reproduced in the book as it is. It’s kind of full of typos, spelling mistakes, it’s really badly written, I mean really badly written, and I just thought it would be funny to send that manuscript to Mills and Boon and to Penguin and lots of publishers…

TM: Faber.

JC: … and get these letters back, which will then be the cause for his final energetic thermospasm where he gets rejected. I also did something. You can actually pay for critiques of your floundering novel on the Internet and for £500, people will go through it and pick out what’s wrong and what’s right with it and send it back. I think the one that I got was a 15 page analysis of his work called Come Hell or High Water, and you can tell by her writing, this person who’s doing the critique, that she kind of is aware that this floundering author is probably perched on the edge of a stool with a rope around their neck, so she’s very gentle.

TM: When you’re trying to write in that kind of way or when you’re trying to paint, how much is there a kind of act involved? That it’s almost like you have to get into character because naturally you have a facility with words, you and your brother have a facility with making that you’ve talked about not being the essence of your work, but nonetheless you have that facility. How difficult is it and how much is it a kind of piece of method acting to be able to write like that or paint like that?

JC: I don’t think it’s such a strange event to happen within late capitalism[? 6:33] that artists try to adopt the persona of children. Picasso[? 6:41] spent the latter part of his life trying to draw like a child.

TM: He claimed didn’t he, he said that he could draw like Raphael until he was 12…

JC: Yeah.

TM: … which is not true, but anyway, and then he said he spent the rest of his life trying to learn to draw like a child, absolutely.

JC: I’d say that our attempts to draw badly are more akin to something with special needs rather than something to do with trying to be pure. I think we try to be impure. I think our idea of being cack-handed is to make a virtue of being a buffoon, of undermining all of the principles of idealistic, grown-up and mature culture, in favour of something more degrading and scatological. Again, I think the first thing I said was that the way we embarked was a political point of view first, then the idea of making art second. So the idea of drawing on an Adolf Hitler picture and making your drawing worse than his, which I think is kind of the point, has a political dimension to it, which is something to do with saying, well, what happens when art decides to underwhelm rather than overwhelm? What happens if there’s a kind of anti-sublime which is something to do with dragging culture screaming and kicking back towards the potty?

TM: Thank you very much for taking part and Jake, thanks very much for coming.

Recording ends 8:40