Jake & Dinos Chapman

The Cruel Practice of Art

'The painter is condemned to please. By no means can he make a painting an object of aversion. The purpose of a scarecrow is to frighten birds, to keep them away from the field where it stands, but even the most terrifying painting is there to attract visitors.’
Georges Bataille, The Cruel Practice of Art

It is appropriate that we start with Georges Bataille, but not the novelist/philosopher who wrote The Cruel Practice of Art in 1949, and certainly not the one-dimensional caricature of eroticism and death usually invoked in relation to the work of Jake and Dinos Chapman. Instead, we have to go back to Georges Bataille in 1930: numismatist (expert in coins) at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and general secretary of the magazine Documents, which drew together other coin experts, ethnographers, musicologists, archaeologists, art historians and ex-surrealist poets, painters and writers. Documents was also the venue for the publication of Bataille’s ‘critical dictionary’, a radical epistemological project intended to reveal the tasks of words rather than their meanings, through short written texts and subversive illustrations. Bataille wanted, as he put it, ‘to bring things down in the world’: to be a debaser.

Documents contained what have since become Bataille’s most important texts on art and representation in their most heterogeneous forms: ‘The Lugubrious Game’ (originally entitled ‘Dalí Screams with Sade’), ‘The Language of Flowers’, ‘The Big Toe’, ‘The Human Figure’ and many more. But within Documents, as with the many magazines and scholarly journals that Bataille contributed to over his lifetime, Bataille was also a brilliant, often wicked reviewer of exhibitions and books. In 1930 he reviewed a new publication by the child psychologist G.H. Luquet called L’Art Primitif, which sought to explain the prehistoric art of the Aurignacian period by comparing it to the drawings of children. Bataille was not happy with either Luquet’s methodology or his conclusions, nor, we can assume, with the way illustrations were used. In his review essay, also called ‘L’Art Primitif’, Bataille chose his own images, which form a supplementary counter argument that runs alongside the text: three watercolours by Lili Masson (aged nine) and two pages of graffiti carved illicitly by children inside churches in Ethiopia (the latter had been rubbed and otherwise recorded by Marcel Griaule, an ethnographer and frequent Documents collaborator). Bataille’s review contains the following:

‘Luquet has linked these actions…(the dirty hands wiped across walls or the scribblings in which he sees the origin of children’s drawing)… to the destruction of objects by children. It is very interesting to note that in these different cases it is always a matter of the transformation of objects, whether the object be a wall, a sheet of paper, or a toy.’

Whereas Luquet designates childish marks as ‘mechanical affirmations of the personality of their authors’, Bataille is interested in the whole process, making a subtle but important distinction between the mark itself and the way that it is made. He continues:

‘It is a matter, above all, of transforming what is at hand. During early childhood the first sheet of paper that comes along, which you fill with dirty scribbling, does just fine. But…the principal transformation is not on the surface on which the drawing is made. The drawing itself develops and is repeated in different versions, as the representation of the object becomes more and more deformed. This evolution is easy to follow, starting with some scribbles. Chance isolates a visual resemblance from a few strange lines that can be fixed through repetition. This phrase represents a kind of second degree of transformation; that is to say, that the altered object (paper or wall) is transformed to the point where it becomes a new object, a horse, a head, a man. Finally, by dint of repetition, this new object is itself altered by a series of deformations. Art, since that is incontestably what it is, proceeds in this sense through successive destructions.’

From church wall to art gallery, representation is always a process of transformation: drawings, as Bataille explains, are ongoing collaborative processes: one bored child scratches the outline of a face and leaves; the next child arrives and transforms the face into a rabbit, and leaves, and so on from week to week. The collaboration happens across time through returns to the same place. And, as Bataille points out, each participant engages in this game knowing that it is wrong and inherently risky. ‘I remember’ he says, ‘having practiced such scrawls: I spent a whole school year smearing the suit of the student in front of me with ink from my inkwell.’

Etchasketchathon is likewise the result of a process of transformation and re-signification, but where Bataille’s Ethiopian children scratch at the walls and doorposts, Jake and Dinos Chapman cut and trace, print and paint their ‘deformations’: interventions multiplied through circuits with inbuilt delays. ‘Big jotter’-style children’s colouring-in books are cut up and the elements reassembled into new compositions. These are then traced onto acetate, together with any additional hand-drawn elements, before leaving the studio to be etched onto copper plates. These plates are then used to produce black and white prints, which are returned to the studio to be hand-coloured. This results in a procedural feedback: colouring-in books are cut up and reused only to end up as new images that still need colouring in. And at each stage, the content is transformed by different hands. It is impossible (and pointless) to conceive and produce an intentional design, for an idea to be seen through from start to finish. Draw a rabbit, go to lunch, come back to find a death’s head: art proceeding through successive destructions.

Indeed, where Etchasketchathon is concerned, the very impoverishment of the raw materials on which the prints are based suggests that collaboration, under these conditions, is more of a get-out clause than a helping hand: the mitigation of inanity as opposed to the idealistic multiplication of possibilities. The original negative for such collaborative practice lies in the surrealism of the 1920s. Books were co-written one word, sentence, or paragraph at a time, poems were plucked from newsprint, and the parlour game of Consequences became the ‘Exquisite Corpse’: draw, fold, pass, repeat (although with the likes of Miro or Dalí ‘playing’ the exquisite corpse was always, inevitably, quite a piece of work). Even the Chapmans’ turn to colouring-in books might be related back to this history, to Max Ernst’s over-painted sales catalogues and children’s almanacs. But Etchasketchathon differs from such precursors in both aim and result. It does not rely on the injection of chance in a search for the marvellous but succumbs instead to the inspirational equivalent of a mouse’s wheel: an endless circular activity where variety is stifled, constrained and constricted. Surrealist automatism in all its forms strived optimistically for novelty, whereas the Chapmans collude in a predetermined stagnation where repetition renders internal iconographic references increasingly desperate. What remains is a depressing surplus of work: lots done, lots more to do, the dots have to be joined, the shapes coloured-in. Their collaboration means work is finished only to return, bounce back, re-emerge needing more attention. Individual actions in this process seem about as much fun as the long car journeys that colouring-in books are used to while away. The results can be seen elsewhere, spilling disingenuously onto a page of their 'Disasters of War' etchings: ‘Dinos, Friday afternoon, 4.30, gone home, couldn’t be bothered, J. xx’

But for some reason, despite or perhaps because the material on which works such as Etchasketchathon, Gigantic Fun and My Giant Colouring Book are based is so mind-numbingly simple, so ineffectual in its raw state, the result is a manic and effective over-compensation. The volume, variety and detail in the end results militate against the formulism of the base materials, which have been overcome by the Chapmans’ sheer bloody-minded activity. Again, Bataille comes to mind. This time the Bataille who wrote deliberately, even compulsively, against the subjects that interested him, alchemically transforming (debasing) the objects of his disaffection through his insistent critical perspective. In 1929, at the height of the fashion for modernist photography (close-ups of every conceivable household utensil, industrial complex and naturally-occurring geometry, impossible to avoid), he wrote in Documents, with, around and against Karl Blossfeldt’s book Art Forms in Nature. Where the photographer, through looming perspective, produced skyscrapers from stamen and found art nouveau flourishes in stalks, Bataille saw instead the hairy sexual organs of flowers and recalled the damp squalor of their roots. Bataille’s collaborative engagements in Documents were fraught, charged affairs in which his focus could be in equal parts illuminating and shaming. He appreciated Blossfeldt’s work but saw in it, nevertheless, something needing urgent attention (like the unstained suit of his schoolmate, perhaps). When Salvador Dalí refused permission for his painting The Lugubrious Game to be reproduced in Documents, Bataille drew his own diagram of it and published his discussion anyway. What was Dalí afraid of? ‘My only desire here’, Bataille wrote, ‘is to squeal like a pig before his canvases.’

The Chapmans describe their relationship with Goya as one of ‘collaboration’ (Goya, presumably, will always work late on a Friday). This idea of collaboration, however, is more plausible than it might first appear. For one thing, it neatly avoids the tired discourse on vandalism, iconoclasm and the destruction of art. Vandalism as a concept was born in the late-eighteenth century out of an ignorant horror at the sophisticated ways that French revolutionaries were re-signifying spaces and objects. Recent scholarship, however, contends (having long since dispensed with ‘vandalism’) that even the apparently neutral term ‘iconoclasm’ fails to account for the ways in which so called ‘iconoclasts’ marshal existing representational codes in the service of new meanings. It is also worth noting that ‘iconoclasm’ – literally, ‘the breaking of images’ – is frequently misused to describe situations where nothing is broken but, instead, something is added. With ‘the destruction of art’ limited by its reference to the unquantifiable and historically contingent category ‘art’, new terms have been established. The deeply problematic, value-laden ‘act of iconoclasm’ has been replaced by the more accurate but ambivalent idea of ‘a process of sign transformation’.

If it is accurate to describe the relationship between the Chapmans and Goya as one of collaboration it is precisely because Goya’s graphic works exist in a perpetual process of sign transformation, of which 'Insult to Injury' is only the most recent evidence. In fact, ‘Goya’ itself (the holding concept used to organise a corpus of work, as much as a historical figure) is also a sign in constant flux. It has recently been argued that it is precisely art history’s redemption of Goya as the original humanist (where 'Disasters of War' represents the triumph of moral outrage over technical sophistication) that made a re-evaluation of the Goya’s ‘irrational supplement’, the indigestible aspect of his work, inevitable. In the face of this same logic, Bataille linked Goya with the Marquis de Sade, suggesting that they share a response to horror that ‘takes the form of a sudden leap into humour, and means nothing but just this leap into humour.‘ It is this Goya: irrational, expendable and hilarious, with whom the Chapmans collaborate.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the surrealists made great strides with this collaborative logic, reanimating a whole pantheon of long-dead writers, artists and poets, with whom they placed themselves on an equal footing. Sade was regularly deployed, popping up with unpublished texts and new portraits so often that you half expect to see his signature on their manifestos. He was also enlisted, through a kind of historical puppetry, into Bataille’s critiques of surrealism, allegedly dipping rose petals in sewage, and screaming for the storming of Bastille while imprisoned inside. But there is a more apposite apocryphal story from this period about Marcel Duchamp ‘collaborating’ with the eighteenth-century architect Jean-Jacques Lequeu. Duchamp is supposed, with Bataille’s help, to have gained access to a restricted section of the Bibliothèque Nationale. There he allegedly ‘corrected’ several Lequeu drawings with interventions intentionally made so as to be invisible to the naked eye. To add insult to injury (to coin a phrase), Duchamp then refused to tell anyone what he had or hadn’t changed. Because Lequeu’s designs were pretty strange to begin with (outsized close-ups of male and female genitals, people poking their tongues out, etc.), experts are now unable to tell whether Duchamp actually did anything or not: other, of course, than permanently scramble perceptions about both his own and Lequeu’s reputations. This, it should be underlined, is not rumoured to be true so much as being truly a great rumour.

It is impossible to believe that the blatant, often tragicomic [22] ‘improvements’ in 'Insult to Injury' could confuse any potential audience, let alone an expert eye. In a knowing semantic game, the collaboration is strictly limited to defacing (actually, de-facing), the figures on each plate of an edition of the Goya prints. Turning to 'Los Caprichios', however, opens a much bigger can of worms. As with Duchamp’s and Lequeu, Goya’s original designs are so wild and unlikely that it is much harder to see where Goya ends and the Chapmans begin. Or at least it would be if the collaboration were not medium-specific. As with 'Insult to Injury', the over-painted ‘improvements’ to 'Los Caprichios' are in colour, the hand of the artist overriding the mechanically reproduced support. The normative process of printing and hand-colouring destabilises this fact, however, as without a ‘clean’ copy of the series for reference, it is difficult for the non-expert to recall what is there and coloured in, and what is new and improved. The collusion between the two sets of works is so close that in places the Goyas seem to have overwritten their own re-versions, as though the images in 'Los Caprichios' were somehow incomplete, waiting for their finishing touches. It is almost as if one of those great historical teams of printers and colourists, (William Blake and his wife, perhaps) had endured some kind of chronic, catastrophic misunderstanding. In this way, the series relates to, and reflects upon Etchasketchathon, rebalancing the ‘big jotters’ and other children’s colouring-in books with Goya’s 'Los Caprichios' so that each benefits through proximity from the vital qualities of the other. The operation at work here even extends, logically, to include the Chapmans’ own earlier work: etchings based on 'Works From The Chapman Family Collection' are themselves remorselessly and unsympathetically over-painted. These sets of finished works exhibited as spectacle in the gallery reflect a curious equivalence in the studio, where colouring-in books sit unashamedly alongside both the Chapmans’ own prints and Goya’s 'Los Caprichios', all waiting to be coloured-in, levelled by a common use-value.

In the quote that introduced this essay – Bataille’s take on 'the cruel practice of art' in 1949 – the ‘modern’ work of art is established as a peculiar cultural form that permits viewers to understand and internalise the double-edged sword of seduction and repulsion, pleasure and horror. It could be argued that in the meantime, Bataille has been proven correct: terrifying paintings, stinking installations and butchered objects still attract visitors. The idea that a work of art, a whole exhibition, or a national art prize, might act as a kind of spectacular ‘anti-scarecrow’ will be one familiar to the Chapmans. It could be argued that with sculptural works such as Great Deeds Against the Dead, Sex and Death, the Chapmans tacitly acknowledge the impossibility of scaring even a few old crows from the field. Whatever they do, they too seem condemned to please.

Writing about 'Insult to Injury', Jake Chapman introduces a compelling literary equivalent of the scarecrow in the form of Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs. A novel stigmatised by cruelty, The Man Who Laughs is the story of a boy deliberately mutilated in preparation for a life of indentured exhibition and performance. The child’s face is broken, fashioned into a permanent smile, which horrifies and entrances in equal measure, like the ear-to-ear grin of a clown. Hugo, however, construes a redemptive twist on the life of circus slavery normally endured by such unfortunates. His ‘laughing man’ escapes his torturers and grows up with a kindly travelling actor; performing by choice, he eventually comes to excel at his craft. But what keeps The Man Who Laughs in the bleak realm of tragedy is that the protagonist performs nonetheless, unable to escape a destiny marked out for him by his disfigurement. His terrifying face cannot help but satisfy an audience, so the laughing man's benevolent exhibitor is at the same time both his saviour and the principal agent of his exploitation.

Bataille also wrote about the mawkish interest in what he called ‘freaks of nature’ in Documents, noting, almost by way of a criticism that ‘in one way or another, in one period or another, mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters.’ And yet, it is precisely indifference to the deformities produced by men (as opposed to nature) that unsettles Goya’s 'Diasters of War' and threatens likewise to taint the Chapmans’ returns to the same ground. It is the position assigned to the audience, whose refusal to remain ‘indifferent’ undoes the moral knot. Just because they don’t care, doesn’t mean they don’t understand.

For Bataille it is precisely the pleasure taken in looking that draws art into a perverse relationship with cruelty. Images of torture may be intended to repel, but works of art eschew an equivalent position of moral judgement. ‘When horror is subject to the transfiguration of an authentic art,’ Bataille writes, ‘it is a pleasure, an intense pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless, that’s at stake.’ With the ability of art to transform horror into pleasure we are back to the link that Bataille identifies between Goya and Sade. Subject to the experience of horror, their responses in their own practice, in the production of art, was to take what Bataille calls ‘a sudden leap into humour’. This leap is an index of genuine affect, as real as an involuntary burst of laughter carved as a broken face.

Evidently, within this reaction there is a tension between an intense but ephemeral moment of pleasure (genuine laughter) and posterity: the endless passage of time into which it erupts. It is not by accident that Bataille describes Goya as taking a sudden leap into humour. For Bataille, the possibility of an effective critical position is always limited to a moment about to pass. History, in these terms, is an alternative to progress, not its companion. In the face of enormous pressure to take horror seriously, to guarantee its place in history, a real laugh (however brief and irrational) is the only honest response for an artist: according to Bataille, ‘the endless carnival of artworks is there to tell us that a triumph, in spite of a firm resolve not to value anything but that which lasts, is promised to anyone who leaps out of the irresolution of the instant.’

Ultimately, Bataille’s The Cruel Practice of Art overwrites, embellishes, colours and perhaps even ‘improves’ the art of Jake and Dinos Chapman. And in this collaboration, Bataille laughs last:

‘This is not an apology for horrible acts. It is not a call for their return. But in this inexplicable impasse, where, in a way, we are moving in vain, these irruptions, which are not the promises of resolution that they seem, and which in the end promise only entrapment, contain all the truth of emotion in an instant of ravishment. It seems that, in any case, emotions, if the meaning of life is inscribed within them, cannot be subordinated to any useful end. The paradox of emotion is that it wants to mean much more than it actually does. Any emotion, which is not tied to the opening of a horizon but to some confined object, emotion within the limits of reason, offers us only a stifled life. Under the burden of our lost truth, our emotions crack up, like a child who imagines comparing their bedroom window with the depths of the night.’

Simon Baker is a lecturer in Art History at the University of Nottingham, and an editor of the Oxford Art Journal. He writes on surrealism, photography and contemporary art, and is currently working on a major exhibition on Georges Bataille and the magazine Documents for the Hayward Gallery, to be staged in 2006.

First Published in Baker, Simon, Jake & Dinos Chapman: Like a dog returns to its vomit, Jay Jopling/White Cube, London, 2005.

More on Jake & Dinos Chapman

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Bibliography
Jake & Dinos Chapman and the Surplus Value of Hell by Rod Mengham
Promotional Trip to Hell by Simon Baker
Esto Es Peor by Robin Mackay

	Related Links
http://www.tate.org.uk/brit... Tate Online
http://www.kunsthaus-bregen... KUB Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria
http://www.tate.org.uk/brit... Tate Online
http://www.tate.org.uk/live... Tate Online

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