The libidinal pleasure of gazing at torture
Johann Hari has some thoughts on the Chapman brothers.
In 2003, the Chapmans bought some of Goya’s original prints – and vandalised them. Where Goya drew with documentary clarity the agonised victims of war, the Chapmans painted the jeering faces of clowns and puppies over them. “Goya’s the artist who represents the kind of expressionistic struggle of the Enlightenment with the ancien regime,” Jake Chapman explained, “so it’s kind of nice to kick its underbelly.” Goya famously said “the sleep of reason produces monsters”. The Chapmans say the opposite: it is when reason is wide awake that it produces monsters…The Chapmans trashing Goya is a pure expression of postmodernist philosophy. They vandalise and ridicule the fruits of reason – and what do they offer in its place?
Oh, you know, the usual stuff, Bataille, the Marquis de Sade, torture, ‘transgression.’
Jake Chapman echoes his hero. He talks about the “libidinal pleasure” that comes from seeing a real picture of a real person being tortured, because of the “transgression of the ethics that that image is supposed to trigger or incite”. A few years ago he was asked in the Papers of Surrealism: “Does Battaille’s formulation of the conception of transgression relate to the way that work like your own is sometimes suggested as being part of a necessary force?” He replied: “Yes – a good social service like the children who killed Jamie Bulger.”
Wo – dude, that’s hip. Or something.
As bad as the consequences might be, this makes me wish there were laws against destroying cultural treasures even if privately owned.
Actually, the loss of cultural treasure here is a useful function of art – a genuine canary in the coal mine. The destruction shuold help alert the ones who both value the treasure, and who are susceptible to the bad ideas.
Plus, clown and puppy faces? These guys probably have dogs playing poker over the mantel.
This is incredibly depressing. Not being British, I am at a total loss to understand how intellectual life there has come to this pass. I used to admire Britain and the British, but the more I’m exposed to their so-called artists and intellectuals (at least those who write for the Guardian), the more disgusted I become.
The Taliban destroyed the Bamayan Buddhas. They were(are) clearly barbarians.
Exactly how are these Chapman numbskulls different?
They are not different in any way.
They rank alongside one of eaglebombers’ probable heroes: – Joseph Maistre, as being fascist creeps.
Simply two more in the long line of self-regarding reactionary turds pantomiming the role of ‘progressive artist’ while whoring to the capitalist elite. In this case the particular twisted expression of the Chapmans’ ‘transgressivity’ is notably odious, but their social role is a well-established one – to mock the serious-minded while claiming to be superior to them, and taking wads of cash to prop up the idea that the social elite is also a cultural elite, because it can afford to support these *@#$$! in their comfortable lifestyles.
“Exactly how are these Chapman numbskulls different?” Quite.
It didn’t even occur to me there might be some overarching pomo ‘philosophy’ to why they did that to the Goyas, I just thought they were complete w@nkers who need pelting with bricks. Can I get a grant for that ?
Have any of the commenters so far ever seen the work of the Chapman brothers?
I have seen the Chapman’s work a number of times in London and it has never failed to underwhelm me. They have the intellectual depth of 14 year old ‘satanist’ Black Metal fans.
“Have any of the commenters so far ever seen the work of the Chapman brothers?”
As someone who has seen all their works over more than a decade I can honestly say that mere words cannot do them justice.
Fortunately there was the Momart fire.
The pissant eternal adolescent’s vandalism of Goya was an aesthetic failure. Like all postmodernsists the Chapmans confuse the existential and universal quantifiers: some beautiful vandalism does not make all vandalism beautiful. They also confuse being and showing, or fingers and moons. The trite ineptness of their defacing of Goya’s etchings is simply embarrassing rather than having the weight it would need for the aesthetic to transcend (and thereby make) the ethical.
Someone should buy the defaced etchings and restore them. Now that would be shocking. Somehow I don’t think the Chapmans would get the joke. Goya was shocked, not shocking. The Postmodernist cannot wear their heart on their sleeve. It might be the wrong colour for this season. I’m sure there was something about ironists who are not touched by their irony, but like the Chapmans I cannot quite remember it.
KB Player – yes. I was dissinterested until they did the Goya vandalism thing, which stuck them straight in Private Eyes’ “Young Artists” strip. My life frankly has been taken up doing other things since then. I’m sure they’d view that as a good thing.
I share the general drift of feeling about the Chapmans but I have to piont out that the Goya vandalism is much less than it seems and the hoo-ha does sort of make their point for them. These were only prints aned are reproducable, only reproductions have less value, but not for any aesthetic reasons.
Were they not original prints? In which case how can they be replaced?
Were they not original prints? In which case how can they be replaced?
They were, they can be replaced with non-original ones. Why is there one kind of magic print worth loads and another worth nothing? I think that had something to do with what the Chaps are driving at.
I think there may be some ambiguity in the way we are using ‘original’ hre too. The prints were not made until the 1930s.
“They have the intellectual depth of 14 year old ‘satanist’ Black Metal fans.”
True enough, but there can be something amusing about them in a superficial way – it isn’t like there is any depth in most modern art, despite the guff written by museum curators to promote them.
“The prints were not made until the 1930s.”
Oh – well that’s certainly a relief. I didn’t realize that (I’m over here, haven’t been following the Chaps, though I have seen the penis-nose children in photos). I did wonder what was meant by original prints; I’m glad it didn’t mean original to Goya.
There were apparently no prints made from the plates during Goya’s lifetime, so in that sense, no prints original to Goya exist.
This was a set of 80 in mint condition, taken from the original plates and published in 1937 as a protest against facist attrocities in the Civil War. It was regarded as highly significant; by no means a replaceable, mass produced item.
Oh – relief over.
Brilliant – vandalize a protest against fascist atrocities from the Spanish Civil War.
Actually…this is interesting. We’re always being told that lack of fondness for postmodernism is neocon or a betrayal of the left or some such – well what’s ‘left’ about these bozos?
“This was a set of 80 in mint condition, taken from the original plates and published in 1937 as a protest against facist attrocities in the Civil War. It was regarded as highly significant; by no means a replaceable, mass produced item.”
They were a decent set but they are indeed replaceable. To think otherwise is to make a fetish of them which is, I assume, part of what the Brothers C are on about.
The other thing to say about the vandalism in question is that, annoying and pretentious as the Chapmans are when they are talking, their images are often very striking, and stimulating. I think there is a good case to be made that they have added to rather than vandalised Goya here (bearing in mind that we can make as many of these prints as we like (although we don’t like because that lowers their price (not value) which is again part of the point).
“Brilliant – vandalize a protest against fascist atrocities from the Spanish Civil War.”
These images aren’t a protest against fascist atrocities even if they have been co-opted to that effect. Undermining an attempt to recast a great an artist’s work as agit-prop(even if we think it is propoganda in a good cause) is not necessarily a bad thing to do.
So John – why couldn’t they secure another set of prints with less significance ? Or prints of the prints ? Disrespect for the living memory of Spanish Civil War is cool, right ? Narcissistic muppets.
“So John – why couldn’t they secure another set of prints with less significance ? Or prints of the prints ? Disrespect for the living memory of Spanish Civil War is cool, right ? Narcissistic muppets.”
Less signficance? Great works of art don’t have less significance when they are rescused from partisan political uses. If anything they have more.
It is detrimental to art, as the Chapmans realise, to fetishise its objects, to reduce them to luxury exchange items.
“to fetishise its objects, to reduce them to luxury exchange items.”
Well it depends on what you mean by “fetishise.” I hate the luxury exchange aspect too, I hate hearing journalists say a given painting is “worth” whatever price it can fetch in a crazed market. But if the value of associations (historical, political, sentimental, and the like) amount to fetishisation, I’m not so sure. It’s sentimental to prefer of two otherwise identical copies of, oh, The Lyrical Ballads, the one that Keats owned, but I think that kind of sentimentality is perfectly understandable and – what shall I say – life-enhancing, rewarding, enriching, happiness-making; that kind of thing; not something to be sneered at. Same with these prints. They could have made their stupid little “point” with a different set of prints. Only then it wouldn’t have been their point. Well, who cares; they can send a telegram.
John M,
I don’t want to nit-pick, but the concensus seems to be (I claim no expertise) that they were’t just a ‘decent’ set, but perfect and in mint condition. And, no, we can’t make as many as we like because each printing degrades the plate. After a hundred or so the degradation is such that the artist, if still around, has to restore the plate. The limited number of prints made from a plate do indeed raise the price, but that is not the only reason to limit them.
John, there’s history in there too. I I wonder if in seventy years’ time people will regard their defacing of the prints as significant as the reason for them existing in the first place, however else you view other contingencies. It’s a mere fad.
And if these dopes wanted to make a comment about luxury exchange items they could have bought them and put them on permanent exhibition in a gallery, thereby taking them out of circulation. No irony in that move though, just a bit of spirit.
John, no disrespect meant here, but the clincher for me was their take on the Bamayan Buddhas. I find the stance repulsive and infantile, which I’m certain they’d be quite happy about… there were after all quite a few rich public school boys in punk bands also. Destroy ! As the Pistols shouted.
Spanish Civil War very appropriate, come to think of it. What was one of the Francoists’ favourite slogans? ‘Viva la muerte!’
Destroy; viva la muerte; you love life but we love death. Fascism is fascism is fascism.
Hmm. For all the talk of the Enlightenment, Hari’s moral-political argument here is exactly the same argument the church and rightwing politicians usually take (e.g. the controversy over the film of Ballard’s Crash several years ago) – he does rather sound like Ann Widdecombe here. It would have been amusing to see Hari writing in the eighteenth century and the birth of romanticism; one wonders what he would have made of Blake’s ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires…’
You say “For all the talk of the Enlightenment, Hari’s moral-political argument here is exactly the same argument the church and rightwing politicians usually take”
Yeah, the Church always says that “instead of relying on divine revelation, we should closely observe the world around us and base a rational world-view on the empirical evidence we gather”.
Sounds like the Church to me…
What link is there between what hari says and the conservative campaign against crash? I don’t get your point. Hari is taking the opposite stance to the Church. It is the Chapmans who are aligned with the Church (and all the other religions) against the Enlightenment.
Ann Widdecombe believes in virgin births and other ‘mircales’ – the precise opposite of Hari’s position.
Well it is like the Church in the sense that they both oppose an artistic work. And different in a whole host of ways.
Two things:
1. It is not to ‘fetishise’ historical artefacts to recognise that they are rare, irreplaceable [in a literal sense] things-in-themselves, worthy of conservation and care. A case of costs and benefits can be made for anything, but it is hard to see how ‘making the Chapman bros even more notorious’ would weigh very heavily, if treated by a reasonable person.
2. The Chapmans make a very good living in a world far removed from the everyday experience of most people. It is a world of privilege and excess. It is, in a very real sense, an immoral world. Unless we are to suddenly discover that they take disabled children to the seaside in their spare time, I can see no reason to view them with anything other than contempt. The childish abuse they directed at Johann Hari is merely further evidence of their total detachment from what I have to call decency. So f*ck ’em.
I think there is a clear distinction between ‘You shouldn’t have made/said/written that.’ and ‘You shouldn’t have destroyed that.’
Herostratic fame is an even lower form of celebrity than pleasuring a pig on reality TV.
In a related vein, I always used to get extremely p*ss*d off when a guitarist (Pete Townsend, Ritchie Blackmore, etc) trashed a perfectly good – no, correction, really nice – instrument as part of their “performance”.
Complete waste of the craftsmanship & effort in building their high-end “toys”. And a big insult to all the struggling, poor, guitarists who’d have given an appendage (!) for a chance of owning such a fine axe.
Still, at least most of these guitar-smashing rockers had some vestiges of talent…unlike the Chapmans.
Ho hum
You can tell I’m a boring muso, eh?
:-)
Yes, but when Kieth Moon trashed a set; pure art.
“Exactly the same argument – the judgement of art according to moral or political criteria rather than aesthetic criteria.”
But that’s not exactly the same argument. You can claim it’s the same kind of argument, but not that it’s the same argument, because it isn’t.
“and you’d wipe out vast swathes of art and literature”
You would? By criticizing it? Criticism isn’t the same thing as censorship you know. Anyway your argument just turns around and bites you: Hari could just say at that rate you’d wipe out vast swathes of criticism and reviewing.
“you can’t hold fire”
Sure you can. You can just select your targets. That may not be consistent, but why does it have to be?
The liberal neocon thing wasn’t an ad hominem, I meant it was like being called a liberal neocon, as Johann was by Prospect when he said nice things about a book Jeremy and I wrote. I wasn’t calling you a liberal neocon. Sorry for unclarity.
“Viva la Muerte”…
And the Islamists say that you (the West) love your decadent life, but we love death (and union in the heaven of the “prophet” …..
Erm … Heil, someone?
“I don’t want to nit-pick, but the concensus seems to be (I claim no expertise) that they were’t just a ‘decent’ set, but perfect and in mint condition. And, no, we can’t make as many as we like because each printing degrades the plate. After a hundred or so the degradation is such that the artist, if still around, has to restore the plate.”
This isn’t nitpicking, these things are very important to the art market, they just don’t have any relevance to the art itself. Plates degrade but they can be repaired by a skilled artisan, the artist’s hand needn’t go anywhere near it. In fact, it is easy enough, especially today, to remake near-identical plates from scratch (identical enough that no expert could tell the difference from looking only). There is a reason why the art market doesn’t like that sort of thing to be well known, but it isn’t anything do do with aesthetics. It is quite possible to have as many of these prints, in mint condition, as we like, all identical except for tiny accidental and meaningless imperfections. The reason we don’t, is that they would be worthless in cash terms, although hugely life-enriching for the people who can get hold of them.
Of course there is sentimental value attached to certain objects and there is no harnm in that. Some people will pay a fortune for Andy Wharhol’s underpants, but why should the rest of us be bound by these people’s idiosynchrasies? If I come to own a pair of Andy Wharhol’s cacks I will feel feel perfectly free to do what I like with them, regardless of the outrage of Wharholists (relax if you are such, this isn’t likely to happen). My advice to people who invest sentimental value into particular instances of mass-produced objects, is not to sell them.
Hendrix at Monterey. Untouchable.
“It is detrimental to art, as the Chapmans realise, to fetishise its objects, to reduce them to luxury exchange items. “
Have they told Saatchi this?
If they are making a critique, they seem happy to be untouched by it. So are they poseurs or hypocrites?
Interesting debate. I think John M has put forward a set of very good points, and his interpretation of the significance of the Chapman defacement of Goya’s prints is a hell of a lot better than the simplistic charges of vandalism etc.
When the Chapmans’ work was done (all those years ago) I really liked it (I was young and naive, yes). The defaced images struck me as having significant impact.
Now, though, I think that it’s worth looking at the work and asking whether the statement the Chapmans (Chapmen?) made (as well explained by John M) was really substantive enough to justify the act. I’ve been umming and ahhing over that. Ultimately, though, I think their statement was too banal to really pass muster – thus it is not that I find the defacement itself unacceptable, just that their artschool banality robs the act of much of the significance it might have had.
Incidentally, the 1937 printing was the 7th run of prints, so though struck from the original plates it was not the first ed. by any means. The argument certainly has been advanced (by Goya expert Juliet Wilson-Bareau, for a start) that the cooption for a politicized conflict of what was intended as a universal disavowal of war was itself a desecration. (Not sure how far I condone that interpretation, but it’s worth giving thought to it).
“If they are making a critique, they seem happy to be untouched by it. So are they poseurs or hypocrites?”
I am not asking anyone to like them. They are hard to like. But being a hypocrite and/or a poseur does not disqualify you from being a major artist. If it did, we’d lose a lot of big names.
We have been a bit caught up in this debate on the ‘vandalism’ question and forgotten the business about ‘libidinal pleasures’ and I think the Chapmans have something interesting to say there as well, even if it is said in a characteristically annoying, provocative and disgusting way. The pleasure taken in the horrific content of images such as those of Goya is nearly always swept under the art historical carpet but it is surely there and the Chapmans make us face up to that (or they seem to me to do that). This is a shocking thing to have to face. Most of us would prefer to think that Goyas ‘anti-war’ images ()and others such as Guernica) are uncomplicatedly moral and have a clear anti-violence ‘message’. But that is naive. They give immense aesthetic pleasure while depicting abominal acts, like much art (in popular art such as slasher movies this idea is uncontroversial, of course). The Chapmans are forcing us to confront that aspect of this art, and fine art in general, again. These images are about the thrill and excitement of violence and war as well as its horrors. This is uncomfortable but, to my mind, helps make Goya fresh and vivid again and does him a service. Insisting that the images are simply ‘anti-fascist’ statements or something like, on the other hand, kills them dead. Art is supposed to complicate, not simplify.
“The pleasure taken in the horrific content of images such as those of Goya is nearly always swept under the art historical carpet”
No, you present a good case but I don’t think we needed their puerile clever-dickery to know that ‘we’ (civilisation) occasionally fetishise the contents of pictures of anything upwards of car crashes. Banal. Old news.
“Art is supposed to complicate, not simplify.”
Well, arguably (though I’m not sure about ‘supposed-tos, I do get your point). But are the Chapman’s any less guilty of simplification? Do they really add anything to the dialogue about war and viscerality that the Goya prints did not themselves say? That’s part of what I mean by the banality of their message, I guess.
I think that visually they have done something rather interesting with the images; but remember that given the subject of this debate what is at issue is what is added to that by using these ‘original’ prints.
BTW John, please excuse the brusque manner, I hate traffic, and seem to spend most of my life being in it. It’s an interesting debate.
But now much of being a ‘major artist’ these days *is* about being a poseur and a hypocrite? After all, you aren’t ‘major’ unless rich people and state-sponsored cultural institutions have paid large sums for your work, work which supposedly comments critically on things like the existence of rich people and the state…
Andy Gilmour – I had it on good authority that Blackmore actually used stunt strats that were cheap mock-ups – the roadies used to swap them for his vintage jobbys just before the wig-outs. He was – and is – very tight-fisted.
@ Dave
Hmmm. Conflating ‘state-sponsored institutions’ with ‘the state’ (meaning what, anyway?) is a bit disingenuous of you (methinks).
So if I’m right, these prints have nothing to do with Goya at all, unlike, say, Rembrandt’s etchings or Picasso’s prints? They were produced by someone unrelated to Goya in any way in the 1930s. So what’s all this stuff about their intrinsic value? They’ve got no more intrinsic value that a picture in an old edition of Illustrated London News. And the Chaps did to them what the surrealists did to such illustrations, changed them to make us look at them differently. Unlikely to put then up there with Titian and Raphael in the long run but interesting nevertheless.
And I defy anyone not to be moved by their ‘Hell’. Am I right in thinking that this one of the works destroyed in the Saatchi fire? Shame if so.
Why is it disingenuous? I was under the impression that a fashionably nihilistic anarchism was still a requirement of the ‘artistic elite’ just as it has been since the 1860s or thereabouts. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe they do have something to tell us about the appropriation of public funds to support them that’s worth hearing. I seriously, nay earnestly, doubt it, though. DO a KLF and burn a real £million, now that’s an artistic statment… Of course, I can think of about a million better things to do with the money, but at least they didn’t do a D. Hirst and use their ill-gotten gains to collect more crud, and hence inflate its notional ‘value’ still further.
“But that’s not exactly the same argument. You can claim it’s the same kind of argument”
Fair point (though I do still think the tone of his complaint is identical to the religious right and shares the same indifference to the question of artistic merit). But I really don’t care about the exact political or moral criteria being invoked – both assume that art can be reduced to propositional content alone and should be solely treated in those terms. Hari could have described the Chapmans as peddlers of crude statements thinly dressed up as art and unworthy of the name. But instead he responded to it as if he was responding to a newspaper article or a treatise (and I’mn not even sure that this isn’t taking it more seriously than it deserves).
“Anyway your argument just turns around and bites you: Hari could just say at that rate you’d wipe out vast swathes of criticism and reviewing.”
If it takes politics as the sole point of reference, I’m inclined to respond that it wouldn’t be a great loss. But it’s not so much that I want to exclude politics from consideration as that I want aesthetics included. Knowing that Knut Hamsun and Ezra Pound were Nazis genuinely does change how one sees their work, but even then it would certainly be reductive to take that as the sole point of reference.
“Sure you can. You can just select your targets. That may not be consistent, but why does it have to be?”
Because while aesthetics may be a subjective concern, I don’t think that follows as well for politics or ideological commitments. You can’t dimiss one artist for a set of ideological views and absolve another artist with the same commitments, when your case is solely based on the nature of those commitments rather than on aesthetic merit. Hari could have raised aesthetic merit as an issue – but he didn’t and came across as being fundamentally indifferent as to whether he was talking about good or bad art. Given that, the logical implication of his argument is that Blake and Rimbaud have to be discarded along with the Chapmans.
I don’t know much of anything about Bataille – but I’m not sure why Hari mentions Sade in the same breath as anti-Enlightenment. If anything, as a trenchant critic of religious dogma, internalized religious-based morality, and a champion of the autonomy of individual reason, he’s rather the opposite. Maybe the Chapmans wish to use the same kind of subversiveness now levelled as what they perhaps regard as reigning Enlightenment-based ideology – but that’s another story. As John M indicated, the “libidinal pleasure of gazing at torture” runs like a red thread through art and non-art long before Sade and long after him – and will be still with us after we’ve completed the Dyson sphere. Might be a biological thing. Pace Hari, uncovering that unpleasant truth, forcing the viewer of reader to look into the abyss, does in no way constitute an attack on Enlightenment values, in my opinion.
Nick S –
Yeah, he certainly did once he’d got to the point of having it as an “expectation” on the part of the audience…!
On t’other hand, there’s definitely a point on “Deep Purple In Concert” where he has to do some rapid (slightly desperate?) retuning/adjustment having chucked his main axe into a speaker stack…without quite destroying it completely. To be fair, Strats can take a lot more abuse than Townsend’s Rickies, but it’s still a pointless bit of posturing…
anyway, the “cheapness” of a guitar is only relative to the potential owner’s income. What you can get second-hand for under £80 or so nowadays is waaay better than the East German strat copy I started on 21 years ago, but is still a big investment for a lot of people.
And setting fire to your instrument on stage is not big, or indeed clever, Hendrix or not….! :-)
I once saw a tw@t in edinburgh attempt to emulate hendrix’s guitar abuse for a “big rock finish” – foot-pedalling the whammy bar, sliding it across the stage on the strings, that sort of thing. Then out came the lighter fluid…should have seen his face after the gig when he finally realised exactly what he’d done to his (old, rather nice) guitar.
and don’t get me started on all those “angry” punk @rs@h@l@s…!
:-)
where’s me pipe and slippers??
Sure Andy, the whole thing is embarassingly juvenile now; you only needed to see Mooney or Hendrix do it once (on archive footage if like me you’re too young to have been there…).I must admit to always quite admiring Townsend’s intelectual hooligan schtick tho.
The rest was pure Spinal Tap if you ask me… (All of which is quite rivetting I’m sure to all the rest reading this thread…) Regards, Nick (entering the Arena of the Studded Slipper.)
Whether you think it should have been done or not, I think it was done very well.
The idea of exposing our pointless fetishisation of originals was pulled off cleverly – they picked something that was only marginally an ‘original’, and of which identical copies are easily made, and defaced it for the sake of defacing something with an inflated material value but no increase in artistic value. In doing so they created another work of art, which clearly involved a lot of work to do.
Then the choice of slightly sinister puppies and clowns was a very clever one. They took something we deem very serious – war, and graphically portrayed – and trivialised it into twee entertainment. But they weren’t the first to do it. The moment aspiring cultured folks started gawping at Goyas in galleries and being disgusted for fun, the horror-to-pastime process was complete.
And then I bet you lot rather enjoyed your chance to be outraged at this absolute travesty and rant about it on the internet. You took time out of your day to do it, anyway. Travesty-to-controversty-to-entertainment. Their piece of art trivialised too.
“They took something we deem very serious – war, and graphically portrayed – and trivialised it into twee entertainment.”
And having been entertained by posting our comments/grievances we are complicit in the Chapman’s vandalism. ‘Transgression’ seems the only strategy that grabs our attention, angering us more than war documentation does. It’s horrifying to take pleasure from destruction, torture, murder, and APPARENTLY vandalism, too.