ARTWORKER OF THE WEEK #4

Jake and Dinos Chapman @ White Cube

Jake and Dinos Chapman are two of the most celebrated of the YBAs, having exhibited both in Sensation and in the Royal Academy's international follow-up, Apocalypse. The brothers are most famous for figurative sculptures that flirt with abomination and atrocity, but as Mark Sladen found out, their current exhibition at White Cube is very different in character. The show is staged as a display of tribal art from the "Chapman Family Collection", but the objects are in fact mock-ups shot through with a conflicting body of imagery and myth -- that of McDonalds.

MS: Do you speak about this work from within the joke or outside it?

JC: I'm happy to discuss how the work works.

MS: How does it work?

JC: It puts two things into a hostile collaboration: the idea of tribal art and the idea of McDonalds. What we're doing is offering McDonalds a tribal origin that they don't have and ostensibly don't deserve. There are all sorts of little linkages: like woodcarving, which equates nicely with McDonalds' role in rainforest deforestation. The idea that an ethically negative activity can produce something positive, like tribal art, jams the notion that McDonalds and the globalisation discourse are such easy things to un-pick.

MS: What is the nature of your interest in McDonalds and globalisation then?

JC: We're always attracted by the most vulgar and over-determined terms. We're always looking for the things that are redundant of meaning in order to produce more works that amplify that sense of disappointment. One of the things we're trying to avoid is a useful critique of culture.

MS: The body of work has a simple conceptual premise but -- like all your work -- is realised in an exhaustive way. How does that extreme dedication inflect the original idea?

JC: One of the important things about the fanaticism with which the work is produced is that it squeezes out any notion that it is just a bourgeois humanist activity. There's always an attempt in our work to undermine the notion that art is moving towards a defined goal. We try to underscore that by using techniques that are barren, conservative, luddite.

MS: The voice with which you speak about your work is an intellectual one, whereas the work radiates dumbness.

JC: Absolutely. I think that the irony inherent in the heavily handmade nature of our work oscillates really well when it's in tandem with a severe theoretical discourse. I think that's how it works; it works because the one is the buffoon of the other.

Mark Sladen is a curator at Barbican Art Gallery

Works from the Chapman Collection, until 7 December 2002
White Cube, 48 Hoxton Square, London N1, 020.7930.5373


Image © the artist, Jay Jopling / White Cube, photograph by Steve White

© 2002 KultureFlash Limited