Output details

Memento Moronika

Research content/process:

The output by Jake Chapman (co-produced equally with his brother Dinos) comprises the series of 9 bronze sculptures, collectively entitled ‘Little Death Machines,’ exhibited at the Kestnergesellschaft gallery in Hanover, Germany. These works (all 2008) are: I wanted to Hurt an Enemy, I wanted to Punish Myself, Say Goodbye to Loneliness, I Learnt the Hard Way, I Felt Insecure II, I Wanted to Be Popular, Someone Offered Me Money To Do It and It Was A Romantic Setting (illustrated in the accompanying catalogue Jake and Dinos Chapman: Memento Moronika: pp.42-53). The work I Wanted to Impress Friends III was also exhibited but not illustrated in the catalogue. These sculptures, made from bronze casts of a variety of found materials assembled into complex objects to be viewed from all directions, articulate Chapman’s concern with mind/body interactions, the materiality and sexuality of human bodies and the explanatory significance of psychoanalytic accounts of human nature. Themes of organic process, unconscious drives and mechanistic models of cause and effect characterise the sculptures’ incorporation of the iconography of, e.g., hammers, balloons, human & animal body parts, medical and other equipment. The vividly coloured surfaces allude to C18th and C19th Spanish Catholic painted sculptures of Christ’s suffering and death on the cross. The titles of the works, seemingly random yet all suggesting a reflective human consciousness, establish a sharp contrast with the brute materiality of the world and human interests to which the sculptures attest. As an ensemble, the ‘Little Death Machines’ create a kind of ‘mad scientist’ laboratory environment of and for human contemplation. This is disconcerting, horrific, humorous and bewildering in equal measure.