Output details

Jake or Dinos Chapman

Research content/process:

Output comprises all the works Jake Chapman created (co-produced equally with his brother Dinos) at the 2 venues of White Cube gallery for the exhibition Jake or Dinos Chapman. In addition, Jake Chapman published an extended text, Introspastic: From the Blackened Beyond (his third such publication) which served both as partial catalogue for the show and a written demonstration of his abiding interest in notions and productions of identity, biography and authorship. This text, as catalogue, illustrates some of the 47 painted cardboard sculptures he exhibited in the ground floor gallery of Mason’s Yard, including Miss Universe (p.117) and Why Oh Why Oh Why? (p.144). As experimental text, this book deconstructs novelistic procedures of plot and character construction, and includes a fictionalised interview between himself and a woman journalist (see 151-60). The book also includes one illustration of a ‘black nazi storm-trooper’ sculpture included, as part of an ensemble, in the exhibition at Mason’s Yard. A group of about 25 such figures look at artworks by the Chapmans. In another installation ensemble, a group of 12 sculptures of school children also view a painting positioned on the rear wall of the gallery (Hoxton Square). A third life-size sculpture, of a Ku Klux Klan member, looks at another painting. These installation groups (entitled Fucking Dinosaurs, Flock Off (after A.S.), The Dark Destroyer and Oi Peter, I k-k-kan see your house from here!) underline Chapman’s challenging and sometimes disconcerting concern with highlighting the conditions and interests of those doing such viewing – real or imagined – as well as the values attributed to art in a postmodern society. A series of 80 etchings by Chapman, entitled ‘From the Blackened Beyond,’ also indicate the thematic links between different elements in the works comprising this show. 60 other two-dimensional works were included.