Jake and Dinos Chapman are British visual artists who were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2003. They were a key part of the Young British Artist movement in the 1990s, along with household names like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. The brothers are known for their controversial installations and sculptures that are often obscene and violent. Jake Chapman himself suggested, ‘the more shitty, nasty, transgressive the art is, the more it kind of defines the centrifugal tolerance of a liberal society’. The purpose of the artworks is mainly to push the boundaries of what is acceptable, and to make the audience question how transgressive modern art can be.
I am particularly drawn to their 2002 installation 'The Chapman Family Collection' , which is pictured above. It is made up of 34 sculptures that resemble cultural artefacts stolen from colonised lands, which are displayed in a dark room and are separately lit. At a first glance, the installation is redolent of a Western ethnographic museum, with links to colonisation and the slave trade. On closer inspection, the sculptures feature hamburgers and Ronald McDonald and the locations the objects were 'found' in spell 'Big Mac, Fries and Coke' backwards. This imagery is recognisable but difficult to spot because of how desensitised we are to advertisements, so the piece could be a criticism of consumerism and capitalism. Alternatively, the artists could be referring to the appropriation of ethic culture by the western world and modern artists, which is a result of globalisation and colonisation.
Dinos Chapman said about their work: 'its 99% funny and 1% whatever else. The most obvious thing about it is that it's funny and what's funny is that people want to take it seriously'. This humour is something I'd like to bring into my own work, to point out the irony how seriously we take ourselves when we inherently question our own significance. I would like to explore the subversion of serious concepts linking to globalisation or humanity's search for greater meaning, which is ultimately superficial.
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