Subject, Object, Abject: Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Disasters of War
by Frank G. Spicer III, Case Western Reserve University


[PLEASE NOTE: All of the Chapman’s Disasters of War prints are without titles in the 1999 Booth-Clibborn edition in which they are reproduced. Therefore, I refer to each print based on its corresponding number in the Booth-Clibborn edition, i.e., C1.]

The formal aspects of modern art have been constantly changing during the span of time that separates us from Goya. But the underlying convulsions that make these stylistic revolutions inevitable remain the same. We are still suffering from a disease of which Goya was the first to describe the symptoms. –Fred Licht

Jake and Dinos Chapman have been continually preoccupied with Francisco Goya throughout their career. Their sculpted version of Goya’s Great Courage! Against Corpses! was the centerpiece of the Sensation exhibition which opened at the Royal Academy in London in 1997 and traveled, only to open controversially, to the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. Later that same year, British publisher Charles Booth-Clibborn commissioned this artist-brother duo to execute a suite of prints on a topic of their choice. The Chapmans’ first-ever engagement with the medium of printmaking resulted in 82 black-and white, untitled prints that appropriate Goya’s Disasters of War print series of ca. 1810-20. Using hardground, softground, drypoint, and aquatint etching, they lift Goya’s series out of the context of the early nineteenth century and re-contextualize it under the late twentieth-century topos of modern warfare, adding a distinctive, contemporary flavor to Goya’s masterpiece. Diverse subjects such as fascism, the Holocaust, nuclear and biological warfare, Star Wars, and pornographic surrealism make the Chapmans’ prints a combination of the fantastic, the visionary, the brutal, and the comic.

However, it is what Fred Licht refers to in his quote as the condition from which we still suffer—the madness, irrationality, and horror of war—that bridges a seemingly vast 200-year gap between Goya and these contemporary British artists. If Goya was indeed one of the first to describe these symptoms, the Chapmans’ prints continue in the spirit of Goya’s diagnosis, while simultaneously commenting on 200 years of escalating insanity and brutality that has transpired since Goya’s own time. As Guardian critic Jonathan Jones has shrewdly noted, the Chapmans’ work is “not so much a travesty of Goya as [it is] an extension of his despair.”1 This bridge of despair enables us to utilize rather effectively the trope of abject horror, which, in turn, while significantly underlining each of the artists’ powerful indictment of man’s inhumanity to man, enables us to appreciate how contemporary the Chapmans’ project is.

In her 1982 text, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva outlined key principles of abjection, the basis of which is that which repels, rejects, or repulses. The abject can pose a threat to one’s own personal stability or well-being. Kristeva notes, “Refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live,” and it is the corpse, in fact, that is the paragon of abjection in her analysis.2 Severed limbs, disembodied heads, and disfigured faces can all elicit horror in the viewer, challenging bodily gestalts by showing that which is perilous to human existence.

For example, Goya’s Great Courage! Against Corpses! (Plate 39), which inspired the Chapmans’ sculpted version in Sensation as well as their etched version [C1], is a stark tableau of severed limbs and a truncated torso. Presented in an extremely direct, almost still-life manner, the corpse in both the Chapmans and Goya’s versions is the result of that which threatens our bodily integrity—dismemberment. These corpses are phobic objects, as Licht observes in the work of Goya: “The body of man, for untold centuries represented as an object of reverence, is for the first time rendered as corrupt and repulsive, bereft of nobility, and bearing no trace of the spirit that once inhabited it.”3 This hacked-up figure is no longer a religious body, no longer redeemed by God, and the Chapmans would agree: “Goya introduces finality—the absolute terror of material termination.”4 Goya’s victims of beatings, hackings, and hangings look like the forsaken dead.

Yet, there is the possibility of a cathartic release in these images. As Kristeva noted, the abject stirs a sense of survival in the viewer—it provokes one’s will to live, to maintain the integrity of one’s corporeal existence. Both works evoke not only pathos, but also a desire not to die in an undignified manner such as this. As a result, the body parts metonymically signify a threat to our bodily existence, embodying, on the one hand, a result of man’s capacity for brutality, while on the other provoking a will to survive that proclivity.

In keeping with their overall endeavor to not copy Goya but to transform his unique vision into their own versions of the horrors of war, the Chapmans add to their image an indictment of the worst purveyors of modern violence. The swastika etched on the surface of the plate holds the Nazis accountable for the atrocities seen in this image. While Goya responded to the violence of Napoleonic forces in Spain, the Chapmans locate the Nazis in a historical lineage of crimes against humanity that extends from Goya’s own time to the modern era.

In a similarly accusatory gesture, the Chapmans conflate the symbolic and the abject in print 43 [C43] by conjoining four severed fingers into the shape of a swastika. As a result, the fingers and splattered blood come together to signify acts of violation and defilement of the human body during the Holocaust. It is as if the Chapmans have removed these fingers from the severed arm in Goya’s Great Courage! in order to comment on the historical truth behind the Nazi party emblem.

Haunting images of abject horror are brought to the forefront in other Chapman prints inspired by Goya. The ninth print [C9] features the same hanging figure in Goya’s Nor This (Plate 36), but the Spaniard’s reclining, voyeuristic soldier is omitted in order to intensify the visual impact of this execution scene. Furthermore, this violent act is made all the more menacing by the anonymity of the figure. Occluding the solider de-contextualizes this lynched figure, situating him in the realm of some unknown form of racial, social, or military violence. He becomes even more anonymous, a universal Everyman who signifies, as a victim, a potential threat to our existence at the hands of racial or social injustice.

The Chapman brothers transform the soldiers in Goya’s What More Can Be Done? (Plate 33) into three garish, cartoon-like figures in the second print [C2]. They are about to commit an overtly gruesome violation of this body, an act that is analogous to the narrative structure of Goya’s version. However, the Chapmans render their torturing and tortured figures in a more free, gestural manner that amplifies the irrationality and insanity of this act. Extreme deviation from standards of normal experiences becomes all the more apparent here. Kristeva’s text and Simon Taylor’s essay “The Phobic Object: Abjection in Contemporary Art,” offer pertinent reflections that are certainly discernable in this and other Chapman prints. There is a disruption or disturbance of identity, system, and order (all-out violation of the figure); an undermining of idealizing notions of the sublime and the beautiful (the eerie characters); and an adversary of all that is acceptable and proper (this gruesome act).5

The eighth in the series [C8], inspired by Goya’s This is Still Worse (Plate 37), is a similar cartoon-like vignette. The central, armless figure from Goya’s print is still present, but the Chapmans have added child-like, quickly rendered characters to their composition. Goya’s print evokes a disturbing uneasiness that is intensified in the Chapmans’ by the addition of these bizarre bystanders who gawk at this scene as if it were some sort of macabre merry-go-round. The lithographic, crayon-like lines also create a sense of juvenilia-meets-horror, and in light of Goya’s title, as well as this figure’s gaze, we are provoked to wonder what could be worse than this act of corporeal desecration.

Before examining their more free-form, imaginative Disasters prints, we should consider a final example of the Chapmans’ direct engagement with Goya’s Disasters of War, Number 41 [C41]. This work is strikingly similar to Goya’s The Consequences (Plate 72). Both works evoke the nightmarish fear of attacks by nocturnal creatures, but the Chapmans’ version is reversed. While this could be a technical oversight or a means of distinguishing their own print from its source, what is more intriguing is how, in the next print, [C42] they play with Goya’s image by turning the scene around to reveal the opposite side. This reversal exposes a theatrical, prop-like setting, possibly a jibe at critics, such as Guardian writer Adrian Searle, who have pointed out that Goya was an alleged witness to the horrors of the Peninsular War, thanks to his well-known print, I Saw This (Plate 44), whereas the Chapmans have only seen horror through the eyes of television, cinema, and the media.6 The staged setting functions as a Chapman tongue-in-cheek counter-critique designed to downplay the importance of first-hand or eyewitness experience. In other words, just because Goya “saw this” and the Chapmans “did not” does not make their work any less serious or relevant.

A lack of seriousness is, in fact, one of the most common criticisms of these two young artists. Their frequent use of humorous (and, according to some critics, sometimes appalling) visual puns has earned them a reputation as the enfant terribles of the British art world. However, the positive, recuperative value of abjection—its ability to instill survival in the viewer—is complemented by the function of humour or laughter in this visual field of repulsion and revulsion. Goya’s ironic titles and the Chapmans’ humorous devices are ways of placing or displacing abjection. When confronted with a challenge to our sense of stability or survival, the ability to laugh at that threat becomes a means of diluting or diminishing the impact of abject horror. A common feature of horror films, laughter is a form of scatological purging or cleansing that David Falconer, author of the London ICA’s 1996 Chapmanworld exhibition catalogue, has detected in the Chapmans’ work.7 Humour tempers the intolerability of abject imagery found in their Disasters of War, which Jennifer Ramkalawon has also observed: the Chapmans “use humour as a weapon of deflation and to indulge their appetite for game playing.”8 The horrific impact of their imagery is thus diluted and made easier to swallow. Although the brothers have been scolded for their mischievous visual antics, most critics have failed to recognize in their work the positive value of comic repulsion and irony as a displacement of the abject.

Goya’s iconography is often disturbing, but the titles of his images also introduce ironic humour into the scenes. For example, his declaration, “Great Courage! Against Corpses,” is contrary to what we know to be true—there is no courage or nobility in the atrocity committed against this figure. “What More Can Be Done?” is a rhetorical reflection upon this torturous act—we are asked to imagine what could be worse than this. Goya’s ironic statements displace the corrosive evocation of the image while simultaneously seeking to re-inscribe dignity to these corpses.

Print 61 [C61] is a similarly harrowing scene of carnage, with severed heads and crucified figures seen through the eyes of a skull. Yet, notice how the Chapmans introduce humour into their untitled prints by means of their own idiosyncratic and ironic statements. The crucified figure on the left proclaims, “Oi, Peter I can see your house from here,” to which there is no response from the figure on the right. Although some viewers may not find humour in this comment, it is nevertheless their attempt to add an element of comedy to this otherwise bleak tableau. Number 62 [C62] truly captures this unique, and sometimes challenging, blend of repulsion and humour. Inscribed above this perverse amalgamation of children (inspired by their fiberglass “Zygotic acceleration” model, also in Sensation) is a statement by the figure on the far left directing us to “look! 36 penises, 16 vaginas, 6 anuses: It must be a girl!” These figures could be the result of a genetic experiment gone awry or genetic defects caused by nuclear or biological warfare, the effects from the fallout of the three-tiered mushroom cloud in number 44 [C44]. The irony is that, despite advances in the fields of medicine or defense, tragic mistakes are the result of misused or abused technology.

The Chapman brothers have the ability to direct their wit and humour at themselves, too. Number 26 [C26] features one of their trademark “fuck-face” figures wearing a t-shirt version of their print based on Goya’s What Courage! In addition to a comic device, the shirt functions on a simulacral level, as well. In French author Jean Baudrillard’s writings on simulation theory, he notes that souvenirs are ersatz substitutions for the real thing—“if you can’t have the original, just buy a copy.” Thus, the shirt could be interpreted as a Chapman mockery of art market commodification (i.e., the proliferation of art-based commodities sold at museums and galleries), or perhaps it is a coy means of promoting their art and merchandise. This visual pun nevertheless makes more palatable the gravity of Goya’s, as well as their own, abject imagery.

Recently, the Chapmans have been scorned for committing the ultimate act of artistic mockery. Two years after completing the Booth-Clibborn series of DOW prints, the “Brothers Grimm” purchased their very own suite of Goya DOW prints and altered them by adding gas masks, as well as clown and puppy dogs’ heads, to Goya’s figures. The resulting work was dubbed “Insult to Injury” and unveiled for the first time in early 2003 at Modern Art Oxford, England. If the Booth-Clibborn edition garnered a minimal amount of press, the resounding indictment from critics was a scathing accusation of vandalizing an original work of art. However, the fallout from their seeming attack on Goya’s prints is actually indicative of a much deeper issue: preserving the sanctity of the artist-genius.

To counter these claims of violating the integrity of Goya’s original works, Jake Chapman cited the example of Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning of 1953.9 Rauschenberg spent two months erasing a de Kooning drawing given to him by the elder artist. Rauschenberg’s gesture could be seen as an act of love-cum-defiance, as the younger artist both admired and sought to challenge the Abstract Expressionist elder. The Chapmans preoccupation with Goya is undeniable, as evidenced by the Booth-Clibborn prints and their sculptural Goya-based works. Their “rectification” (the artists’ term) of the Goya prints could be seen as a similar Rauschenbergian act of defiant love, a counter-romantic challenge to the inviolability of Goya’s artistic genius.

“Insult to Injury” resulted in several published reviews, one of which was titled “Goya Probably Would Not Be Amused” by Alan Riding in the New York Times, March 2003. Yet, perhaps the reverse is true. It is significant to take note of the fact that Rauschenberg was able to request a drawing from de Kooning, whereas the Chapmans obviously were not afforded the same opportunity. Nevertheless, they altered the Goya prints, and considering the irrational subtext that inspires these artists’ work, I offer a rather ahistorical response to this critic’s ahistorical yet not altogether insignificant musing on a dead artist’s thoughts: Goya not only could have been amused, but he might have even appreciated the Chapmans’ incendiary gesture. Their “vandalizing” of Goya in the “Insult to Injury” series, in fact, keeps with the theme of “body vandalizing” in Goya’s own prints.

Subjected to harsh criticism, objected to by critics, and composed of abject iconography, Jake and Dinos Chapmans’ Disasters of War series indeed extends Goya’s spirit of despair into the twenty-first century. Their response to the insanity, irrationality, and horror of warfare re-inscribes within the trope of abject horror Goya’s own commentary on this historically ubiquitous trend. Disfigured corpses, severed heads and limbs, and tortured bodies cogently appear as threats to our own existence, but what tempers this danger is Goya and the Chapmans’ use of comic irony and visual puns as a means of making this reality more bearable. If we still suffer from a disease that could ultimately lead to our own demise, a disease whose symptoms Goya was first to describe, then Jake and Dinos Chapman have reified and revised the degenerative symptoms of that same syndrome.