Art! Fuckers!

The Classified: Contemporary Art exhibition at the Tate is great.

It's all about advertising really.



In the first room there's this excellent Mark Dion cabinet of things. I wanted to own this. I think that's from working in advertising, it means when you see art, you want to buy it.

It turns it into a commercially viable object, and therefore makes it less threatening. Or accusatory even.

I don't know, but I reckon Charles Saatchi has a bad case of this.

There's a couple of really big Hirsts in it. One is a whole room, a sculpture you can be in, and as modern consumers we're all experts at reading environments, so all your environmental senses light up, and you think 'I'm in a hospital' and that is part of it.

There's also 'The Chapman Family Collection' which is a dimly lit room full of sculptures that look like tribal African art, but as you go further into the room you see that they all incorporate elements of the McDonalds brand identity.



I insist on my right to take pictures with my mobile in galleries, even though it's not my right. But given my history of high-concept camera phone art I reckon the rule is legally unenforceable in my case.

So we might look at African art and think 'oh how primitive, look at the way they use personifications to connote different ways of being or feeling'. Obviously we now classify this behaviour as branding, but it is the same behaviour.

Sometimes when I'm in the Westfield (I am often in the Westfield) I walk around thinking that you really need to believe in something to create a building like this. In the same way that people believed in a God terrifying enough for it to be worth building cathedrals for.

And when you think about buying an iPod, and the way that you want the latest iPod, but can't ever really have the latest one, because that only exists in a kind of timeless place where things never grow old, you realise that the whole commerical process is votive and utterly primitive, no matter how many apps you download.

My sister got the same feeling in the Westfield and she really is religious. But then, it is an excellent shopping centre.

The part of this that makes it relevant to you is that, according to their own argument, there's no difference between what the Chapmans do and what you do in a creative department. In fact, I believe there's no difference in what it takes to become the Chapmans and what it takes to become an advertising creative. They went to art school, they did apprenticeships with Gilbert and George and then they started working.

I think the art world, seen from where they are must feel just like the advertising world feels from the inside. You struggle to get into it, and it seems like people that really do it are a whole different species and talented in ways you could never be. And then when you finally do get into it most of it is shit and hype, apart from the one or two people who you admire who maybe died before you got to meet them. The rest is just administration.

If anyone wants to talk about the difference between Banksy and the Chapmans we can do that.

Banksy makes art for London Lite readers.

Radio, radio.

As a child my parents would sometimes take me to the Barbican centre. There was nothing fun about the Barbican Centre, the strange interior spaces seemed inexplicable and unnerving and I associate it with sales of charity Christmas cards and craft knickknacks. Thinking about it, I’m really just remembering one occasion when we went to see the Nutcracker Suite, hence the Christmas associations. Craft knickknacks are disappointing for children, because they look like toys, but are actually no fun. As was the absence of the nuts and sweets I had been expecting, hence the lingering resentment.

Anyway, I mastered my antipathy for the place and went to see the exhibition of war photography by Capa and Taro. That exhibition is excellent and I may write about it later, but the thing that really grabbed me was an installation in The Curve gallery near the entrance called Frequency and Volume. It’s by a Mexican artist, Rafael Lozano Hemmer, who seems like a serious dude. As you pass along the gallery a series of powerful lights throw your silhouette onto the opposite wall. The outline of your shadow is then read by a series of computers as a position on the scale of radio frequency – you get a kind of red Redibrek glow around your shadow and a projected caption tells you what frequency and station you’re on. As you walk from one end of the gallery to the other you pass through all the different stations, very much like the red line moving through the dial of an old fashioned FM radio. By moving towards the wall, enlarging your shadow, you pass upwards through AM and FM into mobile phone, astronomical and MoD frequencies, which, for legal reasons, are turned off in the installation’s London incarnation.

It’s great right.

So I’m having this wonderful, joyful interactive experience and all the time I'm thinking of an obscure 1980s cinema ad for Red Stripe in which a red stripe is overlaid over a black and white film following a man through a day in his life, "tuning in" to different stations, until finally he reaches a bar and drinks a pint of Red Stripe. There the music switches to, I imagine, reggae. I can’t find this ad anywhere but I reckon it would be from 1989 or so.

I’m not for a moment suggesting that Rafael Lozano Hemmer ever saw this ad. Or that his installation isn’t a much more interesting thing than the Red Stripe spot. It’s just funny that in this case the ad definitely preceded the artwork, and yet there can be no suggestion that one was copied from the other. But if the two things had happened the other way round, you’d just get that horrible feeling you get when creatives rip off art wholesale and then start spouting off about Andy Warhol or something.

I’m not saying this because I think it’s bad, or unfair, but just that it demonstrates the hierarchy. If you were the Chapman brothers (both of them, so you wouldn’t have to argue about it) you could do a series poor copies of adverts, or even just copies of ads taken from YouTube, and sell them for millions as studies of the relation between commercial ideas and ideas that sell. It wouldn’t be good, or even original, art, but it would really annoy advertising people.

I like the Chapman Brothers - a few months ago I had the day off and it was one of those strange, magical days off when you feel like you're really getting one over on the world. I went to see their sculpture "Fucking Hell" at the White Cube and found it both hilarious and moving. It combined many of my interests: Nazis, gore, model making, to name but a few. Later that day I saw Beck in the street with his wife and baby - I got his autograph - not because I really wanted his autograph, but just that I might once have done, and I wanted a record of my non-excitement. It was that kind of day.

Anyway Jake Chapman (the handsome Chapman), has published a book and a friend took me along to see him talk to Dinos Chapman about it at the ICA.

The book is more or less unreadable - it's like Mills and Boon written by a comittee of the criminally insane. It doesn't work like a normal book, because it's written with a different set of criteria in mind - art criteria, not literary criteria. It's all form, zero communication. Every sentence is designed to negate itself, for instance, "she took to therapy like a duck to water, and her therapist's questions rolled of her like water off a ducks back" - which doesn't help you see anything - I mean it looks like it might, but then slaps you in the face. Chapman likened it to "teasing children with sweets". Obviously this quickly becomes appalling, and then keeps going, something like the literary version of one of their sculptures. I didn't buy a copy, but I appreciated it as an idea. I often feel that way about artists, I'm glad someone is doing it, and feel relieved I don't have to participate.

What I found really interesting though, was that as Jake Chapman went on and on describing his book, the process of writing it, it emerged that, although he was trying to see it as an art exercise, he'd begun to think of himself as a writer. And all the stuff he was talking about, the pain of composition, the anxiety about the book's reception, was just banal Radio 4 writerly stuff. So while he imagined himself as this alien enfant terrible let loose on a dozing literary scene, corrupting the very form of the novel, what had actually happened was quite the opposite - the novel seemed to have corrupted him.

The other thing that I like about the Chapmans is that they're millionaires. And that Dinos spends his spare time in his basement cutting together footage from Rotten.com to grindcore soundtracks.

There are two artist brothers, the Braithwaites, in the Will Self's excellent novel "Great Apes" who I think are based on the Chapmans. And the artist protagonist of that book is producing something that looks a lot like a 2D version of "Fucking Hell".

There are only a few ideas I suppose, you just have to wait for your turn with them.