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From: blp Category: Art Date: 08 October 2006 Time: 12:20 PM Review: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1890007,00.html Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr asks Jake Chapman a few questions and is booted out into the rain. Here's how she describes the experience: '...here are the vague questions, all of them, in full: 'How have you found the collaborative process?' and: 'Are you looking forward to seeing the final results?' Here are my only other statements: 'I find the ponciness of the language that surrounds the artworld a bit frustrating.' Followed by: 'I don't believe that a complicated word is necessarily better than a simple one.' And, here, the rest of the exchange: 'You know, I'm sick of fucking talking to people who are trying to tell me my business about complexity and simplicity. What's the point of trying to talk to someone who's always going to try and reduce it down to this kind of like, the common language... there is no common language in art, it's a complex activity. I get bored of this, I'm bored of this already, this conversation.' 'I'm sorry, I didn't mean in any way to offend you.' 'No, what's the point of the newspaper sending someone who's going to stand here telling me that they're bored of the jargon. I'm a fucking artist! I speak in the jargon! I speak in terms appropriate to art.' 'I'm really sorry, I really didn't mean to get your back up.' 'Why is your opinion important?' 'It's not remotely.' 'But you just stated it quite heavily. Simplicity blah blah. I'm sick of it. That's the end of the conversation, I think.' 'Oh dear. I'm sorry.' 'Get out now. Just get the fuck out of here. What right do you have to come in here and talk to me like that? Go on, just go.''' And then she was out in the rain. The blindingly obvious and absurd contradiction of this is in the violently simplistic terms in which Chapman asserts his right to complexity, not to mention its use of conventionalism to demand freedom: I'm an artist so I talk like an artist etc. (despite the almost simultaneous declaration that there is not common language in art). A little bit (only a little bit) of what's going on here is perhaps the old tussle between lit types and artists over language use. Artists, of course, tend to use it spectacularly badly, glutted, albeit magpieishly and without academic rigour, in often obfuscatory philosophy and theory speak, but often virtually illiterate in other areas and childishly bad at basic sentence and argument construction. But Chapman's knee-jerk hypocrisy goes way beyond that and in a way that's all too easy to relate to. He thinks he wants complexity, but only on his 'own' terms, or at least terms that, to some extent, are convenient for him. Within the proscribed space of the artworld it works. Perhaps he really feels that his transgressive heroes have challenged him at some point and forced him to re-examine his positions in various ways (one would hope he does, because if he doesn't, the only alternative seems to be that he's nothing but a baby asserting his right to a tit). The challenges, if there were any, may, to some extent have been genuine - the shock of a Paul McCarthy video, say, or the difficulty of a Kristeva text - but still, in becoming a recognised need for the artist, they become materially desirable and transfer from being experiences of threat and loss to being valued possessions and methods of self-definition that can, in turn, be threatened. This is the great trap for would-be avant-gardists, especially since they probably, at least partially, open themselves up to the challenges of art's alternatives due to some sense of disgust with the mainstream, or their imagination of the mainstream. In other words, they accept the challenges that go with a world that promises an escape from a hated otherness, but never the challenges of that otherness. They end up always back where they started, but feeling masochistically proud of the journey and/or exhilerated by its genuine achievements. I don't mean to ridicule Chapman. It's a worry for us all. Implicit in it, all this simplistic vs. complex 'blah blah' is the sense of a struggle against, basically, fascism - and that means there's probably real, forceful anxiety lodged in it. Funnily enough, two pages on in the same review section was Carsten Holler, chatting to Lynn Barber (she of the satisfying Turner Prize sucks diatribe of a few days ago) about his new installation in the turbine hall. In perfect contrast to Chapman, Holler seemed to be talking with gentlemanly urbanity and utter lack of defensiveness about the importance of freedom and the subversive means by which he approaches the subject, e.g. traps for catching and killing children. There's a simplicity both to the ideas and his mode of description and explanation that doesn't dim the peculiar sense of satori one gets from these ideas or the neatness and exactitude with which they pinpoint the world's weirdness. It exposes Chapman's key schoolkid error, the elision of simple with simplistic. Broadly, it exposes the problem I've always had with the Chapmans, the sense that their locked in by their own anger to an impotent, unfree binary with something or other (banality, stupidity, the press, you, me, their parents who knows) that they can't affect because they can't let go of it. You do have to wonder why Europeans often seem so much better at talking so wittily about this sort of thing than the Brits (with the exception of George out of Gilbert and George). Holler, for all his talk of freedom, gives the impression of a man who's never been put on the defensive about what he does, never had to allow for the possibility that anyone might find it odd or pointless. Jake Chapman comes across as someone who's been badgered to distraction. Who the 'hell' knows?