- Venue
- White Cube Bermondsey
- Location
- South East England
Having turned up at the White Cube, Bermondsey ten minutes before opening, I see staff arriving to begin a day’s work. Art is hauled in like daily stock take from a truck aside the building – the Cube feels normal, average, despite being hailed an exciting new London gallery. The space is empty and cold. We are the first visitors of the day.
The Cube has polished concrete floors and vast corridors six men wide. The whole experience is new to me and the clinical white, chrome and concrete feels oppressive, serious and heavy. I systematically walk through the white rooms, the artwork curated meticulously and challengingly. I find a screening behind the ominous black curtains at the end of the huge corridor. Entering this dark, comfortable auditorium I don’t know what the work is or who it’s by and I am open to whatever unfolds in front of me.
The Organ Grinder’s Monkey by Jake and Dinos Chapman begins with whimsical music as we meander towards a group discussing art in a busy British pub. IFANS’ (Rhys Ifans) is at the centre as the group hang onto his every word. From my perspective the group were talking in riddles, yet the cartoonish overacting suggested IFANS’ words were fascinating. At this point maybe the Chapman brothers are suggesting something about how people talk in artistic circles – utter rubbish. We then find PABLO, a hopeful cockroach (plasticine stop-motion), bent on realising his artistic dreams. He thinks IFANS is his means to achieving these and follows him home. We later find IFANS painting a prostitute in his pitiful, grimy flat. Buffy the prostitute is asleep, stark naked when IFANS endeavours to humorously clean oil paint off her breast. He finds himself licking paint off Buffy’s breast when she wakes up and runs off screaming and clothes less. Next we find IFANS masturbating, revealing a fairly squeamish sequence in the film. We watch what looks like a papier mache puppet of IFANS as he ejaculates. At the same time PABLO has arrived at the flat and is by IFANS’ feet. Inevitably PABLO finds himself in a puddle of ejaculate just as a rampant, talking chimpanzee enters. The monkey professes his want to give up on art. As IFANS jumps up to calm the monkey down, he squashes PABLO bringing him and the story to a sticky end.
Despite not really understanding the film, I appreciated it. I enjoyed its erotic and chaotic nature. Thanks to the cast (Rhys Ifans, Rosamund Pike, Daniel Craig) I immediately bought into the film. Their presence suggests they can accept a sordid art film, and so can I. The film sticks in my head; I found the ejaculating penis unexpected perhaps as I was unfamiliar with the Chapman brothers’ work at the time. This image is imprinted on my brain thanks to the shock it created. The film is strangely riveting and leaves me wanting more. The work is apparently part of a full-length screenplay which despite research I cannot find, this perhaps explains the lack of context and my want to see more and find out what on earth the film was all about. However, on researching the film I struggle to find any reference on the internet or in the library, especially nothing from the Chapman brothers explaining the film. All I know is it is inspired by The Rebel, a 1961 Tony Hancock film following a bored businessman pursuing his artistic dream, no matter how talentless he may be. While connections are evident with the film we’re still left to draw our own conclusion from The Organ Grinder’s Monkey.
Consequently I am unsure as to the Chapman brother’s intentions of the film. I question if the Chapman brothers want the film to be thought about in depth? A previous exhibition catalogue explains “Do not try to ‘understand’ the work, but allow…that its ‘meaning’ may exist more at level of an unarticulated emotion or feeling.”[1] The Chapman brothers often oppose the notion of looking further into the work for a positive meaning, if any meaning at all, “If you enter the terrain of making art the pre-supposition is that a work of art, however nasty it is, that ultimately it must serve some morally profound ambition…What happens if you make a work of art where you say ‘no, it’s only nasty’?”[2]. Looking at Jake Chapman’s book Meatphysics, he uses the vocabulary of an essayist but he breaks up the text with computer symbols, confusing the reader. It feels to me that the Chapman brothers want to keep their ideas their own secret, so they make it incredibly hard to decipher meaning and don’t want us to attempt to understand their work, to take it at face value, despite maybe being more to it.
The idea of the work being an odd film and nothing more is hard for me to follow. Perhaps ideas of the Chapman brothers’ artwork are changing. Compared to previous Chapman works ‘Hell’ and ‘Zygotic Acceleration’ this film not particularly unpleasant to watch.
Recently Jake Chapman has written a surreal romantic novel – a soft subject area. So, are the Chapman brothers mellowing out? The brothers have begun to work on their own projects more and the Frieze art fair showed exhibits by the two artists separately. These alterations in tradition may suggest that taking their work at face value doesn’t apply as strongly as it did. Maybe meaning is to be found in their work on a deeper level. Or perhaps not, as the Chapman brothers will not inform us, or they may not know themselves. However the Chapman brothers from my perspective appear to be changing and maybe The Organ Grinder’s Monkey is evidence of a more audience friendly piece of work – by the Chapman brothers’ standards.
[1] COTTER, S. And NAIRNE, A., 2003. Jake and Dinos Chapman The Rape of Creativity. Exhibition held at Modern Art Oxford, 12 April–8 June 2003. [Exhibition catalogue].
[2] 2009. Chapman Brothers Interview [online]. Manchester: Creative Tourist Magazine. Available at: http://www.creativetourist.com/features/artspeak/c… [Accessed 17 November 2011].