Dinos Chapman and the dark side of the country
Craig McLean looks at the wild and disruptive career of Dinos Chapman, from his emergence with the YBA movement to his brand new show for audiovisual, art and experimental music festival, Sonica
A sixtysomething bloke, shaven of head and side-eye of stare, dressed as a giant white rabbit, the head dangling off his lap: it’s not everyone’s idea of the curator of a 50-minute club mix. But then Sonica, as a world-class visual sonic arts festival, is far from a normal rave-up, and Dinos Chapman is far, far indeed from a mere DJ or electronic music producer.
The new work from the creator habitually referred to as ‘the former Young British Artist wunderkind’ is a pulsing piece of instrumental electronica soundtracking images as potentially disturbing, if not quite as grotesque, as anything Dinos created with his brother Jake in their controversy-magnet heyday (ie 2008’s ‘Fucking Hell’, their monumental Nazi landscape composed of 60,000 mangled toy soldiers). As the Sonica publicity materials about his headline piece put it: ‘Instead of escapism, Chapman’s work encourages us to engage with the visions he shows us: folding forests with eerie faces; overgrown toy rabbits cavorting in a psychedelic field. Across Britain, something buried is coming back to the surface, a haunting Chapman makes as enthralling as it is unsettling.’ Let’s call it the rural-infernal, the alco-bucolic.
The near-hour-long work (no interval) is of a piece with where the elder Chapman’s solo practice has focused for the past five years. ‘Rendered in a hand reminiscent of the Old Masters,’ runs the wording on his website, ‘Dinos Chapman forages an iconography traditionally associated with the naive and the playful: dinosaurs, flowers, birdies, bees, bunnies, and wide-eyed children peppered with the occasional skull, limned in glitter, or, a candy-coloured noose, to create a potent quiver of drawings, watercolours, glitter works and canvases that mine the gothic crevasses and corners of the human psyche.’
It’s certainly a long way from the cultural space inhabited by the wife of the London-born, Los Angeles-based Chapman: she’s the actor Lucy Punch, titular star of brilliant BBC sitcom Amandaland. After emerging as part of the YBA movement in the early 1990s, Jake and Dinos Chapman had a wild ride together. Their works were provocative in execution (child-like mannequins with genitals on their face, all those mini-Nazis) and no-punches-pulled in their titles: ‘Hell’, ‘Two-faced Cunt’, ‘Fuck Face’, ‘The Rape Of Creativity’.
But working in that netherworld, at that intensity, as brothers, was highly likely to end in tears. And so it did. After three intense decades, the partnership had run its course. Speaking to The Guardian in 2022, Jake said: ‘Nothing about our practice was amicable. It was never a love-in. It was always tinged with a certain seething disdain for each other, so I guess at some point that reached critical mass, and we decided to go our separate ways.’
Music, though, has long been a throughline for Dinos. With Jake, he curated 2004’s Nightmare Before Christmas edition of the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, with Aphex Twin, The Fall and Throbbing Gristle offering an insight into both the Chapmans’ taste and their feelings about the festering season. The pair directed the video for PJ Harvey and John Parish’s ‘Black Hearted Love’ (2009). In 2014, Dinos released Luftbobler, an album of throbbing industrial techno. And, after doom metal trio Ramesses used ‘Fucking Hell’ on the cover of their 2010 album Take The Curse, there were plans for the Chapmans to join them for a gig at Selfridges. Bizarrely, the brothers had been asked to curate some sort of piece in the London department store’s boujie food hall. So they invited Ramesses to get involved.
‘Jake was going to play guitar with them,’ Dinos told Vice in 2013. ‘I couldn’t work out how my music was going to fit in with what they were doing so I was just going to dance like Bez. We wanted to see if we could fill one end of the hall with loads of amplifiers and see if that would smash all the crystal and glass in the room with noise. It got quite far down the line until someone pulled the plug. We couldn’t believe it took them so long to realise it was such a bad idea, from their point-of-view.’
Almost two decades on, Dinos Chapman’s disruptive approach to what music can do, where it can be performed and how it can inspire, destabilise and, frankly, freak-out, lives strongly, loudly on. Now, at Tramway, he’s inviting us to go weird in the country.
Dinos Chapman, Tramway, Glasgow, Thursday 24 September.