TATE BRITAIN


TATE BRITAIN

Turner Prize 2008

Turner Prize 2008

The Debate - Report

My Giant Colouring Book

guest author

Posted by guest author

3 October 2008

Andrew Bryant asks, are the Chapman Brothers anything more than adolescent boys putting frogs down girls dresses?

My Giant Colouring Book
Jake and Dinos Chapman
Campbell Works, N16
16 August – 14 September

Cute creatures with a Great White’s pearly whites, an amputee teddy, a bulimic fairy princess, and Little Red Riding Hood the terrorist bomber: are the Chapman brothers’ exquisite etchings anything more than the banal pranks of adolescent boyhood, like putting frogs down girls’ dresses and pulling the wings off flies?

The Chapman brothers have always traded on subversion, whether it be children with anuses for mouths or, as it is here, dark interventions with children’s ‘join-the-dots’ colouring books, but the question is what is being subverted, and into what? Whilst it may seem at first glance a cynical attack on innocence symbolised by childhood, in fact the aggression and cynicism has already happened.

Manikins of children are not children; they are idealised versions of children, objectified for the purposes of advertising, perfectly smooth, forever smiling, with no orifices so that nothing gets in and nothing gets out, including tears and laughter. These children are non-desiring: they have no otherness.

And the same can be said of My Big Colouring Book, because my big colouring book is not really mine, it belongs to mummy and daddy, and I belong to mummy and daddy, and these dots I have to join have already been joined, so that the inscription I trace is not my inscription, not my language, not my desire.

Unlike little boys, whose impotent attacks are a paranoid attempt to annihilate otherness, when Jake and Dinos Chapman amputate teddy’s paws without anaesthetic, blow up the Big Bad Wolf or give children back their sexual organs, they reinscribe the possibility of otherness into a location where it has already been annihilated.

By Andrew Bryant

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3 Responses to “My Giant Colouring Book”

By Francis
5 October 2008, 07:14

“Everyone talks about alienation. But the worst alienation is not to be dispossessed by the other but to be dispossessed of the other, that is to say to have to produce the other in his absence, and thus to be continuously referred back to oneself and to one’s image. If we are today condemned to our own image (condemned to cultivate our body, our look, our identity, and our desire), this is not because of an alienation, but because of the end of alienation and because of the virtual disappearance of the other, which is a much worse fatality.” – Jean Baudrillard “Plastic Surgery for the other” 1995

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By Andrew
8 October 2008, 10:35

This is very interesting Francis. Could you explain for me a bit more about the ‘virtual disappearance of the other’ and in particular how you think it might be applied to the Chapman brother’s work?

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By mylipsrmoving
26 November 2008, 07:48

emotions and to capture down for all to see ones inner self to portray it child like is much more easy….as all childrens books have morals for us to learn at an early age…..a goody a baddy, the little girl lost….its there infront of us in todays society….children paint there emotions and yet we say oh thats nice and hang it on the fridge, they do it naturally adults forget and deep in the mind the inner self is the child with is wanting to express there emotions through art….why not

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