Bad Manners by ACC Art Books

A Conversation between Yuval Etgar and Jake Chapman

Yuval Etgar — On your studio wall hangs an etching of Olympia by Édouard Manet. The etching is coloured in, however, with watercolours – presumably by you? Jake Chapman — Yes. Y. E. — This is not the first time you have modified – or as you often call it, ‘improved’ – another artist’s work. Previously, collaborating with your brother, Dinos, you added photographic elements and glitter paint onto original Goya etchings from his famous series The Disasters of War (1810–20) and Los Caprichos (1799); you painted naïve sunsets and rainbows onto watercolours that Hitler painted in the 1910s; and in 2010 you even remade Tracey Emin’s famous tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), as your own, after the original was destroyed in a storage fire, naming the piece The Same Thing Only Better. Do you ever feel that what you are doing is morally or ethically wrong? That you are crossing the one line that artists are not meant to cross by tampering with someone else’s work? Even if merely out of solidarity or to acknowledge how much time and effort they put into these objects? J. C. — You say ‘time and effort’, as if in order to qualify the idea that these acts are destructive, we should consider labour as a relevant category to what has been blasphemed. If a work of art did not take much time to make, would its modification be less troubling? I don’t think that these parameters are relevant criteria for an object to merit protection from change. The labour that goes into an artwork does not define its value, although it may seem that way to some. If we separate the object from its material value and the work put into it, then it remains for us to ask, what else is there to constitute the transgressive act? Well, it must be that it inhabits a world in which it is regarded as something sacred, beyond 9

A Conversation between Yuval Etgar and Jake Chapman

Jake Chapman In the Realm of the Hopeless, 2022

Édouard Manet Étude pour ‘Olympia’, 1862

A lifetime print of Édouard Manet’s Olympia reworked and ‘improved’ with watercolour.

A drawing featuring Olympia inverted horizontally in order to achieve the original orientation in a set of etchings that the artist executed in 1867.

Jake Chapman In the Realm of the Hopeless, 2022

Édouard Manet Étude pour ‘Olympia’, 1862

A lifetime print of Édouard Manet’s Olympia reworked and ‘improved’ with watercolour.

A drawing featuring Olympia inverted horizontally in order to achieve the original orientation in a set of etchings that the artist executed in 1867.

the simple value of its production. Beyond the presumption of its literal destruction, we can move towards a more radical sense of transformation in which the sacred value of all works of art is being profaned by the subverting of the single work. In other words, what’s at stake in the ‘rectification’ of a work is the excess value that’s inevitably attached to it. And while it might seem like an unethical gesture, I would argue that this is the immanent process at work in all modern art. Y. E. — Seen from this perspective, you could say that the history of modern art is an ongoing chain of iconoclastic actions and reactions; the rebellion of artists against the legacy of their colleagues and predecessors in the name of ‘progress’. Only, in your account, these actions can be applied directly onto the physical artefacts and not just by citing them or undermining their principles. J. C. — Today, we accept these principles of modernity as a given; the idea of progress, which was the principal contribution of the Enlightenment, largely persists without challenge. By valorising light, the Enlightenment opposes itself to darkness, to religious superstition, to stagnation and the infinite present of the so-called Middle Ages. This ideological shift created for itself certain mechanisms, terminology and technologies to promote its forward momentum – the ‘avant-garde’, for example, was a privileged attribution given to those who claimed to have overcome the fixed, religious, iconographic codes of representation that were dominant in pre-modern Europe. These new creative geniuses were freed from the restrictions of religious iconographic servitude and unleashed into a virtual kaleidoscope of solipsistic nightmares, of new and eccentric pathologies and a modern psyche wracked by the remnant melodramas of secular guilt. Drawn beyond the limits of faith, liberated from the dark mire of insomniac superstition, the free-thinking subject moved inexorably towards the light, drawn to its enlightening effect, this new reflex compelling the romantic hero never to look back. Art of the past had to be vigorously overcome in order to usher in the ‘new’. So yes, I think that the destructive principle is inherent to modernity in its infancy. For Kant, the obliteration of the past in favour of the future is necessary to allow ‘man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity’.1

Immanuel Kant, ‘Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?’, in Practical Philosophy, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, ed. Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p.11.

Y. E. — What characterises creative destruction, then? Certainly there must be some parameters. And why then have only relatively few artists throughout history embraced the physical destruction of another artist’s creation? Let’s take Manet’s Olympia, which you chose to modify recently, as an example. The painting, and by implication also the drawing and etching that emerged alongside it, cites a conventional subject: a female model posing on a divan or chair with symbols that reference her social standing and her taste. Manet’s subject, however, is not a wealthy patron as was commonly the case in women’s portraits of the period, but a prostitute. Further, the servant posing alongside her is Black, another unusual inclusion in this genre of painting at the time. A cat is also included in the scene, although it is not the well-groomed breed that one is accustomed to seeing in such portraits: this is a small black street cat, curving its back as if to demonstrate disinterest or animosity. But more important than all of these symbolic features put together is the fact that the young nude woman gazes directly at the viewer, thereby implicating us in the circumstances depicted in the picture. In the 1860s, Manet’s undermining of social hierarchies and conventions of privacy did in fact cause outrage among some of his colleagues, and even more so among critics and visitors who saw his work. What were you hoping to achieve when you revisited this picture? J. C. — As you say, absolutely nothing in this scene is well-groomed. The sitter is certainly not a wealthy patron and as such has no claim over her image. Since the unpaid artist is under no obligation to flatter his subject with false likenesses, a brutal realism begins to emerge in the absence of any financial grounding that might normally ensure all participants are protected by the veil of a beautiful image. In other words, Manet’s ambivalent realism implicates the viewer in an incomplete prostitutional exchange, in which our voyeurism binds us to the flesh of the indolent woman who returns our gaze with dead eyes. As we blink and blink, little dots dance and gyrate before our eyes; Wilhelm Reich’s ‘orgone bions’ begin to litter the surface of the picture. Actually, these are the leukocytes of the retinal blood vessels leaving their wake in front of our retinas, but this isn’t a bad avenue of thought. Modernity’s pictorial surfaces are always striated with disavowals of illusion and depth, disturbances that clog the surface, returning the eye to the epidermis, blushing at the sight of a work of art that presents to us a misshapen specimen teased by the promise of beauty. Any shameless Internet search for the etymology of the name Olympia will tell us that it has a Greek origin and means ‘of Mount Olympus’. NameBerry.com keenly points out that ‘this name has 13

Paul Cezanne Le peintre et la femme, 1867–70 A revisiting of Manet’s Olympia, replacing the figure of the servant with that of Cezanne’s friend the artist Achille Empéraire.

an athletic, goddess-like aura’. What kind of deity is Manet’s Olympia? One profaned by secular realism, in which a god has given up its divinity in favour of gravity and dirt. Think of the heretical wounds on Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Christ, flattened out by Jasper Johns’s torturous grey ruminations, and how Grünewald even sounds like Greenberg, the high priest of flatness. I could go on, ruining the horizon of possible interpretations, but I suppose my interest in teasing such an image as Manet’s Olympia conforms to the liberal edict to ‘bite the hand that feeds’. Y. E. — There is an interesting technical detail worth mentioning in relation to this work that you chose to modify. To execute this etching, Manet had to prepare a drawing of Olympia horizontally inverted, so that it could serve as a template for printing a set of etchings. The principle of mirroring is significant in this context, as we start thinking about alterations and interventions in other artists’ works, because it offers, I think, the minimal sufficient condition for change or manipulation. Émile Zola, for one, was quick to understand this principle when he argued that Manet’s great contribution to the quest of truth in painting was entirely down to the act of mirroring a reality that art had ignored until that point. ‘When our artists give us Venuses,’ he wrote, ‘they correct nature, they lie. Édouard Manet asked himself why lie, why not tell the truth; he introduced us to Olympia, this fille of our time, whom you meet on the sidewalks.’ 2 J. C. — Actually, Manet’s audacity opens the door to a lot of other artists who then created their own variations on the theme of nineteenth-century bourgeois portraiture and its subjects. Cezanne, for one, made a small work in watercolour and a crayon titled Le peintre et la femme sometime between 1867 and 1870, just a few years after Olympia appeared. The compositional resemblance between Cezanne’s and Manet’s works is incredible, only in the former’s version the servant is replaced with a struggling painter. One thing that artists were beginning to understand in the second half of the nineteenth century was that bourgeois taste is actually very flexible and can accommodate things it hasn’t itself prescribed. I was thinking about a statement by the writer Shulamith Firestone, where she suggests that modern art is a retaliation against bourgeois patronage; that in fact, modern art emerges from the rejection of patronage as a revengeful act against the obligation to serve vain patrons in their desire to see their likeness. In rejecting representation,

Émile Zola, Mon Salon, Fasquelle, Paris, 1969, pp.108–09.

Paul Cezanne Le peintre et la femme, 1867–70 A revisiting of Manet’s Olympia, replacing the figure of the servant with that of Cezanne’s friend the artist Achille Empéraire.

Émile Zola, Mon Salon, Fasquelle, Paris, 1969, pp.108–09.

Francis Picabia Tableau Dada par Marcel Duchamp, 1920 A version of Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. executed from memory by Picabia and initially missing the beard, which was added by Duchamp in 1942 along with the inscription ‘Moustache par Picabia/barbiche par Marcel Duchamp/Avril 1942.’

artists were freed from bourgeois taste. Opticality and illusion could in turn be rejected because they reflected the conservatism of the patron. But of course, bourgeois tastes are really supple and steeped in curiosity – as the artist rejects the patron, the patron follows the artist, infatuated by this very rejection, prompting artists to bite the hand that feeds them, and so on ad infinitum. Liberal tolerance becomes the driving force for new aesthetic excesses, so that in order to keep Firestone’s notion of retaliation vital, ever more inventive forms of transgression have to occur, while at the same time bourgeois taste creeps along. Y. E. — The next significant milestone in this history, however, takes place in 1919, when Marcel Duchamp decides to take the world’s most famous painting as the source material for a new work. Taking a cheap 8-by-5-inch chromolithograph print of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Duchamp added a pencil-drawn moustache, goatee, and an inscription of five letters at the bottom of the image: ‘L.H.O.O.Q’. Pronounced in French, the letters read as ‘elle a chaud au cul’, meaning ‘she is hot in the arse’.3 When asked about it years later, Duchamp explained: ‘I had the idea that a painting cannot, must not, be looked at too much. It becomes desecrated by the very act of being seen too much. It reaches a point of exhaustion. In 1919, when Dada was in full blast, and we were demolishing many things, the Mona Lisa became a prime victim. I put a moustache and a goatee on her face simply with the idea of desecrating her.’ 4 How ever, as Duchamp very well understood, the iconoclastic gesture did not undermine authorship or attribution; on the contrary. Hence, 25 years later, he wrote on the back of this work: ‘This is to certify that this is the original “ready made” L.H.O.O.Q., Paris 1919, Marcel Duchamp, New York 1944.’ J. C. — When undermining authorship, one must either replace it with another or be prepared for the object to lose its vitality. The new author is an important anchor in this equation, even if that is all they end up being. 3

Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. was not the first work of art made using an appropriated image of the Mona Lisa. A previous modification of this iconic figure was executed by the French artist and illustrator Eugène Bataille (better known by his pseudonym Arthur Sapeck). Bataille’s version, however, was published in 1887 in the pages of the satirical magazine Le Rire, and it depicted the Mona Lisa blowing smoke rings from a pipe. As a picture in a magazine, however, the work did not cause much controversy. From a radio interview that took place between Duchamp and Herbert Crehan, broadcast by WBAI, New York, cited in Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, Delano Greenridge Editions, New York, 2000, p.670.

Y. E. — The story of L.H.O.O.Q. continues in a similar line of reasoning, turning out to be even more complicated and layered than is commonly assumed. Working towards the publication of the March 1920 issue of 391 magazine, Duchamp’s colleague Francis Picabia asked him to send over L.H.O.O.Q. so that he could reproduce the work in the publication. But according to Duchamp, ‘My original did not arrive in time and in order not to delay further the printing of 391, Picabia himself drew the moustache on the Mona Lisa but forgot the beard.’ 5 The work was then published in the issue under Duchamp’s name, although it was executed by Picabia and lacked the ‘original’ beard, and neither of the two noticed the mistake. Shortly thereafter, however, Jean Arp was browsing through the magazine in a bookshop when he noticed the omission. He alerted Duchamp, who then took the work back from Picabia and added the missing goatee, as well as the following inscription at the bottom right: ‘Moustache par Picabia/barbiche par Marcel Duchamp’ (moustache by Picabia, goatee by Duchamp). In a way, the confusion of identities in this work is even more interesting once it shifts its weight from the initial iconoclastic gesture of ‘desecrating’ the Mona Lisa to the tacit exchange between Duchamp, Picabia and Arp. I suppose this goes hand in hand with your suggestion that even if the question of authorship is complicated, like in this case, the importance of authorship is not merely anchored but rather becomes the very principle of the project. J. C. — But there is also another perspective on this. One that suggests quite the opposite position, according to which a work of art necessarily deposes the person that makes it, eventually. Our premise of art tends to be that it calibrates the human ego, that it unearths some existential truth about what it means to be human. But if it does so, it is certainly not by perfectly matching the artist’s intentions with their aspired results. There is only partial correlation between an artist’s idea and the work that they eventually create. Intention might be the driver for the production of an artwork, but perception (by the critic, viewer, interceptor, or the artist themselves) is the vital test. That is, the moment we ask ‘does it match?’ Well, no, clearly not. I cannot think of one work of art where the artist’s intentions entirely match the consequences of its production. So, better to claim that art is entirely ego-less. Imagine art history as a vast, inhuman mass, an aggregate of baroque objects that have somehow migrated through humans who participated, like puppets, in some pointless creative flourish. In the novel Erewhon (1872), Samuel Butler

describes the newly industrialised workers as ‘machine-tickling aphids’. Likewise, it is entirely possible to think of the artist as a ‘paint-tickling aphid’. Rather than having an anthropocentric view of the history of art, it might be better to have a history of art that does not mention people at all, a non-human history of art – even when it comes to the most figurative, the most expressive works. Invoking Firestone, a modern art that retaliates against humans. Y. E. — Do you think that the inappropriateness between the artefact and the artist’s cerebral intentions suffices in order to argue that the work is distinct from the ego? Let’s look at collaborative practices, not necessarily long-term ones like your own, but ad-hoc collaborations. These became very popular in the 1920s, predominantly among Dada artists and Surrealists, who were keen to undermine the very notion of identity as a single, coherent thing: from the experiments with exquisite corpse compositions in collage, drawing and writing, to the collaborations, magazine commissions or cycles of works executed by multiple artists. A good case study here would be the joint projects of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, such as their perfume campaign for the made-up label Belle Haleine around 1921. It was for this project that Man Ray photographed Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, his androgynous alter-ego, for the first time. They then placed the photographic portrait onto the label of a Rigaud perfume bottle, whose title Duchamp altered from ‘un air qui embaume’ (a scent that envelops) to ‘belle haleine’ (fresh breath). Identity – of product, artist and gender – are conflated in this campaign, but the power of the icon is amplified. No wonder that in 2009 Francesco Vezzoli was tempted to create his own perfume label following Duchamp’s recipe, which he then titled Greed, The Perfume that Doesn’t Exist. For his label, Vezzoli asked fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo to photograph him in a similarly androgynous look, and he then built an entire campaign around this one bottle of perfume that included posters depicting major women artists shedding a tear (Lee Miller, Frida Kahlo, Eva Hesse and others), and he even asked Roman Polanski to create a 60-second commercial with Natalie Portman and Michelle Williams, who play two women battling over a single bottle of Greed. The notion of the artist’s identity as an iconic symbol became everything the piece was about. In fact, the term ‘identity’ embodies a beautiful paradox. On the one hand, it serves to distinguish something from everything else around it, but on the other, it is meant to express the principle of absolute similarity. Take René Descartes’s famous attempts to prove the existence of the self in the seventeenth century: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Once Descartes

Ibid., p.671.

Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette, 1921

Francesco Vezzoli Greed, The Perfume that Doesn’t Exist, 2009

A perfume campaign for Belle Haleine, featuring Duchamp photographed by Man Ray as Rrose Sélavy, each print signed by Man Ray and the paper in turn inscribed by Duchamp.

A reinterpretation of Man Ray and Duchamp’s Belle Haleine.

Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette, 1921

Francesco Vezzoli Greed, The Perfume that Doesn’t Exist, 2009

A perfume campaign for Belle Haleine, featuring Duchamp photographed by Man Ray as Rrose Sélavy, each print signed by Man Ray and the paper in turn inscribed by Duchamp.

A reinterpretation of Man Ray and Duchamp’s Belle Haleine.

Marcel Duchamp Miroir, 1964

Enrico Baj A Magic, 1960

An Enrico Baj mirror intended to be broken for the artist’s presentation at the 13th Milan Triennial, taken by Duchamp, signed, and turned into a ‘potential future portrait’.

A collage with broken mirror and paint applied on wallpaper.

Marcel Duchamp Miroir, 1964

Enrico Baj A Magic, 1960

An Enrico Baj mirror intended to be broken for the artist’s presentation at the 13th Milan Triennial, taken by Duchamp, signed, and turned into a ‘potential future portrait’.

A collage with broken mirror and paint applied on wallpaper.

proved that the very fact that he is thinking these thoughts confirms his being, his existence, his subsequent task was to prove that that thinking entity subsists over time. Or, in other words, that he continues to be identical to himself. Now, this type of inquiry might sound all too philosophical, but it links back to the expectations we have for a symbiotic rapport between an artist and their work. How can such a rapport even exist when artists collaborate with one another? Is it maintained over time? Can it be transferred to another artist? I am thinking about another of Duchamp’s mischievous actions, a much later one, from 1964. Visiting his colleague Enrico Baj during preparations for the Milan Triennial that year, Duchamp was mesmerised by all the mirrors that Baj was breaking into pieces to create new works. He snatched three small frames and quickly signed their surfaces, explaining afterwards to Baj that these were to be ‘potential future portraits’. J. C. — What Duchamp captured here so brilliantly is that a work of art must be transgressive. That is, it must operate in terms of its innovation, overcoming the old in favour of the new, but to do so every time you encounter it. The gradient of progress in the trajectory of modernity is not at all a straight line, but rather a jagged, spiky movement, if one can even imagine progress or trajectory. So in some sense, the ‘potential future portrait’ enables one to gain its revolutionary status with every new encounter. But this act emphasises the fact that every iteration of that transgression must come at the expense of its previous incarnation. You see, the way we comprehend transgression in art is that we see it as if for the first time. It is a process of built-in amnesia that allows each act of transgression to have its spontaneous effect, its abyssal gasp, as it were – as it does in religious rituals that purposely profane the divine. Y. E. — I am going to try and tread carefully here, in order to avoid derailing our conversation towards the realm of forgeries, fakes and copies, and their place within the history of art. But I can’t help but think of two paintings by René Magritte in which the identity of the author is quite radically undermined. The first is from 1927 and titled Le fruit du rêve (The Fruit of Dreams), which Magritte executed shortly after he arrived in Paris for the first time, aged 29. It is an unusual painting that resembles terribly the work of Max Ernst from that year, and particularly his famous forest grattage oil paintings. The work is entirely in black and dark-grey shades. It contains a circular shape at the top, much like Ernst’s forest suns, and another form that resembles an animal’s tail or head. In fact, according to Marcel Marïen, a younger colleague of 24

Magritte’s, this painting eventually made its way to the Tate Gallery retrospective of Ernst in 1961 in London without anyone – Ernst included – mentioning anything about it. Marïen goes on to argue that this incident would explain Ernst’s act of retaliation, which took place in 1962. In this instance, Ernst purchased a painting titled La force de l’habitude (The Force of Habit) by Magritte, depicting a large apple with an inscription above it that says: ‘This is not an apple’. Ernst then added a bird behind bars (perhaps a Loplop figure, Ernst’s fictive alter-ego) onto the fruit and an inscription below, stating ‘Ceci n’est pas un Magritte’ (This is not a Magritte), and adding his own signature. Like Magritte’s Ernst making an appearance at the Tate, Ernst’s Magritte appeared shortly thereafter in an exhibition of collages at the Paris gallery Le Point Cardinal. This time, however, the catalogue indicated that this work was executed ‘in collaboration with René Magritte’. But according to Dorothea Tanning, when Magritte saw the altered painting he responded with surprise and a ‘forced laugh’. He was not amused. J. C. — I would agree with your initial hesitance about these works. The provocations of Ernst and Magritte and their ability to assume the aesthetic form of one another gets as close as possible to crossing the line between art and forgery, even if by doing so they raise questions about their own status as recognised artists. A similar thing could be said about Picasso, when in 1940 he decided to draw a portrait of Dora Maar in the style of Matisse. The result was so successful that he signed the drawing under Matisse’s name and gifted it to Maar as such. Later, in 1949, the drawing made its first public appearance in an issue of Cahiers d’art, once again as a Matisse. But it is important to understand that these forms of banter do not differ all that much from artistic collaboration. When you have two people making a work of art together, they cannot spontaneously create something that is entirely honest, either. Their work would have to be schizophrenically divided between two sets of intentions which are never going to marry. You could imagine, hypothetically, a duo of artists who come to the studio every morning and play a game of rockpaper-scissors to determine how they both feel: happy, sad, and so on. ‘Oh, shit,’ one says to the other, ‘no luck today. Let’s try again tomorrow.’ Y. E. — Was this, at least in part, why in your creative partnership with Dinos you often chose to engage with readymade works by other artists? To neutralise some of that impossible tension?

René Magritte Le fruit du rêve, 1927

René Magritte La force de l’habitude, 1960

A painting executed in the style of Max Ernst’s forest paintings and, according to contemporary sources, included in Ernst’s retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1961.

A Magritte painting from 1960 altered in 1962 by Max Ernst, who added a caged bird, the inscription ‘Ceci n’est pas un Magritte’ and his signature.

René Magritte Le fruit du rêve, 1927

René Magritte La force de l’habitude, 1960

A painting executed in the style of Max Ernst’s forest paintings and, according to contemporary sources, included in Ernst’s retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1961.

A Magritte painting from 1960 altered in 1962 by Max Ernst, who added a caged bird, the inscription ‘Ceci n’est pas un Magritte’ and his signature.

Published in 2022 by Ridinghouse and Luxembourg + Co. on the occasion of the exhibition: Bad Manners On the Creative Potentials of Modifying Other Artists’ Work 1 March–15 May 2022 Luxembourg + Co. 2 Savile Row London W1A 3PA luxembourgco.com Ridinghouse 46 Lexington Street London W1F 0LP ridinghouse.co.uk Distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world by: ACC Art Books Sandy Lane, Old Martlesham Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 4SD accartbooks.com Distributed in the United States and Canada by: ARTBOOK | D.A.P. 75 Broad Street, Suite 630 New York, NY 10004 artbook.com Texts © Jake Chapman and Yuval Etgar For the book in this form © Ridinghouse and © Luxembourg + Co. ISBN 978-1-909932-70-8 Ridinghouse Publisher: Sophie Kullmann Ridinghouse Senior Editor: Aimee Selby Research and Coordination: Inès Leynaud and Raphaële Sevrain Designed by Ray O’Meara and Thomas Swann for A New Archive Printed in Italy by Verona Libri Production: Sophie Kullmann