Sedition

Jake & Dinos Chapman have included a poem alongside the launch of their latest artwork Who's Afraid Of Red, White And Black? on Sedition. The 10-minute video is a self-referential piece that encapsulates the raw, emotional power of the Chapman brothers' work.

Set within an unsettling, fetishistic dreamscape, Who's Afraid Of Red, White And Black? features flashing portraits of British 19th Century aristocracy from their One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved (that it should come to this...) series - the portraits modified by the artists to appear as decaying corpses. The video also features images from the artists' I Felt Insecure series of sculptural pieces composed of brains, sexual organs, rubber gloves, tools and industrial equipment.

The following poem, chosen by the Chapmans to accompany the new artwork, touches upon cultures, history, death, war, body and animals as themes and symbols that run throughout their work.

Under the magic ascendancy

of scribble and the crushing

opposable-thumb a hunter

with an ogre-like head

poached by a rabid dog

emerging from a dark cave

snapping at the hand

whose savaged imprint

reappears in a cave in Castillo

with two hundred mutilated

hands at Gargas to ward off

evil eye-sockets wearing

a magical diamante collar

of the Aurignacian period

threading fangs of slain prey

sucking plasma of sacrificial

animal’s bones hand-carved

by deft artisans into magical cattle-prod

which matches the perspectival

size and shape of one of the

Easter-egg Island petroglyph shells

decorated in the background

carved from volcanic lava

rolled over wooden logs

to propriate the spirits of the dead

mummified remains painted

in crude-oil trompe l’oil foreground

rock crystal skull glows

radiating light through

a thin grey skin wash - yet behold!

to the left of the camp commandant

wrapped in barbed wire

chained to a wooden scaffold

a captured teddybear is mocked

by nomadic Ghiliak tribes

before they gorge themselves

on its tortured fun-fur’s

Passing Iglukik female demon

goes off in search of game

from the mother of all sea animals

Enclosed inside a pack of ice

which melts in summer she

falls and loses consciousness

on the mountain being unable

to recover until a beneficent dog

has licked her frozen heart warm.

Mummy Pynry-Wayrgyn lives in the moon

squeezing fish and sea-creatures

from her nipple which swim towards

sinister fishing nets –

the sinister spirit of nervous maladies

the spirit of epilepsy,

the spirit of St.Tourette

the spirit of ether or opium

the spirit of vacuum packing

the spirit of the industrial machine-gun machine

the spirit of the looming Jacquard loom

the assistant spirits of the Tunguska

shaman’s felt-tip circle weaving

the mandalas of the Hindus

the zodiacal plans of pre-Colombians

and clenched solar beams

squeezed through the cathedral’s

clenched petal aperture

filling the vestibule

with debauched lapping

buttresses of choir boys

whispering in the shower

attendant’s ear a shaman

from Tunguska clothed

in the death's head

insignia of his succession

exorcising his priesthood

in the midst of a people who look

upon their abnormalities as the cracks

through which unseen powers manifest themselves

A host of ancestors sapping the fear

of fruitless love borne in the name of

the departed, the benevolent or terrifying

of ancestral figurens carved

in a railway transit of logs and rags

The remembrance of the dead

in New Guinean earthen-ware parties

An inomminate skull upholstered

with the skin of an ancestor

whose virtues they wish to preserve

for themselves and their descendants

a snake standing up like a cock’s comb

or jester’s hat on the head

of a long-eared devil from a Bolivian

tourist casting spells with Congolese nails

while Enguerrand de Marigny

is hung at Montfaucon for casting a spell

on Louis X’s papier-mâché effigy

hung on a miniature wooden gibbet

A glassy obsidian Luger pistol

studded with pearls and precious stones

dedicated to Huitzilopochtli

sits in its leather holster

symbol of the metaphysical objective

behind ritual holocaust reflects

the belief in the necessity of assimilating

those forces which having left the dead

will come to inhabit the body of the excutant –

all seven million of them

and staring out into the black bitumen

tongue flashes of superheated gas

warp away from the turbulent corona

of the moon-sun,

compressed helium ignitions

arcing back into superviolent gravity...

View Jake & Dinos Chapman's Who's Afraid Of Red, White And Black? digital edition now available on Sedition.