A world of the mysteriously macabre

Standing in the square is an evil-looking bronze tree statue with joke skeletons hanging off its branches and maggots crawling through the eyes of hollowed-out faces.

I point out the obvious: it’s an apt image with Halloween looming and a fair reflection of Jake and his brother Dinos’s reputation for focusing on life’s dark underbelly.

“It [the darkness] is not an invention,” says Jake. “It is there. It is all around us... I suppose we see it as our job to drag some of that into this world.”

He draws attention to the foot of the tree, where puddles are forming between its roots and around scattered bones and worms feeding on the dead.“We knew it would turn green when we took it outside,” he grins.

Sturm Und Drang

The gothic death scene Sturm Und Drang is covered in a black wax which deteriorates with the rain and allows the bronze to oxidise and turn green. Not only does it rework 1994’s Great Deeds Against The Dead and reference Francisco Goya’s print of the same name from his Disasters Of War etchings, it is also a development of Sex, the work the brothers entered for the 2003 Turner Prize, eventually won by Grayson Perry. A quick Google reveals its title references the German 18th century movement driven by free expression translated as Storm And Stress.

“We were going to show our Hell sculpture for the Turner Prize but [Charles] Saatchi wouldn’t let us do it so we had six months to make some new work,” says Jake, referring to Sex.

“We assembled everything from joke shops, so it is like the idea of saying – how can you make a sculpture which has any aesthetic value or worth to it when you take the components from somewhere the elements are so worthless, so throwaway?”

Mysterious mannequins

Elsewhere in the seafront gallery on The Stade are mannequins wearing clothes the brothers bought from Hastings charity shops and three academic drawings a teenage Jake Chapman made in Hastings in 1983. These are a direct response to the location and have been unveiled as part of the crowd-funded exhibition brought to the town thanks to £30,000 raised by locals via the Art Fund’s Art Happens scheme.

In The Realm Of The Unmentionable capitalises on the popularity of the duo’s previous appearance at the gallery in a Museums At Night event.

Gallery director Liz Gilmore helped bring the Chapman brothers to the gallery.

“It’s brilliant to have Jake and Dinos here.

“The story started for us a couple of years ago when we were bidding to have them as part of Museums At Night. We won, we had 49 per cent of the vote. So many people wanted to have them here and we sold all the tickets.

“We asked them to come back with an exhibition which responds to the context and is also a retrospective of many different things.”

From school to success

Dinos and Jake Chapman were born in Cheltenham but went to school in Hastings. Their parents still live in the town. Jake admits it was special to come back to Sussex before revealing, “We have long since left Hastings. We don’t really know anyone down here apart from our mum and dad. And we don’t really know them.”

Dinos, whose comic humour is blacker than his younger brother, says, “It is our home town – there is fear involved and a bit of revenge.”

The brothers rose to fame in the 1990s after a stint as assistants to Gilbert and George and studied at the Royal College Of Art. With a well-executed combination of vision and skill, they became the most provocative English artists of their generation.

They say their work is impersonal. The geography of where they are doesn’t matter. The 2006 show Like A Dog Returns To Its Vomit revealed a duo who go back to the same ideas over and over again. As such, Hastings’ effect on their output is minimal, just as London or Britain will never figure in their work.

“There is not much autobiographical stuff going on. There are no reflections on our childhood or places or any kind of personal history. So there is not much literal reference to Hastings other than the psychiatric damage it caused us as children and the outcome as adults and the years of therapy.”

Goya groupies

Another new work which builds on the brothers’ long-held love for the 18th century Spanish master Goya is a series of water-coloured prints called Los Caprichos. Translated from Spanish as ‘The Follies’ or ‘The Whims’, the 80 reworked etchings of Goya prints the pair brought at an auction three years ago are part-comic, part-nightmarish visions, and mirror another part of the Turner Prize entry, Insult To Injury.

For that work the brothers painted clown and rabbit faces over Goya prints dealing with atrocities inflicted on Spanish peasants during the Napoleonic invasion.

The act caused outrage at the time. They were called vandals. Though many of the characters in Los Caprichos are grotesque, the effect of reworking these Goya prints is not as shocking as it once was.

The duo once considered changing their surnames to Goya in homage to the artist, and, as Jake reveals, “Nothing we’ve done is original. It’s not like we could claim originality in our work.

“All of our work is lifted from everywhere else because we don’t subscribe to the idea that artists generate anything which is original.”

Out of the fires of Hell

The brothers say all art attains meaning from other art, “that the history of art is the thing that gives the meaning to anything you are making at any given time”. Stitched onto a tent pitched in the middle of the first gallery are all the people Tracey Emin has ever slept with from 1963 to 1995. It’s a replica recreation of the fellow Young British Artist’s tent destroyed in the Momart warehouse in London in May 2004. The brothers’ version is called The Same Thing Only Better (2010).

“She felt like she couldn’t make her iconic sculpture which was burned in the Momart fire so we thought we’d make it for her,” Jake told the BBC as he and five others assembled the tent during the filming of BBC Four’s What Do Artists Do All Day?, to be screened on November 5.

“One of the things we’ve always been interested in is about trying to make a work of art which has a residual content of zero. And if the content in this work refers to someone else’s autobiography then we have made a work that has nothing for us. It is like producing a black hole.”

It is a completely accurate copy, confirms Jake, who reveals it is the first time the sculpture is going to be shown, “so it will be interesting to see how it goes down in Tracey-land”.

The Chapman brothers’ ‘Hell’ was destroyed in the 2004 fire along with £50 million worth of art, including work by Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread as well as more than 100 pieces owned by Charles Saatchi.

Ten years on from the fire four glass cases filled with thousands of toy model soldiers, frolicking dinosaurs, crucified Ronald McDonalds and a space station are the latest remake of the famous piece. God appears as the new addition to The Sum Of All Evil, with two giant severed feet wearing rainbow-coloured socks and Birkenstock sandals bought in Hastings. It’s a totem to the exhibition’s humour and seriousness.

Bringing the roof down

Audience responses in the gallery might not figure in the brothers’ minds as they create but they have noticed how people respond to key set pieces.

“There are funny effects we’ve noticed over the years”, explains Jake. “For example, on works in big glass cases you start to notice this echoing of the profile of the diorama in nose grease. You can see how people have worked their way along. That is nice. You see these funny ergonomic effects people have had with the work. You can hear the umming and arrghing and weeping and laughing. It’s the rich tapestry of our work.”

The rich tapestry also includes a response by Jake to criticism he received after saying children might not be best served by an afternoon weaving around an art gallery.

A spat erupted when the father of three told the Independent On Sunday that standing a child in front of a Pollock was “like saying … it’s as moronic as a child. Children are not human yet.”

So they’ve lowered the ceiling in one room to five feet and placed a still life of a fruit bowl on the wall. Waddle or crawl over to see an original by a Mr Adolf Hitler. Perhaps it is a suggestion, reflecting the disagreement, everything is not always as it seems.

“I’m really proud of the space above that sunken ceiling,” says Jake. “It’s a little children’s gallery. It’s nice to do something for children in galleries after the recent spat with the press. This is like rehabilitation for us.”

Dinos chips in: “There is the potential for it to fall on them”.

Leaving their mark

Still, Jake says they’ve a childlike approach to making art. And as we peer at the black tree in the courtyard he rolls back his sleeve to unveil some smiley face and one-eye monster tattoos designed by his six-year-old daughter Blythe.

She’d been doodling on his arm, art brut style, with a biro on a flight to Kiev for an opening. Jake made good on his bet to have it tattooed.

“We went to a tattoo parlour in Kiev and she stood over the guy making sure he did it properly.”

With that he’s off to assist in the temporary tattoo parlour set up in the gallery, where Dinos is drawing a Chapman brothers’ original on agency showbiz reporter Rollo Ross’s bicep.

As part of the crowd-sourcing campaign fans could buy Chapman brothers’ non-permanent transfer tattoos for £25 (as well as loo rolls for £60 and postcards for £15).

On the day of the launch a tattooist from Hastings needles designs for free on a flurry of residents and curious members of the press. Options included Hitler’s dog Blondi and one of the Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse.

“It’s just like going to the dentist,” one onlooker jokes.

“You get anaesthetic at the dentist,” replied another.

The brothers, who have tattooed each other, wanted to be let loose on the public. Though hard as they try, only professionals are allowed to tattoo the public.

“Dinos has done loads of tattoos on me,” says Jake. “He can’t tattoo to save his life but I’ve got a few of them.”

The parlour idea was rebuffed by London’s Freize Art Fair on health and safety grounds but permitted for one day at Jerwood Gallery. The duo’s aim is to test boundaries.

“We’ve been trying to tattoo people for a long time,” reveals Dinos. “Every time we try to do it someone tells us we are not allowed to. So we have to rely on other people doing it.

“It is the idea of saying where is the boundary, where is the limit to what you can do? It is also us infiltrating every form of activity – so of course we are going to do tattoos. It’s like expanding foam – we will expand into any space left for us to expand into.”

Tuesday to Friday, 11am to 5pm, Saturday and Sunday, 11am to 6pm. Closed Mondays. Adults £8, children £3.50, family £20. Residents £3, £1.50, £8. Call 01424 728377.