“It's about interpretation or misinterpretation. Once a piece of work is finished we have no greater right to interpret it than anybody else. We don't necessarily know what it means. It becomes its own thing. It doesn't need us anymore.”
—Dinos Chapman
Marcus Field: How does working as a partnership, rather than in the traditional manner of individual talents, affect your work?
Jake Chapman: We always considered art an activity confined by its language, rather than some idea of exclusive personal expression. I think that's the cause that the two of us have been working for. Our work raises questions about the speculative aspect of making a work of art rather than any simple expression of latent content. As soon as you assign the task of thinking about art to more than one person you make your practice critical automatically. It's not abouti skill, it's about the adoption of different modes of operation, of different modes of being.
Dinos Chapman: I think working as a double act has caused us to fracture away from the kind of single-minded genius prototype of a normal artist. It doesn't just turn into binary equation, it turns into a totally fractured equation whereby everything is available to us – art history, popular culture, music. So the things we make become a conglomeration of not just Jake and my thoughts. We're interested in whether two people can constitute one genius. There's a very romantic notion of the great artist that still exists from the sixties.