Artist Jake Chapman is not known for his sentimentalism. In their masterwork Hell, he and his brother Dinos showed no pity for thousands of toy soldiers they tortured and eviscerated in a landscape of baroque psychosis.
They have also collected and exhibited paintings attributed to Adolf Hitler, and in interviews, Jake Chapman goes out of his way to defy liberal soppiness with provocative remarks such as saying children should be banned from art galleries. Yet it turns out that, like the apparently heartless Andy Warhol who secretly worked in soup kitchens, Chapman has a penchant for modest acts of kindness. It has come to light that when he heard about Refugee Relief, a charity that works on Lesbos to save exhausted refugees from drowning, he bought them a lifeboat.
Now that news of his generosity has emerged, Chapman is of course being true to form and making provocative remarks about art and the refugee crisis. He has denounced artists who grandstand about it: “There’s something pathetic about Ai Weiwei going to lie down on the beach to aestheticise others people’s misery.”
Ai Weiwei was photographed last January lying face down on a Lesbos beach, posing as the drowned child Alan Kurdi whose fate (all too briefly) moved the world in 2015. He has also created a studio on Lesbos and is making a documentary about refugees.
I strongly agree with Chapman about a famous artist pretending to be a dead child. What the hell was he thinking? No one else would get away with such a thing. As art it is risible, as politics fatuous, as a human gesture grotesquely inept. Imagine if Tom Hiddleston had posed as a drowned refugee – the online mockery would never end. Yet such is the strange world of artistic fame that Ai Weiwei’s absurd image was acclaimed as a serious political artwork.
Nor is it the only feeble artwork about the refugee crisis. One artist even created an underwater tribute to the drowned. How is such a work, accessible only to well-heeled scuba divers, going to help anyone? How do well-intentioned works for the Biennale elite change anything?
Public professions of virtue can be the most odious kind of cant. The Chapman brothers have instead always shunned any kind of moral claim for their art – and Chapman has said of his lifeboat: “I’m not being euphemistic when I say that buying the boat and sending it to Greece was the least I could do.” He might have proved that the most ethical artists are those who make no claim to do good in the gallery, and instead put their money where their mouth is.
