Bad Manners

Bad Manners is an original history of non-consensual collaboration between artists, from the first decades of the twentieth century to the present day. Narrated by artist Jake Chapman and art historian Yuval Etgar, this book takes the reader through a wealth of artworks and anecdotes involving cannibalistic acts of modification or alteration of another artist’s work, the hijacking of authorship through the addition of a signature, and occasions when the identities of artists or their creations are cast in doubt. Among the works in discussion are a drawing by Pablo Picasso signed as Henri Matisse, a coffee table executed by Martin Kippenberger using a painting by Gerhard Richter as its surface, and a performance by David Hammons documenting the artist urinating on a Richard Serra sculpture.

 

Published to accompany an exhibition of the same name at Luxembourg + Co., London, Bad Manners raises questions concerning the nature of artistic authorship, standards of collegial etiquette, plagiarism and ownership.

 

Jake Chapman is an artist and a writer famous for his iconoclastic sculptures, prints and installations. He has worked collaboratively with his brother Dinos for three decades; the Chapmans first received critical acclaim in 1991 for the diorama sculpture Disasters of War and since then have exhibited extensively in solo and group shows. In 2015, Jake directed The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, a film based on his first novel of the same title. The book was followed by Memoirs of My Writer’s Block, INTROSPASTIC: From the Blackened Beyond and, most recently, 2+2=5, a rectified version of George Orwell’s flawed masterpiece 1984.

Yuval Etgar is a curator and art historian who specialises in the history and theory of collage and image appropriation. He is the author of John Stezaker: At the Edge of Pictures (2020) and The Ends of Collage (2017). He is currently working on Phaidon’s first survey of collage in contemporary art, Vitamin C+, to be published in autumn 2023.