Jake and Dinos Chapman, The Disasters of Yoga II, 2019-2020. Francisco de Goya Disasters of War. Selections from portfolio of eighty etchings reworked and improved with collage. Courtesy of Jake and Dinos Chapman, photographed by Ken Copsey.

The Disasters of Yoga

With just a little flick of the wrists the Manduka yoga mat unfurls effortlessly across the floor, the end flicking expertly short of Adriene and Benji-the-dog, who are both patiently paused on my laptop’s screen, ready to continue on the 45th day of our intimate yoga journey. This morning Adriene explains how she has prepared a lesson to help guide me towards awakening the true artist within, whilst Benji performs a flawless downward dog pose and collapses in a rhomboidal shape cast by the sun through the gaping window. Adriene invites me to allow the sound of her voice to guide us… fingers and toes to touch the mat, each digit spread wide over the surface of the world, and then tells me to breathe…. to inhale…. and exhale. And as I begin to drift away beneath Adriene’s coenobitic drone and the choreography of mindless movement, the contiguity of two words—“world” and “breathe” —seem to linger persistently in the foreground of my mind’s eye, obstructing the true path towards the abstract enlightenment that beckons… Sensing my collapse back into the mundane, my guru whispers, close your eyes and breathe deeply.... and Adriene, Benji and I close our eyes and breathe deeply. To breathe deeper you must exhale more, she says, but yelling gets out all the old air and some of those pent-up feelings we seem to collect along the way... let yourself be open to the world, yell right now if you want... But I’m too reserved to yell, and there’s the neighbors to consider. Instead, I clench my eyes, redoubling my efforts against the world outside, but the sun flares red, piercing the thin skin of my eyelids, the pink incandescence that even registers on a blindman’s eyes—and as if sensing catastrophe Adriene shouts out: and breathe!  But breathing is now the source of a new and sublime anxiety—the world is breathing—inhaling… exhaling… coughing and spluttering, the very cause for my retreat from the worldly disasters of Goya to indoor yoGa, inhale…. exhale…. And even as I yearn for Adriene’s promissory Nirvana, I can only think of Coronavirus, the ominous being-for-death that has descended upon us so ruthlessly, collapsing the sovereign human back into the species—the hive of contagion that is humanity, inhaling and exhaling the virus across its hideous social intimacy…. I silently plead for Adriene’s voice to lead me away from myself, now bending my right knee and pulling it close to my chest just like this, like I’m hugging myself, in a fetal coil… inhale… hugging myself tight… That’s it—exhale! Now stretch out your left leg in front of you—nice and slowly... I try to move, but am stuck fast, and all I see is mouths leering, grinning, gaping, gasping, moaning, shrieking, belching…. inhale…. exhale… A hanged man’s mouth lies open and a woman reaches up to filch his teeth…  inhale…. exhale… Grown men stick fingers in their mouths like sucking infants… inhale…. exhale…  Mouths vomit, the sick gushes out of them, and a great furry beast sicks up a pile of human bodies… inhale…. exhale…  Mouths guzzle avidly, ferociously, living flesh as well as dead… I come-to, not yelling, but shrieking, a post-partum howl in reverse, inhaling all matter back into the womb of the universe, back into the big-bang from whence it came. My eyes are dilated with cosmic insignificance. All around me, the dead—a mass grave of yoga gurus, a carnage of manhandled Goya prints, The Disasters of War etchings discarded about the floor, some pinned irreverently on the walls—a litter of plundered yoga books, torn pages and paper shapes cast about in a collaged mess of scissors, scalpel blades, glue and blood. But Adriene and Benji are beaming at me with joyful smiles, quite satisfied that they’ve released the true artist within me.

— Jake Chapman