Kapparot, Religious Art And Chicken Soup

A Conversation With Jack Hirons, 26th August 2023

Bruno Grad

Oct 15, 2024

Kapparot in Brooklyn, 2023, Oil on Board (artist made black from chicken bones),
83.5cm x 64cm

Bruno Grad

To kick us off, could you briefly describe the project and how you started painting with chickens?

Jack Hirons

Yeah, of course. I’d developed this way of making work while I was studying Photographic Arts at uni, where I was really focussing on materials and methods of depiction, and what exactly was the relationship between those things. I guess the big discussion through the whole degree was about the differences between analogue and digital: what it means to make an analogue image, which is so much more directly connected to materiality. That was kind of the focus and I made a piece of work which was a 16mm film following silver in the production of black & white film. So it was like you were looking at silver tell its own story. I guess I realised that was what I wanted to try to do with paint. And I found out you could make paint from bones.
It was around the time that I’d discovered the Wing Bowl competition [a spectacular competitive chicken wing eating competition in the USA]. I was thinking about taking something from a moment—a material from a moment—and reflecting that moment.

And so it kind of developed into a bigger thing. The more I read about chicken,
the more I realised how ingrained they are in our cultures. There is something like four times as many chickens than humans on the planet at any one moment, which is crazy because you rarely see them. There aren’t many cultures that don’t eat them.
There’s only vegetarian cultures, for examples Rastafarians, vegans. And then there’s the iconography: it’s in the zodiac, it’s in Christianity in a big way.

Did you have a connection with or interest in chickens before you found out about the Wing Bowl?

No, not really. It was more that it was a material that made sense for the work.
My mum and her new husband have lots of chickens and ducks at their house but I haven’t spent much time with them. I did grow up in the countryside though, in North Devon, so animals were about!

Do you think you’ve gained any insight through the process of making this work about why the chicken is important to all these cultures?

Not really. There was a book I read at the start, called How The Chicken Crossed the World [by Andrew Lawler], which is quite an extensive look charting the rise and spread of the chicken.

Could a vegan buy your work?

Yeah, I think so!

Do people criticise it from that point of view?

I haven’t had that... yet. I feel like if I was doing massive paintings and it was using loads and loads of bones, maybe then. There’s just so many people still eating meat,
so you can’t really criticise someone just using the bones to paint.

It’s making me think a lot about sacrificial offerings, and how those kinds of ideas and rituals, which are so foundational, could be seen to be manifest in our time.
I’m particularly thinking of your Kapparot painting, which is a painting of a sacrificial rite. And here you could say that you’re using the material of the animal, the chicken, as an offering— like the best kind of offering to G*d. I mean, in our [Jewish] scriptural tradition— beginning with G*d’s preference of Abel over Cain— an animal sacrifice is seen as the best kind of offering. And your paintings can also be viewed in this context: as a kind of offering that also is made with animal materials. It’s interesting to think about whether that’s relevant to what you’re doing. You’re taking the material of these animals and sublimating them into these images.

Yeah, totally. I think there’s something ceremonial about it too. Spiritual, even.
You’re taking something that was living, and those particles have now passed through and they’ve become paint, and then an image, which adds language to it and then allows it to speak again.

Going back to the Kapparot image— I had the image on my hard-drive for probably about three or four years before painting it. I mean, what does it say if it’s me painting it? You know, I’m not Jewish.

Was that an important question for you?

Yeah, definitely. Because I think if you choose to paint something, you’re choosing to comment on it. But it doesn’t really come from a place of me pointing any fingers.
I paint pictures that I think are interesting and that add something to the whole story. But it’s never supposed to be discriminatory. I’m always trying to find some sort of balance. Yeah, the paintings of the wing eating competition are really gross—
it’s maybe something that I wouldn’t align myself with—but you’re still using a chicken in a similar way to how somebody might if they were having a Sunday roast with their family, which is a really beautiful, ceremonial thing. The Kapparot thing is the same, it’s really visual. You know, killing a chicken on the streets of Brooklyn obviously is quite extreme, but is it any worse than two thousand chickens running through a factory and being dispatched that way? Just because you bought the meat in a plastic packet, just because you’re removed from the death, it doesn’t make it any different.

Wing Bowl #002 (The Locust), Oil on Board (artist made black from chicken bones)

Yeah, so many of us are thoughtlessly complicit in the mass destruction of animal life anyway. So to take individual examples: I suppose someone could criticise your work for celebrating chicken culture, which is bound up in that mass destruction of the chicken. They could easily point their finger at the image of Kapparot as well,
and maybe rightly, as being an image of a barbaric thing—which it is—but I suppose the intention of those rituals is to arouse an elevation in our moral sensibility, to help develop the moral character of a group, in relation to eachother, to the world, to the materials around them. It’s interesting to consider whether that one chicken’s life is worth sacrificing for the sake of lifting a whole community…

Did you know all the chicken we eat is basically genetically identical? It all comes from an original chicken.

The chicken Eve.

The painting behind you, she’s the ‘Chicken of Tomorrow’ Beauty Queen. It was a competition in the States in the 1940s. Before WWII in America, chicken wasn’t really eaten much. Only really in African American culture. That was because slaves were allowed to keep chickens and it stayed within their culture. But across the rest of America people didn’t really eat chicken until WWII when it was discovered that this was a kind of meat that you could produce quite easily. So just after the war there were lots of these regional events and one big grand final. It was an open competition to anyone, but I guess mainly small-holders and farmers entered to crossbreed a chicken that yielded higher breast meat and that grew quicker: had a higher feed-to-meat conversion rate. I can’t remember the name of what the winning breed was, but the winner of this competition was basically the foremother of what we’re all eating today.

No way.

There’s another painting I did looking at this company called Cob. If you look at their website it’s extraordinary. A farmer can basically buy a model of chicken like you’re buying a car. You buy the Cob 500 chicken, or the Cob 700. It’s so industrialised.

It’s a really interesting counterpoint to the Kapparot image. This is the ultimate endpoint of the industrialisation of a life, to become purely product: replicateable, reproducible, de-individuated, absolutely reducible to a consumable product.

From this point of view, you could say it’s not much of a sacrifice. Because it’s this engineered thing anyway. The chicken never existed until Man created it.

Do you think there’s something beyond the genetic iteration of chicken-ness here that is still individuated potentially? They’re still living creatures with their own concerns.

Yeah, I mean it would be a fascinating experience to occupy the mind of the chicken...

My friend hatched two chicken eggs during the pandemic. Incubated and hatched them, and I got to know them quite well. But one of them became ill and died.
And then the other one just went into mourning and refused to be in the house and stayed in this one spot for ages and started to lose its feathers. And they thought it was ill as well, but they bought another chicken and it just came back to life.

Wow, it was heartbroken.

Yeah, you just get a sense of the subjectivity that exists there, when you think oh,
this is just like an automaton almost, but actually there’s a deep experience going on, it’s just inaccessible for us generally. You get glimpses of it when it goes through a crisis like that. To think that for each animal that is getting sacrificed on the altar of industrial meat production that isn’t the same, that each animal isn’t capable of having an experience of their own life and that it’s just blankly and mechanically going into death without suffering, I don’t believe that. But I still eat meat occasionally in spite of that.

Yeah it’s because you detach from it a little bit. Growing up in the countryside I like to think I could kill a chicken. I mean, I haven’t done it. But I’d like to think I could, and eat it. This takes us back to the sense of ceremony. I have lots of friends who are vegetarian and I like to cook for them. If you’re cooking for friends there’s already an element of ceremony there. But I always think, ah, but that ’s not special enough. There’s something about an animal on the table.

[Jack shows me the website of the Cob chicken]

It’s just like buying a car. Strange world.

Wow. That is fascinating. What a world.

“The World’s Most Efficient Broiler”. “The Standard in High Yield”. Trademarked.

Going back to what you said about the serving of an animal at a feast with friends— that’s probably one of the best examples of how the sacrificial offering manifests today. There is something really important to our culture and to our sense of ourselves in relation to each other, about the act of eating together. It matters that an animal has been sacrificed essentially for that. There is something intangible about why that’s the case, why there’s something more special about that than just a really well made risotto. It brings me back again to the image of Kapparot. Do you know much about the ritual?

I don’t know how I came across it you know. I used to live in Upper Clapton and I worked for a photographer for seven years, who lived in Stamford Hill, right in the middle off Oldhill Street. Literally right in the thick of the Hassidic community.
I used to spend a lot of time at his house, driving around there. Once you’re in it, it makes such an impression, it’s fascinating. There’s like a completely other world going on around you. You’re not in their world really, and they’re not in yours. But you’re co-inhabiting that space.

I used to live in Clapton too, and I often used to walk round there. Modernity is so all-encompassing. The idea that we have to participate in this specific version of Late Capitalism... It’s really hard to find an outside of that, but then you walk among a community that’s just rejected most of it, and has managed to remain intact despite the pressures of assimilation, albeit frozen in time, you could say, in a moment in time from the Victorian age. And they’ve managed to keep that intact, in spite of being surrounded on every side by attitudes and visual cultures that are hostile to it, or at least so very different. I found it really enjoyable just spend time in that environment. It's nice to be reminded that it’s possible to live in an alternative way, with a different value system.

Yeah, but the contradictions are also interesting to observe. There's this attempt to reject modernity but then you'll see all the kids smoking ciggies on the street corner on their smartphones. It's funny.

It seems maybe an internal struggle is going on. Like, how do you police the boundaries of who we are, whilst inevitable technological changes and developments always infiltrate? Still I think most of us who don't live in these communities don't understand who they are, what their belief system is. I'm fascinated by people who try to live in ways that are meaningful and value-driven, as opposed to the nihilists that think nothing means anything and are just bumbling through life. You can end up very lost and miserable when you live like that. I think people need to have purpose and meaning in order to feel sane. I think there's a lot to learn from these communities. It's also incredibly courageous in the current climate to walk around so clearly marked out as Jews.

Yeah there's nothing incognito about it, wearing a massive coat and a big fur hat! Yeah it is brave in that sense, but inside the community it would be incredibly brave not to dress like that.

I mean it's a striking look. The silhouette is amazing.

So what made you finally paint the Kapparot painting, if you'd been holding off so long?

Well, I was thinking how I'd been painting all these images looking at chickens across different cultures. I just felt I'd now have a good answer if anyone came to me and asked ‘why are you digging us out?’

What would your answer be?

I'm not! That's not my intention.

Is there a comment though? Earlier you mentioned that by making a painting you're choosing to comment on the subject. What's your comment in this case?

I think my basic comment on the act depicted in this image would be that there’s no real difference between what’s going on with the chicken here and going to buy one in a supermarket. In terms of how the animal is treated, I mean. When I was in Morocco I saw market stalls with live chickens that they dispatch in front of you. So that’s somewhere between the supermarket shelf and Kapparot. The more I paint this series, the more it feeds back into these concerns with spirituality, religion and ceremony.
By choosing to paint this image, I’m including it in this discussion. I think my painting of Tottenham captain Son Heung Min is like a religious painting, with the iconography of the cockerel. There’s a massive golden cockerel on top of the stadium. It’s like every church in Europe also has a cockerel on top of it. All these people congregate at the stadium every weekend. It’s so ceremonious going to football. Everything’s all about ritual.

Son, 2023, Oil on Board (artist made black from chicken bones), 61cm x 50cm

I think there's a religious or spiritual possibility in the probing of the everyday and the seemingly unextraordinary. Seeing infinity in a grain of sand!
That's something that really interests me with religion—it's often through an interrogation of the banal and the everyday that you discover the extraordinary.
That transformation. I've just started exploring that in a more concentrated way in my own work. Would you call yourself a religious artist?

No, I think that's just an interest. I mean, religion is so ingrained in art anyway. If we look at art history it's everywhere. So I think art and artists are always drawn to that because it's the foundation. Especially figurative oil painting. You can't really get too far away from these resonances. So, I wouldn't necessarily call myself a religious artist, but it's something that always comes back. Maybe spirituality is a better word. But yeah, if you want to call me a religious artist go for it!

Well you're using the material of life itself...

Yeah, half-way through I was reflecting on the work and I thought it's all quite morbid. But that's really not what it's supposed to be about. It's supposed to be the opposite, it's supposed to be about life. It's really about looking at this [points at a painting] and going 'Oh that is actually a chicken'. It literally was a chicken.
It's realising that the chicken is somewhere in the reality of this painting. Rather than being purely image, if that makes sense? It's not transporting you to somewhere else, you're acknowledging the reality of what's physically in front of you.

It's almost like a resurrection...

Yeah. It's all about experiencing that moment and what you're physically doing. Rather than something like an image on a screen that's removed from you. It's all about life, and bringing you back to an encounter with life. But perhaps if it's something all about life then inevitably it's also all about death. It works both ways.
If something's all about death then it's about living too. It's not one conversation. So I guess in those terms that is quite religious. What happens to you physically when you pass. This idea of resurrection or reincarnation.

A lot of contemporary painting seems to be about its own process, in a way that is internally coherent but not reaching beyond that to say something more. Often it doesn't have that sort of scope or ambition. There's this conversation with itself,
its own process and its own context within an art community, but it isn't necessarily reaching to say something beyond the fact of its own insisting. I personally find it so interesting that you're making work like this. It's exciting to me that within a contemporary idiom you're able to make those kinds of moves. You're finding ways to take the substantiveness of those religious works into a modern idiom, a forward-looking one that seems fresh. That's really cool.

Thank you. I must also mention the fun with it though. There's a lot of humour involved. Coming from a conversation about life and death—I don't want the work to be that... dry! I also don't like to take things too seriously.

We should wrap up, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about your work. One last thing before we stop: do you know what the Kapparot ritual is about?

Yeah, so you recite a prayer whilst waving a chicken above your head, which is like a cleansing of sins going into the new year. And then you dispatch the chicken.

Yeah so your sins and the sins of the community are transferred into the chicken.
And then when you've killed the chicken you give it to someone who needs it, to a family that might not be able to afford one. I guess the chicken is being sacrificed for the community in this way. In a way, perhaps something similar is happening in your work. The images are speaking to the human passions: there's glory, gluttony, all these things—we're learning about ourselves in a way that might be edifying or cleansing in some way. The chicken has been sacrificed for this end... although I guess you don't kill the chickens yourself!

Not physically, no.

Would you though?

Well like I said before, I feel like I could—

But i mean, could you kill a chicken for the work?

What and not eat the meat? No, I don't think so. I would kill a chicken to eat and then make the work.

Are there any circumstances where you think the work would merit that?

And just waste the meat?

Well in this instance the production of meat wouldn't be why you're killing the chicken. It would be killed to make the painting.

Maybe I would. In that case, I'd be valuing my art more than a chicken's life.
There are quite a lot of chickens about, and not many of my paintings... Let's reset the balance!

It’s an interesting question.

That would be controversial. Maybe you need to be controversial because it makes more of a comment. It's probably still a bit unnecessary!

It would be powerful. I'm interested in what would be retained in the image of the context in which it had been made. That life has been converted into this painting, solely for the purpose of this painting. Not just to meet a biological need, but for a different end. I think it would be an interesting thing to think about. And that really would be a sacrificial object. So it would become not just an aesthetic object, it would be a sort of ritual object as well. Which is an interesting expansion.

Yeah, I would say there's also lots of ritual wrapped up in food though as well. A lot of the work is acknowledging the importance of food, both ritualistically and spiritually as well as in terms of nourishment.

In Judaism that is particularly interesting, because we went from being a tradition that burned animal offerings in the Temple—to a tradition that is really centred around the domestic, the home, and eating together. The food is such a big part of it—eating together, fasting together. Even with the Kapparot, the chicken isn't being killed just for God, it's going to be eaten by a family that needs it. And chicken soup of course is very important to us. The move from the altar offering to chicken soup...

Nothing is black and white. With my work as well, it is black and white, but there’s also loads of grey in it. This idea, ‘eating meat is bad’, let’s just pick that one for now, ‘farming animals is bad, it’s bad for the environment, it’s bad for animal welfare’. It’s not that simple. Nothing is that simple.

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