Gavin Turk

The Unbearable Awkwardness of Things

 he Unbearable Awkwardness of Things A Conversation between Gavin Turk and Tim Marlow with Peter Dickinson

TM  Are you actually interested in the process of controlling how your work is shown at every level or do you think curators have a use?

GT  I don’t know. I think naturally putting art into spaces is a kind of curation in itself. You have to self-curate, if you like. From all the work you haven’t made, or all that you have made even, you have to somehow curate yourself, and work out how you are going to put it into a show. I think it is important, also, to go and look at other artist’s work. It’s been a logical extension, really to curate things. I mean, I think it can be compromising for shows if they get over-curated. It probably comes back to that point of ‘how do you manage art in the spaces available?’ How do institutions actually control and decide how to organise it [art] – a sort of programme.

 The institution gears itself up to run at the same level for everything.

  It has to run in superlatives, always talking in superlatives. Always ‘this show is better than the last’, rather than saying ‘this is a dud show for a bit… but never mind – we took a risk.’

 That’s interesting because even when there is something of a survey in the way an exhibition is produced – like Walsall, for example, where there were different types of work produced over a relatively short period of time – but it was actually cleverly and very tightly conceived and everything related quite subtly but significantly to everything else in what was a very rigorously produced show. I always find with your work that every show becomes a project. When you put things together for an exhibition, Sherborne for example, I wonder whether or not you start a train of thought that becomes a way of recontextualising and re-thinking your work?

 Yeah, in that it is similar to the process of making the work itself. You make one piece to sort of change a piece you mad before. Also the works you have already made are going to affect the way in which people are going to perceive the work you are making at the moment. So you sort of… you make the next work in order to recreate the older works so you can actually change your work, its not fixed. The paint is still wet.

 That is most obviously the case in the wax self-portrait you made. You said at the beginning that early on in your career after you had made ‘Cave’ (the blue plaque piece)… after your signature had appeared as the work itself and after the first wax self-portrait appeared as you said, Sid, in the pose of Elvis and so on… that you were trying to create an artist, ‘Gavin Turk’, who has the same name as you. Have you come any closer to that artist? Have you and the artist become one and the same person in your mind now? Or would you separate the two?

  No. I still (to a point) separate the two. I think it was much more necessary at that time to think in that way, because I was using my name in my work as a tool and it was much more confusing then. It has become more difficult to use my name in that way now, because it has a kind of currency. Using my name was previously critical of the value or the currency of artists names.

 So now it has become…

  Now it is slightly deconstructed… it’s not such a good tool anymore.

 When you talk to me now are you Gavin Turk the artist or Gavin Turk the bloke?

  I don’t know really. I mean there was a point where, especially early on in my career, I thought it was very important to simply be a practising and functioning artist. I went out and made sure my work was shown and made sure talks, give lectures, and found it difficult and uncomfortable and it did not go with the grain… but it was necessary and it was just having to do that to just complete the work… Yes, probably more Gavin Turk the artist than Gavin Turk the bloke. Whatever the split is, I don’t know.

 I’m thinking about the idea of the artist as an alchemist. It’s an old metaphor, but perpetually an interesting one. You use bronze in order to try and create a close replica of something that has no value or something we might not notice, that in fact people just walk past. Is there a social or softly political agenda running through those pieces? Because they are certainly perceived in that way.

  Yeah, I think there is… it is sort of soft, in a way.

 People reading this interview will have no idea about the context in which we are doing it. So I’ll tell them. We are sitting in your studio in Charing Cross Road and one of the things that I am conscious of in here is the view out of the window, where London seems to be moving by… and you can’t not notice, looking out this window day in day out, the fact that there are people sleeping, by day and night, in doorways. So it is as if the fabric of the world around you is informing the particular piece [‘Nomad’].

  Yeah, that kind of thing. I mean there is a kind of squiffy logic with other works aswell. Like the ‘Pop’ piece became ‘Bum’ which then became ‘Death of Marat’, which then became ‘Death of Che’, which then got put into a body bag. What happens is that [he demonstrates] the figure has a gun, and then it is just pointing, and then it’s in the bath like that, and then it’s right back on the slab, and then it’s lying in a sleeping bag. There could be a weird narrative running through works from 1993. In a way things like that have an appeal to me.

It’s what you said earlier  later works change the way you see earlier work. You just now described what could be said to be a formal transition – you talk about the gun – so that you can physically see that something starts right up and then ends curled up in a foetal/death-like position. Then we take the idea of the self-portrait: you are present in those works; to a certain degree, you are the model in those. We then end up having gone from hero to not just bum, but anonymous bum, curled up, face invisible. You could have died in the bag and then you put it out in the street…

  Yeah, I put it out in the street out there [the Artist points]…

 So is that line of narrative gone now? Is that the end point? Can we have resurrection next?

  Yeah, possibly… yeah, I think so. I mean I am, kind of. I have got this female De Chirico Ariadne figure in my head. So there is a gender shift and there is a starting to get up again, that kind of thing.

 What about visual slights of hand and deception? How interested are you in seeing the viewer see a sleeping bag that looks just like a sleeping bag but that is actually the cast of a sleeping bag in bronze and then painted… or a box that is cat as a box, wonderfully like a box. Are you interested in the Wow Factor?

  I think the Wow Factor is very useful as a tool. I hope that it doesn’t totally dominate the work.

 What about the So What Factor? It’s a cast of a sleeping bag that looks fantastic… but So What?

  Well, I don’t know… how do you deal with the So What Factor? It’s a kind of dismissal that it is a bit like you just find it boring, there’s not much you can do about it. If they have said ‘So What?’ but they are still listening I might go back to that point and try and talk about it and try and help them approach it in different ways. There are lots of different ways you could look at the work, from looking at reclining figures in art – traditional kind of formal things – or you can look at it in terms of the artist as alien, the egg, the guy on the periphery.

 The artist as the outsider… With the box sculptures too – they obviously reference Andy Warhol, but there are other ways of looking at them too. These vessels can be seen in a Freudian way, they can be seen as a basic fact of life, of transportation. Works of art often arrive at exhibitions in containers, so to make a container the subject itself has resonance too. But how does this fit in with your recent concrete loaf sculptures?

  It’s like the comment that culture is how you cut your bread in the morning and it’s that thing about the geography of where you are, and because of the way knives have been used. In some countries they cut their bread towards them, because of the kind of bread and knives they have. In this country you never cut your bread towards you. You’d be in Italy or other places in Europe. Different kinds of bread are born out of different kinds of climate, geography and stuff like that. There is a sense that bread itself is a kind of cultural symbol… and then bread is used as another word for money – the Western fetish.

 Conceptually one has to use one’s loaf.

  Your loaf, exactly. It’s also your head.

  If a gallery is a frame, you put your artwork into that frame. The artworks exist within the gallery frame, that is itself hanging or framed in a super-museum thing… [André Malraux’s concept of all museums being themselves exhibits in a meta-museum.] There is an interconnectivity between the various institutions that show art and that house art. At what point does the frame start and stop? I’m trying to frame the frame.

 It’s a reverse role. That’s brilliant.

Anyway, the point is we may have unconsciously seen or experienced pieces of art – let’s say relatively well-known clichés of modern art – and we can actually use that information that already exists, that we already have. It happens with my work a lot. One of the more obvious examples would be like in the ‘Pop’ sculpture, where the actual pose of the figure is taken from Warhol’s Elvis Presley image. I felt it wasn’t necessary that you had to know that, but I felt that if you saw it you would somehow recognise the way in which the figure was standing, although you had never seen the thing before  there would be recognition. There would actually be this other voice… Warhol would appear when you were there with this sculpture of mine.

  I mean how could you agenda that, work with history itself, and how you could change the way that your work looked or change the way that people thought about other art, by using your art as a tool? So it’s not only about changing your own previous work using your own genre; it’s also like the potential your own genre has to knock against and change the way people perceive other people’s work, or, alternatively, the other way round. Other people’s work actually containing or offering a frame for the way that your work is.

 Do you find a non-specialist art audience are responsive to your work?

  Yeah.

 Because it operates on numerous levels?

  Yeah, but this is what I really thin is important, and I do from time to time get too blinkered by the whole art history thing… but I also get highly motivated by it; it’s a double-edged sword, that. For me it’s really important that my work enables people who have very little experience of art to come in and see art, but I also want it to function with people who are fully aware of art and the power or art and are fully ‘arted up’… The thing people frequently ask me when I tell them I am an artist, is ‘What materials do you work in?’

 Where do you begin?

  I am yet to find a proper answer to it. I always tried to resist it before, but now I just use clichés… I go, ‘I mix sculpture, painting, videos, photography, all sorts’. I just say that.

 Do those categories mean anything to you, though?

  No they are clichés, but there are lots of barriers to break down and I want to continue the conversation. The question is how interested they are, because most people don’t want a CV, do they. They want something they can grasp. ‘I am an accountant’, ‘I am a writer’, ‘I am a…’

  You would say you are a writer?

 No I don’t necessarily, it depends on the situation.

  You just build, make it up on the spot?

 Whatever seems appropriate, because I am so many things. So… pithy questions only to Gavin Turk… So what is the meaning of life?

  Don’t know.

 Only joking.

  It was good to see my exhibition in Walsall, ‘Copper Jubilee’.

 What was your response, what did you think I was doing?

 I thought the Walsall show was a very tightly conceived exhibition that took you on a clear journey – through a space or through a building – that did not have a beginning or an end… and you weren’t sure that you reached a conclusion, but nonetheless you were taken. It had this very strong sense of being taken around. You could talk about it terms of the vessel from one to another, but also the idea of transformation.

I loved the visual sleight of hand – and I mean that in the most complimentary way (and if I didn’t I would tell you)… but I love the fact that there is this, ‘now you get it, now you don’t.’ And that happens. If you put it in the bluntest terms, to someone that comes to it for the first time  looking at a sleeping bag and trying to work out what it is, and one minute you can see what it’s made of and the next you can’t. But I find that kind of approach is constantly there… for example, there are pieces of yours that I still can’t get a handle on, like ‘Pimp’ [a shiny black custom-painted rubbish skip]. I find that a fascinating piece but I don’t know why, I can’t grasp it…

  Yeah?

 But I can’t grasp it at all.

  I have got to confess, even I find it really hard to talk about that work. I mean, I describe it as both a political object (street furniture) and a modernist form (Donald Judd). It is actually to do with architecture… You know, then I start drying up almost. People say why have you called it ‘Pimp’? Well, it just sounded right. I wish I had more vocabulary to deal with it.

 I really like this idea that you make something over which you have exerted quite a strong amount of control – sometimes in the selection of the object and sometimes in the physical process of transformation, and sometimes it is in the detail finishing of it all… then you name it, like you name a child or you name a pet, like any number of things. You’ve had all these involvements, at all these different stages, and yet you don’t quite know what it is and hat it means or what it signifies. On one level people reading this will think this is crazy.

But I think  anything goes. It’s a definition that has been used on a number of occasions – optimistically, anything is possible… that we are in this world where we navigate masses of information, objects we are encouraged to consume, we want to consume; we are in control of our lives but the world around us is chaotic. We are trying to navigate through all this stuff and actually the kind of art that has that open- endedness – that is both familiar and absolutely elusive – seems to me incredibly pertinent. So it strikes a very strong chord.

  That is partly how – when I try and negotiate your work – I am very conscious… it makes me very aware about how I try and negotiate my way around many different situations or scenarios out in the world. So I don’t find it removed from the world around me. Again, maybe that’s a truism to some people, but art is often about the self as ‘other’, and the idea of taking any object and putting it in an art gallery is deemed in may situations to be a shift of context that changes the meaning of the work. It’s not as simple or as glib as that in your case… the thing is continually slipping. There is a slippage in the meaning of perception. That I find very strong.

  But there is a danger (not from you)… broadly, a danger of over-reverence and what I like more about ‘Pimp’ and what I like about the conversation we have just had, is that, in the end, Gavin could come to the conclusion that I could come to, that you could come to… that it’s meaningless, that it’s crap. It isn’t a given that this is something that is major or successful, and we are kind of chasing that. That’s making a slightly extreme case. But it could in the end, at least metaphorically, evaporate.

  I’m interested in the way people respond to your work, the way in which it has been written about. Because people are very personal about their engagement with it or what they were doing with it and how they responded. But yet there is also this personal relationship with you that is always stressed because you are central to the work, in self-portraiture and in signatures and so on.

  It’s not central to the work in the way that Tracey [Emin] juxtaposes herself in relationship to her work.

 No, I don’t see the work as explicitly self-referential, but sometimes in the way that it’s written about, people make that connection.

  People jump, my work gets leap-frogged, certain ideas in the middle get missed out and they go straight to B without going through the journey you are talking about. The work changes as you look at it. There is a certain amount of cynicism in my work, as there is a certain amount of irony, but actually there is just a small amount of those things. Ultimately they are neither ironic nor cynical, they just are. I am continually finding that my work just gets seen in this cult-of-celebrity kind of conversation.

 You mean self-promotion? How do you promote the cult of an individual artist? I didn’t mean with you, but in Art Schools there is a strong emphasis on how to promote yourself as an artist. I think people are aware of that…

  I think it is necessary and important to incorporate that. It is part of getting ‘seen’! But back to the art…

 I think there are a number of important pieces, important pieces in the wider context of British Art. I think that ‘Cave’ is clearly an iconic piece, it’s a wonderfully resolved piece, incredibly smart and anyone and everyone can understand what that piece is about. There are also issues raised that are rarely talked about. For example, what did Gavin actually do for the two years that he was at the college that he didn’t display? The feeling is that in certain circles he was a ‘slacker’ and he hadn’t actually done anything.

  I have this cult following among students as they have taken me as someone that doesn’t do any work at all.

 But in fact you worked really hard?

  Yeah, but I get used as an example by all these people about to be kicked off their courses. They use my name as they go out the door.

PD  With the work ‘Nomad’ the technique of casting was so involved, the work involved in getting it to look that way and the commitment to bring that thing into being. I think a lot of people appreciate that, which is the old thing of appreciating the skill and technique of something for it to have value. I think that is when the humble object becomes open in the eyes of people who might otherwise dismiss it.

TM  I think that is only a starting point. I think that really is a red herring. I think craft and technique can be learnt. People have that facility, it can be acquired. I think what is smart about that piece is the act of transformation and what it is.

  I enjoy making stuff… it helps to inform the things that I make, but I do whole-heartedly hang onto the idea that it is not important that I make it myself (unless I’m the best person for the job).

As I said before I like the piece ‘Cave’, but it doesn’t matter whether you know the details of your career at that time. When someone explains that an art school student, instead of producing examples of the work he had done over two years, produced a plaque that parodied an English Heritage Plaque, but said ‘Borough of Kensington, Gavin Turk, Sculptor 1989 – 1991 worked here’… everyone grasps it. They might think it was smart-arsed… it’s just smart, you can forget the arse in that. It is that kind of piece, it’s the Nick Hornby factor. It’s the kind of thing that everyone says  ‘fuck I wish I had done that’, but they didn’t.

  Is that what you call it? The Nick Hornby factor?

 Well, no, but any football fan that reads Nick Hornby’s ‘Fever Pitch’ thinks ‘I could have done that… I wish I had done it’. When in fact, hen they really examine themselves they couldn’t have done it. But it is such a great idea and it spawns loads of imitations but it’s like the moment when someone has an idea and it’s pretty original… but everyone thinks, shit, why didn’t I do that?

  Yeah, that’s it.

 But I play Gavin Turk kind of games because I bought one of the editions [the plaque was produced in a limited edition plastic form], but that’s no big deal, and I have it at home. It’s on the way to the kitchen, and often I walk down and it’s there above my head.

  Do people get grumpy about it?

 No they don’t. People say ‘Oh wow you’ve got one of those’, Or ‘is that the original one’. Then you say ‘well, no’… but what is authentic in Gavin’s work is a moot point or elastic point. Then I find people like my dad who didn’t know what it was, and I explained and he kind of smiled wryly and thought it a smart thing. But I find myself sometimes walking down and saying – well I don’t talk to myself, but in my head – I say ‘no, he didn’t’, because you didn’t actually work there in my house by the heating system and the lavatory. Then the more you think about the piece the more you realise that it is working and that in a way you have worked wherever it is situated.

  Then obviously the more you think about it and the more you think ‘No, he didn’t’ the more it is working, I suppose. Yes he did.

 Of course.

  It is kind of those sort of awkward things about things… The awkward thing about things! [All laugh]

 The awkwardness of things – it’s rather good. That could be the title of an essay. The unbearable awkwardness of things.

  The awkwardness of things.

 That is the thing – the awkwardness of things. I can’t remember quite what I said…

 Well it’s all on tape!

 First published in Marlow, Tim and Deborah Curtis. Gavin In The House. Sherborne House, Dorset 2003

 Tim Marlow is a writer, broadcaster and Director of Exhibitions at White Cube

More on Gavin Turk

	Related Texts
Tonight, Manzoni, I'm Going to be Gavin Turk by Alex Farquharson
CV
Bibliography
Text from Collected Works 1989-1993 by Andrew Wilson

	Related Links
http://collection.britishco... British Council
http://www.tate.org.uk/brit... Tate Online

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