Gavin Turk

Text from Collected Works 1989-1993

'... another signature "real" or "forged": GAVIN TURK

The artist, in his studio, picks up a piece of paper (actually an old envelope that had been through the post) and moves it onto the top of the desk. Affixed, near one edge of this envelope, is a piece of chewing gum that had once been in someone's mouth (the artist's, perhaps) and, finished with, had been put out of harm's way on the first piece of scrap paper to hand. It is retrieved and placed on the desk which becomes a sort of plinth suddenly. The artist thinks.

Starting with the gum, he sees an issue of authorship and creation as soon as it had come out of the mouth. It is as if it had been released from a mould to form a trace of that person. The mind begins to wander and the site of chewing gum stuck under tables or chairs or just on the ground, ready to be flattened as it adheres to the sole of one's shoe, is remembered. A potent trace of a point in a life passing by. Stuck onto the envelope, this sense of something left behind is amplified by what the envelope had contained, a letter of one sort or another sent into the post, communicated, received and read. The gum becomes part of a purposeful linguistic transaction. Additionally - and as more than just the product of a mould - it helps to define, through the abject, the limits and boundaries of the body. It marks the ends of something. Once in the body but not of the body, it is waste matter. Although anonymous and discrete in form (and perhaps not terribly interesting to look at), the sight of the gum unlocks a trail of references and meanings on the human condition and even, perhaps, on the condition of sculpture. But then, at what point is it just a horrible bit of chewing gum, sculpture, or a model for sculptural ideas (and does the placing of it in one category invalidate the other)? Is gum that has been found in an artist's studio of a different order to that found under the seat in a bus (perhaps it matters who is doing the finding)? What sorts of frames distinguish art from its surroundings?

Describing a visit that he had made to Piet Mondrian's studio in Paris in 1934, Ben Nicholson wrote that there was a 'feeling generated by his thought in the room. I remember after this first visit sitting at a cafe table on the edge of a pavement almost touching all the traffic going in and out of the Gare Montparnasse, and sitting there for a very quiet time with an astonishing feeling of quiet and repose (!) - the thing I remembered most was the feeling of light in his room and the pauses and silences during and after he'd been talking. The feeling in his studio must have been not unlike the feeling in one of those hermit's caves where lions used to go to have thorns taken out of their paws.'1

The studio is more than just a work place. It is a place where attempts are made to bridge the abyss between idea and image through creative transformation. It is the site of the event of becoming. It is not the place itself, but the quality of thought (of work) found within that place that is the significant issue. Such a place as this was found in Gavin Turk's Cave 1991. In an empty and cleaned out sculpture studio in the Royal College of Art (hardly even a trace of dust) Turk affixed a blue ceramic English Heritage plaque high up on the wooden tongue and groove wall. The studio became a place of importance because of past occupation by someone of apparent significance. Just as a reliquary assigns value to a dusty relic so the clean, empty (and so seemingly unused) room did to the plaque. Moving closer the words on the plaque could be made out: 'Borough of Kensington Gavin Turk Sculptor Worked Here 1989-1991'. Despite his use of the phrase 'worked here' within this, his degree show installation, the Royal College of Art's Academic Board for Concessions and Discipline along with its Final Examination Board decided that Turk had 'displayed insufficient work of the standard required for Final Examination' and so, following re-examination, refused to award him an MA certificate.2

Because of this unforeseen outcome of displaying the plaque for his degree show - in which a work that played off a sense of absence and end of a career that was actually yet to begin was seen to signify a complete lack of work - it is entirely appropriate that he should now display the plaque behind the glass of a Beuysian vitrine. Its wooden structure recalls the wall of the studio while also memorialising the trace of an event through the particular presentation of the plaque as a relic. The plaque, on its own, defines a particular endpoint for a life just as a vitrine encases, and makes conceptually valuable, the work. These defining endpoints have recently provided Turk with much of his material. Endpoint as starting point. What Turk does, when he draws attention to his period of 'work' with Cave, is to upend preconceptions of the position of those determinants of value within art of the late 20th Century: originality, authorship and tradition. Furthermore, by grounding his attack within the frame of the work produced by the artist Gavin Turk, what is new and what proceeds from a referenced past become split through mutual contradiction. Although this was recognised by Rosalind Krauss - that an understanding of 'the self as origin is the way an absolute distinction can be made between a present experienced de novo and a tradition-laden past'3 - the references (as much as the Self) do not become things in themselves but rather point away from the specific objects to their specificity as objects that are of art.

By moving from specific objects to their specificity as art, Minimalism offers Turk a useful endpoint. With the installation of his Untitled at the Green Gallery in New York in February 1965, Robert Morris performed both a cogent picturing and subversion of what were then Minimalism's main concerns: the removal of illusionism through the incorporation of real space within an indivisibly physical presence. This approach had already been figured in his 1961 text 'Blank Form' where he claimed that 'So long as the form (in the broadest possible sense: situation) is not reduced beyond perception, so long as it perpetuates and upholds itself as being object in the subject's field of perception, the subject reacts to it in many particular ways when I call it art. He reacts in other ways when I do not call it art. Art is primarily a situation in which one assumes an attitude of reacting to some of one's awareness as art'.4

Morris' sense of an idea of an art that could be both nominated as such and also acquire meaning out of the relationship between the object and the beholder in a specific environment was made concrete in the form of his Untitled: four 28" high wooden cubes with plexiglass mirrors covering each face. The central feature of Morris' works of this period was that - as simple and uninflected objects -their formal totality could be apprehended at once. Nevertheless, this cannot be recognised in Untitled. Although it still appears to emphasise the relationship of object, beholder and environment, its own sense of unified gesta/t disappears as the floorboards of the room are cut into by the mirrored surfaces of the cubes; the spaces between and around the cubes (sites of event and passage) become co-extensive with the cubes' faces and provide the piece with its identity, even though it is not 'of itself. As an objectless object whose appearance is camouflaged by its surroundings an end of perception has been reached which is contradictory in that here the truth that holds the mirror is dissolved by the real that it reflects. The logic of the cube and the logic of the mirror are short-circuited and upset where seeing becomes traced as non-seeing.

Ostensibly Turk's Robert Morn's Untitled 1965-1972 1990 just refers to these sorts of questions that Untitled raises. Yet where Morris' work has been discussed through the terms of a perceptual field that constructs its interior condition as sculpture, Turk's mirror cubes push outwards away from Morris' Minimalist aesthetic towards an idea that such an aesthetic would disavow. Discoloured, with weathered edges, they have become like an artifact recovered from the soil speaking of a past civilisation (echoing the appearance of his two Untitled 1989 museum display cases, both now destroyed, one of which was filled with water and the other with an aged mould). Sited on the ground with history written over its grimy surface any idea of specificity appears not just misplaced but actually functionally placeless. Its own frame as sculpture (historical as well as self-referential) becomes at that moment absorbed into the object as a relic of a way of thinking or proceeding with a certain strategy within art, and away from the space surrounding it. By doing so it becomes its own plinth. Present and past become indistinguishable.

What Gavin Turk proposes is a state of affairs where the sculptural object becomes a function of its frame or plinth (as a formed conceptualisation) so that the focus of the artist (as of the beholder) is no longer trained on the interior nature of the work but marks down
its exterior field. By making a work that is more than an object, one's attention is led away from its actual status as object and into another realm, pipe 1991 makes this even clearer. At first glance this is a liquorice pipe held in a carefully constructed plinth. An idea of something readymade and nominated as art returns our thought perhaps to the chewing gum. Even without the intervention of illusion this is quite obviously not a pipe that you smoke but rather its sugar coated twin with red 'hundreds and thousands' for burning tobacco.

And yet illusion does intervene. This is a bronze sculpture painted to seem to be liquorice (but is still not a pipe). It is something that has not been found but made. In both pipe and Robert Morn's Unfitted 1965-72 the object is foregrounded, but Turk's strategy is to stand with his back to it. To show what I mean by this it is perhaps useful to show just how different the strategy of pipe is to that which it makes reference, Jasper Johns' Painted Bronze (Beer Cans) 1960. As the story goes Johns got the idea from a comment made by a disgruntled Willem de Kooning about Leo Castelli -' "That son of a bitch, you can give him two beer cans and he could sell them."... So I made this work. It fit in perfectly with what I was doing. I did it, and Leo sold it.'5 The aim was to make something that would confound perception in looking not only like two beer cans but also like cans that were identical (they are not)6 and look enough like art to be able to be sold. Turk uses that history as a sort of internal plinth to the work. Rather than chase after a good trompe I'oeil he is concerned to manipulate a conceptualisation that would be referential to certain strategies (not to actual appearance), and be figured as a challenge to any idea of the work's authorship - a challenge which is already indicated by the sculpture's image as readymade - overturning the primacy, within the history of contemporary art, of any notion of originality.

Turk has been drawn to the egg as an image of this dynamic between original creativity, the force of history and tradition. To ask 'What came first the chicken or the egg?' is not just to wonder if the creator came before or after the created but to realise that a single origin - a point of true originality - is an impossible goal where we are all determined by the past and our surroundings. As Marcel Broodthaers declared in 1968 in an early dig at Minimalism, The language of forms must be reunited with that of words. There are no "Primary Structures"'/ The egg is not a unitary object, it is itself as much a mould of a past as it is of a future. To sign an egg - as Turk has done with his Egg Drawing 1992, as Piero Manzoni did with his Eggs 1960 or as Broodthaers had done on the title page of the special issue of Phantomas no. 62, 1966 - is to enact a transference of authorial presence and frame the power of creation onto the persona of the artist, while also being an admission of being a part of the past. The instruction sent by Turk to Liam Gillick for the group exhibition curated at Gio' Marconi Gallery, Milan in 1992 asked 'for eggs to be "blown" and signed with an appropriate name. Either the artist's name can be used or another signature "real" or "forged"'. In this way the altar of originality was further dismantled through the sense of distance between "creator", egg, and authorial certification that this project engendered.

In 1962, while he was installing his room of Achromes in the Zero group exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Manzoni described to Henk Peeters a number of projects, all of which were to remain unrealised. One of these projects was to nail up the door to the room that had been allocated to him at the Stedelijk and to put up a notice that would have read 'In here is the spirit of the artist'. As an idea Manzoni would have been offering a rejoinder, in part, to Yves Klein's 1958 exhibition at Galerie Iris Clert la Specialisation de la sensibilite a Petat matiere premiere en sensibilite pic-turale stabilisee - Le Vide' [The Specialization of sensibility from the state of prime matter to the state of stabilised pictorial sensibility - The Void'] - an empty room that was full of sensibility and pure spirit was what Manzoni sealed up. This capture of a sense of the artist's spirit, quality of thought, or essence, that Turk created with Cave can also be found in his recent project to subject himself to levitation within a gallery space - an undertaking that recalls the moment when Klein launched himself into the void, captured in the photographic self-portraits Le Peintre de I'espace se jette dans le vide! which he printed on the front of his newspaper Dimanche, le journal d'un seul jour on November 27, 1960.

However, there is a crucial point of divergence between Klein's leap and Turk's levitation. Unlike Turk, Klein was reaching out towards an Edenic8 Utopian vision of a life built in air and fire where people have the capacity to fly freely. He believed that 'the painter of space ought to go into space to paint, but he ought to go there without tricks or fraud... he must go there by himself, by means of individual autonomous force, in a word, he ought to be capable of levitation.'9 Where the two projects join is of course in the details of their accomplishment. Despite the belief that unassisted flight and dematerialization (both associated in his mind with a notion of sacrificial death) were possible and had to be demonstrated as such, the published photographs of Klein's leap are all photomontages which do not show those assistants waiting with a tarpaulin to catch the conquistador of the void as he fell out of the sky. Similarly, Turk's levitation project is a product of artifice and sleight of hand (true levitation occurs only in the imagination) where the artist becomes the victim of a trick of his own making and not at all the heroic figure that Klein aspired to be. The nature of Manzoni's notice, 'In here is the spirit of the artist', throws the meaning of the object back onto the artist in a way that Klein's Le Vide avoids, and is closer in form to the wording of Turk's plaque in Cave. Manzoni fixes artistic, aesthetic, spiritual and ultimately commercial value to his own activity through use of the signature as a metonymic sign for the artist and his intentions, as well as a verification of something or somebody as art. The intention was not 'Manzoni Fecit' but 'Manzoni i.e. [this] is art'. In this respect the signature echoes an act of birth, a ratification of life and an identification of art and the spirit with the self.

Turk's use of the signature is of a different order, fundamentally because nothing is born here, the self that is reflected in his signature is another Gavin Turk whose own importance and death was realised in Cave. It is as if something else is being represented here, where there is no 'self as origin'. Similarly with Epiphany 1992 he does not sign his own image on the surface of the surveillance mirror, but somebody else's. The purpose of such mirrors being not to present the self but to provide the means of being observed and so deter the temptation of slipping something into your pocket.

Turk's use of the signature is as a label or marker for a recognition not of the self but of history, which anyway becomes a background to the history of Turk himself (as indeed it does for all artists). P/ero Manzoni1992 represents four signatures of Manzoni, one of which has been dated, on the same piece of paper that has been additionally signed by Turk. He appropriates the purposes to which Manzoni used his signature10 but by so doing erases the metonymic transfer that Manzoni's signature signalled and thus also voids the specific appropriation while throwing the meaning out towards the generic nature of the signature's role in conferring value.

Stain 1992 makes this point even clearer. A large paper table-cloth has been stained with traces of wine, cheese and bread and then exuberantly signed and dated by Turk. Although this may refer to Alberto Giacometti's practice of signing a table-cloth as payment for a meal or to Daniel Spoerri's trap paintings in which the detritus from meals are fixed, Turk instead pictorialises this strategy where value is transferred onto something through the addition of a signature. This might even be similar to the manner in which Duchamp wrote out the Tzanck Cheque 1919 (a picture of a cheque which was worth what it said it was worth but which is now worth substantially more) for dental work,11 except of course Turk is not enacting that sort of exchange. Turk made - without eating a meal - stains that could be seen as traces of a certain activity and which could be viably signed. These drawings, like most of his work, reference an activity whose specific purpose is then denied. They are representations, not the actual thing.

Similarly, other drawings directly point to the reproducibility of the spirit of the artist in a way that is devoid of historical reference. Frank 1992, Recycled Title 1992 and Stencil 1992 all make the not exactly original statement that ideas and the works of artists are indeed recycled and unoriginal. Tattoo 1992, a hand tattoo-print which used the logo for recycled paper, underlines that statement; the artist's hands become part of a continuum in which originality has no place.

What this clarifies is the extent to which role-playing and the creation of myth, focusing on the artist and not the work, is important in the fashioning of an artist's own image. This degree of self-image has been amplified with his latest sculpture Pop 1993. Standing nine feet tall with the plinth, and held within a glass case is a life-size waxwork of Gavin Turk as Sid Vicious performing My Way with the confrontational pose of Elvis Presley as represented by Andy Warhol in 1963.12 As Cave had done, Pop presents an image of memorialisation where the power of an avant-garde purpose becomes domesticated through the sense of a passage of time. Although Presley's stance is aggressively confrontational - not acting a part but playing himself, the Popstar cowboy shooting at an audience - in Warhol's paintings it becomes an image of silence and impotence. Vicious also is playing himself when he lacerates Frank Sinatra's narcissistic song that looks back on a career at an end ('And now the end is near and so I face the final curtain') and yet that image of a reality played to the death ('I ducked the blows. I shot it up and killed a cat') is also a role that is framed by the artifice of Julien Temple's film portraying Malcolm McLaren's manipulatory 'Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle' (itself a myth). Once icons of danger and authentic expression, both Presley and the Punk, of which Vicious was a part, have become emasculated as Pop13 (as the avant-garde has been rendered stale as art), now to be presented in the living death as a waxwork in which Madame Tussauds joins Rock Circus to become a museum as freak show. By depicting himself in this dual role, as Elvis and Sid, Gavin Turk maps a complex self-identity in which the artist's signature is.tamed as it takes on its various roles within a glass case, apart from life.


Notes:
1 Letter from Ben Nicholson to John Summerson, cited in Ben Nicholson John Summerson Penguin books: West Drayton 1948 pp. 12-13
2 Jocelyn Stevens left the Royal College of Art to head English Heritage shortly after.
3 Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde' in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths MIT PRSS: Cambridge 1985 p.157
4 Robert Morris Blank Form 1969/61, scheduled for publication in La Monte Young (ed.) An Anthology La Monte Young/Jackson Mac Low: New York 1963 but later withdrawn. Cited in William Wilson 'Hard Questions Soft Answers' in Art News November 1969 p.26
5 Jasper Johns cited in Emile de Antonio and Mitch Tuchman, Painters Painting Abbeville Press: New York 1984 p. 108
6 One is shown as being full while the other is empty (or at least has been opened) - having holes in the top. One has a New York plain top, the other a Florida three-ring device. One is slightly smaller than the other.
7 Marcel Broodthaers, Open Letter, L/'gnano August 27 1968
8 On the painting Architecture de I'air 1961 Klein wrote that what was pictured was 'une sorte de retour a I'eden de la legende'.
9 Yves Klein, Dimanche, le journal d'un seul jour Yves Klein: Paris 27 November 1960 p.l
10 In this context it is interesting to note that when Manzoni signed letters it was often with a signature that was markedly different to that used when signing something as art.
11 On the Tzanck Cheque see for instance Michel Leiris, The Arts and Sciences of Marcel Duchamp' collected in Brisees: Broken Branches North Point Press: San Francisco 1989 p. 105: 'the cheque entirely fabricated by the payer's hand and remitted to an art-loving dentist in enumeration for his services (a syllogistic snare, since the cheque in question is a bad one, but a good one in the sense that it derives its value from the hand that penned it; a way, too, of ironically demonstrating that in our day the commercial value of a work of art has become, in large part, a question of the signature)'.
12 The image used by Warhol for the Elvis paintings (first exhibited at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1963 along with a series of Liz Taylor paintings) was a publicity still from the film Flaming Star 1960 and shows Presley 'in cowboy garb, holding a gun instead of a guitar, with a holster and hunting knife parked on his notoriously undulating hips, and confronting the viewer in a shoot-out stance.' See David Bourden, Warhol Harry N. Abrams: New York 1989p.l47
13 See for instance Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons The Boy Looked at Johnny, The Obituary of Rock and Roll Pluto Press: London 1978 p 96: 'In 1978 every record company is waking up to find a somewhat superfluous punk combo on its doorstep. Supply and demand? But you can't supply something that there's no demand for. Never mind, kid there'll soon be another washing-machine/spot-cream/rock band on the market to solve all your problems and keep you quiet/ off the street/ distracted from the real enemy/ content until the next pay-day. Anyhow, God save Rock and Roll... it made you a Consumer, a potential Moron... IT'S ONLY ROCK AND ROLL AND IT'S PLASTIC, PLASTIC, YES IT IS !!!!!!'


First published in Wilson, Andrew and Simon Bill. Collected Works 1989-1993, Jay Jopling/White Cube, London 1993

Andrew Wilson is an art historian, curator and critic. He has been deputy editor of Art Monthly since 1997.

More on Gavin Turk

	Related Texts
Tonight, Manzoni, I'm Going to be Gavin Turk by Alex Farquharson
CV
Bibliography
The Unbearable Awkwardness of Things A Conversation between Gavin Turk and Tim Marlow

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

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