Gavin Turk

Tonight, Manzoni, I'm Going to be Gavin Turk

Egg Man, Everyman, Godot. A man in a dark suit and conservative tie occupies the foreground of a large photograph. A Gainsborough-style stretch of golden Home Counties countryside runs behind his head. The head, though flesh tinted, is no head. It hasn't eyes, a mouth, a nose or ears. It's as though these features have been airbrushed out, and our stereotypical well-heeled commuter-belt executive is in fact a retro pointy-headed alien. His swelling, on close inspection, turns out to be an immaculate, outsized egg, which gives this 'suit' the appearance of having re-located to Blair's Britain from what had been Rene Magritte's Belgium between World Wars. Photographed rather than painted, this bourgeois mutation, carrying displaced surreal and existential baggage, seems to have migrated via the embarrassingly passe Magrittian look of 1970s Pink Floyd album covers courtesy of 1990s City advertisers. In so doing the image has degraded, irrecoverably. One half expects the image to be accompanied by jingle, catchphrase and logo, Wittgenstein style. No longer just a stereotype of the 'modern man' lost and alone in an absurd world (it is titled Godot after Samuel Beckett just to rub it in), the figure photographed recycles a cliched motif of that stereotype. The Magritte citation is not towards any original painting but to the journey that the 'original' image has taken through art history and commercial pastiche, a migration that has had the effect of all but effacing any true sense we might have of the primary source.

The man wearing the egg for a head is one Gavin Turk, a British artist a whisker over thirty whose arrival on the art scene was inaugurated by his own death. A blue plaque, of the kind one sees stuck to the facades of countless London residencies commemorated the deceased dignitary's working years as a sculptor in his studio at the Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London W1. Since 1991 Gavin Turk, the artist, has been busy being born with a variety of illustrious avant-garde elders on hand as midwives: Manzoni, Klein, Duchamp, Magritte, Dali, Johns, Warhol and others. Recently, last year in fact, one could hear the sound of One Thousand, Two Hundred and Thirty Four Eggs cracking, heralding his imminent arrival perhaps. The eponymous 'painting' (medium: white egg shells on canvas) is etched through with a six foot Gavin Turk signature. The artist's signature, that most common sign of identification and authorisation, is delineated by smashing the relevant eggs through a whole field of eggs, (the egg, of course, being a quintessential organic metaphor for origin and originality). This might seem an entirely vainglorious affair until one spots the references and realises that this enormous statement of identity is a series of layered references to the artistic identity of another. Not just any other, but Piero Manzoni, whose oeuvre may well be art history's most outrageous statement of authorial omnipotence. Not content with a single citation Turk has overlayered three recurrent Manzoni motifs-the egg, signature and the Achrome (his white matter paintings) - a cross-referencing that has the effect of looping and cancelling out the symbolic aspirations of each.

In 1960 Piero Manzoni made art works from eggs which he boiled then marked with an ink thumb-print in front of an audience. In contrast to Duchamp's readymades, which were deadpan, anti-aesthetic designations, Manzoni's appropriations were highly metaphoric acts of transformation, that were more about the act of energising ordinary substances than the ontology of objects. The poverty of the materials underlined the artist's powers of ordination. The artist's signature or some other indexical imprint of the artist's body was the agency of transubstantiation. A human being might be a 'Living Sculpture' if signed by Manzoni, or whilst standing on one of his plinths. Even air might be art if it happened to have been breathed by Manzoni into a balloon. So might his shit and Manzoni had one hundred samples of it canned. Viewed from the antipodes the whole world was art, since it 'sits’ on Manzoni's Socle du Monde, a large cubic plinth sited in Milan. Through contact with the artist a base material is transfigured or alchemised by an act of transcendent authorship.

But what happens when the 'original' idea is done again by someone else? Like a Manzoni acolyte Turk has produced his own stool in a jar, has made art works out of his own signature and has even forged Manzoni's own. He's stolen Manzoni's egg, and his white reliefs (the Achromes). Second time around aren't these formerly simple and apparently supreme acts of authorship just a little pathetic, nerdy even? Sunday painters, if nothing else, are at least acquiring some kind of skill or technique by copying a good Impressionist, but come on Gavin, everyone knows how to sign their name and lay a turd. If you're going to plagiarise someone else's work at least make it difficult. If you've got stars in your eyes make sure they're Shirley's, Barbara's or Celine's.
So what is going on in Gavin Turk's cover versions? Remember Jasper Johns' painted bronze sculpture of his brushes dipped in a tin of turps? Well Turk has done two bronzes of a paint roller instead. One an actual roller coated with a fine layer of bronze powder (reversing Johns' procedure), entitled Gavin Turk's 9" Roller in Bronze, the other left bare, ironically true to its material. With Johns the brushes hover enigmatically between brush and sculpture, between original art work and banal object, between signifier and signified. But however bifurcated and reflexive, the piece at least alludes to the traditional tools of the artist and so the discussion remains without the confines of the object. A roller though belongs to the worlds of painting and decorating, not to Fine Art, and when in a gallery it refers to whitening the walls in preparation of an exhibition, or preparing a modern minimal plinth to display a sculpture. In other words it points to what surrounds art objects, which is supposed to be beyond the bounds of scrutiny, yet which has the discursive authority to identify as art those objects within its frame. Turk's three roller pieces sit on plinths under glass lids posing as art objects. One is an actual paint-soaked roller sitting in a tray of white emulsion (this time accompanied by two brushes), which rests on an unpainted wooden plinth under a glass top. It is as if the roller is about to paint the plinth white so that it can more properly identify as art that which it displays. In this tautology the art object is apparently there at the service of the frame.

Biographical anecdote has also come to frame the work of some artists, especially the best known. Manzoni's death from gluttony in his early thirties (he lied about his age), Warhol's shooting in 1968, Dali's bizarre masochism, Beuys' crash in his Stukka fighter plane in arctic Russia and his convalescence under the supervision of nomadic tribesmen. Usually the recitation of these events conspire to inflate the critical and commercial worth of the art works. Much of the significance of Joseph Beuys' work relies on a mythification of an accident of history which has in turn accorded the artist the status of a shaman, and imbued the objects he produced with the aura of holy relics. The assorted things in his vitrines remain banal and obscure without access to the gospel that produces their meaning.

When Gavin Turk re-stages this elevating process second time around the superstition and smoke and mirrors are glaringly apparent. Turk is like a medieval charlatan in the business of manufacturing false relics. In place of Yves Klein's Leap Into The Void (itself a faked photograph of the artist diving from a first floor window), Turk presents a video of himself being levitated by a television conjurer with the aid of a pink fluorescent hoop. Or else a pair of crutches stands on display as part of a piece entitled Munchausen's Robin which was the residue of an 'accident' the details of which he faxed himself care of a gallery a few hours prior to the actual event. After the accident and before the exhibition the artist walked with crutches at all times for a duration of two weeks. Like those afflicted with Munchausen's Syndrome whose obsession with hospitals leads them to fake infirmity in order to undergo treatment, Gavin Turk's constructed events reverse the relationship between cause and effect, action and object, biography and myth.

Sometimes he quite literally raids art history's dressing-up box: he greeted a group of 'ordinary people' who were curating a contemporary art show for the BBC in a Dali moustache, which he afterwards framed and presented as a relic of the performance. In doing so he acted up to a populist conception of the identity of artists, whilst disguising his own, thus pre-empting some of the programme's underlying assumptions about artist and audience. Although one of many spin-offs or asides from some of his more central concerns the piece efficiently satirises the media cultivation of the artist as eccentric or clown whose sartorial appendages - pointy moustaches, silver wigs, bleached hair-frame and in some cases precede the art works themselves.

Camouflage Self-Portrait (A Man Like Mr. Kurtz) is a photograph of Gavin Turk's head against a black background, his face covered in patches of cosmetic mud-pack like army camouflage. The piece alludes to Warhol's self-portraits which underlay his features with camouflage in vivid colours. As with many of Turk's more recent works the single reference is opened up to a number of contradictory readings that together chart a complex semiotic/cultural voyage. Camouflage, originally, is a kind of abstraction of the landscape used to hide soldiers and vehicles from the enemy. Its roots are in observing the appearances of animals. As a hybrid of the abstract and representational, and as a quotidian form of painting, Warhol's appropriation of camouflage deconstructed the ideology of autonomy that framed abstract painting. His use of vivid, altered colour schemes rendered it both camp and psychedelic, thus also subverting its military use and identity. In Turk's photograph he partially returns the image back to its source in another act of self-effacement. He also brings in further cultural dimensions to camouflage and khaki by evoking Marion Brando's portrayal of Mr. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now itself a Vietnam update of an earlier work, Joseph Conrad's novel, Heart of Darkness. Vietnam veterans and many others, including John Lennon around the time of Give Peace a Chance, wore army fatigues with long hair as a pacifist inversion of military code. This was again taken up by New Age 'travellers' in Britain in the late Eighties. Now in the Nineties combat trousers are worn by pop stars and fashion conscious city dwellers. Camouflage, stripped of its function and reference, becomes just a pure, promiscuous image.

In Britain art has never been regarded as a serious pursuit. Call yourself an artist and you can't help but hear the prefix 'piss'. However polite and domesticated Britain's version of Modernism, the artist in Britain has never felt at home. How could we have expected 'our boys' to have leapt into the void or christened a colour 'International Klein Blue (I.K.B.)' at the height of experimental bullishness elsewhere? For heroic guises Turk has had to look abroad to America, France, Italy or Spain. Mix the traditionalist iconography of Britishness - the flag, our tabloids, the royals - with lofty Modernism and you get a contradiction of hostile terms, as in Turk's Indoor Flag a painting of a limp Union Jack against a starch-white ground whose blues are made of I.K.B. pigment. Gavin Turk is of the generation of British artists who knew of Carl Andre as the one whose 'bricks' were trashed by British tabloids before they knew of him as the American Minimalist. Turk plays Andre's ambivalent avenger with his piece Window which superimposes Turk's own face onto that of a British soldier at the centre of a Union Jack which filled the whole front page of a notorious issue of The Sun at the height of the Gulf War. The paper carried the instruction 'support our boys and put this flag in your window1. Many did. On Turk's head the army beret becomes that cliched attire of the Parisian avant-garde painter which was imitated by some in St. Ives a little later, but never really gained much of a foothold in this country elsewhere.

The increasing fame and success of the Nineties generation of British artists is built upon an iconography of failure. Most of the current work registers resignation to the fact that 'our boys' (and girls) will never be accorded centrality in our own culture, however much the international art world thinks they swing. What has usually been most admired in British popular and 'avant-garde' culture tends to mark a distance from and scepticism towards the modes of freedom and transcendence that American and Continental cultures have proposed. Perhaps the most extreme icon of post-Imperial British disenchantment is Sid Vicious. Where else might glamour coalesce so naturally around an embodiment of apathetic, inarticulate, self-destructive nihilism? Gavin Turk's Pop is a waxwork portrait of himself as Sid Vicious singing Sinatra's My Way in The Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, in the pose of Elvis playing the part of a cowboy in a movie as silk-screened by Andy Warhol (phew!). All these allusions are embodied within the broader pastiche of a MadameTussaud/Rock Circus aesthetic, which in turn is housed in an ethnographic-style glass display case. As attention around the post-Freeze generation of artists has escalated, so Turk's semiotic Frankenstein has become something of an icon for the problematic status of the young post-Modern artist working in a culture that never really recognised Modernism itself. At The End of the Twentieth Century (a title of another sculpture by Turk of a melted modernist plinth), the British artist probably really does relate more easily to our own Sid Vicious or Madame Tussaud, than to Andy Warhol or Elvis Presley.

This preoccupation with the social failure of Modernism in Britain has emerged more fully in Turk's work since Pop. As his earlier recyclings of famous avant-garde moments have themselves become known in critical quarters, the Manzoni, Klein, Johns and Warhol disguises have lifted to reveal, ironically, a classically-authored body of work. As Turk's own signature has become commodified so the role of the cultural parasite passing from host to host no longer functions as a critique of originality from a position of anonymity and remove. Where Turk was embarrassingly overdressed before, he now appears unacceptably underdressed. Oi! is a triptych of life-size photographs of the artist dressed as a tramp, one eyelid closed, pointing a limp finger at a half-imagined adversary, mirroring the stance of Sid in Pop. The piece developed out of his uncommissioned performance as a wino at the private view of Sensation at the Royal Academy. The mammoth exhibition was widely considered the apotheosis of the young British artist scene, and its institutional absorption. Turk's 'performance' - which is what much private view behaviour in any case is - pointed towards the confused social identity of today's artists who might find themselves entertained at a rich collector's home only to find they cannot find the bus fare home. Bum is the waxwork version of Oi!. The pose echoes an inebriated Pop. It is a verisimilitude of Turk in the guise of a tramp, wearing some of his own old clothes. The clothes have been subjected to processes reminiscent of 60s body art: Turk has urinated in the trousers and worked up some rancid underarm sweat to achieve a mock-abject trace of his own corporeality in what is otherwise simulacra.

A third waxwork in progress is a glass-cased tableau transcription of Jacques-Louis David's Death of Marat (1793), that tragic masterpiece of neo-classical painting. Gavin Turk lies in place of the murdered martyr of the French Revolution, not dead, just asleep. The tub is an ordinary bathtub and it extends beyond the edges of the scene David depicted. The floor is tiled in mundane grey linoleum, and the bathwater remains unbloodied. Within what has become a banal scene lie embedded at least two more artistic recyclings. The drapery which hangs off the bath like bedding in David's painting is reminiscent of Alberto Bum's 'matter' paintings, while the inscribed block in the painting now resembles a neo-classical pedestal by the contemporary Scottish sculptor lan Hamilton Finlay. Like Pop the piece is a vertiginous essay in representation. This time it's a representation of Madame Tussaud representing David, her contemporary, via Sixties American Assemblage (Kienholz, Hanson, Segal). Turk is able to fold an image of his own identity into that of Marat's by appropriating a sequence of incongruous realisms - assemblage, waxwork, classical portrait - and by throwing in his own additional realist style, the readymade. Each on their own terms call on viewers to believe that they are in the presence of a 'real' scene. Superimposed, each unravels the others' claim on reality.

This heightened awareness of representation mirrors the entwined destinies of Marat's image and Tussaud's cultural legacy. (Tussaud's own wax portrait of Marat, made in the same year David painted his, can be seen today at her museum on Marylebone Road). In both cases Tussaud's and Marat's place in two very different narratives of representation - Fine Art and entertainment spectacle - has all but erased their historical identities. Madame Tussaud made her wax portraits for the French court shortly before the Revolution. To survive the aftermath she concealed her Royalist past by making deathmasks of decapitated aristocrats for the Republicans. Some are thought to have been incorporated in the original Chambers of Horrors. (The very Warholian celebrity/death twin tiers of the Madame Tussaud Museum can be seen in terms of the Revolution, before and after). Today both David's painting and Tussaud's waxwork version of it have followed their own representational destinies. As icons they are now largely unstuck from their origins and historical contexts. Via reproduction and tourism they are now independent images which we observe with the nonchalance of the over-entertained at the fag end of history.

Pimp, strangely, is perhaps Gavin Turk's most idealistic piece. It is simply a skip that has been given a smooth, gleaming coat of black paint. Here for once, apparently, the tables of degradation are turned, and this ugly, ubiquitous symbol of urban waste and disruption is presented as a sexy, abstract, retro piece of painted steel sculpture. Its shiny surfaces lend an otherwise lumbering mass the illusion of weightlessness as if it might glide through space; its angular plates suggest a folded, futuristic bird. But like an empty vitrine or bare plinth, there is again the sense of frames and the absence of actual art works originated by the artist. It's an empty container, a Pimp or purveyor perhaps of abandoned moments of art history. Here though it's empty, a Void, devoid of the tangle of references and recyclings that together make up Turk's secondary aesthetic. For an instant we are presented with a vacuum amid the convolutions, a container containing emptiness at the end of an avant-garde that has worn itself out.

Alex Farquharson is a curator and critic based in London.

First published in Farquhason, Alex and Joshus Compston. Gavin Turk. Collected Works 1994-98, Jay Jopling/White Cube, London and South London Gallery, London 1998

More on Gavin Turk

	Related Texts
CV
Bibliography
The Unbearable Awkwardness of Things A Conversation between Gavin Turk and Tim Marlow
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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