IT can be hard to think about clichés, the mind tends to slip and slide over
surfaces as seamlessly smooth and self-evident as the shell of an egg. The
very nature of a cliché makes it appear obvious and uninteresting, obscuring
the fundamental, and often universal, truth that has brought it into being.
Like an egg, a cliché often refers to the origin of things, at once
miraculous and banal to the point of near invisibility. Much of Gavin Turk’s
work appears concerned with this conundrum – how to look at familiar things
and actually see them, how to renew a sense of the complex layers of
symbolic meaning encapsulated in the most humble of everyday objects and
images. Thus the bag of rubbish, the apple core, the loaf of bread, the
spent match, the artist’s signature, the human icon and even the egg, each
thing constituting the metaphorical presentation of a dangling end of
string. Take hold of it, pull a little, and you find yourself getting
tangled up in an intricate system of cultural layering and knotting.
In Turk’s most recent London show he presented a long-contemplated
object-project: a ceramic font. The perfect, circular bowl stands on a solid
wooden plinth – a dense rectangular section of trunk from a large old oak
tree. A bronze plaque inscribed with a museum name attached to the wood
confers provenance, authority, ownership. There are 223 of these fonts, each
ascribed to a European or American museum collecting contemporary art. They
are perfectly designed to compliment one of the 15 Duchamp urinals produced
between 1951 and 1964 and farmed out to the world’s major art museums, many
years after the original infamous readymade was first signed by the
anonymous phantom, R Mutt, in 1917.
Theatrically spotlit in the Fine Art Society’s basement, Turk’s font unites
spiritual birth and the sublime with what could well be the most
diametrically opposed, but centrally contemporary, concern – a play on the
commodity aspect of the objet d’art. In 1951 Duchamp transformed the holy
art objet into a kind of sex toy entitled Objet-Dard. Taken from the mould
of his female figure in Etant Donnés (in the area of her rib, reversing the
Biblical creation myth) (1946-66) the ambiguous phallic form comprising
Objet-Dard is cast bronze with a painted strip of silver. Of similar
dimensions and not dissimilar form, Turk’s first painted bronze object, Pipe
(1991), cast from a liquorice pipe, embodies the Turk-Duchampian
distillation and mix: an apparently ordinary object with quotidian
associations related to a physical experience (taste) and (childhood role-)
play. That is one level – others related to art history are self-consciously
manipulated by the artist: Turk positioned his pipe on a white plinth in a
vitrine at an angle related to that at which Van Gogh painted his pipe on a
chair in 1888, 40 years before René Magritte made his famous painting The
Treachery of Images (1929), in which he emphasised that the representation
of a pipe is not the real thing. Van Gogh, Magritte and questions of the
real have become clichés in European art; Duchamp and his readymades still
have iconic status, but I suspect at some point in the not-too-distant
future they will become clichés too. Which begs the question, how does this
slide from icon to cliché operate? And what are its boundaries and
slippages? Where do the points of reference go? (And where did they come
from in the first place?) The Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara perfectly
embodies this process of decline from political hero to misappropriated
emblem, now embraced by any teenager aspiring to liberation from parental
authority, and any political movement taking up the cause of freedom full
stop. Turk has staged the Guevara-Gavara icon-cliché live and dead,
confusing notions of portraiture and identity by placing his own face behind
Guevara’s beard and adding notions of artistic iconicity to the chain of
associations zig-zagging through the larger cultural soup.
There’s a birth-and-death dichotomy see-sawing at the core of Turk’s oeuvre
and rippling outwards through all these references to Surrealism, Modernism,
representation, commodity and the icon. His more recent objects made from
cast and realistically painted bronze trigger an entry to the rich depth of
symbolic references lurking behind ordinary appearances, while validating
them through the monumentality and permanence of the material. Possibly the
most potent of these objects are the cast black bin bags, straining,
sagging, filled with unidentified rubbish, the inevitable by-products of our
intensely consumer-orientated lives. Providing the perfect counter to the
egg (a recurring presence in Turk’s work) – one of the most universal and
clichéd symbols of potential life – the filled bin bags evoke death and
disgust. The egg’s fragile shell contains a matrix of nourishment (often
drained out in a Turk-work, evoking Marcel Broodthaers among others); the
thin plastic skin of the bin bag conceals the horror of decay and
dissolution; however both can give off bad smells; the egg may also be a
coffin (the original title of Turk’s first giant painted fibreglass egg, now
titled Oeuvre (2002)), while the contents of the bin bag may nourish vermin
and mould, returning matter to life in an ideal ecosystem, but more probably
adding to the endless stacking up of slowly decaying toxic matter in the
overflowing landfill sites that are a contemporary and increasingly global
problem. The bin bags (with such titles as Dump, Tip, Waste, Trash, all
2004) appear to be the natural progression from Nomad (2002), the cast of a
grimy sleeping bag containing a body we assume is sleeping, but which may
just as well be dead. Completely hidden under the covers, the body strains
against the zippered seam where legs are bent at the knee, evoking
retrospectively the stretched surface of the claustrophobically sealed black
plastic sacks.
Cross sleeping bags with garbage bags and you have body bags containing the
grim remnants of soldiers returning home from exotic places where they went
to defend somebody else’s idea of freedom (or potential financial gain). And
taking another twist in the associative journey, Turk has most recently
brought bodies and bags together in a series of monoprints made by
substituting full bin bags for the svelte naked ladies operating as human
paintbrushes in Yves Klein’s iconic ‘Anthropometry’ works of 1960. Young
bags turning into old bags? Or expressive plastic coming to life? Imprint or
relic, like the marks left on paper by a slopped teacup (ongoing works begun
2003), the masticatory imprints left in chewing gum (ongoing post 1998),
Turk’s rubbish bag prints suggest the final trace left by the human
presence. Which leads nicely to a series of shrivelled apple cores, their
flesh consumed by unknown bodies, now immortalised in their state of decay.
In Would you Adam and Eve it! (2005), the core got left behind to trigger a
wonderful wealth of associations that Turk evokes flippantly and playfully
with a series of punning titles (Grapple, Cores and Effect, Exquisite
Corpse, Paradise Lost, The Pleasure Principle, all 2006, to name but a few)
with more or less poetic associations. The ultimate referent – taking us
back to the beginning (of consciousness and separation) and on to the end
(egg-bag in one) – the apple core may be superseded only by something that
extends to the ephemeral bright heat of the spirit: Spent Match (2005) is a
used match, its flame burnt out, its end reduced to ugly black carbon. It’s
so obvious, it’s genius.
Gavin Turk’s Exhibition ‘The Negotiation Of Purpose’ Opens At The Hague’s Gemeentemuseum On February 5th
Elizabeth Manchester Is An Artist And Writer Based In London