AboutEssays2022Interview - Gavin Turk in conversation with Louisa Buck

IN SEARCH OF ARIADNE

LB: What first attracted you to the subject of Ariadne?

GT: I have always engaged with Surrealism and with art that questions notions of reality and perception, which in turn are informed by dreams, the psyche, and psychological states. I have been especially interested in the idea that there is a whole load of mental baggage you bring to an object that you're engaging with, which informs the way you understand that thing and give it meaning. This is even more relevant now in 2022, as many of our social, political, economic, and cultural paradigms are being transformed.

It was in the late 80’s that I first came across Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings and the proposition that de Chirico was a founding figure of Surrealism - and also Cubism. I became interested in this metaphysical artist, looking at him as an inhabitant of a world more invested in objective reality. There is an engaging awkwardness to the way that de Chirico painted, and that awkwardness is what I am transfixed by in his paintings.LB: So, your introduction to Ariadne came through her representation by another artist.

GT: Yes. Looking at de Chirico’s paintings, I was suddenly in contact with this Classical Greek figure that kept reappearing across time.  I then went on to study who this figure was and how she appeared in lots of different stories. This storytelling seemed to come from many different perspectives. So here was this figure that stood for many things at the same time, I think this is what art does. For me, making an artwork is a chance to make something that is fixed, but at the same time fits into a multiplicity of narratives simultaneously.

LB: Over the centuries Ariadne has been a lightning rod for so many ideas around women and the female form. In Minoan, Greek, and Roman mythology she is thedeceiver of her father King Minos, the betrayer of her half-brother the Minotaur, and a canny labyrinth-cracker with her ingenious use of thread. She is a woman wronged by Theseus, ravaged by Dionysus, who then becomes a goddess herself. She has been repeatedly represented in her trademark raised elbow pose as the archetypal slumbering, semi-conscious, reclining nude, abandoned, gazed upon, and lusted over by multiple artists from ancient Greece to Andy Warhol viade Chirico. These many layers of interpretation seem analogous to your earlier sculpture Pop (1993), the waxwork self portrait of you as Sid Vicious, in the stance of Elvis Presley, as portrayed by Andy Warhol, all contained in a museum-style vitrine. In both works there is a millefeuille of potential interpretations, while each is also an arresting, psychologically charged object in its own right.GT: I think that there is always a level of ambiguity to art. Art always has this quality where it can be read, understood, and interpreted through different lenses. In a way, there is a maze or a labyrinth of interpretation that greets any object that we put in front ofus in the cultural space. Culture will wrap itself around theobject, contextualise it, and start to move us through to an understanding of that thing.

LB: Your Ariadne is a sculpture, of a painting, of a sculpture that was in itself a kind of Surreal dream. And then you have added this extra dimension by wrapping her up. This is the first of your Ariadne sculptures that you have presented as wrapped. Why did you choose to cover her? It is almost as if you are simultaneouslydenying and highlighting all these anticipated projections onto her form.

GT: Through the process of making her invisible I tried to imbue the sculpture with the idea of transformation. She is a chrysalis, if you like, and I am interested in the idea that that she might, through her disappearance, make a reappearance in another form. Wrapping the sculpture is about this idea of transition, of something changing to something else. For me it seemed important that the wrapping was about possibility.

LB: The wrapping is also enticing, because you always want to know what's inside; what it’s covering.GT: Quite apart from the wrapping, the meme of the reclining Ariadne has endured precisely because it is the embodiment of desire, illicit and beyond reach. She will awaken to discover that she has been abandoned by Theseus, but, in this recurring depiction, she is frozen in sleep. The idea of a figure suspended in a helpless state is compelling. I am reminded of my piece The Negotiation of Purpose, 2002 where a knife spins round and round on a table indefinitely, without ever stopping. They are both caught in suspended anticipation.

LB: The wrappings seem to suggest two very different things at the same time. Are they protecting or shielding?  Is something being stifled or suffocated under there? This tension seems very deliberate and key to the piece.

GT: The sculpture can be seen in all these ways, and as I said the ambiguity is crucial to capturing the imagination of the audience. There is a functional sense to the way the wrapping works, it is like a decorator’s dust sheet secured with hemp ropes as has been done for centuries before the advent of plastic. Just as dust sheets are thrown over the furniture when a historic house is put to bed, or to protect furnishings during renovations, there is this sense that the sculpture has been wrapped up to protect it, to stop it from getting damaged. Within the context of the rail station, it can also be read as a package that is about to be moved, to be transported, or indeed, that has reached its destination and is about to be unveiled.LB: Those ropes are very tight, nothing can escape.

GT: There is a Houdini-like feel to it. If there is an actual figure underneath there, then there is this sense of constraint. But, as it is larger than life, we know that there isn't a real figure inside. The figure is suggested, and the wrapping is there to stimulate the imagination. The ropes act like wireframe modelling in computer graphics, creating a faceted breaking-up of the surface. It also reminds me of the lines that art historians place across the surface of paintings to chart and analyse composition. The string and the lines are mapping three-dimensional space, which relates to Ariadne’s thread and how it was used by Theseus to map his path out of the labyrinth.

LB: Ariadne Wrapped also makes knowing reference to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s wrappings and Man Ray’s L’Enigme d’Isidore Ducasse, the sewing machine wrapped up in a blanket and tied up with string that he first made in 1920. So the wrapping itself also has its own history in art. And then there are the sexual connotations of those tight rope bindings. So, you have got all these additional art historical considerations and sexual connotations bulging in your back pocket.

GT: I may have all this art history in my pocket, I think that most people do. Artists are forever solving visual problems, and to a greater or lesser extent, this is something that everyone does. Although I know many people claim not to have a creative bone in their body, I am very much of the belief that everyone is an artist. Not to say that it’s biologically determined, but for social and cultural beings, creativity is inevitable.

LB: The ideas of trompe l’oeil and transformation recur in your work: the bin bags, the apple cores, the polystyrene cup or the wooden chip forks, all cast in bronze and then meticulously painted to be indistinguishable from the original throwaway object. Similarly, albeit on a larger scale, Ariadne Wrapped is a cast bronze sculpture painstakingly painted to look as if something has been wrapped up in canvas tarpaulin and rope. Only when you touch the work does it become evident that the surface is not cloth and rope. Then the label reveals that it is made of bronze, a material steeped in monumental art history, rather than concrete, plaster, or resin. This ambiguity seems very crucial.

 GT: Yes, indeed. Before the trompe l’oeil can exist, there is a long making process. You have to make a model, and then you have to mould it to make the cast, and then you have to almost make it again by covering it with a layer of paint. The process itself consists of many layers of wrapping. When viewers realise they cannot trust their first visual assessment of the work, all of those wrappings start loosening. People feel the urge to touch it, and when they do, it unravels and takes on another life. I am also provoking and encouraging the wrapping and unwrapping of the larger idea of public art. What is public art? How does it function?

LB: Much public sculpture has become invisible to the people that walk past it, but here you’ve actually made a piece of public art that is deliberately, overtly invisible. At the same time, conversely - and perversely - by rendering her invisible you have made her much more conspicuous, because hardwired into all of us when we look at something wrapped up is to wonder what is inside.

GT: I am trying to create a gap, like the gap on the wall where the stolen Mona Lisa used to hang. The sculpture has a physical presence with an inbuilt absence. There is something inherently metaphysical about this wrapped sculpture; you are compelled to visualise something that you cannot see with your eye and your rational mind. Recently, when I was beside the sculpture in Cambridge, someone who didn't know that I had anything to do with the sculpture asked me, ‘What is it going to be?’ Like a lot of my work Ariadne Wrapped tries to turn looking at art into a less passive experience for the audience. I hope viewers might become more aware of their assumptions and expectations.

LB: The mysteriousness surrounding its materials seems key to this.

GT: In a way I am using old fashioned material, old fashioned sculpture, old fashioned canvas and rope, to force a new reading of things; to invite the audience to see the station and square with fresh eyes, and to see a public sculpture in their midst much like the stranger who you get to know a bit more through each encounter.

LB: Can you talk about why you quote the work and motifs of other artists as part of this investigation?

GT I often use other artists’ work, in particular their ‘signature works’, to create a sort of hybrid work. It is a kind of gaming of our collective memory of art that is inseparably linked to the artist who made it. I am questioning the notion of ideas as individual, of the ownership of ideas, of intellectual property, and of authorship. I like to see how an artist’s signature carries a whole set of aesthetics and associations. Often, just the mention of an artist's name in a conversation is a way of shining a light on something, as if the artist is synonymous with an aesthetic or approach.

LB: Which brings us back to de Chirico and the instant identifiable ‘look’ of his empty colonnaded squares, inhabited by the sculpture of Ariadne casting strange shadows, occasionally with a train puffing away in the distance. 

GT: During his life de Chirico was subjected to his own iconography. He repeated this same – or very similar – painting with the square, the colonnades, the sculpture in the middle, the shadows, and maybe a train in the distance, over and over again. It was the signature piece that people associated with him. 

LB: The way in which de Chirico’s trademark motifs became a shorthand for the metaphysical, chimes with what you were saying earlier about why you choose other artist’s signature styles, materials, or indeed their signatures themselves, to act as a kind of conceptual shorthand. How you then blend these identifying signifiers to make hybrid works that have at their core a basic interrogation of how we look at art, why we look at art, and how and why we value art. Even before de Chirico’s work became a trademark of itself, right from the beginning he was using his colonnades, and his many Ariadne as a shorthand for the classical tradition. He painted his strange squares as an emblem of Italy as a ghostly moribund museum. Then later Breton and the Surrealists who were steeped in Freud, seized on their atmospheric, dreamlike quality even though de Chirico knew nothing of Freud and psychoanalysis when he had started painting them. So, all of this is embedded in your Cambridge Ariadne?

GT: Exactly! It is asking, what is a picture (or, in this case a sculpture)? What is it for? Why would you make it? And then how do you make it? And what is it depicting? I am transported to those important years just before the First World War, when de Chirico was making these paintings. Fast forward to 1915, when Duchamp left war-torn Europe and arrived in America following the scandalous success of his Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912). Two years later he triggered the whole debacle with the urinal sculpture, Fountain (1917) and Conceptual Art was born.

LB: So, there is this watershed early twentieth-century moment that you tap into a lot, and then you also refer to other key movements and major figures that built on those early radical foundations, whether it be Magritte’s Surrealism, Warhol’s Pop, Manzoni’s Arte Povera, and others who pick the various batons and then go off in a whole host of other directions.

GT: All the artists I pick up and respond to are artists who had a foot in many different worlds. Although they may have had quite defined and distinctive artistic practices, they were also aware of the fact that those artistic practices have real world consequences, and of the iconoclastic potential of artmaking itself. This self-conscious art practice has always been there for me. When I started out I was aware of the notion of a constructed author, and so I created this artist, and I called him Gavin Turk. This artist was a kind of puppet; an artistic cypher. He could make art in the art world, and I was able to look from a distance and see what this artist was for, what he was worth and what he was doing. This duality has been difficult for me to sustain because that avatar has become the real-world me. I have disappeared into the performance of being an artist and only occasionally seem to get snapshots of what is happening in the real world.

LB: Was it when you stopped being unknown and anonymous that Gavin Turk, the avatar artist, started to cross dress stylistically with these figures from art history and to merge their signature styles and motifs into what you have described as ‘trompe l’art’, of which Ariadne Wrapped is a recent example?

GT: Yes, there is a progression through these characters. Marcel Duchamp created this Rrose Selavy alter ego, and I made a sculpture of myself as a fortune teller called Rosy Lee (2013). This Ariadne sculpture definitely follows a line of figurative sculptures that I made Pop (1993), Bum (1997), Death of Marat (1998), Che (1999) and then Nomad (2001), which is a wrapped figure in a sleeping bag. So, I see Ariadne as a formal transitional point where, even though the work may no longer look like me, it is me. Every artwork that an artist makes is a self-portrait. As an artist you're fated to be involved in the process of self-portraiture. From Diego Velazquez onwards, there is the sense that artists make something to communicate with an audience, and the audience communicates with that artwork through interpretation; discovering what the artist is saying, or the artist’s philosophy, or what can be seen in the mirror that the artist has constructed.

LB: But while all art may be a form of self-portraiture, no art is made in a vacuum. Every work of art is also freighted with all its art historical precedents, precursors and references, and your work is equally about that.

GT: Yes, that is true of art and also of the audience. When people come to art, they bring their culture and they bring all their points of reference to bear. I play with that in the work.

LB: The exhibition IN SEARCH OF ARIADNE at the Heong Gallery expands on many of the motifs and themes underpinning the sculpture Ariadne Wrapped and how they play out across much of your work. It also points to other underlying concerns which may not be so immediately evident. One such theme is that of recycling and revaluing. The elevation of mundane, discarded and overlooked objects to the status of ‘fine art’ has been a central strand in your work for many years, but more recently it seems that you have become more overtly environmentally active.

GT: The moment when you throw something away, or something gets thrown away, we tend to believe this is the end of this object’s life. Even though we know that it will continue to exist, in many cases far longer than us, it has finished the life that matters to us. I often refer to that kind of thinking in the way that I present my work. I want to invite people to become more aware of the reality we all know is there but hide from ourselves. There is a provocation around value in presenting people with something they instinctively think has little or no value, and in inviting them to look again to find meaning, importance, and relevance. To re-attribute value is to redefine how value is generated.

LB: Ideas around the functionality of art reminds me of Le Corbusier’s description of paintings and sculpture as ‘machines for creating emotion.’ 

GT: The relationship between functionality and art has always fascinated me. Some time ago I got quite caught up with the idea of creating a portrait of someone as a filled bag of rubbish, a kind of anti-portrait, to suggest that we are what we throw away. Something that was once functional gets stripped of its functionality once it is thrown away. For example, I see a disposable lighter that has run out of gas and is lying on the street as embodying the history of portable fire. So, if I pick up this discarded lighter and I represent it as an artwork, it becomes a testament to human ingenuity.  It is the sort of thing I want to send into space for the aliens to come across. All humanity is here in this disposable lighter.

LB: But what you present is not a disposable lighter, or an actual bin bag full of rubbish - it’s a bag or a lighter which you have cast in bronze and then painted to look exactly like a cheap piece of plastic. It’s not an objet-trouvé or a Duchampian readymade, it is a highly crafted object that triggers a frisson of the uncanny and also interrogates value in art.

GT: That level of production, especially with the painted bin bags, was important because when someone walks into a room and they see only a bin bag, they don’t consider the binbag as anything to look at. They might even say, ‘oh, this room is empty’. But, by casting it in bronze, it makes sure this something stays in the world. Obviously, it also plays with Jasper Johns’ Two Beer Cans (1960). It makes reference to the material of bronze as an art material, whatever the subject matter. It plays with perception and leads to the realisation that we are able to change our minds.  We are capable of paradigm shifts. So, it comes back to this idea that the artwork itself is a kind of provocation to possibilities for revisiting our understanding of reality.

LB: Are you saying that if you can look at a chip fork or a bin bag in a new way, you could look at how to live your life in a new way.  And if you look at the impact of your life on the environment, and the way in which you interact with the rest of the world - whether it be natural, social or cultural – you could start to re-assess all that?

GT: Definitely. I think that the future is environmental awareness. It is here now, and it will become  more central in the future.

LB: Finally back to Ariadne in Cambridge. This wrapped sculpture also seems to be an emblematic provocation to make people reassess how they view and negotiate what is directly around them.

 GT: With art, we are always looking for the edge. We are always looking for the boundary where the picture stops, and the world starts. In Cambridge, at what point does this artwork actually stop? Where does it finish? Ariadne Wrapped is a chrysalis, a kind of carapace with something changing underneath; something constantly altering and in a state of flux. We are just seeing the shell or the box, but it is a Pandora’s box. We can’t be sure if it contains something of our world, but we do know that it is unknowable.

Louisa Buck is an art critic and contemporary art correspondent for The Art Newspaper.