An ‘historical blue plaque’ to commemorate work done by the artist during his time at the Royal College of Art. In a sky-lit wood-panelled room inside the Royal College of Art mounted on an otherwise empty wall in an otherwise empty room, a blue ceramic English heritage plaque reads “Gavin Turk, Sculptor, worked here 1989 – 1991”. A commemoration of a life, it marks the presence of the artist with the most powerful and evocative of the tools that might be at his disposal - his absence. The curtain has fallen. The titles are rolling. Gavin Turk has left the stage. Death as performance. While the absence of the artist, we make the art. The artist is no more and all that is left for the audience in this empty white space is to reverently imagine the work which once filled this space, while apprehending that the emptiness is the work. And so material object of the plaque frames the space and the art work frames the artist, the one somehow preceding the other in an elliptical sleight of hand, as the end frames the beginning. All that is left behind of the artist is a memorial to an implied body of work, and by extension, an implied life and worth, while the title, after Plato’s famous allegory, tells of a hidden reality we can neither see nor know. In an unexpected twist to the tale, Cave has additionally become infamous as the piece of work that "won" Turk a fail for his Masters which he had been studying for at the Royal College of Art. Ironically, it has gone on to become regarded as one of Turk's most iconic pieces.
Essays
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Which Came First? - Rachel Newsome
SHOW
Which Came First? - Rachel Newsome
To begin at the end. In a sky-lit wood-panelled room inside the Royal College of Art mounted on an otherwise empty wall in an otherwise empty room, a blue ceramic English heritage plaque reads “Gavin Turk, Sculptor, worked here 1989 – 1991”. A commemoration of a life, it marks the presence of the artist with the most powerful and evocative of the tools that might be at his disposal - his absence. The curtain has fallen. The titles are rolling. Gavin Turk has left the stage. Death as performance. While the absence of the artist, we make the art.
The artist is no more and all that is left for the audience in this empty white space is to reverently imagine the work which once filled this space, while apprehending that the emptiness is the work. And so material object of the plaque frames the space and the art work frames the artist, the one somehow preceding the other in an elliptical sleight of hand, as the end frames the beginning. The artist is dead. Long live art!
To kill yourself off before your career has even begun is a particularly punk thing to do (never -
The Blank Page - Darian Leader
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The Blank Page - Darian Leader
Everyone is familiar with the image of the writer or artist confronted with blank page or canvas. We see it on TV, at the movies, in comics or in magazines. When we read a description of the particularity of the experience, we might identify with it or we might not. Sometimes the emphasis is on a preconception and sometimes on a void: there’s a difference between having a clear image of exactly what one wants to create and being stuck at the moment of materialising it and just knowing one wants to create but not having any idea of what. Both of these suppose the encounter with the blank page, but isn’t this blankness itself something that involves a complex process of creation? Is a page with nothing on it a blank page from the start?
Blankness, like silence, needs to be created. You might enjoy the silence of your garden every morning until one day you notice that it isn’t silent in the same way anymore: the birds have suddenly stopped twittering. The silence you feel now has a weight to it, created by the absence of birdsong. In other words, it’s the noise that creates the silence, -
Celebrity - Paul Flynn
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Celebrity - Paul Flynn
In the immediate wake of 9/11, Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan hastily declared an end to The Celebrity Culture. His polemical wager centred on the dawn of a new age of serious thinking. It cut directly against the grain of tabloid thinking and effectively signed his own newspaper death-knell, as The Mirror’s sales fell directly into freefall.
Ignore The Celebrity Culture at your peril. Celebrate it with caution. Attempt to defy it and you will hastily become enveloped by its Faustian embrace. Seven years after declaring its end, with an irony arch enough to drive a double-decker bus under, Piers Morgan is a central figure in Britain’s Celebrity Culture. He makes his living mostly as a judge on The Celebrity Culture’s favourite medium, reality TV shows, and interviewing celebrities for a glossy magazine. Soon he will consolidate his own niche in The Celebrity Culture, replete with the requisite spray tan and teeth whitening signifiers, by hosting a chat show in which one self-made Celebrity of the age will talk to others. His brassy soundbite, so potent in the eye of international tragedy, meant nothing after all.
At the risk of glibness, just as the words were dropping -
Plato's Cave - Rachel Newsome
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Plato's Cave - Rachel Newsome
The allegory of Plato’s Cave, as told by the Greek philosopher in The Republic (approx 360 BC) goes right to the heart of human existence by seeking to answer the question: what is truth? The story of the philosopher-poet-king’s ascent from the ignorant pit of humanity to the sun, followed by his subsequent return to share the knowledge, it deals with ideas about consciousness, perception, perspective, representation and truth and has influenced thought in philosophy, psychology, art, sociology, science and education.
The story begins with a cave in which man is imprisoned. His neck and legs are chained in a way that he cannot move while he can only see what is before him. Behind the chained prisoners, a fire burns providing a degree of light with which they are able to see. On a shelf in the cave between the prisoners and the fire, a series of marionettes in the shape of animals and plants are moved by an unseen carrier. The shadows of the marionettes are cast by the fire onto the wall directly ahead of the prisoners in order to create a series of moving images in the manner of a primitive cinema.
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