pipe
Edition of 3
Painted bronze
11 x 2 cms
1991
A children's liquorice pipe cast in bronze and painted to look real.
This painted bronze cast of a liquorice pipe sits on a plinth under a glass case. The work relates to the Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe, ‘The Treachery of Images’, 1929, which has the phrase ‘Ceci n’est pas un pipe’ (This is not a pipe) written under it – the point being that is it not a pipe; it isn’t a painting of a pipe. Certainly Turk’s work employs a similar rebuttal, but there is another famous artwork that this piece refers to: in 1888 Vincent van Gogh made a painting of his pipe resting on the seat of his chair. Turk used the relative scale of the chair to the pipe to determine the size of his glass vitrine, and even placed his pipe on the plinth at the same odd angle that van Gogh had placed his pipe on the chair.
Exhibitions
- Turkish - Aurel Scheibler Gallery, 1995
- Burnt Out - Kunsthaus Baselland, 2008
- Gavin Turk, Collected Works 1989-1993 - 1993
- Who What When Where How and Why - Newport Street Gallery, 2016
Essays
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Redundancy of Symbolism - Charlie Porter
SHOW
Redundancy of Symbolism - Charlie Porter
Redundancy is the hidden downfall of symbolism. Of their moment, an object can seem so symbolic that to possess it in an act of self-definition. But once that item becomes obsolete itself, its symbolism disappears. Indeed the absence of relevancy can then have a negative mirroring effect on its symbolism, as if to balance out its previous power with impotency. Before smaller cars became desirable as well as worthy, oversized vehicles were loaded with a phallic symbolism so blatant that all hoped that the reality was, “big car, small dick”. Nowadays, big cars are so impractical that its “big car, not even worth having an opinion about”.
It means that symbolism has an inbuilt nostalgia about it, especially as western culture speeds up. For much of the twentieth century, items had purpose and longevity that allowed symbolistic meaning to gather round them. Its seems the mission of the 21st century to shed life of the unnecessary. It may sound weird to state that of such a materialistic times, but it also seems true: we may buy more stuff, but the sheer volume of what we buy makes us care less about what we then own. If we don’t