A bronze cast of the middle of a toilet roll painted to look real.
Turk’s trompe l’oeil sculptures of toilet rolls mischievously imply a symbiotic association between art and shit. Indeed, works such as In Memory of Piero Manzoni see Turk make a playful reference to Manzoni’s Merda D’Artista in which he presented cans of shit as art. Concerned with challenging meaning through re-cycling, re-appropriation and re-contextualisation, Turk’s bog rolls might also be seen to taken on a new life as a child’s telescope – itself an object used to change the viewer’s perspective. They also bear an uncanny similarity to rollers used by painters and decorators to apply paint and wallpaper, transforming the artist into a humble tradesman in the process. Or perhaps not, since these bog rolls are made not from cardboard but bronze, elevating the status of the banal to something far more grand.
Essays
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The End - Matthew Collings
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The End - Matthew Collings
A recent piece by Gavin Turk is a bronze cast of a pile of ashes from a dead fire called "Pyre," which suggests death but also Christianity's ashes to ashes theme and the eternal life cycle. We all go back to carbon. Hegel thought art had a sell-by date, that its revelatory capacity would be superseded by the higher truths of philosophy -- he thought art was just a stage or phase on the big trip to ultimate meaning. We haven't got there yet. We've only got to the end of a style of capitalism that started up in the 1980s.
Money becomes unreal. But it turns out reality is there after all. Is there an art-world correlate? All we know from developments in the non-art world is that there won't be so much spending. What won't there be so much of in the art-world? Will it be unreality? The unreality of art writing. What do art writers do after all? This weird service they perform, giving their paragraphs to the art-selling industry. Never saying anything undermining or challenging to
