A film of the artist as Wolfgang von Kempelen’s ‘Mechanical Turk’ playing the ‘Knight's Tour’. Screened life size from the floor upwards.
In this fourteen minute film, Turk disguises himself as a life-sized 18th Century chess-playing automaton, The Mechanical Turk, whose technical wizardry was said to have outwitted even Napoleon, as this elaborate hoax toured around the most illustrious courts of Europe. The film shows Turk replaying the Knight’s Tour, a clever yet pointless circular ritual which takes the Knight across every square on the board in a mechanical mimicry of the “original” “fake”.
Exhibitions
- Turkey Foil - Aurel Scheibler Gallery, 2009
- Something Like This - Park Ryu Sook Gallery, 2010
- Last Year in Eggenberg (The Paradise Show) - Schloss Eggenberg, 2006
- Gavin Turk Ltd at Paul Stolper - Paul Stolper Gallery, 2009
- Jack Shit! - Aeroplastics, 2011
- Jazzz - Sean Kelly Gallery, 2009
- The Art of Chess - Reykjavik Art Museum, 2009
- The Art of Chess - Saatchi Gallery, 2012
- TÜRK - Galerist, 2012
- The Mechanical Turk - Metropole Hotel, 2015
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