Wood ‘n’ Melon

Painted bronze
20 x 38 x 20 cms
2001

A bronze cast of a melon, half painted in realist style with the skin surface of a classic watermelon, the other half blended into a briar wood paint pattern similar to that of an old fashioned pipe like that used by Magritte.

The is an alchemy piece. It is the transmutation of a melon into briar wood (traditionally used to make pipes) but then you realize that it is actually made of bronze. The layers of material meaning multiply, until you are no longer sure of what you are looking at.
The Artist has made many pieces of art inspired by the street. Cardboard boxes (‘Brillo’, 2002), bin bags in bronze (‘Bag’, 2001) and ‘Nomad’ (a figure in a sleeping bag cast in bronze). All these works are questioning value and status. The melon pieces are quirkier than that, watermelons having saucy, colloquial associations because of their size and succulence. But they are also a vegetable-like fruit often put on the floor outside shops because of their size. An urban boulder. The melon is not indigenous to this country and therefore represents the exotic: the unknown.

Exhibitions

Essays

  • 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

    mind that an unintentional consequence of the piece was that it cost Turk his degree). Even Sid Vicious managed to produce a slim body of work before his bloody act of self-immolation.

    Neither overtly political nor filled with burning intensity nor sneering disdain, what specifically runs through Turk’s work is a quiet psycho-existential angst that says something about all of us in the first decades of a new millennium where all is not half as brave and shiny as we were promised and which finds us on the one hand wanting in desperation to destroy the dream and on the other, equally desperately trying to hold onto it.

    Belonging to a tradition that seeks to critique and challenge what can and cannot be called art which also includes Beuys, Duchamp, Broodthaers, Klein and Manzoni, in Gavin’s work the pipe-smoking intellectual is given an egg for a face and many pipes to chew on at once. Detritus from the street – melons, burnt matches and two pence coins – is cast in bronze as traditional systems and establishment values are turned into surreal jokes intended to reveal all that is hollow within.
    Nor is it any

    accident that Turk is also a fan of Beckett to whom he plays homage in his absurdist puppet show, “Waiting For Gavo”.

    A playful, anarchist mischief-maker, in 1998 Gavin turned up to the private view of Saatchi’s now legendary/notorious Sensation show at the Royal Academy, dressed as a tramp, replete with newspapers stuffed into the holes of his falling apart shoes in – the “starving artist” thrown amongst rich collectors, Daniel to the lions – in a move that caused as much embarrassment as it did entertainment, his newspaper stuff shoes and piss-stained trousers (the artist’s own) all a bit too real for some.

    Disruptive, subversive, the child who persists in asking difficult questions, the merry prankster mischievously picking at the fabric of tradition, of convention, of preconceived ideas…for all his love of absence, somehow Gavin Turk persists like an indelible stain. Regardless of who or what happens to be in fashion, he just will not go away.

    Meanwhile, in Turk world, all art is punk because all art is necessarily fake. It is all represented, copied, a fragment of an unseen whole – a joke on the viewer, bringing into question both perspective and

    perception and the by presenting something that is not. Yet behind it’s fake-ness, or perhaps because of it, is the same question repeated down the line from the myth of Zeuxis and Parrhasios to De Chirico, Magritte, Klein, Warhol not only through art history but philosophical history and indeed human history; how can we know what is real? And yet through and in and of the fakeness of art lies the possibility of a cool objective truth, which might be reached, as pointed out by William Blake “if (only) the doors of perception were cleansed” for then, “man would see everything as it is; infinite.”

    The point being that they are not cleansed but dark and smoky - more opaque than transparent, like the glass placed in a frame over a painting, which reveals most clearly our own reflection. Meanwhile, peering through the doors into the unseen “beyond”, it is not answers that Gavin finds but dead ends and puzzling blind spots, which lead the artist further and deeper into the psycho-metaphysical labyrinth where the monster is the Lacanian “indestructible other” and where it is impossible to tell which came first; the beginning or end, self or mask, original

    or copy, inside or outside, representation or real, artist or art, chicken or…

    Eggs recurs again and again in Gavin’s work. Symbols of life, of creation, of originality, they appear as surreal faces, giant duck eggs, broken shells and in liquid form as mayonnaise and egg tempura. Transforming eggs from the sacred to the profane, the pure to the parasitical, a symbol of creation to something created, Turk takes us on an inventive journey from eggs to eggs cups to fonts.

    But for Turk – the punk, the hoaxer hoaxer posing as a famous artist - as Beuys, as Marat, as Warhol, as Gavin Turk, the artist posing as the notorious chess-playing hoaxer, The Mechanical Turk – it is not really a question of either/or, real or fake but both/and – real and fake, the gallery and the street, the serious and the frivolous, the original and the copy, the beginning and the end, all pointing to what Kant termed the “noumenal” reality outside of us.

    Hence Turk’s interest in trompe l’oeil, in camouflage, in role-playing, in masks and in what the hidden and the concealed is able to reveal. If Turk is a punk, then he

    is also a shaven-headed Zen monk, constructing visual koans in the form of bronze “wooden” melons or private views where all the exhibits are shrouded, Christo-style, in cloth or presenting himself camouflaged as Warhol or as Warhol’s gun-slinging Elvis as Sid Vicious, with one hand adding a layer of meaning, with another, taking it away.

    Refusing to be one thing or another, eschewing the comfortable in favour of the awkward, Turk’s affinity with punk belongs a bigger narrative – the narrative of the revolutionary, the outsider, the lunatic, the scapegoat, the artist as martyr, offered to the world as the sacrificial “Other” in order to simultaneously remind us of our own inner rebel, while reassuring us of our safe position “inside”. Here, it is not his own death that Turk enacts but that of revolutionary icons, Che Guevara and David’s Marat.

    Mythologizing the outsider on the one hand and setting out to de-mythologize him on the other; can the artist, or the punk or the outsider really save us - let alone himself - Gavin’s work wants to know? In Window, which shows the disembodied head of Turk in a black beret superimposed onto a double-page spread

    of The Union Jack taken from The Sun, the artist is here to save the world as both war hero and advocate for peace. In Pop, punk is a wax work museum-ified in a glass vitrine; impotent, dead, useless.

    While Gavin’s revolutionary outsiders all met bloody ends, there is no blood in his own ending. Rather, the stains he leaves behind come in the form of the artist’s mark - tea stains, excrement, signatures in egg shells, in blue sponges pinned to the wall, which do not so much replace the art as become it. The artist might be physically absent but his spirit remains through the sacred aura of his stains/signature. Like graffiti, “Gavin Turk was here”, it reads. Authorship is all, it implies. Only who is the artist? Who is Gavin Turk? And besides, Stain 1992 isn’t a real stain but a representation of one left by Giacometti on a napkin after a meal as a joke. What are these stains, these signatures saying but that identity is a fiction?

    Derrida called the signature a “parergon” or “parasite” upon the work, which in Greek is “ergon”. Something that confers identity and serves as a threshold

    between art and not art, signatures are dependent on their authenticity. They must be recognisable through repetition as belonging to a particular artist. But Gavin’s “signature” is his repetition of works by other artists. Even his artist signature is not his “real” one.

    Acknowledging the tenuous and fluid nature of identity, Gavin’s work expresses the idea that we frame things but that we are also framed by things. “A Portrait Of Something I’ll Probably Never Really See” shows a face shot of the shaven-headed artist with his eyes closed. Almost like a death-mask, the image is dream-like and tranquil, as if Gavin had reached a Zen-like state of transcendence. But looking inwards, not outwards, what the artists “sees” is that he cannot see himself in all his totality. What he sees is that representation is necessarily false. And this, Gavin’s work suggests, is about as near to any kind of Nirvana he, or anyone else for that matter, is able to get. And yet… and yet, there is that niggling, parasitical “probably”. . .

    Derrida described this invisibility at the heart of seeing as an “aporia” or impassable passage. But far from being futile, he saw

    aporia as necessary to the process of making an ethical decision, even if the consequences of that decision remain unknown. Which brings us back to Cave. 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. And what of the artist? What of Gavin? He has disappeared into the lacuna, into the beyond, into the hidden reality, behind the curtain covering the canvas, hiding the stage, like Schrodinger’s cat, both dead and alive, chicken and egg, real and unreal both at the same time.

  • Trompe L'oeil - Rikke Hansen SHOW

    Trompe L'oeil - Rikke Hansen

    Like the carefully staged crime scene, trompe l’œil tricks the viewer through the arrangement of misleading appearances and false clues. Literally meaning ‘cheat the eye’, the art technique involves the realistic depiction of phenomena to create optical illusions, often turning flat surfaces into seemingly three-dimensional objects. Trompe l’œil art does not belong to a particular ism or medium but slips in and out of focus through the ages, depending on dominant regimes of representation.

    Although the term was not coined until the early 1800s, the genre can be traced back to Greek and Roman times. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder writes of a rivalry in ancient Greece between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius, both accomplished in this particular art. Largely forgotten during the Middle Ages, the technique was given a new lease of life by the Italian Renaissance and the era’s advanced understanding of perspective, while painters of the Baroque era applied it to the then increasingly popular genre of still life. Artists of the Modern period, however, made limited use of trompe l’œil, as works no longer strived towards illusion or imitation but were made to investigate the grounds for art’s own existence. Nonetheless, a few

    painters, such as René Magritte and Jasper Johns, did appropriate the style and transform it into their own. The simulacral qualities of the technique, on the other hand, offered a desirable method for postmodern artists eager to challenge notions of authenticity, originality, and authorship.

    Trompe l’œil is all theatre, which is another reason the genre did not catch on in the Modern period. In the late 1960s, the art critic Michael Fried objected to a turn towards ‘theatricality’ in sculpture and painting, a concept that, according to the author, betrayed the autonomy of the advanced, Modern artwork by turning the exhibition space into a stage of sorts. While Fried’s attack was primarily directed against Minimal art, art forms that use trompe l’œil may equally be added to his list of ‘criminals’, as they also trouble the borders between work, ornamentation, setting, and audience, and, like performance, depend on the actual, physical presence of a viewer to be complete. In other words, the ‘power’ of trompe l’œil is not inherent to the work but exists somewhere between image and spectator and between image and place.
    At first glance, trompe l’œil art appears to have no author or origin;

    it aims to erase the traces of its own production. In the attempt to conceal the identity of the ‘perpetrator’, the signature of the artist may be hidden on an object within the image or, in the eighteenth century tradition, on a cartellino, a calling card or a note seemingly attached to the main work. Much like Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘The Purloined Letter’, the desired object is in full view but if we fail to recognise it as the thing it is, it inevitably falls outside our scopic register.

    Trompe l’œil momentarily blends with its own surroundings and transforms the entire environment into a set of representations, causing us to question the validity of other appearances and confuse these with the main work. This is, for example, the case in chantourné, a particularly unsettling form of trompe l’œil where a painting is cut into the shape of the thing it portrays and displayed alongside actual objects. While this specific deviation was fashionable in the seventeenth century, more recent examples exist. Duane Hanson’s late twentieth century life-size human sculptures are, though not paintings, created in the same vein. These figures are so true to life that they

    have been known to trick gallery visitors who have believed them to be real and, on occasions, even attempted to talk to them. However, like the detective story, trompe l’œil hovers between suspense and surprise, and, eventually, incorporates its own slippage. This is what constitutes the paradox of the style: to be successful, it must involve its own failure and sooner or later give the plot away, which is why Hanson’s sculptures are crucially not human.

    Still, some people are experts at turning themselves into trompe l’œil. This can make them seem untrustworthy, but such masquerading may also involve a critical element. La perruque is the French philosopher Michel de Certeau’s name for a specific performative practice through which the worker camouflages his or her own activities as work for the employer. La perruque can be as simple as a secretary writing a love letter at her office desk, a method through which, without being absent from her job or stealing anything of material value, she diverts company time. Such trickery is associated with the power of those who appear to have no power; it is a critique from below.

    There is more than

    a phonetic resemblance between the word perruque, ‘wig’, and perroquet, the French term for ‘parrot’. While trompe l’œil appears to be all artifice, it strangely borrows a mode of appearance that we have come to associate with animality: mimicry, parroting, or aping. Closely related to trompe l’œil is trompe l’oreille, a ‘trick of the ear’. Here, a living being mimics the voice of another as decoy. Birds are masters at this art, and only the most experienced birder might be able to tell the difference between the call of the Pied Wagtail and that of a Blyth’s Reed Warbler impersonating a Pied Wagtail. Just as trompe l’œil erases the trace of its own author, so does trompe l’oreille, although in a different way. The successful avian impersonator throws its voice as if its call was heard from a distance, confusing predators both with regard to its kind and its whereabouts.

    is also a shaven-headed Zen monk, constructing visual koans in the form of bronze “wooden” melons or private views where all the exhibits are shrouded, Christo-style, in cloth or presenting himself camouflaged as Warhol or as Warhol’s gun-slinging Elvis as Sid Vicious, with one hand adding a layer of meaning, with another, taking it away.

    Refusing to be one thing or another, eschewing the comfortable in favour of the awkward, Turk’s affinity with punk belongs a bigger narrative – the narrative of the revolutionary, the outsider, the lunatic, the scapegoat, the artist as martyr, offered to the world as the sacrificial “Other” in order to simultaneously remind us of our own inner rebel, while reassuring us of our safe position “inside”. Here, it is not his own death that Turk enacts but that of revolutionary icons, Che Guevara and David’s Marat.

    Mythologizing the outsider on the one hand and setting out to de-mythologize him on the other; can the artist, or the punk or the outsider really save us - let alone himself - Gavin’s work wants to know? In Window, which shows the disembodied head of Turk in a black beret superimposed onto a double-page spread

    of The Union Jack taken from The Sun, the artist is here to save the world as both war hero and advocate for peace. In Pop, punk is a wax work museum-ified in a glass vitrine; impotent, dead, useless.

    While Gavin’s revolutionary outsiders all met bloody ends, there is no blood in his own ending. Rather, the stains he leaves behind come in the form of the artist’s mark - tea stains, excrement, signatures in egg shells, in blue sponges pinned to the wall, which do not so much replace the art as become it. The artist might be physically absent but his spirit remains through the sacred aura of his stains/signature. Like graffiti, “Gavin Turk was here”, it reads. Authorship is all, it implies. Only who is the artist? Who is Gavin Turk? And besides, Stain 1992 isn’t a real stain but a representation of one left by Giacometti on a napkin after a meal as a joke. What are these stains, these signatures saying but that identity is a fiction?

    Derrida called the signature a “parergon” or “parasite” upon the work, which in Greek is “ergon”. Something that confers identity and serves as a threshold

    between art and not art, signatures are dependent on their authenticity. They must be recognisable through repetition as belonging to a particular artist. But Gavin’s “signature” is his repetition of works by other artists. Even his artist signature is not his “real” one.

    Acknowledging the tenuous and fluid nature of identity, Gavin’s work expresses the idea that we frame things but that we are also framed by things. “A Portrait Of Something I’ll Probably Never Really See” shows a face shot of the shaven-headed artist with his eyes closed. Almost like a death-mask, the image is dream-like and tranquil, as if Gavin had reached a Zen-like state of transcendence. But looking inwards, not outwards, what the artists “sees” is that he cannot see himself in all his totality. What he sees is that representation is necessarily false. And this, Gavin’s work suggests, is about as near to any kind of Nirvana he, or anyone else for that matter, is able to get. And yet… and yet, there is that niggling, parasitical “probably”. . .

    Derrida described this invisibility at the heart of seeing as an “aporia” or impassable passage. But far from being futile, he saw

    aporia as necessary to the process of making an ethical decision, even if the consequences of that decision remain unknown. Which brings us back to Cave. 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. And what of the artist? What of Gavin? He has disappeared into the lacuna, into the beyond, into the hidden reality, behind the curtain covering the canvas, hiding the stage, like Schrodinger’s cat, both dead and alive, chicken and egg, real and unreal both at the same time.