A Gavin Turk Rubbish Bag - Ossian Ward

The idea that one man’s rubbish is another man’s treasure is encapsulated in the series of bronze sculptures by Gavin Turk, collectively titled ‘Bag’. Meticulously cast from real black dustbin liners, the bronze sections of the floor-bound bag are carefully welded together and finished with a topknot or a yellow drawstring. Turk has cast all manner of humble objects in bronze, from a homeless person’s sleeping bag to a takeaway carton, but he has also moulded loaves of bread from concrete and whittled a realistic impression of a candle from a wooden broom handle. The transformative possibilities of art making are inherent in these leaps of material, but there’s an especially powerful alchemical reaction in the up-shift that turns trash into high art.

‘Bag’ is perhaps Turk’s most succinct expression, not only of the metamorphic power that he wields as an artist, but of the doubts that plague both maker and viewer when confronted with objects that challenge preconceived notions of artistic merit. Specifically, it recalls the age-old argument that all modern art is rubbish, mainly due to a perceived lack of skill or any adhesion to traditional concepts of beauty or subject matter. Yet here is an exquisitely

crafted, hand-painted object that nevertheless resists art historical discussion – it’s not a readymade, but an artificially custom-made objet trouvé.

Of course, the idea of the discarded object making its way up the cultural ladder to fine art status has its own place in art history, starting with the readymade and the gatherings of Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg and Arman. Yet, much of this recontextualising of detritus relies on its artful scattering or accumulation, as in the works of Jason Rhoades, Tony Cragg, Noble and Webster and so on. Instead, the various iterations of Turk’s ‘Bag’ bear comparison with more robust minimalist statements of singular objecthood, especially when sited provocatively in the middle of a white-walled gallery, proclaiming its place in the canon (although with much less pretentiousness than its hard-edged, boxy colleagues). It’s precisely this cheerful stubborn quality that makes ‘Bag’ an immovable object that refuses to be condemned to the dustbin of art history.

A Gavin Turk Signature Piece - Ossian Ward

Q: When is a biscuit, not a biscuit? A: When it’s a Gavin Turk. This statement could be modified to speak of any number of objects, including eggs, car parts and surveillance mirrors, as well as paintings and sculptures, that the artist has signed over the years, although the consuming of one bite of an autographed Rich Tea and the subsequent sale of these readily available foodstuffs for a limited-edition offer of £25 was, many felt, taking the biscuit. Buying an authenticated piece of art is important for its value and legitimacy, but it’s also an admission on the part of the collector that he or she wants a piece of the artist and a stake in the creative output of a brand name. Turk has long used his signature as a logo or an industrial mark of quality, even launching his own fashion collection that was formed of random items of clothing into which were stitched one of his eponymous silk labels – the artist’s name glamorously signed in embroidery.

The idea that Turk’s obsessive naming and signing is somehow a defence against his work being defrauded or copied is a false notion, a dead end.

After all, Turk’s own identity – his very Turkness – is itself partially concealed behind the identities of other artists that he’s emulated or inhabited, be they Duchamp, Warhol, Manzoni, Klein or Picasso. Apart from his own evasive character, the possibility of forging or duplicating an authentic Turk is in-built into works such as the nine-metre long steel sculpture, ‘Unoriginal Signature’, which obviously was blown-up in scale and then fabricated by someone other than the artist.

It was Jean Baudrillard who first declared that it was possible to have a painting that was ‘only a signature’, but it’s the cult of the artist that is ultimately strengthened by the use of such nomenclature, not just the work’s ability to be seen as a bonafide cultural object. Artisans before the Renaissance did not put individual names to their work, they instead used the name of their studio or company of painters – likewise, commercial artists and illustrators were not thought worthy of the credibility that a signature would bestow on their handiwork. A signature implies mutual approval, but its overuse may also signify a debasement of the artist’s brand name – there’s a fine line between being a household name,

an out-and-out celebrity and mere signage.

'Untitled (Mirrored Cubes)' 1965/71 By Robert Morris - Ossian Ward

Although untitled, calling Robert Morris’s piece ‘Mirrored Cubes’ is not only an accurate description of his installation, but a minimalist statement of artistic intent in its own right. His first set of four Perspex boxes covered in mirroring were installed at the Green Gallery in New York in 1965, where the space between the cubes was equal to their combined volume, although of more importance to Morris was that there was always enough space to walk comfortably in between them. The interaction of viewer’s feet and bodies reflected and returned by the work is what creates the ‘expanded situation’ as Morris has described it. The cubes almost disappear in a white gallery, even taking on some of the appearance of their surroundings when installed outside. The shifting, uncertain nature of the world, as well as the very acts of seeing and being are appreciable only when the piece is walked into and activated, or as Morris says of its function; ‘it takes relationships out of the work and makes them a function of space, light and the viewer’s field of vision.’

The so-called Minimalists including Morris and Donald Judd, who would themselves have preferred to be remembered in terms

they felt more comfortable with, such as creators of ‘specific’ or ‘literal’ objects, were in fact accused by art critic Michael Fried, of orchestrating highly ‘theatrical’ environments, where the staginess and interactivity somehow detracted from their singularity and unified simplicity. However, rather than a burden, this idea of theatricality and bodily awareness became a productive way in which to frame the minimal art of the late 1960s. Key to this was the existential thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose work, ‘The Phenomenonolgy of Perception’, promoted the notion of an intertwined body and environment, rather than a Cartesian world lived through the mind alone.

Yet despite the powerful effects of ‘Mirrored Cubes’ on spatial awareness, Morris was keener to find an end point to formal aesthetics and a riposte to the heroics of Abstract Expressionism. Here he recalls some of that early minimalist impetus: ‘When I sliced into the plywood with my Skilsaw, I could hear, beneath the ear-damaging whine, a stark and refreshing “no” reverberate off the walls: no to transcendence and spiritual values, heroic scale, anguished decisions, historicising narrative, valuable artifact, intelligent structure, interesting visual experience.’

an out-and-out celebrity and mere signage.

'The Death of Marat' (1793) By Jacques-Louis David - Ossian Ward

Jean-Paul Marat was a radical journalist and staunch Republican, responsible for sending many enemies of the French Revolution to the guillotine. Last but not least of his victims was Charlotte Corday d’Aumont, the assassin who knifed Marat to death in the chest as he lay in a soothing bath on a hot summer’s day in 1793. Friend and comrade Jacques-Louis David was called to the scene to paint the martyr’s portrait, but the body was already decomposing in the heat and no amount of perfume or embalming could hide the putrefaction. Given the circumstances and having visited Marat the day before his death in the very same bathtub, David chose to depict the writer’s final throes (Madame Tussaud was also called in to document the moment), showing him heroically aiding the cause to the last with his quill pen, but also being tragically fooled by Corday’s treacherous letter that he holds in one hand.

Marat was so plagued by psoriasis that he would regularly soak in a vinegar bath or have a kaolin bandage wrapped around his head, but you wouldn’t learn of his skin disease or his famously toady ugliness from this portrait. In fact, these swaddling accoutrements

only add to the classicised, idealized pose that David concocted, supposedly with the help of body parts culled from other corpses, such was Marat’s rigid rigormortis. In 1846 Baudelaire noted that, ‘The drama is here, vivid in its pitiful horror. Where is the ugliness that hallowed Death erased so quickly with the tip of his wing? Now Marat can challenge Apollo. He has been kissed by the loving lips of Death and he rests in the peace of his metamorphosis.’

As well as harking back to antique beauty, the recumbent figure of Marat recalls the body of Christ being brought down from the cross, as does the sliver of a wound above his breast. The flood of blood trickling from the gash is a shocking detail, as is the red bath water and the inclusion of the murder weapon itself; oddly removed from the body and left at the foot of his bath.

David managed to finish his contemporaneous history painting in record time, just days before Marie Antoinette was herself put to the blade, making the picture not just a rousing eulogy, but also a record of an extraordinarily violent time in French politics.

an out-and-out celebrity and mere signage.

The Myth of Zeuxis and Parrhasius - Rikke Hansen

Pliny’s “Natural History” tells us that the painter Zeuxis came to fame in ancient Greece in the 4th year of the 95th Olympiad, that is, in 397 B.C., only a few decades after ‘the gates of art had been thrown open by Apollodorus’. One day he challenged his colleague Parrhasius to a bet. Both were accomplished in the art of naturalistic representation, but now it was time to find the superior. As the artists set up their work in front of the theatre, Zeuxis offered to go first. He showed a painting of grapes so convincing that birds flew to the fruit and began to peck at it.

Parrhasius subsequently presented a picture draped in a curtain. Certain of his victory, Zeuxis requested that the cloth should be removed and the image revealed. There was much surprise as it turned out that the painting was, in fact, nothing but the depiction of this very curtain. Zeuxis admitted defeat; where he had managed to fool the birds, Parrhasius had succeeded to deceive Zeuxis himself, an artist experienced in such matters of trickery and artifice.

It was a double blow: not only were Zeuxis’ artistic abilities shown

to be inferior, but his own judgment was aligned with that of an animal. Did he from that moment onwards see himself whenever he looked up at the birds? We do not know. Later in life he had another go. He painted a child carrying a bowl of grapes. Once again the birds flew down to feast. Zeuxis was furious. Had he depicted the child with the same sort of skill, he shouted, the birds would not have dared to approach the image. And Parrhasius? Legend has it that nature attempted to have its revenge on him. Three times did lightning strike his painting of Meleager, Heracles and Perseus, yet the picture remained intact.

an out-and-out celebrity and mere signage.

'Elvis' (1962) By Andy Warhol - Ossian Ward

Arguably, Andy Warhol realized all of his best ideas in 1962. He set up his studio in East 49th Street (which later became the Factory). He made his first silkscreens on canvas and shot his first films, ‘Sleep’ and Kiss’. He also painted his first Campbell’s soup cans, his first ‘Disaster’ pictures, the first ‘Do it Yourself’ paintings by numbers, as well as the first Marilyn and Elvis pieces.

Taking a postcard publicity shot for Elvis Presley’s Hollywood western ‘Flaming Star’, Warhol enlarged and doubled the image of the gunslinging cowboy, perhaps opting for the silvery background as a reference to the silver screen; this was Presley’s big movie break after all and, as it happened, one of his last major roles. This irony is echoed in the film’s soundtrack: ‘Ev’ry man has a flaming star, And when a man sees his flaming star, He knows his time, his time has come.’

Warhol later multiplied and layered the bow-legged King up to eleven times over, on a single silkscreened canvas: ‘I like things to be exactly the same over and over again’, he once said. Warhol’s commercial background as a fashion illustrator made him acutely aware that his

reproductions and copies of copies were toying with the very notion of artistic originality. But he was also canny enough to know that he wasn’t doing himself out of a job, but creating a new, infinitely reproducible, model for how to make art.

He was also being typically disingenuous about his pursuit of exactitude in mechanical reproduction, because the repeated figures in works such as ‘Double Elvis’ actually appear to dissolve slightly. It’s as if Presley’s image has been folded over and pressed down or re-printed with slightly less ink – as though the faded analogue was somehow less authentic than the original. Roland Barthes discussed Pop art in similar terms; as a second-hand, plagiarised form of expression: ‘Pop art rediscovers the theme of the Double, but it has lost all maleficent or moral power…the Double is a Copy, not a Shadow: beside, not behind: a flat, insignificant hence irreligious Double.’ Warhol would disagree of course, as he felt nothing short of religious devotion to most of the celebrities he portrayed. Tellingly, he wanted nothing more than to be seen in the same way himself, indeed his self-portraits became one of his longest running series. In some way, all

of Warhol’s Presleys, Jackies, Marilyns, Maos, Alis and Jaggers were monumental, masturbatory acts of wishful thinking on his behalf; he was making others in his own image and vice versa.