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  • Resonance FM - The Bike Show - Gavin Turk talks with Tim Dawson about his Les Bike de Bois Rond project and the bike rides that took place in Fleet: Art in the Haven Ports during the summer of 2010
    Resonance FM - The Bike Show
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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.

  • Waste Not Want Not - Ben Cranfield SHOW

    Waste Not Want Not - Ben Cranfield

    I shall show you fear in a handful of dust. T.S. Elliot

    Civilisation is more commonly understood in relation to the grand concepts and conceits we have constructed through the centuries. Where as the arts, education and cultural traditions were used to define the achievements and pretensions of western society we now have waste. Whether it is the box from a little music playing device, depleated uranium, or fuel emissions, over-productive capitalist countries generate waste in accordance with their quantifiable “per capita’ affluency. The casual effects of choices made that inevitably contribute to growing wastefulness impacts ecologically and socio-politically to such an extent that to claim ‘waste’ as civilisations’ defining phenomenon, as philosopher George Bataille did, is not merely tree-hugging, lefty hyperbole. Bataille during his book 'La Part Maudite' developed this theory discussing the primacy of waste and saw expenditure as being modern societies defining feature.

    Although Turk’s interest in re-assessing everyday banalities can be seen to have a haiku-like quality of looking beyond what at once appears uneventfully familiar, the objects chosen to ironically replicate through inherently dishonest tromp-loi, allows for a re-considering of their use and the wider macro issues associated with objects after they

    have served out their usefulness. We are left with matter that no longer fits the rational of utility but is here anyway, asking questions, proving problematic and getting in the way.

    The use of semi precious metal to depict a card board box, an apple core or a disposable chip fork playfully subverts the value associated with the objects we think we see. Litter and Bronze have the streets in common. Traditionally bronze is found in our towns and cities cast into the poses of war and myth to celebrate and condition. These public monuments behave with absolutism, self-assured in the grand social narrative they symbolically represent. Rich men on horse back depict the failures of social and political systems that result in the profitable negation of humanistic logic. Turks sculptures also depict social failings. From the behavioural ambivalence of littering to the commercial over use of natural resources.

    The humble objects occupy the same scheme as the statues only now we can all relate to what is in front of us and choose how we relate to it. These objects can serve as metaphor, as a clever trick, or as ready-mades processed in order to absurdly

    achieve the impossible. Their uncanny quality prompts us to re-evaluate our sense of the real and inevitably how our own value systems operate. Whether in relation to art history (perceptions of beauty, the still life and social-realism) or our shared social consciousness.

    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.

  • Punk - Jon Savage SHOW

    Punk - Jon Savage

    In Gavin Turk’s “Pop”, the artist is cast as Sid Vicious via Warhol’s “Elvis”. While Warhol sourced a still from the 1960 film “Flaming Star” for his silk-screened multiples, Turk reproduces Sid’s most iconic moment: the filmed performance of “My Way”, where the junk-sodden singer in a destroyed white dinner jacket shoots the audience in a climactic spasm of disgust.

    Both sources are high Pop. Warhol’s images in their various forms: doubled, tripled, colour, black and white are prime exam-ples of Pop Art, while Sid Vicious’ punk de/construction of the narcissistic night-club standard was a Top Ten hit for the Sex Pistols in summer 1978. But they uncover a level of violence and hostility in pop culture that only the bravest seek to explore.

    Before the style went national, London Punk was a British version of Andy Warhol’s high Sixties Factory. Many of the musicians and fans were Velvet Underground obsessives who had followed Lou Reed through 1970’s hits like “Walk On The Wild Side” into his later, more self-destructive “Rock’n Roll Animal” incarnation: pure punk with his plastic clothes, dark shades, and A-head jaw-line.

    There was the same self-reinvention into cartoon pseudonyms Siouxsie Sue, Soo Catwoman,

    Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious only these hard etched characters were not superstars but anti-stars. Early TV footage shows the pure punk gesture: not the rolling back of the eyes or the middle finger, but the look of sheer contempt and disgust with the camera as its subject turns away.

    There was the same sense of simultaneity, of young performers immersed in a complete media environment and seeking to turn it to their advantage by being faster and smarter than those who sought to capture their look, their gestures, their souls. ‘You wanna ruin me in the magazine,’ Johnny Rotten sung in his anti-media tract “I Wanna Be Me”; ‘you wanna cover us in margarine’.

    Before it was swamped by tabloid front pages and music industry money, Punk sought direct engagement with the death drive implictly contained in the mass media: ‘now is the time to realise,’ Rotten exhorted; ‘to have real eyes’. Hence all the groups with names like the Adverts and Magazine, hence songs like “EMI”, Subway Sect’s “Nobody’s Scared”, and the Slits’ brilliant “FM”.

    Both the Factory and early Punk exhibited a blistering, amphetamine derived hostility. Think of Mary Woronov as Hanoi Hannah

    in “The Chelsea Girls” as she assaults Ingrid Superstar and Pepper with a non-stop: ‘shut up shut up SHUT UP’ or Ondine at the end of the same film, turning on Rona Page with a lightning fast, unstoppable strike of violent vituperation.

    Some of this was a pose, derived from hard-faced mentors like Warhol and Malcolm McLaren. Some of it had to do with psy-chological and drug damage. But punk was so littered with nega-tives – nofuturenofeelingsnofun – that its refusals verged on the cosmic. Especially when projected into the wider culture. This was a negation that opposed the easy assumptions of everyday life.

    In summer 1977, the BBC shot a special on Punk in Manchester: “Brass Tracks”. Apart from valuable footage of the early Manches-ter scene, the programme is remarkable for the array of adults – preachers, councillors, journalists, almost every kind of adult au-thority figure – condemning these animals. Punk is disgusting, worthless and indicative of a sick society.

    The actual punks – Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks, Alan Deaves of the Worst, and Electric Circus amazon Denise – sit quietly while vats of shit are poured over their heads. Then they begin to argue

    back, quietly and reasonably, and what they say rips their opponents apart: you don’t know what you’re talking about; you’ve been pro-grammed by the media; we’re not the problem, you are.

    Behind the blank façade, many early punks were highly idealistic. They believed in what they said, they were in it for the art and the self-expression, they didn’t think about any idea of a career. At its best, particularly in London during 1976 and Manchester the next year, this encouraged an active atmosphere of total communica-tion: if you’ve got something, bring it to the table.

    Hence the proliferation of fanzines and punk groups. Participation was the key: ‘I wanna destroy the passerby’. Twenty years into a heavily mediated culture, many Punks instinctively understood what the Situationists, and particular Guy Debord, had defined a decade previously: that the media spectacle fostered passivity and, in fact, worked like a tranquillising drug – soma for the masses.

    ‘Everybody’s sitting round watching television’, Joe Strummer howled on “London’s Burning”. Many punk songs were deter-minedly in the world. They directly addressed the state of the na-tion, and what they saw was not flattering: a country obsessed by the past,

    in particular the Second World War, which it had not won but lost – in economic terms at least.

    The urban landscape of the late seventies was brutal. In cities like Manchester, Birmingham and London there were vast, empty spaces, often filled with rubble: bomb-sites that had never been built on, slum clearance projects stalled for lack of funds. Much punk iconography focussed on urban dereliction: soulless motor-ways, brick walls, corrugated iron.

    Punk had an apocalyptic edge that came from more than am-phetamine. The country had a pre-revolutionary feel, the very strong sense that something was over – the postwar Social contract – and that something new and malign was waiting in the wings. Britain’s fascist party, the National Front, was making electoral gains, while Mrs. Thatcher’s Conservatives prepared for power.

    The whole dysfunction between national image and reality was dramatised by the Sex Pistols “God Save The Queen” in June 1977. With almost no support – certainly not from the radical left-wing - the group stood on their hind legs and laid bare the lie behind the pomp: ‘England’s dreaming’. They told a truth that no one wanted to hear, and for their pains were

    turned into pariahs.

    Violence was endemic in Britain at that time. There were major set pieces like the Notting Hill Carnival riot in August 1976 and the Lewisham riot of August 1977 – when anti-fascist protestors tried to stop a National Front march. The Sex Pistols Jubilee boat trip was broken up by the police in a most heavy-handed manner, and then there were the much-publicised tribal Punk-Ted wars.

    Creeping surveillance, the breakdown of law and order, the onset of fascism, the atomisation of society: it all seemed like Burroughs’ “The Wild Boys” mixed with Orwell’s “1984” – the year manically apotheosised by the Clash in their song “1977”. And yet, in the blasted inner urban spaces – when not blocked off by serried ranks of police – there was freedom.

    Occurring just before the massive regeneration programme that began in the 1980’s, the late seventies were the last time that young people could live cheaply near the city centre: whether in squats or inexpensive flats. All the Sex Pistols squatted at some point or an-other, as did members of the Clash and many other groups. The dereliction fostered the rapid city transits that spawned punk.

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    The result was a brief, accelerated period when the music and me-dia industries were forced to react to events that they could not control. When the Sex Pistols were vilified by the tabloids after the Bill Grundy show, it radicalised a micro-generation, who could see the difference between reality and its news-managed simulacrum. The adults, in this case, made monster fools of themselves.

    Punk’s problems occurred when it achieved the success that it part sought, part shunned. The whole idea of worthlessness encoded in the term made the success difficult to sustain, while the sheer level of exposure to the mass media meant that often sophisticated ideas were flattened out, turned into consumer disposables, and recu-perated. Punk was fast and asymmetric, but it was soon caught.

    Sid’s peak performance of “My Way” occurred in spring 1978, right at the moment when Punk negation was turning into self-destruction. It is a complex and problematic clip: Sid is unwell, if not extremely stoned, but he summons up a kind of demonic en-ergy directed at the film-makers, at the audience –whom he shoots in the ultimate act of punk media loathing – and himself.

    In this instance, the

    twinning of Sid with Elvis doesn’t look quite so bizarre. Both were self-made creations from problematic back-grounds who were, at various points, a kind of living litmus test for problems in the wider culture. Both were sent mad by fame and/or notoriety, and both destroyed themselves through heavy use of opiated drugs. Here is the human cost of being an icon.

    Thirty years after Sid Vicious’ final overdose, Punk Rock is, like Gavin Turk’s “Pop”, under glass. It is, apparently, in history: its bones endlessly picked over, dismembered and rearranged into lists and rankings, then finally boiled into mushy, nutrition-free gruel – all those sentimental accounts of male bonding. But it has a dark heart and a fearless spirit that is not recuperable.

    It was no accident that “Pop” was part of a show – Saatchi’s “Sen-sation” – that attracted exactly the kind of numbskull press atten-tion that punk did in its heyday. Punk laid down a critique and a challenge - as did the hippies before them - that English culture wilfully refused to take up, or even recognise. What is buried and repressed always breaks out with renewed force.

    Pop then is a

    dangerous ideal, particularly if you are trying to summon up the spirits, if not the demons of your time. Warhol suf-fered for telling the truth, as did all of the Sex Pistols – perhaps Sid Vicious the most. People do not want too much cultural reality, but for the true artist – or numinous performer – there is no choice but dive deep into the collective subconscious.

  • This Is Not A Story About The Military - Hardy Blechman SHOW

    This Is Not A Story About The Military - Hardy Blechman

    In 1909, when the Victorian naturalist and painter Abbott H. Thayer published his observations about concealment in nature, it’s fairly certain he had no idea what he was starting. Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom was the first comprehensive catalogue of the many camouflage techniques employed in the natural world, and Thayer argued that nature was acting as an artist, creating optical effects with colour and light. On this basis he suggested that his study belonged in the realm of the artist as well as the naturalist. His thesis coincided with the birth of Cubism and, interestingly, with the emergence of Gestalt perceptual psychology. ‘Gestalt’ means ‘shape’ or ‘figure’, and its theorists sought to explore how the brain organizes and interprets visual material through form, context, spatial proximity and patterning. Perhaps unsurprisingly the primary concepts of Gestalt gained some credence within the art world, in particular with Klee and Kandinsky a decade or so later.

    But it wasn’t just in the art world that significant changes were taking place. The early twentieth century saw a seismic shift in the visual techniques employed by military forces worldwide, primarily as a result of the development of longer range and more

    accurate weaponry. These new technological developments negated the traditional use of the military uniform, such as the famous red coat of the nineteenth century British army. The red coat had long been a symbol of military pride and was intended to visibly intimidate the enemy on the battlefield. But the trench warfare of World War One required different strategies. Colour on the battlefield was no longer used to inspire fear, but to conceal. In an unlikely meeting of opposites – the military and the arts – many modern painters were recruited into the army and given the task of using their new techniques, developed through the study of camouflage in nature, to disguise weapons, vehicles, and ultimately, men.

    The French army led the way with its dedicated camouflage section under the direction of artist Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scevola and produced new innovations for concealment in the air, on land and at sea. The Cubists, many of whom fought in the Great War, and ever open to conceptual challenges, had already begun to reinterpret and mimic the camouflage techniques found in nature. It was Picasso who apparently first used the term ‘dazzle’, in reference to the need for warships

    to dazzle (i.e. ‘mislead’) their enemies at sea. Under the direction of British marine artist and Naval Commander Norman Wilkinson, the navy founded a ‘Dazzle Section’ based at the Royal Academy of Arts. Here a group of eighteen artists including Wilkinson and the Vorticist painter Edward Wadsworth developed paint schemes for warships that used disruptive patterns to confuse enemy gunners as to the target’s course, speed and direction. (In 2008 Jeff Koons showed a painted yacht, ‘Guilty’, that was directly inspired by the dazzle painted ships of WW1.)
    The essential role of the artist as camoufleur continued in the Second World War, and by the time the war had ended, camouflage was deeply entrenched in twentieth century visual culture. New printing techniques had facilitated the mass production of army uniforms, and the development of international mass media in documenting war had brought camouflage into the public eye on a scale like never before. The first post-war artist to appropriate camouflage was the French painter Alain Jacquet. Exploring an interest in the visual effects of disruptive patterns, Jacquet created camouflage interpretations of his peers’ works, including Camouflage Jasper Johns (after John’s Flag, 1954) and Camouflage Hot Dog Lichtenstein, both in 1963.

    In 1964, Jacquet reinterpreted Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe, which he described as breaking “reality into dots”, and thus having the same properties as camouflage. In 1964, Jacquet wore a camouflage suit recycled from a US Army parachute to the opening of his show at the Alexander Iolas Gallery in New York, attended by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

    Italian artist Alighiero Boetti (1940-94) famously discovered surplus camouflage cloth (the ‘telo mimmetico’ pattern, created in 1929 for the Italian army) in a flea market. He used it to create works in 1966 and 1967, stretching the cloth as though it was a blank canvas and turning it into a visual artefact, thus subverting its original intention of concealment. The same decade saw the rise of the Civil Rights movement and the Anti-War response to Vietnam in America – the counter culture, in all its many manifestations, took to using army surplus as a new symbol of resistance to the Establishment, again subverting the purpose of camouflage from one of hiding to being seen, this time for political reasons.

    It was newspaper coverage rather than surplus trade that led to Warhol’s re-appropriation of the US Army Woodland camouflage pattern

    in 1986 for his famous Camouflage series. Unlike Boetti, Warhol reworked the pattern’s original colourways and scale, although he left the shapes intact. Warhol used these camouflage patterns as a base for nearly 70 works including The Last Supper, Self Portrait and his portrait of Joseph Beuys. Warhol’s fascination with camouflage as a perfect form with which to explore the possibility of pure abstraction mirrored his own personal need for disguise. Perhaps it’s this central idea of disappearing, blending in, or inversely standing out, whether personally, socially, or politically, that makes camouflage so seductive to many artists. The lure of camo can be seen in modern works as diverse as the ‘pop’ camouflage of graffiti artist Leonard McGurr (Futura 2000) throughout the 80s, the architecturally camouflaged ‘Cloud Towers’ of Emile Aillaud in Paris, and the museum performances of Harvey Opgenorth in 1998, in which the artist stood in front of classic paintings by Matisse and Rothko wearing clothes that blended perfectly with the colours on the canvases.

    More recently the idea of appropriation, the recycling (of theft?) of images has been at the heart of much contemporary artistic work that references camouflage. Gavin Turk’s 2007 exhibition ‘Me as

    Him’ projects both Turk and the Warhol, the men and the images, under a layer of silk-screened camouflage, challenging the idea of the self-portrait as something authentic with ‘deeper meaning’, and looking only to the façade for answers. Damian Hirst’s Amazing Revelations collage (2007) uses thousands of butterfly wings to make abstract patterns and inadvertently demonstrates some of the most skillful camouflage techniques used in nature. Hirst’s interest in butterflies as a metaphor for mortality is perhaps linked to the obvious visual use of camouflage as a survival mechanism.

    Despite all of this, however, and despite the continued presence of camouflage in music, fashion and contemporary culture, the fact that the use of camouflage in the twentieth century developed through the synergy of nature and art is often overlooked. We could argue that its primary symbolic association is still with the military. Today, as more military special forces adopt black uniforms along with the use of new pixelated patterns in army camouflage, the traditional disruptive pattern – the khaki or sand uniforms that have become iconic cultural visual signifiers of war and combat for over a hundred years – becomes less useful. Does this mean that we will

    be able to culturally reclaim camouflage, divorcing its original artistic and natural function from military needs? Each time another artist uses the disruptive pattern in a non-military context, will this slowly reshape our perception on the meaning of camouflage? Perhaps eventually when we see a Warhol canvas or a rap album cover or a Japanese toy that uses a well-known camouflage pattern, it might be possible for us to respond to the colour, shape and form in its new context, without being dominated by the pattern’s prior historical military associations. We have to remember that the desire of Thayer or Braque or Picasso to explore the visual techniques found in natural forms was really a desire to understand themselves. The need to hide or to reveal oneself is not the same as the need to declare war.

    twinning of Sid with Elvis doesn’t look quite so bizarre. Both were self-made creations from problematic back-grounds who were, at various points, a kind of living litmus test for problems in the wider culture. Both were sent mad by fame and/or notoriety, and both destroyed themselves through heavy use of opiated drugs. Here is the human cost of being an icon.

    Thirty years after Sid Vicious’ final overdose, Punk Rock is, like Gavin Turk’s “Pop”, under glass. It is, apparently, in history: its bones endlessly picked over, dismembered and rearranged into lists and rankings, then finally boiled into mushy, nutrition-free gruel – all those sentimental accounts of male bonding. But it has a dark heart and a fearless spirit that is not recuperable.

    It was no accident that “Pop” was part of a show – Saatchi’s “Sen-sation” – that attracted exactly the kind of numbskull press atten-tion that punk did in its heyday. Punk laid down a critique and a challenge - as did the hippies before them - that English culture wilfully refused to take up, or even recognise. What is buried and repressed always breaks out with renewed force.

    Pop then is a

    dangerous ideal, particularly if you are trying to summon up the spirits, if not the demons of your time. Warhol suf-fered for telling the truth, as did all of the Sex Pistols – perhaps Sid Vicious the most. People do not want too much cultural reality, but for the true artist – or numinous performer – there is no choice but dive deep into the collective subconscious.

  • The Outsider - Amber Trentham SHOW

    The Outsider - Amber Trentham

    On the whole, outsiders don’t seem to survive that well. Take the revolutionaries for example: poor old Prometheus was bound to a rock for eternity, Lucifer was consigned to hell, Oedipus gouged out his own eyes with a brooch pin, Jesus was crucified, John the Baptist decapitated, Che Guevara assassinated, Marat too, Bobby Sands starved himself dead, Socrates got to drink hemlock, Travis Bickle executed a massacre and God knows what happened to Hitler, but it can’t have been good. Then there are the half-mad visionaries - the likes of Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Sid Vicious, Virginia Woolf, Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis et al - those brooding souls whose depressive talent sets them so apart from the community they could only die of loneliness. And then there are the reviled, the drop-outs, the misfits, the junkies, the street urchins, the bums, who for some reason or other just can’t swim in the main stream. Ad infinitum. Find yourself an outsider, someone who lives on the periphery of social norms, and more often than not, some kind of grisly extinction follows.

    There’s something about being outside of the inside that’s unsustainable, impossible, that just cannot survive. The

    cult of the extreme individual makes for a sticky end. The community needs these raging individuals to drive it forwards, it needs outsiders to push through evolution, it even creates outsiders – but it doesn’t ultimately allow them to survive. Outsiders serve their function in various extremes; they satisfy the community’s vampiric hunger for saints and martyrs, then it’s goodbye Charlie and curtains all round. Chewed up, spat out. They have to be sacrificed.

    This relationship between the outsider and the community, or the outsider and the ‘insiders’, has a strange alchemy to it that seems at one moment graspable, yet at another vague and mercurial. The relationship is symbiotic, co-dependent, each defining the other – the outsider exists only in relation to the ‘insider’, like black and white, light and dark, knowledge and Eden, good and bad. But exactly how and why the outsider and the insider operate, how they fit together, what this alchemy is – is a quandary.

    Long ago, in small communities, in the days before outsiders were ostensible, there were goats instead. Scapegoats. Upon these goats depended the well-being of the community. Once a year, the people would daub

    the goat with symbols of all the ills of the community and then they would banish it. With it, this painted goat would take away the projected sins of the people, thereby restoring order and calm. The scapegoat, or rather the sacrifice of the scapegoat, would purge the community’s defilement, cleanse it, unify it, make it whole again.

    Later on, the Greeks incorporated this idea of a scapegoat into human form. If ever there were a plague on the land, it was perceived as pollution that needed cleansing. Rather than exiling a goat, however, they would exile (and early on sacrifice) a pharmakos - a cripple, slave or criminal – who would perform the same purifying function. The pharmakos was remedial – behind this ritual was the shutting out of badness from the city in the way a modern day remedy shuts out badness from the body. The pharmakos was led outside of the city and sacrificed,in order to purify the city's interior. It’s interesting to note that both the ‘pharmakos’ and the scapegoat came from the inside in before they were taken outside. Created by the interior of the city, both were made outsiders by its “insiders”

    thus the outsider is both the ritual embodiment of all that is wrong with the community, while also being the means of healing it. He is both sacred and profane, remedy and poison.

    Later still, this ritual became civilised and formalized on the Greek stage with the birth of tragedy - the very domain of fictional outsiders. It is no surprise that Dionysus was the god of the tragic stage, the deity who even on Olympus embodied the ‘other’ and the one who set up communion between things hitherto isolated, separate. Indeed, the literal meaning of tragedy is ‘the song of the he-goat’, which further underlies the connection between the social function of that and the earlier scapegoat. In fact, you might argue they are one and the same, not least since watching tragedy in its native context had the same effect as the banishing of that painted goat and the pharmakos; the effect of catharsis. Catharsis, coined by Aristotle in his “Poetics”, was a purification that happened for the audience of a tragic stage through the experience of watching the play. The emotions evoked by the tragedy: ‘pity for undeserved suffering, and fear for the man like

    yourself’ are the tenets of this purging, cleansing experience.

    How exactly this catharsis happens is a mystery, but inexactly speaking, it’s something to do with our watching the fictional outsider up on stage meeting his doom. We watch the extra-ordinary tragic heroes of Prometheus, Oedipus, Pentheus, Antigone, Achilles and all the other miserables taking their stand outside the norm of the city, becoming ‘other’ through a profoundly extreme and often noble character flaw that they are unable to abate. The chorus stand by and watch, reporting events, passive, observant. And when the tragic hero is undone, the chorus lament and say they told him so and then are able to return to their ordinary lives. The value of these ordinary lives, now reinforced and vindicated.

    There’s something deep in the idea that this highly sophisticated (and then very socio-political community based) theatre could perform a function similar to that of the scapegoat. And maybe there is a clue here to the function of the ‘outsider’ today. Onto him we project our ills, our hopes, our fears. He acts them out. He is a living archetype. He lives out extra-ordinariness, excellence, loneliness, exclusion, rebellion, anarchy, going against

    the grain. He is punished for it, or sacrificed to it. He is exiled. Banished. Rejected. And as such he is given responsibility for the collective salvation of the group.

    Extraordinariness is perhaps a defining feature of the outsider. As history relates, ‘outsiders’ seem to be extra-ordinary either as exceptionally talented human beings, or as sub-human Hogarthian quasi-monsters like the pharmakos, the junkies covered in lesions and the beggars on the street. In terms of the talented, the community ultimately won’t tolerate them: as Solon observed ‘a city perishes from its too great men’. They have to be culled. The community seems to have a mixture of envy and distrust for anyone who is too gifted or successful. As if someone’s exaggerated good luck or excellence might call down the wrath of god on the town. Aristotle noted that if a man oversteps the common level of virtue, he cannot be accepted on equal footing with the rest of the citizens – which is why the democratic state introduces the policy of ostracism. In terms of the wretched, the community pushes them out for fear of contagion. We cross to the other side of the street; we don’t

    want to be infected or sullied. Displaying an animal mentality, we exclude the diseased among us, in order to protect the survival of the group.

    The men and the women who perform the function of the outsider for society are living out something that is buried deep in all of us. They are doing an important and painful job for the community. They are both sacrificing themselves and being sacrificed. The outsider’s destruction reinforces to the mainstream that it’s just not possible to live out that part of ourselves - the part that is a-social, anarchic, monstrous, divine. The outsider’s destruction allows us to commune with the part of ourselves that is isolated, separate, outside – but safely. We, like the chorus of old, purge the outsider inside of us by ritually observing their downfall so that we can return gratefully indoors to the ironing and the soaps on TV. For it’s cold outside. Maybe we should give more thanks to all those oddballs who are on the outside, for whether they know it or not, whether they want to or not, they realign the natural balance of our lives, and restore the ever so fragile eco-system of our

    community… they allow us our normality.

    dangerous ideal, particularly if you are trying to summon up the spirits, if not the demons of your time. Warhol suf-fered for telling the truth, as did all of the Sex Pistols – perhaps Sid Vicious the most. People do not want too much cultural reality, but for the true artist – or numinous performer – there is no choice but dive deep into the collective subconscious.

  • 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.

    the grain. He is punished for it, or sacrificed to it. He is exiled. Banished. Rejected. And as such he is given responsibility for the collective salvation of the group.

    Extraordinariness is perhaps a defining feature of the outsider. As history relates, ‘outsiders’ seem to be extra-ordinary either as exceptionally talented human beings, or as sub-human Hogarthian quasi-monsters like the pharmakos, the junkies covered in lesions and the beggars on the street. In terms of the talented, the community ultimately won’t tolerate them: as Solon observed ‘a city perishes from its too great men’. They have to be culled. The community seems to have a mixture of envy and distrust for anyone who is too gifted or successful. As if someone’s exaggerated good luck or excellence might call down the wrath of god on the town. Aristotle noted that if a man oversteps the common level of virtue, he cannot be accepted on equal footing with the rest of the citizens – which is why the democratic state introduces the policy of ostracism. In terms of the wretched, the community pushes them out for fear of contagion. We cross to the other side of the street; we don’t

    want to be infected or sullied. Displaying an animal mentality, we exclude the diseased among us, in order to protect the survival of the group.

    The men and the women who perform the function of the outsider for society are living out something that is buried deep in all of us. They are doing an important and painful job for the community. They are both sacrificing themselves and being sacrificed. The outsider’s destruction reinforces to the mainstream that it’s just not possible to live out that part of ourselves - the part that is a-social, anarchic, monstrous, divine. The outsider’s destruction allows us to commune with the part of ourselves that is isolated, separate, outside – but safely. We, like the chorus of old, purge the outsider inside of us by ritually observing their downfall so that we can return gratefully indoors to the ironing and the soaps on TV. For it’s cold outside. Maybe we should give more thanks to all those oddballs who are on the outside, for whether they know it or not, whether they want to or not, they realign the natural balance of our lives, and restore the ever so fragile eco-system of our

    community… they allow us our normality.

    dangerous ideal, particularly if you are trying to summon up the spirits, if not the demons of your time. Warhol suf-fered for telling the truth, as did all of the Sex Pistols – perhaps Sid Vicious the most. People do not want too much cultural reality, but for the true artist – or numinous performer – there is no choice but dive deep into the collective subconscious.

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