CAVE DRAWINGS, 2022&nbsp;

During the UK lockdown I made a drawing a day... Abstract, subject-less pencil work where an ‘automatic’ surreal zone appeared on the paper. I looked up the word ‘doodle’ and wondered if it could be helpful to explain the method — ‘A drawing made while a person’s attention is otherwise occupied.’ Umm... there’s something here. However, the process did feel more mindful, like a process of drawing that consciously tried to escape recognition, while still drawing a line or mark that looked ‘right’ or corrected another. 

Things like the question of the thickness or size of a line, as well as the status of certain marks, hovered over my shoulder as I drew. I was conscious of the way that the result would inevitably evoke interpretation and meaning. Looking at clouds or smoke the pareidolic mind has the tendency to perceive and to impose a meaningful interpretation on nebulous stuff, seeing faces, animals, and stories in the ether. Marks can be symbolic and belong to a category that’s recognised as a particular meaning or significance. A cross, a star or even a dot can be read as a message. A line might carry an instruction, like an architectural plan or diagram, while its real partner might exist somewhere else in the world. 

William Hogarth, in The Analysis of Beauty (1853), set out about his beliefs regarding visual aesthetics, This book mentions the ‘Line of Beauty’, a certain S-shaped line ‘that excited the attention of the viewer and evokes liveliness and movement’. These Cave Drawings, far from being dreamlike depictions of gods or prey scratched into the wall, are more an unavoidable expression of the advantages and disadvantages of having a mark-making instrument in your hand. Scribbles, acratches, squiggles and scrawls — drawing out a drawing. 

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave refers to the imprisoned view that perception has of the world describing it, as a series of manipulated shadows on the back wall of the cave. This allegory was modified by Francis Bacon discussing his Idols of the Cave (1620), ‘where everyone has their own special cave or den which scatters and discolours the light of nature, so that the human spirit (as it is allotted to particular individuals) is a variable thing, all muddled, and so to speak a creature of chance.’ 

So, I invite you now to bring your conscious and unconscious biases, as well as an open mind, to float and engage with the ensuing pages.

GAVIN TURK

CAVE DRAWINGS 

Imagine… a letter written by Ariadne to Theseus, remonstrating with him for having abandoned her on the island of Naxos. Such a letter does exist: from the first century BC, composed on Ariadne’s behalf by the Roman poet Ovid. 

It is the tenth of Ovid’s Heroides or ‘Heroic Women’: imagined letters from eighteen heroines of Greek and Roman myth, taking to task the men who have betrayed or otherwise let them down. Some of the pairings are well known: Dido to Aenes, Medea to Jason, Deianira to Hercules; others less so: Oenone to Paris (he abandoned her for Helen). Ovid’s project might seem problematic in its implausibility. Greek heroines (and one Carthaginian) write letters in Latin, each about 150 lines long, in finely-formed dactylic pentameters. Ariadne, marooned on the desert island of Naxos, is presumed to have access to pen, ink, papyrus, and a reliable postal service. Further fundamental suspensions of disbelief are required. In addition to being written by a man, the poem-letters would originally have been declaimed before an audience dominated by men, and by a male performer, very likely Ovid himself. Not much space here, it might be thought, for the women, like Ariadne, who are supposedly the focus of attention.All this may help explain why, until recently, the Heroides were not seen as Ovid at his best; not a patch on his erotic verse; notably, Amores (‘Love Poems’) or Ars Amatoria (‘The Art of Love’). The introduction to the edition I used as an undergraduate in the 1970s, edited by Grant Showermann, began with the discouraging words: ‘The Heroides are not a work of the highest order of genius. Their language [is] nearly always artificial, frequently rhetorical, and often diffuse…’ They were on the Cambridge syllabus, not as choice specimens of Latin literature, but as raw material for the stern discipline of textual criticism: scrutinising corrupt passages in the text as transmitted, trying to restore what Ovid ‘actually wrote’. Did Ariadne allude to Theseus’ oscula (‘lips’) or occulos (‘eyes’)? It was fortunate that the lecturer for the paper was the great E.J. (Ted) Kenney, who emphasised at every turn the qualities of the poems as literature. What follows tries to convey something of their subtlety.

What did Ariadne write to Theseus? Her letter is treated here as a supposed stream of consciousness, ordered for her by Ovid. 

She begins with a paradox: even wild beasts (a recurring theme in their imagined presence on Naxos) are gentler than Theseus in his abusive treatment of her. Then comes confirmation that this is indeed a letter: she presumes Theseus to be reading her words, written after her betrayal by him and by sleep itself (the first of her many personifications of things intangible and inanimate). Sleep-as-deceit leads into the narrative of Ariadne’s experience. She recalls the realisation of her desertion with a vignette which will have resonated with the audience then, and readers ever since: being half awake in the early morning, stretching out an arm, and finding not a person but an empty space. Typically trivial in the circumstances of our own experience, but her response is one of terror, with beating of breasts and tearing of hair (another motif). She wanders erratically along the shore, calling out ‘Theseus’; the rocks (again, personified) echo her cries, as if to offer help. (ll. 1–24)

Lent strength by desperation, she scales a mountain, which enables her to see Theseus’ ship far out at sea, in full sail: the very winds are cruel. Although deeply shocked she shouts with all her strength to Theseus to turn back his ship, which, as she puts it, lacks a member of its crew. Her words are mixed with renewed beating of breasts; then a touch (for us) of realism: she fashions a flag by attaching her veil to a long branch: shades of the Railway Children. Failure of this practical measure is followed by a ‘literary’ allusion. She describes herself as randomly ranging like a Bacchant, with resonance for Ovid’s educated audience, probably familiar with Euripides’ Bacchae, of women dangerously out of control. Ring composition returns the narrative to the bed Ariadne shared with Theseus, then deserted by him. She directly denounces the bed, having harboured both of them, as ‘faithless’; subverting thereby Winston Churchill’s alleged detestation for learning Latin on the ground (still familiar to some) that it pointlessly necessitated having to learn how to address pieces of furniture (‘O table!’). (ll. 25–58)

Ariadne’s thoughts turn to the future: what is she to do? The place seems to be deserted. Even were it possible to leave, where could she go? The backstory she now introduces of slaying the Minotaur demonstrates her ethical dilemma. Since she betrayed her father, Minos, by providing the thread that guided Theseus through the labyrinth, she must needs be an exile. In the ancient world, duty to one’s parents came second only to piety toward the gods. However, another is also guilty of betrayal: she quotes verbatim Theseus’ emphatic oath never to desert her. In retrospect, she wishes that the perjured Theseus had killed her as he slew her brother: a reminder that the Minotaur was, after all, part of the family. (ll. 59–82)

The idea of being ‘better off dead’ leads Ariadne to imagine death on the island through wolves, lions, tigers, seals, or men. For one of high birth like her, death might seem preferable to surviving as a slave; again, the audience possibly dwelt on the royal captives in Euripides’ Trojan Women. Her thoughts return to the threat from wild animals; nor can she depend on help from men, whom, thanks to Theseus, she has learnt to distrust. She harks back to the unfortunate circumstances leading to Theseus’ presence in Crete, her providing the thread, and his victory over the Minotaur. This prompts the conceit that Theseus, having heart of iron and breast of flint, was bound to win the fight. She calls to account sleep, the winds, Theseus’ right hand (killing her brother and now her), and his worthless pledge: all of them ranged against a solitary girl. (ll. 83–118)

Ariadne invokes the frequent motif (best known for us from Sophocles’ Antigone) that no one will give her decent burial. By contrast, Theseus is imagined safe back in Athens, boasting of his great deeds; she urges him not to leave out her help and his abandonment. His parents cannot have been mortal; surely they were rocks and the deep sea. Ariadne imagines that Theseus might, in his mind’s eye, see her wretchedness: how she can hardly hold her pen, her hand trembles so; a reminder that this is a letter. Then a concluding ethical appeal: she makes no claim on Theseus for her service to him; but he should not visit evil on her. If Theseus returns too late, he can at least carry away her bones. (ll. 119–52)

A bare synopsis cannot convey Ovid’s complex interplay of metre with meaning, or how he manipulates word order (far more flexible in Latin) to generate emphasis, surprise and suspense. Nor can we recreate the dramatic impact of the original performance. An imagined approximation might be the combining of modern dramatic monologue (Alan Bennet’s Talking Heads, or The Vagina Monologues) with the declamatory power of Beethoven’s aria ‘Ah! perfido’ (‘Faithless one!’). Though not included in the Heroides, it might well have been. The stand-alone piece by Beethoven had its origins in a now forgotten play in which Deidamia, daughter of the king of Scyros, denounced Achilles for abandoning her to fight at Troy. 

These and other, more accessible aspects of the poem, might loosely be labelled as ‘rhetoric’; defined even more loosely as ‘the art of persuasive speaking or writing’. Showermann, as quoted above, plainly conceived of rhetoric as something superfluous, negative, and possibly deceitful. But more recent approaches allow the legitimate possibilities of persuasion: winning people over to right belief.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 

A case in point might be the repetition, ring-composition, and even wit of the motif of Ariadne beating breasts and tearing hair. This being the expected response by women to the death of another, she poignantly presents herself as sole mourner at her own funeral. In the final few lines, she disarmingly admits to hands wearied with beating and not having much hair left to tear. There is complexity of narrative technique with intermingling of stories told: Ariadne on her present experience; what happened in the past; what she fears for the future. The technique known to us as focalisation sees identical events through different eyes; chiefly those of Ariadne and Theseus, but also via the entities repeatedly personified. 

Allusion to earlier literature, identified and embraced by Ovid’s informed audience, served to enhance appreciation. Suggested cross-bearings from Sophocles and Euripides stand as proxy for a mass of literary material, much of it lost. But for the Romans as for us, the obvious shared knowledge is of the wider myth of Ariadne and Theseus: knowing ‘what happens next’. (A generation of readers needs here to suppress recollection of Mary Renault’s rationalising if bloody version in The King Must Die.) No matter how wretched Ariadne feels, her bones will not have to await collection by Theseus. She is shortly to be rescued by and, with great pomp and circumstance, married to Dionysus. Moreover, we know the further fate of the faithless Theseus, meeting his just desserts (if not justice) at the hands of his wife Phaedra, sister to Ariadne, fatally infatuated with her stepson and Theseus’ son, Hippolytus. Details would be familiar from Euripides’ Hippolytus, reinforced by the fourth of the Heroides, the anguished letter of Phaedra to Hippolytus, both of whom end up dead.

It is now generally agreed that the Heroides stand in their own right as major poetry. But to return, by ring-composition of our own, to the opening question. How are we to respond to letters, supposedly written by women, that are actually by a man (and here being commented on by another male)? My teacher, Moses Finley, wrote sadly but resignedly in the 1960s of ‘The silent women of Rome’. Since then, marginal ways have been found of hearing their voices. But it remains overwhelmingly the case that Roman men wrote about women for other males. Can anything be retrieved from this apparent cul-de-sac? What seems striking are the many Greek myths highlighting women as shockingly treated by men. If myth may be read as reflecting communal subconscious, might this represent some kind of collective guilt? If so, why did Ovid, writing as a Roman, deliberately choose male mistreatment as his theme? One approach might see him as setting up an artistic challenge: repeatedly and convincingly adopting the persona (the Latin word means ‘mask’) of repudiated women. It is a virtuoso performance; more so than taking on in his erotic poetry the persona of relentless male lover. 

In context, what seems arresting about Ovid’s Ariadne is her agency in the carrying through of Theseus’ task, three times mentioned in her letter. She made a massive sacrifice to save him; he has given in return harm rather than help. The relationship that emerges between them is, in anthropological terms, instrumental rather than affective, with no hint, at least retrospectively, of what we would call romantic love. Reciprocity or ‘helping friends and harming enemies’ was one of the guiding principles of Greek myth and a major part of the ethical underpinning of Greek society and culture. That throws into relief Ariadne’s concluding sentiment about not requiring what is due to her from Theseus; she simply wants to be protected from gratuitous harm. Ovid presents her as ignoring the prevailing orthodoxy to occupy at the last, and with dignity, the moral high ground. 

P.S.

To read Ariadne’s letter and the other Heroides, there is the Penguin Classic verse translation in syllabic couplets by Harold Isbell (rev. edn 2004); alternatively, Harold Canon’s version in rhyming couplets (Unwin, 1972). The prose translation in the Loeb edition by Grant Showermann (1914) has a facing Latin text; the second edition (revised by G.P. Goold,1989) is more appreciative of Ovid’s poetic achievement. Renewed recognition of Ovid owes much to Cambridge classicists, inaugurated by L.P. Wilkinson’s Ovid Recalled (Cambridge, 1955). Guy Lee brilliantly translated and commented on the Amores (Murray, 1968). E.J. Kenney wrote the introduction to A.D. Melville’s Ovid, The Love Poems, Amores and Ars Amatoria (Oxford, World’s Classics, 2008). Moses Finley’s ‘The silent women of Rome’ appears in his Aspects of Antiquity (Penguin, 1972). The transformational study of the Heroides is by Howard Jacobson, Ovid’s Heroides (Princeton, 1974), followed by Florence Verducci, Ovid’s Toyshop of the Heart: Epitsulae Heroidum (Princeton, 1985). Rhetoric as potentially positive was decisively reasserted by Brian Vickers (Downing Honorary Fellow) in his In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford, 1989).

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Imagine… a letter written by Ariadne to Theseus, remonstrating with him for having abandoned her on the island of Naxos. Such a letter does exist: from the first century BC, composed on Ariadne’s behalf by the Roman poet Ovid.

Dear Theseus… yours faithfully, Ariadne

‘And suppose I did find those to go with me, and winds, and ship – yet where am I to go? My father’s realm forbids me to approach. Grant I do glide with fortunate keel over peaceful seas, that Aeolus tempers the winds – I still shall be an exile!&nbsp;’<a href="#_edn1">[i]</a>

‘No-one wants us. 
No-one hears us. 
No-one wants to help.’&nbsp;<a href="#_edn2">[ii]</a>

Naxos is an island in the Cyclades, the famous swirl of Aegean islands between Greece and Asia Minor that have been in-between spaces, staging posts, refuges, and sites of mortal danger from the uncertain timelines of myth to all periods of recorded history. The Eastern Mediterranean is treacherous water, with adverse winds making even short east-west journeys hard going. No wonder the great maritime Greek myths seem to take place within a relatively tiny geographic arena:&nbsp; leaving the Eastern Mediterranean was no easy feat. But go to sea they did because all the earth that was worth knowing could only be reached by water.

What of Theseus and Ariadne, fleeing from Crete under cover of night while the death of the Minotaur remained undiscovered? Land breezes and prevailing northerly winds would have aided their escape, the fugitives taking comfort in the fact that any pursuers would have to wait to give chase until the following night when the sea breeze relented.&nbsp; &nbsp;For ships to resist the pull of the land , sails had to swell. Had Ariadne the smallest inkling that Theseus meant to abandon her at the first opportunity, she would have done well to stay awake through the night until favourable winds changed direction mid-morning.

While sailing ships are now the preserve of leisure sailors and sportspeople, other less seaworthy vessels have made the Eastern Mediterranean once again the arena of dislocation, death, and flight, familiar from myth. Inflatables and small fishing boats ferry those fleeing conflict from as far afield as Afghanistan across the Aegean. At the height of the displacement in 2015-16, brought on by the escalation of conflict in Syria, over 800,000 people crossed into Greece from Turkey, with untold others perishing along the way.<a href="#_edn3">[iii]</a> In January 2022, the bodies of a child under three, two pre-teen girls, a man, and a woman were found off Naxos and neighbouring Paros. It is not known whether they were from amongst the seventeen people missing from a boat discovered on 22 December 2021 or the thirty-nine suspected dead from a capsized vessel on Christmas Eve that year.<a href="#_edn4">[iv]</a>

Naxos is no longer a desert island (was it ever?), but Ariadne’s ordeal played out for thirty-eight men, women, and children found on an unnamed, uninhabited islet on the Evros River between Turkey and Greece. They had been reported missing for days, but the search was delayed by a dispute between the two neighbours over whether their journey had ended on Greek or Turkish territory. Designated ‘unnavigable’, the Evros nonetheless deposited at least three hundred and ninety-eight bodies of would be migrants on the Greek banks between 2000 and 2019. What of the stranded thirty- eight who were taken to mainland Greece on 16 August 2022?&nbsp; Could the child reported to have died on the islet have been saved by a timely rescue? &nbsp;In the words of Baida, one of the Syrian women in the group, ‘No-one wants us. No-one hears us. No-one wants to help.’ 

Recast for different audience, Ariadne’s story has survived centuries of retelling,. She is the plucky princess, determined to help Theseus end the Minotaur’s reign of terror. She is the young girl in love, fearlessly abandoning social mores to be with the object of her affections. She is the erotic archetype from a patriarchal age, defenceless in sleep, available to all eyes. In ‘The Soothsayer’s Recompense, the inspiration for Gavin Turk’s “Ariadne Wrapped”, De Chirico made Ariadne into a symbol of loneliness and loss brought on by displacement. Ariadne in the twenty-first century is also Ariadne the refugee, fleeing systemic injustice and dictatorship. Our Ariadne has left behind all that is familiar and feels like home. When our Ariadne awakens to her abandonment, it is not just Theseus she has lost: it is the promise of safety and survival.

The story of Ariadne in transition resonates in Cambridge, a city built on the ebb and flow of populations, be it for education or work. Seventeen per cent of the population are students at the University of Cambridge, for whom the rail station is a portal to and from home. Internal and overseas migration powers the many industries of mind and materials that have enriched the city and expanded its influence. Long-term residents know that their neighbours, their co-workers, will change from one year to the next. In times of conflict, the city, designated &nbsp;a ‘City of Sanctuary’, has a history of stepping forward, finding homes for two thousand children from the Kindertransport and giving refuge to academics, thinkers, and artists who cannot return home. The University of Cambridge provides support to prospective students who are refugees or who have faced forced migration - &nbsp;the students for whom the journey to university is not the first wrench from home.<a href="#_edn5">[v]</a> &nbsp;And at The Heong Gallery, we work with artists in exile such as Issam Kourbaj and Ai Weiwei. Those of us who are “In search of Ariadne” might find her in all the hopeful travellers who come to Cambridge from elsewhere, to find sanctuary, betterment, and themselves.

<a href="#_ednref1">[i]</a> Ovid. The Heroides X, lines 63-66 (G. Showerman ed. and trans., 1914). Loeb Classical Library.

<a href="#_ednref2">[ii]</a> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-62561578

<a href="#_ednref3">[iii]</a> https://www.unhcr.org/uk/news/latest/2015/12/5683d0b56/million-sea-arrivals-reach-europe-2015.html

<a href="#_ednref4">[iv]</a> https://apnews.com/article/europe-middle-east-greece-migration-athens-a9d64c229ed14cce2492d5c66d792121

<a href="#_ednref5">[v]</a> https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/why-cambridge/support/refugees

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Prerona Prasad is Curator, The Heong Gallery.

‘And suppose I did find those to go with me, and winds, and ship – yet where am I to go? My father’s realm forbids me to approach. Grant I do glide with fortunate keel over peaceful seas, that Aeolus tempers the winds – I still shall be an exile! ’[i]

An Ariadne for Cambridge

Trompe L'oeil

Duchamp

Nomad

IN SEARCH OF ARIADNE LB: What first attracted you to the subject of Ariadne?

Interview -  Gavin Turk in conversation with Louisa Buck

See her once, and you’ll be haunted by her: that is the nature of Ariadne. In classical mythology, she was the Cretan princess who betrayed her father, King Minos, and her half-brother, the monstrous, tragic, terrifying Minotaur. Minos had had his court inventor, Daedalus, build the confounding, disorienting labyrinth at Knossos to house the creature, who loved to feed on human flesh. The king demanded that Athens – a puny city compared to his own mighty Crete – send him seven girls and seven boys at regular intervals, to be piled into the labyrinth as a feast for the creature. But one year Theseus, prince of Athens, volunteered to be part of the grisly sacrifice. Ariadne saw him, longed for him, and decided to help him; in return, he promised her love, marriage, and a home in Athens. She gave him a sword, which he used to kill the Minotaur, and a spool of thread, which he used to navigate his way out of the labyrinth. They fled Crete together on an Athenian ship, putting in overnight on the island of Naxos. The next morning, in that blissful state between waking and sleeping, she reached out her hand to feel her beloved and found no one and nothing. She had been lied to. She was&nbsp;abandoned and alone. The Athenian ship was already a speck on the horizon. She veered from disbelief and panic to rage. After a while on that deserted shore, she was spotted by the god Dionysus and his drunken friends. The woman and the god made love and at length she found her place among the constellations.

That moment of Ariadne’s waking – lying on her rocky couch, one hand pillowing her cheek, the other about to reach into a languorous stretch, eyes still shut – was an artistic subject on repeat in the Greco-Roman world. We see her, this Ariadne between sleeping and waking, carved into Roman sarcophagi. We see her as the larger-than-life subject of one of the sculptures most celebrated in the Italian renaissance: the ‘Vatican Ariadne’, as it’s now called. The sculpture, or something like it, was already known to the cognoscenti by 1499, when an anonymous author in Venice printed his dreamscape of a book, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. In it, a woodcut illustration shows her as if she is a statue of a sleeping nymph in a wood. She does not yet know that she is being lustfully observed, in that woodcut, by a priapic satyr – that she is continuing a long career of being gawped at lasciviously. That viewer, of course, is also us, who can shamelessly, greedily run our eyes over her limbs, undetected by the object of our attention. And yet she is about to wake: what will happen next? Her in-between state, her vulnerability, puts us on the spot as viewers. There’s a life-size Roman Ariadne very similar to the Vatican version in the museum in Antalya, Turkey. I once heard a guide there addressing the fact that her breast is showing. It is like this, he said firmly, only because she is asleep. We can tell she is asleep because look, here, the sculptor has carved a lizard by her foot – it would not have come so close had she been awake. She did not, he implied, mean to be such a shameless hussy. Funny how we so easily offload our anxieties on to insensate lumps of rock.

The Vatican Ariadne was bought in late 1511 or early 1512 by Pope Julius II. At the time she was thought to be Cleopatra: the snakey bracelet on her arm was assumed to represent the asp that the Egyptian queen used to kill herself. In her original setting in the Vatican, she was surrounded a water feature – making her not just a queen but a kind of nymph. (Visit Stourhead in Wiltshire, and you’ll see this fantasy made real again: an 18th-century version of the sculpture, commissioned by an enthusiastic Grand Tourist, sits in her own cool damp grotto, turned green by the endless drip of water.) Quickly, though, she made her way on to canvas: she’s the image through which Venice invented the female reclining nude; you see her in Giorgione, and over and over again in the work of Titian. Once you’ve got your eye in, the haunting begins, you see her everywhere. Velázquez painted some tiny, exquisite landscape paintings: in one of them, a view of the gardens at the Villa Medici in Rome, she is there again, as a sculpture on a plinth on a terrace, the colonnade above her framing views on to cypress trees. (The real sculpture was another ancient version of the Vatican Ariadne; it’s now in the Uffizi, Florence.) Sleep and death are close in metaphor and in sculpture: at times church funerary monuments have something of Ariadne about them, especially those of the 18th century, when the deceased are allowed to recline elegantly rather than lie stiffly prostrate. In the 20th century Giorgio de Chirico painted Ariadne over and over again, placing her in shadowed, colonnaded squares, often with a train chugging away in the distance, her plinth inscribed with the single word ‘Melanconia’. Later still she dissolves into abstraction: I see her, even, in Carl André’s Equivalent VIII, a sculpture owned by Tate, which is (deceptively simply) a flat arrangement of bricks on the floor.

Gavin Turk is haunted by Ariadne, too. You can see her in his sculptures The Swimmer and Cyclops. She comes to mind when you see his The Shining, a sculptural reimagining of the form of the Overlook Hotel’s maze from Stanley Kubrick’s film. (Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, is the Minotaur of that story, the raging monster at the centre of the labyrinth.) She is there in his Rough Sleeper – an Ariadne at her most vulnerable yet, curled up in a sleeping bag in a shop doorway, perhaps. He has placed Ariadne at the centre of Cambridge’s Station Square, a curiously anonymous, colonnaded space beyond which the trains chug, just as they do in so many of those de Chirico canvases. In this work, titled Ariadne Wrapped, the sculpture is trussed up in what appears to be canvas and string. She could be trapped. Or perhaps she is in transit, coddled against the rigours of a journey. Maybe the string will help her find her way. Perhaps, under her chrysalis, she is on her way to changing, transitioning between states yet more profound than sleep and wakefulness. At any rate, we cannot look at her. For the moment, she has found a way to be unobserved.

See her once, and you’ll be haunted by her: that is the nature of Ariadne. In classical mythology, she was the Cretan princess who betrayed her father, King Minos, and her half-brother, the monstrous, tragic, terrifying Minotaur. Minos had had his court inventor, Daedalus, build the confounding, disorienting labyrinth at Knossos to house the creature, who loved to feed on human flesh.

Ariadne, again and again

The planet is transforming. We are transforming.

There are myriad indications and signs, as the auspices sound an amber warning of a sickness in our globalised humanity: early skirmishes over basic resources, power, energy and food; cracks appearing in our democracies; social unrest and authoritarian rule.&nbsp;Nature itself is manifesting the feedback loops of systems out of balance. Where are the bothersome insects that have always busied around us: the tiny horticulturists and waste managers; a land army of industrious workers? Can we remember when we last heard the raucous yet exquisite dawn chorus of our operatic, feathered migrants – a quietening uneasy autumn after a glowering summer.

Instead, blurred by the moral ambivalence of our fantasy superheroes and the manufactured angst of reality tv, the forest fires, parched peat bogs, and urban land fires are blazing on the edge of our screens. Scenes of flooded barren monocultures and failed crops seep into our consciousness. Daily reports of bullets being fired in schools in America and nuclear power plants in Europe threatening meltdown, together with our personal experience of escalating costs and empty shelves are unnerving portents of the fragility of our contemporary civilizations.

From the rubble of these auguries, are sprouting green shoots of hope; pioneering leaders appearing in business, community and culture; growing consciousness around issues of social justice; the clarion voices of indigenous peoples rising above the noise; the new, unfamiliar calls to action appearing through every billboard, tabloid and at every supper. [3]

Humans are ingenious, imaginative and inventive, are we not? We have got this.

Within this context, this exhibition representing two decades of artistic preoccupation, poses deep questions. What is it of our history and our past that we value - that we even remember? How do we create meaning, let alone art, from the burden of a labyrinthine past that has led to this place, this aesthetic invitation? How did we arrive here: an intellectual, ethical and visual wilderness hidden within the solid walls of a university town.[4] A culture steeped in ancient practices, rituals and academic rigour.

Perhaps the paradoxes within the artist’s work are clues; golden threads through the darkness of our minds; the shadow play of our internal monsters; blind spots in the brightness, clarity and rewards of the sun. These objects are shapeshifters, simultaneously witless and childlike, and yet with a virtuosity of production and intellectual playfulness that leads us, like children, through the labyrinth of our time.

Within these isles and beyond, our European, Elizabethan epoch gives way to a new unknown era, as we each, in our own way, embark on a personal odyssey.&nbsp; In our search for meaning and value in obtuse and yet familiar objects, we are confronted by our natural curiosity: remembering the importance of valuing what we have, and where we are, and how we got here, so we can feel the possibility of our unknown futures.

The planet is transforming. We are transforming.

In Search of Ariadne – A Preface

It’s out it’s out 
When it was lit 
Light is out 
Just freshly out 
Out of time 
Out of here 
Gone up in smoke 
Missed the moment 
Missed the 
When it’s out it’s out 
When it’s gone it’s gone 
Who can bring back 
The missing light 
Turn smoke back 
Into fire 
Turn back time 
And the hour 
Make it all light again 
Kerze kerze kerze 
Against the changing times 
First there was light 
And it was good 
In ritual or in the dark 
Something to come home to 
Something to see on a hill 
In the night 
When the sun is gone 
And the moon’s not out 
But now maybe the gods 
Have done it 
Or we are the gods 
That did it to ourselves 
Just did it within 
The motions 
Of the clock 
Where they are no shadows 
Just the kerzesmoke 
Where once there was flame 
Or the absent flame 
In the ghostly presence 
Flame is concentrated 
Smoke wavers and drifts 
Sometimes the fire wavers 
But throws its light 
Into the far corners 
All the smoke can do is be 
A ghost, a wisp, a regret 
Nostalgia, a wish undone, 
Sometimes even an arch 
Of floating spirits 
Where the flames die together 
In empty rooms

&nbsp;

Just thinking of those 
Places 
Where the shadows 
Creep closer 
And the darkness 
Is given courage 
And the spaces that 
Had presences 
Shrink and retreat 
With the formless 
Dark advancing 
Not only in rooms 
But in squares 
In hearts 
In dreams 
In parks at noon 
In parliaments 
And the stock exchange 
In school rooms 
Where teachers are not free 
In the bedrooms 
Where the dark 
Comes between 
The warm bodies 
Turning cold 
In the streets 
That used to lead 
To the hill 
But leads now 
To the crossroads 
Where lamps have gone 
Out and the rats 
Grow brave 
In the undergrowth

&nbsp;

Can the smoke 
Bring back the flame 
Does the flame survive 
In the twisting form 
Without a name 
Can that which is out 
Be not out 
Can the dark 
Extinguish itself 
By itself? 
Can the candle 
Light itself? 
Can the heart 
Feel its own beat 
Can the feet 
Smell the socks 
Are moths 
Drawn to candlesmoke 
Can the light 
Put out 
Shine still 
From that hill 
Or among the flowers 
On the windowsill? 
Can we return 
To the source 
Can the source return to us 
Can spilt sauce 
Be unspilled 
Can spooled words 
Be unspooled 
Can the candlesmoke 
Illuminate 
The cobwebs 
Can the darkness brighten 
The walls 
Where children 
Read in silence 
While the clock 
Marks the time 
In the dark? 
Tick tock tick tock 
It’s out it’s out 
Keep your voice down 
Don’t shout 
No one can hear you 
When it’s out

&nbsp;

&nbsp;When the moon looms 
And shadows 
Advance across 
The land 
Tick tock tick tock Listen to the clock 
Ticking in the silent 
Candle 
On the mantlepiece 
But look, 
If you can see, There’s history 
Expiring slowly 
Slowly dancing 
Writhing 
Casting elegant 
Shapes 
In the fading 
Dancing 
Candlesmoke 
But the end 
Of things 
Can be so beautiful 
If anyone can see them

&nbsp;

That sullen 
Wisp 
Of charm ...

&nbsp;

Keep it lit 
While the song 
Lasts ...

&nbsp;

Missed the moment 
Missed the

&nbsp;

&nbsp;Ben Okri – KERZE, 2022

It’s out it’s out When it was lit Light is out Just freshly out Out of time Out of here Gone up in smoke Missed the moment Missed the When it’s out it’s out When it’s gone it’s gone Who can bring back The missing light Turn smoke back Into fire Turn back time And the hour Make it all light again Kerze kerze kerze Against the changing times First there was light And it was good In ritual or in the dark Something to come home to

Ben Okri, KERZE, 2022 

Eggs

Gavin Turk: I'm doing a show, at MM gallery in Brussels. The exhibition’s called ‘En Oeuf’….En oeuf is enough… actually En Oeuf means in egg. Sarah Lucas: En Oeuf (laughs). I see. Gavin Turk: Rather than un oeuf, which would be…      An egg…A egg. Sarah Lucas: In egg. Gavin Turk: Yeah. Sarah Lucas: Good.

Floating in Custard, a conversation between

Gavin Turk, POP, POP & POP

“Do not touch” must be one the first thing anyone learns inside a museum. So much so that the museum is where one is likely to first get acquainted with the fact that there are some things in this world that are meant to be looked at but that can not be engaged with in any other way. It's a favorite pastime of mine to see how long it takes for someone to run up to me or yelp as soon as I extend a hand towards anything that hangs on a wall or sits on a plinth. I never aim to damage anything of course and I rarely actually do touch a piece, but I just want to determine how aggressively touch is evacuated out of the experience of the museum as I believe it is indicative of the degree of seriousness with which a culture defends its boundaries. In certain Italian and Greek museums, I've been known to lay a furtive yet respectful hand on a marble foot or a copper head for long uninterrupted minutes. In Britain and America, I have yet to touch as much as a velvet rope without dire consequences. Regardless of my location in the world, the objects in glass vitrines are always the ones I wish I could handle the most. There is something about the vitrine that almost taunts me. For some reason, the encased objects appear more precious and more interesting specifically because they can be seen but they can only be handled by the precious few who hold the appropriate authority and set of keys.

Although it is now taken for granted that museum collections are not meant to be touched, this has not always been the case. There was a time when a visit to the museum was not ruled by vision but involved a lot of touching and handling. Indeed, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nascent European institutions didn’t have the set of rules that we are now so familiar with. At the time, touching was considered to be an integral part of the museum visit and the whole experience had more in common with visiting an acquaintance kind enough to give a detailed tour of their home. Writes Constance Classen in her essay “Touch In The Museum” in “The Book Of Touch”;

“The curator, as gracious host, was expected to provide information about the collection and to offer it up to be touched. The museum visitors, as polite guests, were expected to show their interest and goodwill by asking questions and by touching the proffered objects.”

By allowing visitors to touch the collection, the curators were merely following rules of hospitality. It is perhaps pertinent to observe that the museum audience of that time was by no means comparable to, say, the visitors that one would now find on a rainy Sunday afternoon at the National Gallery or at Tate Modern. This experience was made possible mostly because fewer people frequented such institutions and because conservation had not yet evolved into the paranoid science of degradation that we know today.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Britain, museums became involved in a national effort to educate and civilize the masses migrating to urban centres in order to take advantage of the plentiful work opportunities brought about by industrialisation. It was believed that museums would be a great alternative to less reputable establishments for workers to while away their newly found leisure time. This consecutively led to a greater number of visitors but also an audience that was not educated in ways of the museum. Museums responded with the imposition of order and rules. No longer were the objects displayed there available for touch but quite the opposite. They were now regarded as sacred and removed from ordinary human interaction. In turn, this increased reverence brought about heightened concern about potential damage to the collection accompanied by intensified programmes of conservation. 
By increasing visibility with better lighting and modes of display, modern museums aimed to promote visual access while discouraging any perceived need for touch. Gradually, the picking up and handling of objects gave way to a public space meant to structure an historical and distancing space between the audience and the objects. Barriers or cords were introduced in the first decade of the nineteenth century as a response to the increased interest in exhibitions and they became a familiar feature of picture galleries in the course of the nineteenth century. Writes Robert D.Altick in “The Shows of London”;

“In the 1820s in Britain barriers were introduced to keep the expanding middle class audiences at a safe distance. In particular large paintings depicting contemporary events had to be railed off, such as David Wilkie’s Chelsea Pensioners Receiving the Gazette Announcing the Battle of Waterloo (1822), which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1822.”

These obstructions were meant to increase the distance between the spectator and the work of art as a way to make the works of art more accessible to a greater number of people. They also meant that the engagement with artefacts and works of art was becoming more visual and less kinaesthetic. Glass vitrines acted in a similar way to railings but pushed the distancing process a little further by blocking access in every way but visually. They also allowed for groupings of small objects from a similar historical period or of a similar school or form, especially the ones made of the most fragile organic materials such as ivory, bone, fabric and wood. Handling of such objects has been known to cause infinitesimal damage such as traces of moisture or grease which can culminate over time in the object’s destruction. Certain restored works composed of separate parts, veneering or inlaid elements will most often also go behind glass.

Today, museums find themselves in the specific predicament of having to protect things that may be damaged by touch while granting the widest possible access. Although for many people, significant engagement with an object is most likely to happen via touch or some form of manipulation, the museum with its tantalising arrays of glass vitrines and velvet cords will always provide temptation.

“Do not touch” must be one the first thing anyone learns inside a museum. So much so that the museum is where one is likely to first get acquainted with the fact that there are some things in this world that are meant to be looked at but that can not be engaged with in any other way. It's a favorite pastime of mine to see how long it takes for someone to run up to me or yelp as soon as I extend a hand towards anything that hangs on a wall or sits on a plinth.

Test Article Museum Vitrines

Sur le dandysme aujourd’hui attempts to show how many of the concepts and strategies developed by nineteenthcentury dandies can be found in the work and attitudes of certain contemporary artists, and how the iconography and themes of the literature of dandyism are still significant.

Sur le dandysme aujourd’hui attempts to show how many of the concepts and strategies developed by nineteenthcentury dandies can be found in the work and attitudes of certain contemporary artists, and how the iconography and themes of the literature of dandyism are still significant.

Sue Le Dandysme Aujourd'hui

A recent piece by Gavin Turk is a bronze cast of a pile of ashes from a dead fire called "Pyre," which suggests death but also Christianity's ashes to ashes theme and the eternal life cycle. We all go back to carbon. Hegel thought art had a sell-by date, that its revelatory capacity would be superseded by the higher truths of philosophy -- he thought art was just a stage or phase on the big trip to ultimate meaning. We haven't got there yet. We've only got to the end of a style of capitalism that started up in the 1980s.

Money becomes unreal. But it turns out reality is there after all. Is there an art-world correlate? All we know from developments in the non-art world is that there won't be so much spending. What won't there be so much of in the art-world? Will it be unreality? The unreality of art writing. What do art writers do after all? This weird service they perform, giving their paragraphs to the art-selling industry. Never saying anything undermining or challenging to an audience that has conditioned itself to expect an art critic not to say anything at all anyway.

The art critic is a historically respectable figure but in practice nowadays there's nothing all that important that they actually do. They provide the intellectual gloss for artists' careers. They help galleries promote the products the gallery wants to sell. Now selling is over. One thing ends and rather than another thing beginning we go back to an old thing.

Clement Greenberg is the last art-critical figure who stands for a hierarchical notion of art: the ranking of products and figures, one above or below the other in accordance with history's inevitable ranking: the consensus on quality that culture arrives at over many centuries. This is against the current notion that there are all sorts of art for all sorts of people: for him that was so but you didn't have to take any of it seriously. The best wasn't art that conformed most efficiently to pluralist expectations but art that behaved as if pluralism, a perversion of modernity, didn't exist. Or you could put it differently: modern art that was successful in a way that criticised the buzzing generality of art by continuing standards of greatness set by the past.

The idea wasn't to fall for all the new modern ideas that modernity produced but to use modern means to re-achieve the standards set by art from a pre-modern era, which would necessarily mean ignoring ideas that didn't come from art itself. Where Greenberg's rival, the confusingly similarly named Rosenberg, gave the name "action painting" to artists like Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning, in order to make that art of improvised, agitated, forever changing and melting forms seem to have a consistently moral quality -- and for that quality to be modern, and codified under the heading of "existentialism" -- Greenberg simply took the position that all add-ons were misleading. There was Jackson Pollock in his shed. There were the puddles of paint on the canvas on the floor. It didn't matter what the puddles meant. Meaning is in the form itself: form itself is an idea. And to appreciate the rightness or effectiveness of the idea you had to have eyes to see the form. Did it work or not? Was it a failed form (or combination of forms) or successful? The success or failure was on form's own terms.

The other thing besides extreme anti-relativism that makes Greenberg a remote figure for our times (but since our times are ending we can return to him) is that initially at least he combined reverence for art's purity with left wing politics. When he wrote his first big essays from the late 1930s into the 1940s he was a Trotskyite socialist. Later he dropped being left wing and eventually left wing art critics targeted him as a cultural imperialist. By now he was actually championing target-paintings by Kenneth Noland. His big essays from years earlier had given a shape and a meaning to modernism, connecting it to history, explaining what the problems were, giving experiment a place, trying out different enemy ideologies or enemy tastes ("kitsch" superseded by "middle brow"). And then he moved on and started disparaging his own heroic early essays, saying they were just "high class journalism:" and the only thing was taste, the eye, educating your eye, having taste, exercising taste, looking at art and reflecting on what you saw, responding honestly to what you saw however awkward a social situation you found yourself in as a result.

His enemies saw this state of affairs as: Look look look plus drink drink drink. Leading to out out out. Robert Smithson said Noland was zeros for zeros by a zero. But now it's the end of money. Money is zero. Will there be zero email press releases? People saying "Robert Smithson" to make themselves seem clever? A press release arrives. It's full of Greek words. I email back: those Greek words are just pseudery! A reply comes: No, here's a much longer version, it's really intellectual -- read it if you've got time. As if, if I didn't have time, I'd be shallow (no wonder I'm not a by-word for intellectualism!) I open the attachment and blow me if it isn't even more Greek words! I send another email. I say: It's just amplifying the pseudery: the idea is to get rid of the pseudery. Before that another press release came with some idiotic paintings of pre-modern artworks done in a stupid unreal style. What the hell is this! (I email back.) Plus why am I having to read this utter bullshit in your press release? I go on: It's obvious you don't really think any of these things. Why don't you think of something you actually believe in, or think, or know, or it really happened, and then try and write that? It will sound much more convincing. The reply to that one is that the gallery always works very closely with the artists on all press material. So it's clear the artist is as thick as this gallery director, which was clear anyway from the paintings.

Fuzzy rectangles and puddles of paint by Rothko and Pollock could be made to seem political, because "freedom" and "individualism" were surely anti-communist. Greenberg himself never wrote anything so simplistic about the relationship between artistic freedom and political freedom, but nor did he distance himself from those propaganda efforts; in fact I think he sometimes lent his support. He stopped writing regular reviews in 1951 after a row over Stalinism (he thought one of the publications was too Stalin-sympathetic.) Maybe he did become a bit cultural-imperialist. So what? Well, it would depend what war you were fighting.

There were government sponsored shows in a cold war climate. Greenberg never wrote anything serious that suggested he thought there was such a thing as artistic freedom. Any kind of art had to conform to some kind of widely agreed definition of art. He more or less stopped mentioning politics. That would make anyone politically aware feel comfortable about saying you were a conservative. Adding to his perceived political and cultural conservatism was his championing of a new post-Abstract Expressionist wave of formal artists, the Colour Field painters (his term was "post-painterly abstraction") -- Helen Frankenthaler, Noland, Jules Olitski and Morris Louis among others. They were about new ways of creating pleasure: new formats, new airiness, new heightened or enriched colour effects. But by now there were all sorts of new ways of being an artist, and these ones seemed too much like the Abstract Expressionists only without the big ideas. Which of course is exactly what defines an artist like Noland. Greenberg responded to Noland's concentric circles precisely because they didn’t have a heavy-breathing existential content but merely communicated things like proportion or colour or a breathing surface. He thought the big ideas associated with Abstract Expressionism were primitive and childish (he said "Death is an overrated literary conceit"). It was the art that was sophisticated not the cultish atmosphere.

What was it that made the artists Greenberg supported after the Jackson Pollock generation seem eventually unworthy of support? A mixture of things: their output was too variable, they weren't tragic figures, they didn't self-destruct, they weren't heroic, they were too successful, they produced too much, abstraction itself is a bit boring, and Greenberg seemed to support them automatically or else he gave and withdrew support for twisted psychological reasons. There are aspects of truth in all these myths. Mainly Greenberg had been a figure of authority but after a certain point authority as a theme lost authority -- authority was awarded to rhetorical challenges to authority. As an artist you gained power in this climate if you could establish a rhetorical system of confusion and undermining. Not in relation to the way pictures or sculptures used to have meaning but somehow totally outside that mindset. Going to the altar of history for vindication of your authoritative judgments on good and bad puddles just seemed ridiculous. History wasn't anything anymore, it was just archaeology.

But Greenberg wrote about art from the past in the same way he wrote about the art of his time, from a visual point of view. He didn't ignore social and historical reality but he provided only the kind of background context that he thought was necessary for explaining what he saw. As if context was always infinitely fascinating but only because there's something there in the first place that doesn't rely on context. We can't have that rationale today because we don't ask art to have any independent meanings. We want them to correspond to what we already know.

Greenberg's writing answers a hunger we didn't know we had -- we're conflicted, we don't like to admit how little we ever read in current art criticism that we could honestly say gives us clarity about anything at all. Let alone about experience that is refined, difficult, challenging or abstract. The whole point about art writing now is that it shouldn't make anyone think there's a problem with how art is.

The idea that "colour" could have a meaning, that putting one shade beside another could result eventually in an overall colour vibration that is richer than any single patch, or the vibration caused by two patches together -- that the overall effect could be not only greater but also different to just the sum of a lot of little colour events -- has become completely alien. We expect art only to confirm a situation outside art that is already sewn up and doesn't need art to confirm it. That's why we don’t want anyone writing about it that won't obey the empty rituals. Dust to dust, rhizomes to rhizomes, press releases to press releases. Many people think art is a place of freedom when in fact it's a place of obedience. The freedom in the nutty USA propaganda art shows for hapless Euros shell shocked after the War and hoping there wouldn't be another one, obviously wasn't what Greenberg really meant, but he made a decision to go along with it for a radio broadcast or a little catalogue intro, or whatever it was he actually did. Obedience to high standards isn't exactly obedience though. It's more like critical self-consciousness and recognition of history and precedent in a time when the past's rich visual traditions don't mean anything to most people so they're not thought about. In a situation like that which way do you turn if you don't want to be a loser?

Because of market operations art became popular. Because of the same thing it's about to enter an era of hard times: how will its natural way of being alter? Success and failure as reality rather than game playing -- suppose this were to become urgent instead of gloss and luxury and decadent play, constant unreal experiment to an unreal end?

Modernism is impossible now because it goes with too much social injustice, which postmodernism has been all about reforming. But these reformations have become ritualised and unreal. Modernism as an attack on falsity starts to seem attractive. Greenberg is the big figure of Modernism: he examines it and explains and rationalises it. He's now seen as a conservative figure: partly because he did in fact became less left wing, and partly because he refused to acknowledge the greatness of Pop, minimalism and conceptual art, and went on supporting abstract artists whose output wasn't consistently convincing.

The reason to go on about him now that our art era is ending, and we're about to enter a new era, is because he stands for complexity on the one hand: an idea of a cultural moment and how it relates to the achievements of the past; and ruthless simplicity on the other: the appeal of the visual. Nice or bilious. Whenever there's a period of economic decline political and cultural conservatism seem attractive. But Greenberg is not at all "back to basics." He's back to complexity. It's a particular psychology, a mindset, getting pleasure from things in art being truly surprising if weirdly narrow in terms of what the surprise might mean (since it's merely formal), rather than faux-surprising and comprising a vast range of possible significance, all of it a bit thin and desperate.

Greenberg's collected writings were published in four volumes between the late 1980s and early 90s. It's certainly a voice from the past. When he writes about Miro, who seems a conservative modernist to a contemporary audience conditioned to swoon to relational aesthetic performances on the one hand, and formal art based on ironic relativising of different formal meanings on the other, we don’t have any objections to what he's saying. He more or less says: "Miro creates a breathing surface. His visually witty economy of means is invigorating." It's just that we think it's no different to what Tal R does or Peter Doig or Neo Rauch or Daniel Richter. Modernism used to be grating and odd and now it's a standard consumerist experience. (We're mistaken.)

We don't expect painting to answer to painterly criteria of success of failure and to have a historic sense of its own formal meanings. We expect it to keep adjusting its attempt to appeal to a broader and broader audience by incorporating elements of conceptual art's awareness-heightening project. But this same awareness heightening has become more conservative than modernism. And doing "good" in a pretend, staged way is just being numb and doing nothing. It's the same as the feel-good factor in movies. (I once wrote a one-line song about it. It went: Let's face it Hollywood, everybody feels good by now.) Reactivating the terminated goodness of modernism is far more mind-expanding.

A recent piece by Gavin Turk is a bronze cast of a pile of ashes from a dead fire called "Pyre," which suggests death but also Christianity's ashes to ashes theme and the eternal life cycle. We all go back to carbon. Hegel thought art had a sell-by date, that its revelatory capacity would be superseded by the higher truths of philosophy -- he thought art was just a stage or phase on the big trip to ultimate meaning. We haven't got there yet. We've only got to the end of a style of capitalism that started up in the 1980s.

The End

Flags have always seemed, somehow, to accredit &lsquo;ownership.&rsquo; Armies go to battle for the sake of their flags. They realize their defeat in the falling of their flag or their victory in the flying of their own. National flags are supposed to serve as the altarpieces of national pride, but the Union Jack seems to inspire a pervasive ambivalence in Britons today. Our National Flag pasted onto windows, fluttering from car aerials or hanging from balconies is becoming an increasingly unfamiliar sight. Looking closely at what our national flag represents, this is perhaps to be expected. Given the confusion that stems from generations of British imperialism, it is unsurprising that when our flag is flying high, no-one seems to know who or what it is supposed to represent. &#9; The lack of clear patriotic feelings in Britain is partly due to the hundreds of years of historical conflicts between England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. England has notoriously colonized nations all over the world &ndash; and Scotland, Wales and Ireland have too suffered under this imperialist regime. Wales was part of the Kingdom of England when the Union Jack was first constructed in 1606, so the red St George&rsquo;s Cross, at the time, represented both England and Wales. Then the St Andrew&rsquo;s Cross &ndash; the white diagonal on the blue background &ndash; represented the inclusion of Scotland in the Union. St Patrick&rsquo;s Cross &ndash; the red diagonal of Ireland &ndash; wasn&rsquo;t incorporated until 1800. The Union Jack as we know it now was thus formed. Ever since, however, Scotland, Ireland and Wales have fought against this blanket &lsquo;Britishness&rsquo; that the flag promotes, feeling perhaps that their own national identities have been usurped by the voracious colonizing appetite of England. This discontent has been channeled over the years through debates over the Union Jack&rsquo;s composition &ndash; as if the flag in itself has come to embody this complex history of the &lsquo;United&rsquo; Kingdom. The Welsh have made several attempts to try to include the Welsh dragon into the Union Jack to assuage their feelings of exclusion from it. Scotland has long since felt contempt that St Andrew&rsquo;s cross is depicted behind St George&rsquo;s. There is a suspicion in Ireland that the St Patrick&rsquo;s Cross in the British flag was merely an invented convenience to fit the Union Jack, and has never been the National flag of the Irish. English ignorance of the Union Jack is captured by the stupidity of tourist shops in Oxford street in selling t-shirts depicting a Union Jack, brandishing the word &lsquo;England.&rsquo; The flag has become, then, the flag of a divided Country, a country of split societies, none of which wish to harness the flag that tries to unite them all. The only people who seem to give any particular notice to our national flag are the very people who feel excluded from it.Wales, Scotland and Ireland have thus struggled to locate themselves within the flag &ndash; in the same way that black and Asian Britons have felt unrepresented by the Union Jack. It was recently proposed, for example, that black stripes should be incorporated into what was described a &lsquo;racist&rsquo; flag. This comes into sharp relief in depictions of the Union Jack by black and Asian artists. These artists are giving voice to these zeitgeist issues, in an attempt to understand the multi-culturalist nature of post-colonial Britain. Again, people feeling marginalized, people feeling excluded from being &lsquo;British&rsquo;, voice this discontent through the symbolism contained in the Union Jack. The National Front also saw the Union Jack as a representative of an exclusive white Britain, and they harnessed the flag as a symbol of white supremacy. The Union Jack became the flag of the National Front in Thatcherite Britain. Flags are supposed to promote nationalist feelings, which the National Front pushed into a violent extreme. The right wing National Front used the flag as a symbol against the multiculturalism that right wing British Imperialism set the way for. Britain today is coming to terms with the consequences of colonialism &ndash; a regret that it&rsquo;s gone, an embarrassment that it ever happened. When &lsquo;Britannia ruled the waves,&rsquo; the Union Jack was even coined &lsquo;The Butcher&rsquo;s Apron&rsquo;. Perhaps part of the contemporary attitude towards the flag suggests our aversion to flying the Union Jack is due to an embarrassment about these imperial associations. Perhaps we don&rsquo;t want to be reminded of the atrocities of our forefathers, the blood red of the St George&rsquo;s Cross. Even today, the Union Jack can be traced around the world in the flags of the countries we &lsquo;civilized&rsquo;. &#9;&#9; The red white and blue of Britain has fluctuated in and out of fashion over the twentieth century, not necessarily in parallel to national attitude. The Union Jack accompanied the Beatles on their World Tour of 1964 and soon became a rock&rsquo;n&rsquo;roll symbol of the artists and bohemians of Carnaby Street in the 1960s. As British pop music triumphed globally, the flag once again achieved the world respect it had during Imperialism. It became a marketing sign in the branding of the swinging city that was 1960s London. The next decade saw the Union Jack ripped up and defaced by Punk. The inclusion of the flag on the album covers of the Sex Pistols together with the sarcastic patriotism of their &lsquo;God Save the Queen,&rsquo; put the band at war with the establishment. The single was released during the time of Queen Elizabeth&rsquo;s Silver Jubilee and it was seen as an attack on the monarchy. The fact that the band and their fans were brandishing ripped up versions of the monarchy&rsquo;s own flag seemed especially pertinent. Like the artists, by defacing the Union Jack, punk bands of the 70s were voicing the concerns and dissatisfaction of a dispirited British youth. Again, the Union Jack becomes a symbol through which to speak. The flag represented the old school establishment and the flag&rsquo;s vandalism heralded a new generation which went on to change the shape of the country. &#9; The late eighties and early nineties saw Britain again coming into the global frame that was seen in the 60s. Once again Britain started to dictate what was hip to the world, and this was especially true in the zeitgeist of the art world. The various names given to the art produced at that time, all further this brand in their reference to the fact that art itself was British: &lsquo;Cool Britannia&rsquo; or &lsquo;Young British Art&rsquo;. Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit, the John and Yoko of the 90s, appeared in magazines draped in a Union Jack with the familiar headline of 1966 Time magazine, &lsquo;The Swinging City&rsquo;. Even Geri Halliwell showed her patriotic attitude as her Union Jack dress became one of the flag bearers of British pop culture. However much the Union Jack has appeared in and out of vogue, there is still a marginalized interest and recognition in the country as a whole. The Union Jack has become a confused symbol of a divided nation, a nation to which no one really belongs. Jack of all trades, master of none&hellip;

Flags have always seemed, somehow, to accredit ‘ownership.’ Armies go to battle for the sake of their flags. They realize their defeat in the falling of their flag or their victory in the flying of their own. National flags are supposed to serve as the altarpieces of national pride, but the Union Jack seems to inspire a pervasive ambivalence in Britons today. Our National Flag pasted onto windows, fluttering from car aerials or hanging from balconies is becoming an increasingly unfamiliar sight.

The Union Jack

Redundancy is the hidden downfall of symbolism. Of their moment, an object can seem so symbolic that to possess it in an act of self-definition. But once that item becomes obsolete itself, its symbolism disappears. Indeed the absence of relevancy can then have a negative mirroring effect on its symbolism, as if to balance out its previous power with impotency. Before smaller cars became desirable as well as worthy, oversized vehicles were loaded with a phallic symbolism so blatant that all hoped that the reality was, &ldquo;big car, small dick&rdquo;. Nowadays, big cars are so impractical that its &ldquo;big car, not even worth having an opinion about&rdquo;. It means that symbolism has an inbuilt nostalgia about it, especially as western culture speeds up. For much of the twentieth century, items had purpose and longevity that allowed symbolistic meaning to gather round them. Its seems the mission of the 21st century to shed life of the unnecessary. It may sound weird to state that of such a materialistic times, but it also seems true: we may buy more stuff, but the sheer volume of what we buy makes us care less about what we then own. If we don&rsquo;t care about something, if we don&rsquo;t associate ourselves with it, then symbolism cannot build up. This is particularly true of a man and his possessions. The male wardrobe, as well as a man&rsquo;s bits and bobs, were both part of an outfit and also symbols of stature, intelligence and also physical endowment. It was once the case that a pipe, a cane or a bowler hat were loaded with symbolism about a man&rsquo;s wealth and prowess. The secondary message of male stuff was overt enough for Ren&eacute; Magritte to abuse it in &ldquo;Ceci N&rsquo;est Pas Une Pipe&rdquo; as part of the series The Treachery of Images. Magritte was a young man at the time, and his image that mocks the pipe came at a time when speech was entering cinema and the cigarette began to be marketed through movies, intentionally or not, as the modern way to smoke. By the late 1920s, the pipe was losing its symbolism of virility and contemplation, to eventually be replaced with ones of fustiness and even thought-avoidance. To sit with a pipe in modern day life is to pretend that everything is how it once was, and therefore is to avoid having to deal with life as it is.I am talking here about symbolism of a pipe rather than the use of a pipe itself. I have a strange relationship with pipes that makes this distinction seem important. Until the late eighties, my father smoked a pipe, about which I loaded with no symbolism - I just wished he didn&rsquo;t do it. I was never attracted to smoking as a child, and have only ever tried a cigarette once, in my late twenties, when a friend asked me to hold hers when we were in a club (this was pre-smoking ban) while she was doing her shoe-lace up, and while she was bent down I figured I may as well bring it to my lips to see what it tasted like. To me, that late on in life, it was like a MacDonalds - entirely ineffectual.At the time, I never considered my father&rsquo;s use of a pipe as odd, outlandish or even self-indulgent, as he didn&rsquo;t use a pipe as some sort of urban fashion statement - we lived in the country, our family life was fairly isolated, and that was just his preferred way of taking in tobacco. Neither of my parents engaged in pop - his preference in particular was for jazz, and I presumed his acceptance of the pipe came from there. Also, his father had smoked a pipe, and I remember a photograph of them both proud with pipes in their mouths, my father a young man. I didn&rsquo;t like my father smoking, and would probably have liked him smoking cigarettes even less. He gave up after he suffered a heart attack in the mid-eighties, the pipe soon forgotten, by me at least, as part of his daily make-up. My father is a painter, and is alone for prolonged periods, working. He has managed to do so just as well without his pipe. Smoking being an aid to contemplation is probably just an excuse conjured by smokers to justify their habit. The mind focuses very well on its own.To me, as a child and teenager, the pipe had no symbolism - using it was just what my father did. This might be because he smoked a pipe removed from a context that would imbibe it with such symbolism. Maybe also by this point the pipe was obsolete in popular culture, and actually in the farming villages in which we grew up it actually found a less potent and more natural home. When I think of my father, the pipe is not part of the picture. I actually think of him most concentrating on his work. When he does so, I became aware early on that he did with his jaw locked open. I noticed it when I would sit for portraits for him. I notice it now because it is a habit I have picked up - if I am working hard, some people think I am sat there yawning. It is the mouth open that is crucial - you can&rsquo;t hold a pipe with your jaw stretched out its furthest. Obviously it satisfied my father&rsquo;s nicotine cravings, but to me the pipe was superfluous.As it has proven to be now - I cannot think of the last time I saw a man with a pipe. Cigarettes, too, have been marginalised by smoking bans, and I feel no sadness at this. The modern male wardrobe has softened to become a thing of functionality and comfort - few men manage to wear a suit and still look as if they are living right now, but they are the rarity - men in suits tend to look like they wish they could be wearing something else. The male wardrobe has many of the same elements as the female one - jeans, hoodies, trainers - a way of dressing that is a middle-ground between the two genders, hence removing symbolism from what either sex wears.Indeed the stuff we carry around has also lost its symbolism in the race to become more useful, more efficient, less burdensome. Try sexualising an iPod, or a mobile phone - pretty impossible. Now try getting on a high horse and claim that these items are an affront to society and our cultural life - a pointless position to hold, since they&rsquo;ve made life so much better. In their design, these items are not imbibed with symbolism, and nor do they gain any when they enter into public use. Symbolism is one of the great casualties of modern life. It is not one we should mourn. ENDS

Redundancy is the hidden downfall of symbolism. Of their moment, an object can seem so symbolic that to possess it in an act of self-definition. But once that item becomes obsolete itself, its symbolism disappears. Indeed the absence of relevancy can then have a negative mirroring effect on its symbolism, as if to balance out its previous power with impotency. Before smaller cars became desirable as well as worthy, oversized vehicles were loaded with a phallic symbolism so blatant that all hoped that the reality was, “big car, small dick”.

Redundancy of Symbolism

Dandyism is a form of self-worship which dispenses with the need to find happiness from others - especially women. It is a condition rather than a profession. It is a defence against suffering and a celebration of life. It is not fashion; it is not wealth; it is not learning; it is not beauty. It is a shield and a sword and a crown - all pulled out of the dressing up box in the attic of the imagination. The estrangement of the thorough going dandy is not from women, but from life. It is taking up a posture of ironic detachment from the world and living it out in scrupulous detail. Dandies are a brotherhood of higher types. The true princes of the world. And the true priests of the world. To become a dandy your days will become so ordered they will make the life of a Trappist monk seem like an orgy. Here are the lessons in self-transformations I apply so rigourously. You must empty yourself of the dreariness of mere personality, and make yourself available without reservation, not to individuals but to the world at large. But you will find that this way of life is only in a certain sense fulfilling. It is also a martyrdom of sorts. If you choose to share your life with the world rather than one person then you have to forfeit marriage, children, happiness - all the things, of course, that don&rsquo;t matter. So, how exactly is it done? It is time to take off my face and reveal my mask. The projection of dandyism can be effected by three principal means - speech, movement and appearance. Speech.Unless you can improve on silence - keep your gob shut. To justify its existence speech has to be extraordinary. If it&rsquo;s ordinary it&rsquo;s less than worthless ; it&rsquo;s clutter. If language is the dress of thought then there is never any excuse for denim.Read every day something no-one else is reading. Think every day something no-one else is thinking. Above all be witty. Wit enables us to act rudely with impunity. And wit has truth in it. Remember : The beginning of wit is to desire it. Read wit continually, exercise the mind, simply to keep the muscles at attention, like a person who tries to do a marathon. Turn your pain into humour and your anger into wit. Embrace life as a great metaphysical joke to which the only logical response is laughter. The key is to make people believe everything you say, though not a single word is sincere. The only terror is the terror of being understood. Movement.If all speech should be a kind of literature, every movement should be a form of dance. Every day put on your best trousers to go out to battle for freedom and truth. One must always look beautiful, look up and smile at the camera - even if it&rsquo;s only a security camera - or a satellite. Contra Mr Orwell : be grateful to be worth watching. Curl your skip into a smile and your smile into a show. Your gait, should be a purposeful lope, taut with authority. Walk in the perfect glow of self adoration, striding invincibly through London's awe-struck and fawning populace.Clothes.When it comes to dress, it takes a strong man to be an extrovert. A true dandy, needs a complete conviction that he is right; the views of the rest of the world simply don&rsquo;t matter. &ldquo;If someone looks at you, you are not well-dressed&ldquo; Mr Brummell tells us. But then Mr Brummell would say that: prissily precise, he was essentially a conformist. True dandyism is rebellious. The real dandy wants to make people look, be shocked by, and even a little scared by the subversion which his clothes stand for. And yet, dandyism is social, human and intellectual. It is not a suit of clothes walking about by itself. Clothes are merely a part - they may even be the least important part of the personality of the dandy. Dandyism isn&rsquo;t image encrusted with flourishes. It&rsquo;s a way of stripping yourself down to your true self. You can only judge the style by the content and you can only reach the content through the style. Mr Brummell was the original and most celebrated dandy but he was no hero of mine. He was so refined that I do not regard him as a dandy at all. I am more concerned with style than breeding. And the key is to dress in such a style that you would attract attention at a Liberace concert. Being &ldquo;well dressed&rdquo; is not a question of having expensive clothes or the &ldquo;right&rdquo; clothes. You can wear rags, but they must suit you. In fact to be able to sustain an existence on nothing and rags is the epitome of style. A curious dignity and a refusal not to keep up appearances is what we want. Style is not elegance but consistency. So, take heart, you will not need any money at all. A modest sufficiency cramps style; extreme poverty, like great danger, enriches it. Remember : Life is nothing but a game of dressing up and make-believe. All dress is fancy dress except our natural skins. Occupation.Works of art do nothing but they do it passionately. So, retire at birth. You must have no obligations, no attachments, no wife, no child, no occupation, no possessions, no obvious means of support, visible or invisible. Basically no use whatsoever. Are we agreed about that? Good. Looking beautiful and being stylish is essential. A purpose in life is not. I have never had a career - but I do a splendid job as one of the handsomest men in the world. I don&rsquo;t want anything. I am completely un covetous. Unless it is under the covers avec tous.Family life.As a natural loner and auto-invention you will have grasped early the irrelevance of family life. Dandies reproduce themselves through emulation and style, not through family descent. So, get rid of them. Distant relatives, are the best kind, and the further the better.Love, marriage and sex represent species sameness and so the defeat of individuality. And so, they gotta go. A dandy will not be link in the chain of being, exchangeable with any other and expendable in himself. They are not a piece of animated meat. A fornicating carcass. He must defeat his animal function at all costs.The only place a dandy would push a pram is into the Thames. Of course, it is fine to date children but never to have them. You must raise nothing but your cock.As for women? Women are on this planet only as trumpets of our glory. To love, even in the least elevated sense, means to desire, which means to be dependent. The key is to be disinterested and not become giddy from the heads you turn.Life trajectory.Dandyism oscillates between narcissism and neurosis, vanity and insanity, Savile Row and Death Row. All the great dandies have ended in the flophouse or the madhouse. Gutter or nutter. You have lived like a king and shall die like a beggar. DeathAs all self-respecting dandies know, suicides are the aristocrats of death. They represent a triumph of style over life. Your existence is a work of art. It deserves a frame - if only to distinguish it from the wallpaper. Suicide will look nice. It will match the home furnishings.Write a note. If you are young perhaps something like :&ldquo;I have decided to stop living on account of the cost&rdquo; Or if you are old (say 90) &ldquo;I am committing suicide because I am worried about my future.&rdquo;Remember : It is not enough to know how to make a dazzling entry : you need to know how to vacate the stage with the same panache. Dandyism is a modern form of stoicism. It is a religion whose only sacrament is suicide. Fear not : by the time you have reached the end of the run you will be as God. You will not be committing suicide but deicide. Pesticide is for mere mortals.******From Savile Row to Death Row. Of course Dandyism fails. How can originality replicate to create a whole movement? How, on the one perfumed hand, can you talk about freedom when you willingly give it up with the other un-gloved mitt? How can you be unique and yet part of the gang? There are two universal truths about human beings. One : they are all the same. Two : they all say they are different. Two is of course the result of one. The dandy just happens to be the biggest, the best and most beautiful fraud of them all. His doctrine is a laughable conceit, a delightful illusion.But so what? Life is absurd and so the only way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in a perpetual orgy of absurdity. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens and then everybody disagrees. Nothing solves the meaningless absurdity of life. But we can clothe the abyss and make it wearable. When you hear thunder, take a bow. When you hear rain, assume it is applause. And so like the sun, shine, having no alternative. You shall be a reprobate dandy; that&rsquo;s your job. And the good lord will forgive you : That&rsquo;s his.

Dandyism is a form of self-worship which dispenses with the need to find happiness from others - especially women. It is a condition rather than a profession. It is a defence against suffering and a celebration of life. It is not fashion; it is not wealth; it is not learning; it is not beauty. It is a shield and a sword and a crown - all pulled out of the dressing up box in the attic of the imagination.

Masks or How To Be A Dandy

Pliny&rsquo;s &ldquo;Natural History&rdquo; 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 &lsquo;the gates of art had been thrown open by Apollodorus&rsquo;. 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&rsquo; 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.

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.

The Myth of Zeuxis and Parrhasius

I shall show you fear in a handful of dust. T.S. ElliotCivilisation 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 &ldquo;per capita&rsquo; 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 &lsquo;waste&rsquo; as civilisations&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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.

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

Waste Not Want Not 

&ldquo;Do not touch&rdquo; must be one the first thing anyone learns inside a museum. So much so that the museum is where one is likely to first get acquainted with the fact that there are some things in this world that are meant to be looked at but that can not be engaged with in any other way. It's a favorite pastime of mine to see how long it takes for someone to run up to me or yelp as soon as I extend a hand towards anything that hangs on a wall or sits on a plinth. I never aim to damage anything of course and I rarely actually do touch a piece, but I just want to determine how aggressively touch is evacuated out of the experience of the museum as I believe it is indicative of the degree of seriousness with which a culture defends its boundaries. In certain Italian and Greek museums, I've been known to lay a furtive yet respectful hand on a marble foot or a copper head for long uninterrupted minutes. In Britain and America, I have yet to touch as much as a velvet rope without dire consequences. Regardless of my location in the world, the objects in glass vitrines are always the ones I wish I could handle the most. There is something about the vitrine that almost taunts me. For some reason, the encased objects appear more precious and more interesting specifically because they can be seen but they can only be handled by the precious few who hold the appropriate authority and set of keys.Although it is now taken for granted that museum collections are not meant to be touched, this has not always been the case. There was a time when a visit to the museum was not ruled by vision but involved a lot of touching and handling. Indeed, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nascent European institutions didn&rsquo;t have the set of rules that we are now so familiar with. At the time, touching was considered to be an integral part of the museum visit and the whole experience had more in common with visiting an acquaintance kind enough to give a detailed tour of their home. Writes Constance Classen in her essay &ldquo;Touch In The Museum&rdquo; in &ldquo;The Book Of Touch&rdquo;;&ldquo;The curator, as gracious host, was expected to provide information about the collection and to offer it up to be touched. The museum visitors, as polite guests, were expected to show their interest and goodwill by asking questions and by touching the proffered objects.&rdquo; By allowing visitors to touch the collection, the curators were merely following rules of hospitality. It is perhaps pertinent to observe that the museum audience of that time was by no means comparable to, say, the visitors that one would now find on a rainy Sunday afternoon at the National Gallery or at Tate Modern. This experience was made possible mostly because fewer people frequented such institutions and because conservation had not yet evolved into the paranoid science of degradation that we know today.During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Britain, museums became involved in a national effort to educate and civilize the masses migrating to urban centres in order to take advantage of the plentiful work opportunities brought about by industrialisation. It was believed that museums would be a great alternative to less reputable establishments for workers to while away their newly found leisure time. This consecutively led to a greater number of visitors but also an audience that was not educated in ways of the museum. Museums responded with the imposition of order and rules. No longer were the objects displayed there available for touch but quite the opposite. They were now regarded as sacred and removed from ordinary human interaction. In turn, this increased reverence brought about heightened concern about potential damage to the collection accompanied by intensified programmes of conservation. By increasing visibility with better lighting and modes of display, modern museums aimed to promote visual access while discouraging any perceived need for touch. Gradually, the picking up and handling of objects gave way to a public space meant to structure an historical and distancing space between the audience and the objects. Barriers or cords were introduced in the first decade of the nineteenth century as a response to the increased interest in exhibitions and they became a familiar feature of picture galleries in the course of the nineteenth century. Writes Robert D.Altick in &ldquo;The Shows of London&rdquo;;&ldquo;In the 1820s in Britain barriers were introduced to keep the expanding middle class audiences at a safe distance. In particular large paintings depicting contemporary events had to be railed off, such as David Wilkie&rsquo;s Chelsea Pensioners Receiving the Gazette Announcing the Battle of Waterloo (1822), which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1822.&rdquo;These obstructions were meant to increase the distance between the spectator and the work of art as a way to make the works of art more accessible to a greater number of people. They also meant that the engagement with artefacts and works of art was becoming more visual and less kinaesthetic. Glass vitrines acted in a similar way to railings but pushed the distancing process a little further by blocking access in every way but visually. They also allowed for groupings of small objects from a similar historical period or of a similar school or form, especially the ones made of the most fragile organic materials such as ivory, bone, fabric and wood. Handling of such objects has been known to cause infinitesimal damage such as traces of moisture or grease which can culminate over time in the object&rsquo;s destruction. Certain restored works composed of separate parts, veneering or inlaid elements will most often also go behind glass. Today, museums find themselves in the specific predicament of having to protect things that may be damaged by touch while granting the widest possible access. Although for many people, significant engagement with an object is most likely to happen via touch or some form of manipulation, the museum with its tantalising arrays of glass vitrines and velvet cords will always provide temptation.

Museum Vitrines

Some people think he is, but I disagree. I think he’s more like Hans Gruber, the German terrorist who takes over Nakatomi Towers in Die Hard.

Let me explain.

Mr. Turk is certainly a copycat. This is a well known fact, and indeed, a reason people are drawn to his work. The way he deals with concepts such as authorship and originality resonate with us, and for good reason.

Most of us are common thieves.

Every day each of us break copyright laws many times, without even realizing. If you photocopy a page from a book, take a picture of a work of art you didn’t produce, sing ‘Happy Birthday’ in public or forward an email you didn’t write, you’re guilty.

Our ideas about property rights, intellectual or otherwise, are generally viewed as good for society. Most of the time, they are. The problem is our laws pertaining to intellectual property are no longer sophisticated enough to deal with the ways we use information in the real world.

A law professor named John Tehranian from The University of Utah recently conducted an experiment that proves this. He made a note of every time he inadvertently broke copyright law and then worked out how much he would owe if he was sued each time this happened. He calculated that he would owe an average of $12.45 million a day. If we take Tehranian to be an average law abiding citizen, then the average law-abiding citizen is currently ringing up $4.5 billion a year in copyright violations.

Of course, the majority of us don’t get sued for these heinous crimes we commit daily, because these laws are ridiculous and unworkable, and most acts of copyright infringement are entirely harmless. The crimes are ignored and we go unpunished. But we’re still common thieves on paper. This huge crevasse between law and reality appeared because two things happened.

First our technology changed. When these laws were written, information used to flow in one direction. Producers produced, consumers consumed. There was a clear line between broadcaster and receiver, artist and fan, creator and pirate. But today that line is just a blur. Information now moves in many directions at once. Anybody can produce, rebroadcast or remix information of all kinds. Consumers can talk back in a variety of ways. They can form angry mobs or fan clubs - the fate of producers is in their hands. There is a power shift going on.

Secondly, all this new technology amplified one of our oldest behavioural traits; copying. Copying is part of the human condition. It is the backbone of our culture. It is how we learn to talk. It is how we learn social norms and manners. We are, all of us, relentless copying machines. And now we have access to the internet, the most advanced copying machine we’ve ever created.

The big problem is that our laws are not written with the behaviour of billions of human copying machines in mind. We common thieves don’t spend large amounts of time and money coercing governments to make sure copyright laws suit our behaviour. But large multinational media companies do. The result is a set of rules that serve their needs, but don’t work quite as well for everyone else.

But the lot of the common thief is worth defending. Families shouldn’t be receiving takedown notices from record labels for posting home movies up on YouTube of their kids dancing to copyright protected music. Companies shouldn’t be able to use copyright law to stifle free speech and stop information that makes them look bad from reaching the general public. Entertainment conglomerates shouldn’t be allowed to upload damaging spyware onto your computer without asking you, just to make sure you’re not stealing any of their content. Telecoms companies should not be given the power to decide what information you do and don’t see online. If the disconnect between law and reality is not addressed, our freedoms will be eroded.

It takes a different kind of thief to defend such freedoms. It takes artists like Turk publicly questioning who owns what. We need pirates that speak truth to power in order for things to change. Without the outcast at the outer marker moving the boundaries, everything stagnates. Ideas capable of making society better, fairer or more democratic are always resisted by those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. We need people who innovate without asking permission.

Some of the greatest innovators in history were thought of as common thieves when they started out. When Thomas Edison invented the phonographic record player, musicians branded him a pirate out to steal their work and destroy the live music business, until a system was worked out so everyone could be paid royalties. We now call this system the recording industry.

Edison went on to invent film making, and wanted to charge a license fee to every film maker using his invention. Several New York film makers, including a young man named William, disagreed with this policy, and fled to the then still Wild West coast where they could make films illegally away from Edison’s team of lawyers, and flee to nearby Mexico if said lawyers were dispatched. This town of pirate filmmakers is still there today, it’s called Hollywood. William’s second name was Fox.

Today these industrial monoliths established by pirates are locked in fierce battles with us common thieves to protect their intellectual property rights. But when throwing lawsuits at your fans suddenly becomes an important part of your business model, you no longer have a business model.

When information flowed in one direction, it was easy to take culture and attach it to a product in order to sell it. Those on the edges of society created meaning, and then the commercial world stole it. But now the outsiders are finding ways to take meaning back from the market. People are organizing without organizations. Loose-knit networks and open source structures are proving to be more effective at doing some things than governments and markets. As a result we’re rebelling in new ways. Warhol famously said that “good business is the best art.” Culture used to be one of the only ways of rebelling in a non-violent manner, but today we can kill bad ideas with new business models.

It already seems like bad ideas and old power structures are being brought to the slaughter on a daily basis, and the revolution hasn’t even started yet. The future promises even more unfettered access to information and intellectual property. In May of 2008, a Professor named Adrian Bowyer at the University of Bath created the world’s first 3-D printing machine that can print out a copy of itself. The internet may be the world’s ultimate copying machine at the moment, but that was just Act One.

Act Two promises even greater levels of conflict. The war over intellectual property is going to get weird. But this movie has a happy ending. The truth is this new reality is good news for creators and copyright holders large and small - it’s just taking a while to figure out the details.

The future promises unlimited opportunities to create, reach audiences, gain notoriety, earn money and all the rest of it, if we can only reconcile the two conflicting forces at work when we have a new idea. At the same time as we are thinking “how can I get this out there?” we’re also asking ourselves “how can I benefit from/monetize this idea?” We want to spread ideas as information, but capitalize on them as intellectual property.

Which brings me to Die Hard.

Just before 20th Century Fox released the fourth Die Hard film in 2007, the marketing team at Fox had only one question: How do we get people excited about the Die Hard films again online?

They didn’t know a comedy rock band named Guyz Nite had just uploaded their new video for their song entitled Die Hard, to YouTube. The verses of the song outlined the plots of the first three Die Hard set to a sequence of tightly edited clips from the movies. It was hilarious enough for millions of people to watch it and tell their friends about it.

The legal team at Fox found out about the copyright violating video. They did their jobs, and asked YouTube to take down the infringing material. And YouTube did. End of story.

Except it wasn’t. When the marketing team at Fox found out about the video, and the millions of people getting excited about the Die Hard franchise again because of it, they called Guyz Nite. They had only one question: How much do we have to pay you to put that video you made up on YouTube?

It all worked out in the end – copyright laws were ignored in favour of user-generated content that helped everybody out. The band even got an invite to the New York premiere of the film. Pirates can reach the places other advertisers cannot reach. It’s like Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”

This period of corporate cognitive dissonance we are experiencing will continue for some time. But unreasonable and outdated notions about intellectual property will eventually become history, if enough of us strive to be more than just common thieves.

Towards the end of Die Hard, Holly McClane says to Hans Gruber, “After all your posturing, all your speeches...you're nothing but a common thief.”

Hans replies, “I'm an exceptional thief, Mrs. McClane.”

Some people think he is, but I disagree. I think he’s more like Hans Gruber, the German terrorist who takes over Nakatomi Towers in Die Hard. Let me explain. Mr. Turk is certainly a copycat. This is a well known fact, and indeed, a reason people are drawn to his work. The way he deals with concepts such as authorship and originality resonate with us, and for good reason. Most of us are common thieves.

Gavin Turk Is Not A Common Thief

There is no real reason why chewing gum in its modern form should exist at all. At the time it was invented it served no purpose beyond the satisfaction derived from purchasing and owning an object (albeit briefly), and the pleasure to be had in exercising one&rsquo;s lower jaw. Any functionality that is now ascribed to modern day chewing gum has been grafted onto it since its first appearance 120-odd years ago.Apparently cursed with a lot that plumbs the depths of banality &ndash; there can be few fates less appealing than being placed in the mouth to be masticated into tastelessness before being spat out &ndash; chewing gum has somehow achieved iconic status. The frivolous nature of its existence, its record as one of the first mass-produced products of the twentieth century, and its standing as the epitome of inbuilt obsolescence have assured its place as a poster boy for the consumer culture of the developed world. It was not always thus. The first chewing gum was extremely practical in nature. Archaeologists working in Sweden and Finland have discovered pieces of birch bark tar imprinted with human tooth marks made over 5000 years ago. Our Neolithic ancestors are believed to have chewed the medicinal tar as a way of warding off tooth ache and sore throats. Since then, there have been many resins, grasses and other plants made into some form of gum so that their healing properties might be released into the body. However, it was the American Indian habit of chomping on a resin derived from the sap of spruce trees that paved the way for chewing gum as we know it. Settlers in New England began to mimic the practice to such large numbers that one John Baker Curtis began to market strips of his home-made &lsquo;Curtis&rsquo;s State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum&rsquo; for two a penny in 1848. So successful was the product that he was able to build the world&rsquo;s first chewing gum factory four years later. However, for all its antiseptic qualities, spruce gum did not have an appealing flavour and Curtis soon moved over to the production of gum made from paraffin wax whose own less than thrilling taste was masked by the addition of vanilla or liquorice. The development of chewing gum might have stopped right there had it not been for a 1869 meeting in New York between exiled former president of Mexico, General Santa Anna &ndash; Davie Crockett&rsquo;s victor at the Alamo &ndash; and compulsive inventor Thomas Adams. Santa Anna was keen to raise money to fund an unlikely armed insurrection against the Mexican government by promoting chicle &ndash; a latex tapped from the chicozapote tree &ndash; as a cheap substitute for rubber in the manufacture of car tyres.After months of failed attempts to create a chicle rubber suitable for the motor industry, Adams and Santa Anna gave up on the enterprise. It was only when the former witnessed a young girl buying a pennyworth of paraffin wax gum (which the shop owner described to him as &lsquo;pretty poor&rsquo;) that he hit upon the idea of experimenting with chicle as a chewing gum. He came up with a putty-like material that could be rolled into a ball in the mouth and, by February 1871, launched it in a single shop in New Jersey. It was tasteless and had no health-giving properties but it was recognisable as chewing gum and since it was better than the wax chewing gum on offer, people bought it. It was sold by the stick as &lsquo;Adams New York No.1 &ndash; Snapping and Stretching&rsquo;. A picture on the box showed City Hall, an instantly recognisable building in America&rsquo;s most exciting city. Chewing gum had taken the first step in its long journey of appropriation of celebrity as a marketing tool.Adams and other entrepreneurs were soon adding flavours to the gum to make it more appealing. Early experiments saw the inclusion of sassafras root bark, liquorice (again) and tolu, an ingredient then used in cough syrup, a move that gave back to chewing gum its original medicinal function. Pliant experts were soon on hand to recommend the use of gum to relieve thirst, freshen breath, calm nerves, ease sore throats and quicken the appetite. Competition from other brands spurred Adams to advertise on huge billboards on Broadway, bringing gum into the public space and consciousness as never before. William Wrigley went one better, erecting a line of 117 billboards along a New Jersey railway track on his way to becoming the United States&rsquo; largest purchaser of advertising.Since chewing gum was a product essentially without a purpose it acted as a blank page onto which manufacturers painted the fantasies of consumers. A brand called Kis-Me played on the sexual appeal of placing something in one&rsquo;s mouth. William White, the first man to market a mint gum, was also the first to make a link in the minds of potential customers between the chewing of gum and fame, fortune and success. In 1898 he began to get his gum into the mouths of the beautiful people, even managing to foist a stick on the future Edward VII whilst on a trip to England. The ploy was to be expanded later by the mass theft by the industry of an idea used by bubble gum makers: the issuing of free cards depicting movie stars, baseball players, national heroes and prominent millionaires.Gum first crossed the Atlantic in large quantities in World War I when more than four million packs were sent to troops by the American Red Cross. However, it was the GIs based in the UK in World War II who turned Britons on to chewing gum in huge numbers. It has since crossed the globe so that today there are over 500 companies making chewing gum in 93 countries (though, famously, the substance is banned in hyper-neat and tidy Singapore &ndash; those caught smuggling it in face a 12-month prison sentence). Chicle is almost a thing of the past, however, since almost all chewing gum is now made from synthetic substances such as vinyl resins or microcrystalline waxes.The relative cheapness and easy portability of gum has contributed to its use becoming routine for large swathes of the world&rsquo;s population. As a source of displacement activity and instant gratification it has only the cigarette to rival it. However, despite chewing gum&rsquo;s acceptance into mainstream culture and its tooth-whitening, breath-freshening image, there&rsquo;s still something about it that suggests its home is on the wrong side of the tracks. Mix some surly body language with a slow deliberate chew and gum becomes a vehicle to express aggression and rebellion. This perhaps goes some way to explaining its popularity amongst successive generations of the young.More surprisingly, once used, chewing gum is capable of its own feats of artistic self expression. Unlike its inert uniform pre-masticated state, used gum is uniquely shaped by the mouth of the individual who chewed it. Spurned by the user, it then takes its revenge wherever it is discarded, clinging limpet-like on pavements, park benches or Lonny Donegan&rsquo;s bedpost. It punishes the species that created its all but meaningless existence by inflicting upon it its inherent ugliness. More potently still, it remains poised and ready, day and night, to stick to any careless shoe, hand or even backside with which it comes into contact. In 5000 years, archaeologists will find it and will make a pronouncement about our era that we may not wish to hear.

There is no real reason why chewing gum in its modern form should exist at all. At the time it was invented it served no purpose beyond the satisfaction derived from purchasing and owning an object (albeit briefly), and the pleasure to be had in exercising one’s lower jaw. Any functionality that is now ascribed to modern day chewing gum has been grafted onto it since its first appearance 120-odd years ago.

Chewing Gum

There are a few things in this world that simply demand to be fiddled with. Once these mundane objects have served their purpose, they are free to be appropriated via all kinds of operations that are usually carried out absentmindedly as their porous surface easily yields to teeth and nail imprints, ink doodlings and cigarette burns. This flexible material, as strong as certain metals, is in fact an aromatic polymer made from solidified liquid hydrocarbon. The type of polystyrene used specifically to make the familiar cups and packaging material is an expanded form produced by mixing a gaseous blowing agent into what would otherwise become the solid plastic that is regular polystyrene, often used in the making of CD cases and disposable cutlery. Its very texture and lightness contribute greatly to the pleasure derived from modifying them. Has anything precious ever been fashioned out polystyrene? It is very unlikely for the very reason that because it is so light and devoid of character, it feels inconsequential to poke and prod at it before unceremoniously disposing of it. As a disposable material though, it doesn't get much better as its cushiony consistency offers just enough resistance while allowing for a variety of marks from the deep to the superficial. It is also recognized as an efficient insulator, thus its frequent use as a container for hot liquids, but bear in mind that it is highly flammable if you are ever possessed by the urge to decorate your empty coffee cup with an open flame. Ironically for an object valued for its disposability, because expanded polystyrene takes on average up to 900 years to decompose, polystyrene cups that have been absent-mindedly sculpted and marked accidentally become works for posterity. With this in mind, if everybody treated the polystyrene as a respectable material on which to write, draw and engrave, perhaps the British Library could, in time, give up on the digitalisation of all its books and turn to the &ldquo;polystyrisation&rdquo; of its collections instead. Imagine sorting through stacks of cups instead of piles of books.

There are a few things in this world that simply demand to be fiddled with. Once these mundane objects have served their purpose, they are free to be appropriated via all kinds of operations that are usually carried out absentmindedly as their porous surface easily yields to teeth and nail imprints, ink doodlings and cigarette burns.

Polystyrene Cups

There is perhaps no meal so quintessentially British as fish and chips. Leaving aside the competing claims of the traditional Sunday roast &ndash; and the fact that the method of preparing chipped fried potatoes is generally acknowledged to have been imported from France or Belgium &ndash; the fish and chip supper has become as much a symbol of Britishness as the Routemaster bus or the (now all but mythical) bowler-hatted city gent.That is not to say that the dish has been with us since the dawn of Albion. Indeed, it is only known to have been eaten in Britain since the latter half of the nineteenth century &ndash; Charles Dickens makes passing references in Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities &ndash; when it became a hit with poorer sectors of society. The nation&rsquo;s fishing fleet had taken to using trawling rather than line methods, resulting in a far greater catch and a consequent lowering in the cost of fish. When combined (around 1870), with the plentiful and inexpensive potato, a meal was created that became the treat of choice for the working classes. By the 1930s &ndash; when fish and chips were at the peak of their popularity in Britain &ndash; the middle classes were also to be found in the queues outside chippies.It is not until comparatively recently &ndash; and then rather by accident &ndash; that the now familiar polystyrene chip tray and the wooden chip fork made their mark on this dish-cum-institution. The chip tray owes its very existence in large part to the unstable properties of printers ink coupled with a certain squeamishness with regard to standards of food hygiene. From its inception, fish and chips had been wrapped in the cheapest form of packaging available: yesterday&rsquo;s newspapers. However, in the 1970s and 80s, the owners of newspapers began to experiment with new types of ink. Although these were cheaper, it was discovered that they were also more susceptible to transferring themselves onto the fingers of readers. When the ink came into contact with hot batter and a liberal dose of vinegar, it leapt off the page faster than headlines themselves. However, contrary to popular belief, there has never been an Act of Parliament banning the use of newspaper as a wrapping for fish and chips. It was environmental health inspectors who took a dim view of this unwelcome new condiment and began to apply pressure on fish and chip shops to discontinue their use of newspapers.There are several reasons why many chip shop owners sought found a solution in the polystyrene chip tray. They cost less than a couple of pence each, they are feather light and stackable, and they help assistants gauge the correct size of a portion of chips.However, to say that the chip tray has been taken to the hearts of the public would be to overstate the esteem in which it is held by some margin. Above all else, it suffers from being a very dull object visually. Trays per se are functional articles, a flat surface, usually an oblong, with a raised edge all round. Their simplicity has left them largely impervious to radical changes of design and the chip tray has not bucked the trend. Its all over brilliant whiteness does not help its cause either. Perhaps if all chip trays were post box red or covered in yellow and black stripes or had some other markings that characterised them as chip trays and nothing else, they might establish some sort of tradition and we thus might muster some affection for them. As it is, the overwhelming majority of them are merely the default colour shared by every other object made of expanded polystyrene.This genericism is mirrored by the chip tray&rsquo;s function. Despite its name, it can be found in numerous other outlets conveying a range of completely different fast foods to consumers. This compounds the lack of sense of the chip tray being special in any way. Not only is it a banal lifeless thing in the fish and chips world, it repeats its bland uniform monotony wherever else it appears. Understandably, this lends it a feel of the corporate, which does not sit well with the independent spirit of fish and chip shops, the vast majority of which are individually owned, Harry Ramsden&rsquo;s chain notwithstanding.Even the fact that the use of such trays spares the hands of consumers from the burns and vinegar seepage that traditional newspaper wrapping was wont to subject them to is outweighed by the argument that the added protection they afford sanitises and thus diminishes the whole fish and chips experience.If this were not enough, chip trays are fast on their way to joining supermarket plastic bags as the anti-eco-warriors of our times (and, unlike the bags, customers have no option of refusing them). Until recently, they were a source of chlorofluorocarbons (CFC). A very small proportion of them are recyclable. The vast majority are not biodegradable either (biodegradable trays are more expensive and so tend only to be used by chips shops attempting to promote themselves as eco-friendly). Unlike plastic drinks bottles, which biodegrade in five to ten years, or fellow litter icon chewing gum (25 years), polystyrene chip trays will be still be polystyrene chip trays on the day the universe finally collapses in on itself.Since the chip tray&rsquo;s useful life extends only for the length of time it takes for a person to eat the food it contains, and that typically that period ends when the consumer is outside, it is no surprise that it has become the archetype of British litter. If a television drama requires a shorthand means of expressing urban grit or rural squalor all that needs be done is to scatter a few used chip trays around the place.For the sake of authenticity, a number of miniature wooden forks would have to be sedulously strewn around too. In common with the chip tray, the chip fork is a relative newcomer and has found itself just as likely to turn into litter the instant its raison d&rsquo;&ecirc;tre has been exhausted. One could almost argue that, since they are typically bought from wholesalers in job lots of 20,000 at a cost of less than a halfpenny each, chip forks are produced for the express purpose of being thrown away and that the ten-minute period in which they are employed to shovel chips into a mouth is an aberration. As would be pieces of art these are not so much objets trouv&eacute;s as objets jet&eacute;s. At least it can be said that there is some aesthetic pleasure to be gained from them. The organic feel of the wood between the fingers complements the texture of the paper wrap held in the other hand. The chip fork&rsquo;s sinuous curves, rounded handle and aggressively slanted tines give it the appearance of a Weeble crossed with an angry tadpole. Flipped sideways, however, and it all but disappears, prefiguring its own ineluctable disappearance into the cracks, crevices and fissures of the street, the Bic pen of the pavement. Perhaps, in the end, its most important function is as a delineator of humans beings: after all, what sort of people buy a portion of chips and then imagine themselves too precious to eat them with their fingers?

There is perhaps no meal so quintessentially British as fish and chips. Leaving aside the competing claims of the traditional Sunday roast – and the fact that the method of preparing chipped fried potatoes is generally acknowledged to have been imported from France or Belgium – the fish and chip supper has become as much a symbol of Britishness as the Routemaster bus or the (now all but mythical) bowler-hatted city gent.

Chip Trays And Chip Forks

Those were my bags. My bags, filled with my stuff. My stuff, that she chucked out in the street. Grabbed my stuff she did, the bitch, and shoved it in the fucking bin bags that I&rsquo;d fucking bought &ndash; my fucking bin bags! &ndash; and chucked them out the window into the road behind the block. It wouldn&rsquo;t&rsquo;ve been so bad but the silly bint lives on the fifteenth floor and my bloody CD decks were in there and all. Fifteen hundred quids&rsquo; worth of kit that was, ruined, not to mention the splinters that got into my calvins. And then that frigging Gavin Turk artist cunt swanned by in his poxy House of Fairies V-fucking-W camper van and swiped them and cast them all in fucking bronze and according to what Col says is flogging them down at that poncey tent they have in Regent&rsquo;s Park. Fifty grand he&rsquo;s going to get for them, he reckons. Fifty-frigging-grand! I mean, you have got to be having a laugh.And House of Fairies? Fuck that shit. What&rsquo;s all that about then? Bunch of arse bandits talking wank and sitting in the warm while I&rsquo;m out here freezing my tits off. Where the fuck is that wanker Col? He said twenty minutes. Two fucking hours more fucking like. A friend in need is a pain in the arse, that&rsquo;s what my old man always said, and it&rsquo;s certainly a mantra Col&rsquo;s taken to heart. Not that he ever met my old man. Not that that matters. Just as long as he remembers to bring that bloody coat I lent him. And that wrap of beak.I don&rsquo;t see why I shouldn&rsquo;t sue. Way I see it, that is my intellectual property. My stuff, my bags, my shapes. Coleen would no doubt have it that given that it was her what put the bags and stuff together and threw them out the window by rights the creative act was hers. But she hasn&rsquo;t got a leg to stand on given that she says it was me what caused the row we had, and so therefore fine: I caused the row by boning her sister&rsquo;s cousin, which makes me the prime instigator, QED intellectual property = mine. I mean, what I could do with fifty grand. That&rsquo;s more than twice what I ripped off from that cash point Col and me ram-raided that night with that digger what we found. It was just too tempting, that was. Sitting right there in behind one of those flimsy metal fences on a building side right next to the bank. So easy to jump they might as well&rsquo;ve left the bloody keys in it, the wuzzocks. We were pissed and that, or we wouldn&rsquo;t&rsquo;ve taken a crack at it, I mean it wasn&rsquo;t worth three years, we were only having a laugh. But really, for fuck&rsquo;s sake, what were they expecting? They should take more responsibility for things like that, have them properly locked up. Anything could&rsquo;ve happened. Someone might&rsquo;ve got hurt. Other than that plod. Either way we didn&rsquo;t come away with it with anything like fifty-frigging grand, I can tell you that for free.And they&rsquo;ve got them on show in a tent for fuck&rsquo;s sake, so the security can&rsquo;t be bollocks. It&rsquo;s Danny Mattoc&rsquo;s crew what got the contract for the lockdown, and streak of piss in the wind that he is we could probably walk out with the bloody things in a barrow for all the trouble it would take. Though them being bronze, that might be hard, and then what are you going to do with them? I mean what kind of fence is going to hand over fifty large for five bronze bin bags? I&rsquo;d end up having to melt the fucking things down and sell &rsquo;em for scrap, and given what I&rsquo;d get for them it probably wouldn&rsquo;t be worth the hassle. What&rsquo;d happen is, I&rsquo;d just have to dump them back on the street, which would be somewhat ironical, all things considered. And then the whole game of soldiers could start off again, with Turk swinging by to pick them up so he could cast them again and extract another wodge of moullah out of some other wanker banker with more house than nous. Though I&rsquo;d like to see him hoist them in that prick-tease little fairy-wagon this time around. If they didn&rsquo;t go straight through the floor they&rsquo;d burst the tyres or snap the wishbones. And then were would the fucking fairies be, eh? Eh? Bitch! How fucking dare she? What didn&rsquo;t I do for her? What didn&rsquo;t I give her? Fucking cows, whores the lot of them, all that I love you let me fuck you crap when they only want one thing: a long fat length of wallet. Not that I&rsquo;m likely to be able to have much of that, not working construction shifts for cash like this &ndash; and where is that wanker Col? &ndash; not unless I win the frigging lottery, which is hardly likely since it&rsquo;s three years since I bought a bloody ticket. Either that or I go out and mug an artist, which should see me alright for a while given that the whole world seems to have decided to give them good hard cash for the oldest bloody rope. I just don&rsquo;t get it, I really don&rsquo;t. Maybe I should get into art myself, I could do better than half these jokers, I really fucking could. That ram-raid, that was art, it really was, and we were bloody pissed. And those bin bags, they&rsquo;re mine for fuck&rsquo;s sake, like I said, I should bloody sue. I wonder if could get legal aid?And where the fuck is Col?&copy; James Flint, November 2008www.jamesflint.nethttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Flint_(British_novelist)

Those were my bags. My bags, filled with my stuff. My stuff, that she chucked out in the street. Grabbed my stuff she did, the bitch, and shoved it in the fucking bin bags that I’d fucking bought – my fucking bin bags! – and chucked them out the window into the road behind the block. It wouldn’t’ve been so bad but the silly bint lives on the fifteenth floor and my bloody CD decks were in there and all. Fifteen hundred quids’ worth of kit that was, ruined, not to mention the splinters that got into my calvins.

Kicked Out (after “Pile” by Gavin Turk)

&ldquo;He owned nothing. No object, no family furniture, no souvenir. All he had was contained in an old trunk where he kept a few photos and notes relating to his past work.&rdquo; Lydie Sarazin, Marcel Duchamp&rsquo;s first wife, from a privately printed memoir, published 1927. This starkness of Duchamp is liberating. There is a similar resonance in descriptions of his New York apartment; one room, one chair, a basic bed, packing crate and two nails banged into the wall. A piece of string hung from one of the nails. If it has nothing to look at, the mind has a better opportunity of being quiet. I don&rsquo;t know if this was Duchamp&rsquo;s intention, and pictures of his last home in Neuilly that he shared with his second wife show a much more &lsquo;normal&rsquo; looking room. There are shelves and books, art and objects.But a souvenir will trouble and disturb the mind. The word is French (it is a verb) and means &lsquo;to remember&rsquo;. The English noun &lsquo;souvenir&rsquo; is the infinitive mood of &lsquo;souvenir&rsquo; used substantively. The usage is modern. The word does not appear in The Bible, Shakespeare, Blake, Dickens, &lsquo;Moby Dick&rsquo; or &lsquo;Alice in Wonderland&rsquo;. There is a souvenir in Joyce&rsquo;s &lsquo;Ulysses&rsquo; (once) and Scott Fitzgerald where usage is plummy and sentimental. Gatsby refers to a photograph. &ldquo;A souvenir of Oxford days. It was taken in Trinity quad. The man on my left is now the Earl of Doncaster.&rdquo;The etymology of souvenir is Latin from &lsquo;sub&rsquo; meaning under or near and &lsquo;venire&rsquo; to come. The meaning is of something, in this case a memory that comes from the deep of the mind. &lsquo;Souvenir&rsquo; then describes an object that will dredge memory (like policemen looking for a corpse in the river).It is not common to think of souvenirs as objects that recall lost memory. In regular usage the word hitches itself to snow-domes and &lsquo;tasteless&rsquo; (insists Wikipedia) objects linked to tourists sites and capital cities. It is possible these objects ridicule the colossal state monuments they miniaturise and recast in plastic. Or suggest that any place or object that requires a souvenir to remain memorable is therefore, by itself, forgettable.But the souvenirs that recall lost memory externalise memory as three-dimensional objects. It is hard to see a memory. What does a memory look like? Pablo Picasso was fond of Alfred Jarry&rsquo;s gun. Picasso acquired this weapon after Jarry&rsquo;s death as a souvenir of his friend notes Duchamp&rsquo;s biographer. (Although Picasso&rsquo;s biographer Roland Penrose claims Jarry gave him the gun). Regardless of how he acquired the gun, Picasso took it on night-time jaunts and sometimes discharged the weapon in the Parisian air. The gun reminded Picasso of his dead friend, say the biographers. It might be accurate to exhibit the gun and with the label &lsquo;souvenir of Alfred Jarry, author of Pere Ubu&rsquo;. It might be tempting to say the gun was a &lsquo;relic&rsquo; of either Jarry or Picasso although the word &lsquo;relic&rsquo; has a specific theological meaning. &ldquo;Orthodox Christians,&rdquo; explains Bishop Kallistos Ware, &ldquo;believe that the grace of God present in the saints bodies during life remains active in their relics when they have died and that God uses these relics as a channel of divine power, as an instrument of healing.&rdquo;And relics have a future. In the last days they will be reclaimed and refleshed by the resurrected saints. &ldquo;The relics were the saint,&rdquo; notes Patrick J Geary in &lsquo;Furta Sacra&rsquo;. But you could say &lsquo;they are the saint&rsquo;. They are not souvenirs. Or representations. Jarry&rsquo;s gun is inert. It does not belong to eternity. Jarry&rsquo;s gun is not Jarry. It is a path to the memory of a dead writer (who will remain dead) and to Picasso&rsquo;s memory of his friend (Jarry died in 1907, Picasso in 1973). If Jarry&rsquo;s gun still exists and if you could hold it in your hand it would be proof that Jarry (and also Picasso) did exist. It is an artefact or piece of evidence, like the dinosaur skeletons. And it can be difficult for those of us living in the present to believe the Past really happened. We need physical evidence; museums, galleries and archaeologies.Jarry&rsquo;s gun is like Coleridge&rsquo;s Flower; an object that connects us to another world, in this instance Montmartre circa 1906-1910. Coleridge&rsquo;s Flower is a meditation (unpublished in his lifetime) that reaches out to Heaven, Narnia and wonder. &ldquo;If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke &ndash; Ay! &ndash; and what then?&rdquo;.But most souvenirs, even if they function as evidence that you have been somewhere are &lsquo;tasteless&rsquo; (says Wikipedia) and also kitsch. The word comes form the German &lsquo;verkitschen&rsquo; meaning to make cheap and &lsquo;kitschen&rsquo; to collect junk from the streets. Kitsch is the &lsquo;commodification of the souvenir,&rdquo; says Celeste Olalquiaga and &lsquo;the souvenir the commodification of remembrance&rsquo;.There might be some who resist having their memories cast in &lsquo;cheap&rsquo; plastic (and there is a reflex prejudice against plastic &ndash; Umberto Eco has written about the wonder and beauty of plastic). St Mark&rsquo;s in Venice is to be avoided, I was told on Boxing Day by a young postgraduate student of architecture, because it is tacky, a theme park. But if you walked away from the centre, my student friend advised, you will find strange, watery fields, real farmers, authentic experience. This longing for the &lsquo;authentic&rsquo; might traumatise an otherwise restful holiday. And there is an appalling egotism in the tourists&rsquo; refusal to accept his or her role. But this is a consoling delusion because (for some of us) commodified leisure and memory are harder to stomach than commodified transport or education. There is an image Gavin Turk has exhibited of a discarded paper cup bearing the image of Stonehenge. And Stonehenge (says Wikipedia) is &lsquo;one of the most famous prehistoric sites in the world&rsquo;. I suppose you could say its the country&rsquo;s oldest and most &lsquo;magnificent&rsquo; art work. Gavin may be having a go at English Heritage, who produced the cup because there might be some leakage, some diminution of value heading back from the cup to the &lsquo;magnificent&rsquo; original. But then again both the cup and Gavin&rsquo;s image are perfectly adequate pictures of Stonehenge. And they are calm images. There is no anxiety about authenticity or form. When I started this story I wanted to rail against spoons from Ramsgate and a Tower of London snow-dome; now I find myself warming to these objects; they are without angst and they are useless.Celeste Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury Of The Kitsch Experience (Bloomsbury, 1999) Patrick J Geray, Furta Sacra, Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1991) Roland Penrose, Picasso (Granada, 1981) Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: a biotgraphy (H.Holt. 1996)

“He owned nothing. No object, no family furniture, no souvenir. All he had was contained in an old trunk where he kept a few photos and notes relating to his past work.”Lydie Sarazin, Marcel Duchamp’s first wife, from a privately printed memoir, published 1927. This starkness of Duchamp is liberating. There is a similar resonance in descriptions of his New York apartment; one room, one chair, a basic bed, packing crate and two nails banged into the wall. A piece of string hung from one of the nails.

Souvenir

In 1909, when the Victorian naturalist and painter Abbott H. Thayer published his observations about concealment in nature, it&rsquo;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. &lsquo;Gestalt&rsquo; means &lsquo;shape&rsquo; or &lsquo;figure&rsquo;, 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&rsquo;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 &ndash; the military and the arts &ndash; 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 &lsquo;dazzle&rsquo;, in reference to the need for warships to dazzle (i.e. &lsquo;mislead&rsquo;) their enemies at sea. Under the direction of British marine artist and Naval Commander Norman Wilkinson, the navy founded a &lsquo;Dazzle Section&rsquo; 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&rsquo;s course, speed and direction. (In 2008 Jeff Koons showed a painted yacht, &lsquo;Guilty&rsquo;, 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&rsquo; works, including Camouflage Jasper Johns (after John&rsquo;s Flag, 1954) and Camouflage Hot Dog Lichtenstein, both in 1963. In 1964, Jacquet reinterpreted Manet&rsquo;s Le Dejeuner sur l&rsquo;herbe, which he described as breaking &ldquo;reality into dots&rdquo;, 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 &lsquo;telo mimmetico&rsquo; 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 &ndash; 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&rsquo;s re-appropriation of the US Army Woodland camouflage pattern in 1986 for his famous Camouflage series. Unlike Boetti, Warhol reworked the pattern&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &lsquo;pop&rsquo; camouflage of graffiti artist Leonard McGurr (Futura 2000) throughout the 80s, the architecturally camouflaged &lsquo;Cloud Towers&rsquo; 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&rsquo;s 2007 exhibition &lsquo;Me as Him&rsquo; 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 &lsquo;deeper meaning&rsquo;, and looking only to the fa&ccedil;ade for answers. Damian Hirst&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ndash; the khaki or sand uniforms that have become iconic cultural visual signifiers of war and combat for over a hundred years &ndash; 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&rsquo;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.

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.

This Is Not A Story About The Military

Like the carefully staged crime scene, trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il tricks the viewer through the arrangement of misleading appearances and false clues. Literally meaning &lsquo;cheat the eye&rsquo;, the art technique involves the realistic depiction of phenomena to create optical illusions, often turning flat surfaces into seemingly three-dimensional objects. Trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;&oelig;il, as works no longer strived towards illusion or imitation but were made to investigate the grounds for art&rsquo;s own existence. Nonetheless, a few painters, such as Ren&eacute; 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&rsquo;&oelig;il 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 &lsquo;theatricality&rsquo; 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&rsquo;s attack was primarily directed against Minimal art, art forms that use trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il may equally be added to his list of &lsquo;criminals&rsquo;, 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 &lsquo;power&rsquo; of trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il is not inherent to the work but exists somewhere between image and spectator and between image and place. At first glance, trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il 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 &lsquo;perpetrator&rsquo;, 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&rsquo;s short story &lsquo;The Purloined Letter&rsquo;, 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&rsquo;&oelig;il 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 chantourn&eacute;, a particularly unsettling form of trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;&oelig;il 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&rsquo;s sculptures are crucially not human. Still, some people are experts at turning themselves into trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il. This can make them seem untrustworthy, but such masquerading may also involve a critical element. La perruque is the French philosopher Michel de Certeau&rsquo;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, &lsquo;wig&rsquo;, and perroquet, the French term for &lsquo;parrot&rsquo;. While trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il 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&rsquo;&oelig;il is trompe l&rsquo;oreille, a &lsquo;trick of the ear&rsquo;. 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&rsquo;s Reed Warbler impersonating a Pied Wagtail. Just as trompe l&rsquo;&oelig;il erases the trace of its own author, so does trompe l&rsquo;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.

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.

On the whole, outsiders don&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s something about being outside of the inside that&rsquo;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 &ndash; but it doesn&rsquo;t ultimately allow them to survive. Outsiders serve their function in various extremes; they satisfy the community&rsquo;s vampiric hunger for saints and martyrs, then it&rsquo;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 &lsquo;insiders&rsquo;, 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 &ndash; the outsider exists only in relation to the &lsquo;insider&rsquo;, 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 &ndash; 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&rsquo;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 &ndash; who would perform the same purifying function. The pharmakos was remedial &ndash; 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&rsquo;s interesting to note that both the &lsquo;pharmakos&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;insiders&rdquo; 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 &lsquo;other&rsquo; and the one who set up communion between things hitherto isolated, separate. Indeed, the literal meaning of tragedy is &lsquo;the song of the he-goat&rsquo;, 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 &ldquo;Poetics&rdquo;, 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: &lsquo;pity for undeserved suffering, and fear for the man like yourself&rsquo; are the tenets of this purging, cleansing experience. How exactly this catharsis happens is a mystery, but inexactly speaking, it&rsquo;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 &lsquo;other&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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 &lsquo;outsider&rsquo; 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, &lsquo;outsiders&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t tolerate them: as Solon observed &lsquo;a city perishes from its too great men&rsquo;. 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&rsquo;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 &ndash; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s destruction reinforces to the mainstream that it&rsquo;s just not possible to live out that part of ourselves - the part that is a-social, anarchic, monstrous, divine. The outsider&rsquo;s destruction allows us to commune with the part of ourselves that is isolated, separate, outside &ndash; 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&rsquo;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&hellip; they allow us our normality.

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.

The Outsider

In every generation there are the brave ones: the artists, stylists, intellectuals, the street kids who heedlessly launch themselves into the future, who refuse to be trapped by what is known. Within this small group, there is always a figure who doesn&rsquo;t necessarily produce very much, if anything at all, but whose whole presence defines his or her time and place. Their every gesture, captured in a photograph or on film, appears to sum up the spirit of an era. In the late 1920&rsquo;s &ndash; the era of the Bright Young Things &ndash; it was androgynous socialite Stephen Tennant. In the Warhol Factory it was the elfin, amphetamined Edie Sedgwick, who danced the high wire with consummate grace. In British Punk, it was Sid Vicious.Sid could have been the front man of the Sex Pistols &ndash; and eventually was. He was one of the four Johns &ndash; Lydon, Wardle, Beverley and Grey: herberts all from North and East London - who crashed down the Kings Road during 1975, sneering at everything in sight. When McLaren decided to hold an audition for the fledgling &ldquo;Sex&rdquo; group, Sid was absent. His friend John Lydon got the call.Unhappy about this turn of events, Sid became the Sex Pistols ur-fan. He began to get attention for violent behaviour. He was one of the Sex Pistols&rsquo; entourage involved in the famous, photographed fight at the Nashville in April 1976. He assaulted rock journalist Nick Kent, and was implicated in an incident at the 100 Club where a glass was thrown and a girl badly injured. He was, after all, called Sid Vicious. In later years, Lydon would downplay his involvement in what turned out to be the creation of a monster. Sid was known under a couple of names &ndash; John Beverley and Simon Ritchie - but sometime in 1974 or 1975, in the spirit of pop re/creation, Lydon gave him a new pseudonym: Sid after his hamster, and Vicious after the song by Lou Reed.It was a joke, a laugh. But re/creation is an unpredictable undertaking. In the Warholian ambience of early London punk, Vicious was a leading character: his name offered him a fast-track to fame, if not notoriety. By the time that the music press began to run features about Punk as something more than just a couple of rock groups, Sid was highlighted as an avatar of this new, troubled age.In Jonh Ingham&rsquo;s seminal October 1976 Sounds article, &lsquo;Welcome to the &ldquo;?&rdquo; Rock Special&rsquo;, Sid dominated the pull quotes: &lsquo;I didn&rsquo;t even know the Summer of Love was happening. I was too busy playing with my Action Man&rsquo;; &lsquo;I don&rsquo;t understand why people think it&rsquo;s so difficult to learn to play guitar. I found it incredibly easy. You just pick a chord, go twang, and you&rsquo;ve got music&rsquo;.And there was more: &lsquo;I don&rsquo;t believe in sexuality at all. People are very unsexy. I don&rsquo;t enjoy that side of life. Being sexy is just a fat arse and tits that will do anything you want. I personally look upon myself as one of the most sexless monsters ever&rsquo;. In the end was a kind of manifesto: &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve only been in love with a beer bottle and a mirror&rsquo;.Sid&rsquo;s comments were a mixture of posturing and candid revelation. They introduce him as a character not afraid to take the limelight, with a catchy &ndash; if slightly ludicrous: Sid after all was redolent of the 1920&rsquo;s &ndash; pseudonym that seemed to match the half-serious, half- joking brutality of early Punk. Violence was both theatre and tool: to clear space, to reproduce the ambience of England in 1976. Unlike the moronic monster of legend, Sid was very sharp, as his friend Viv Albertine remembers: &lsquo;I always felt very uncomfortable with him he was so strict, and so idealistic, and so clever, which people don't seem to realise. The reason he went scooting downhill, he was so idealistic, and he really couldn't stand the world and its pettiness&rsquo;. I first encountered Sid in November 1976, at a Clash show at the Royal College of Art. Standing at the front, I became aware of this person standing next to me, swaying and strutting. I kept watch on him, and was not surprised when he got up on stage, sharing Joe Strummer&rsquo;s mike, and threatened the students who were busy showering the Clash with beer glasses. His threat was blunt and to the point: &lsquo;c&rsquo;mon cunt and I&rsquo;ll do ya&rsquo;. It is this brutal earthiness that characterises Sid&rsquo;s verbal pronouncements &ndash; before his persona and the drugs took him over. In the summer of 1977, he gave an excoriating interview to Fred and Judy Vermorel: &lsquo;I think that largely they&rsquo;re scum and they make me physically sick, the general public. They are scum&rsquo;.By that time, he had become a Sex Pistol. The selection had been made not so much on musical ability &ndash; although Sid could play Ramonic bass lines well enough &ndash; but on his persona and his friendship with John Lydon. He looked like a Sex Pistol and, as the other three members of the group began to withdraw from all the media attention, he began to take centre stage.His slow and wracked downfall was conducted in public. Part of Sid&rsquo;s problem &ndash; which is also the reason for his iconic status &ndash; is that he followed a bad idea all the way. He was in love with the New York punk ethos than ran from the Velvets to Lou Reed to the New York Dolls and then Richard Hell and the Ramones: that&rsquo;s where Nancy Spungeon and the hard drugs came from.The photographer Roberta Bayley befriended him during the Sex Pistols&rsquo; January 1978 tour of the US, when Sid was going cold turkey. The climactic show of the tour occurred at San Antonio in Texas, when the band played under a hail of material thrown by the local rednecks: Sid took up the challenge, and clubbed a sample member of the audience with his bass.As far as Sid was concerned, he was the only one of the band who had stood up to the cowboys. He was the true Sex Pistol. But the expectation of his name was all too much. &lsquo;I was sitting with him at the soundcheck,&rsquo; Bayley remembers; &lsquo;He said &ldquo;I wanna be like Iggy and die before I&rsquo;m thirty,&rdquo; and I said: &ldquo;Sid, Iggy is over thirty and he&rsquo;s still alive, you got the story wrong&rsquo;.A week later, the Sex Pistols broke up and Sid was in Jamaica Hospital after an overdose on his flight from LA. He was all alone, and reflective when Bayley called him up: &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve got six months to live&rsquo;, he tells her. &lsquo;Oh well don&rsquo;t drink. You asshole&rsquo;. &lsquo;I&rsquo;ll end up burning myself out&rsquo;. &lsquo;But what will you do if you go back to London? The same thing?&rsquo; &lsquo;Yeah, I probably will die in six months actually&rsquo;.Sid&rsquo;s self-destruction cast him as an archetypal Romantic hero and the embodiment of London Punk&rsquo;s headlong, heedless momentum that in 1978 was on the point of burn-out just as it was becoming mainstream pop. After John Lydon abdicated, so Sid became the singer: fronting on &ldquo;My Way&rdquo; and the group&rsquo;s two best sellers of the 1970&rsquo;s, &ldquo;Somethin&rsquo; Else&rdquo; and &ldquo;C&rsquo;Mon Everybody&rdquo;.These Eddie Cochran covers recast Sid as the archetypal &lsquo;Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die&rsquo; rock hero. This had been one of McLaren&rsquo;s names for the shop at 430 Kings Road, and the Sex Pistols&rsquo; manager remained in love with the nihilistic, primal drive of fifties rock&rsquo;n roll. As filmed in &ldquo;My Way&rdquo;, Sid was the young gunslinger, the fanatical assassin out to murder a world.There was a human being under this: one who did not have much of a chance. The most disturbing moment in &ldquo;My Way&rdquo; comes when Sid shoots a middle-aged woman: the idea was that this was not only a representative of the hated hippie generation, but also Sid&rsquo;s mother, Anne Beverley &ndash; the woman who bought the heroin that would kill him in February 1979.In the Vermorels&rsquo; interview, Sid locked into one of his characteristic rants: &lsquo;Grown-ups have just got no intelligence at all. As soon as somebody stops being a kid, they stop being aware. And it doesn&rsquo;t matter how old you are. You can be 99 and still be a kid. And as long as you&rsquo;re a kid you&rsquo;re aware and you know what&rsquo;s happening. But as soon as you &ldquo;grow up&rdquo;&hellip;.&rsquo;Sid never grew up. In all his spectacular crash and burn, there was not much that was not the action of a child. This concentration on child-like awareness had, ironically, been one of the hallmarks of the hippies, and had &ndash; in the hands of leading exponents John Lennon (&ldquo;Strawberry Fields Forever&rdquo;) and Syd Barrett (&ldquo;Mathilda Mother&rdquo;) had been just as redolent of emotional damage.But then Sid also did it to himself. He bought the script, much of which was already a clich&eacute; by the time that he was living it. How wearing was that New York junkie style, that blind sense of Rock &rsquo;n' Roll entitlement &ndash; with the black clothes, leather trousers, and sunglasses after dark. You&rsquo;d avoid those people on the street, not because they were dangerous, but because they were boring.Even so, there was something in Sid that made the script all his own, that transcended his self-destruction. In his thuggish poses and rebarbative discourse, Sid now announces himself as a particular kind of English archetype &ndash; the stylised, intelligent hooligan whose sarcasm flays the established, the bourgeois and the boring, who tells a truth that this country never wants to hear.

In every generation there are the brave ones: the artists, stylists, intellectuals, the street kids who heedlessly launch themselves into the future, who refuse to be trapped by what is known. Within this small group, there is always a figure who doesn’t necessarily produce very much, if anything at all, but whose whole presence defines his or her time and place.

Sid Vicious

In a TIME cover article of August 1960 Ernesto (&ldquo;Che&rdquo;) Guevara, was described as the &ldquo;Brain&rdquo; behind Castro&rsquo;s Cuba. Whilst Castro was the &ldquo;heart, soul, voice and bearded visage&rdquo;, and his Brother Raul was the &ldquo;fist that holds the revolution&rsquo;s dagger&rdquo;, Ernesto took control of the countries ideological and fiscal policies, although in a particularly maverick way. Whilst recent artistic projects, not to mention notable biographies, have sought to put the brain back behind the floating iconic face, it may still seem peculiar to hear Che described first and foremost as a brain, with Castro taking the place of the visage. Furthermore, the TIME front cover of the 8th August 1960 jars with our contemporary imagination. The Che pictured in realistic shades and hues is not the Che of Alberto &lsquo;Korda&rsquo; Diaz&rsquo;s ubiquitous photograph; not the statuesque Che, staring enigmatically off into the distance, not forever young, melting into the mane of his hair and beard as a crown of thorns or a halo, but smiling, engaged and ruggedly lined. TIME, however, did prefigure the objectifying of Che, with the all attendant problems for historical truth, by remarking that he is &ldquo;the most fascinating, and the most dangerous of the triumvirate&rdquo; and that his smile has a power that &ldquo;women find devastating.&rdquo; In the same issue of TIME, there is piece on Marilyn Monroe as she prepared for &ldquo;The Misfits&rdquo;, directed by her husband Arthur Miller. The piece poignantly points to cracks appearing in Monroe&rsquo;s fa&ccedil;ade. She is painted as a neurotic figure who reflects the character she is playing, Roslyn, as a &ldquo;fractured, manhandled woman.&rdquo; Monroe was found dead almost exactly two years later, &ldquo;The Misfits&rdquo; being her last film. &ldquo;Che Guevara was the Marilyn Monroe of Marxism, an empty receptacle for fantasy&rdquo; writes Jonathan Jones in his review of Gavin Turk&rsquo;s 2001 post-Beuysian teach-in, &ldquo;The Che Gavara Story&rdquo; [sic]. This seems an easy association, one which we can accept without flinching. Yes, Hollywood&rsquo;s tragic heroine of Che&rsquo;s hated America and Cuba&rsquo;s martyred hero seem to be part of the same breath. And yet it is only their emptiness which is the same. It is only the remarkable similarity of their magnitude as ciphers that makes this connection so easy. Beyond this they are, of course, complete opposites. It is one thing above all that makes the Marilyn/Che comparison so natural, and that is their reduction to a single image; Warhol&rsquo;s image. Within the course of &lsquo;The Gavara Story&rsquo;, Jones reports, the question was raised as to why Warhol never &ldquo;did depict Che&rdquo;. Jones recalls that in fact Warhol had depicted Che, in his 1965 film The Life of Juanita Castro, but not as the Che of Warholian silhouette that we all know. We may in fact be forgiven for thinking that Warhol had in fact depicted Che in typical multicoloured silhouetted fashion. Trisha Ziff has tried to establish the origin of the famous &lsquo;faked&rsquo; &lsquo;Warhol Che&rsquo; and traces the authorship of the image to former Warhol assistant and star of many a Warhol iconic portrait himself, Gerard Malanga. Of course the notion of authorship in Warhol&rsquo;s silkscreens is ambiguous and debatable and Warhol allegedly claimed the series as his own after Malagna&rsquo;s appeal for help following the discovery of the forgery. We may wonder as to why Warhol had not produced an iconic image of Che himself. As Jones&rsquo; opening assertion suggests it would appear to have been an obvious choice. Perhaps Che had not captured Warhol&rsquo;s imagination, perhaps, as the campery of Juanita Castro would suggest, Che did not possess the compellingly deep one-dimensionality that Warhol usually sought, or perhaps he simply had not got around to it before the forgery and other similar versions had appeared. Forgery or no forgery, Warhol had already made an image of Che; for all images that appear on t-shirts, the icon of the Korda photograph, the Jim Fitzpatrick posters, the &ldquo;devastating&rdquo; Hollywood smile, could all be said to be Warhol&rsquo;s in a crucial way.When Jim Fitzpartick made possibly the most famous silhouette of Che using Korda&rsquo;s &ldquo;Guerrillero Heroico&rdquo; in 1967 there was no mistaking the presence of Warhol. Warhol, as a signifier for repetitious celebrity, as an embodiment of one-dimensional contemporary iconography came before and after the flowing of Fitzpatrick&rsquo;s icon into contemporary consciousness. Although those dependent on the art market might like to dispute it, Warhol&rsquo;s signature was not so much a moment of artistic authoring, but a statement about celebrity and value itself. The content of the signature as repeated, as the image of Che or Monroe repeated, existed in the act of repetition itself rather than its particular signification. The proliferation of a Warhol image enacted its death with the morbidity which occurs with the uncanny fascination of recall and distancing. The attention to the particular and the generic which exists within a Warhol series is like that which makes the familiar strange, like a word or name repeated without context until the tongue becomes awkward around it. The morose nature of repetition leads, arguably to the limit event of Warhol&rsquo;s &ldquo;Death in America&rdquo;, series. Hal Foster asserts, in his essay titled after the series, that;&ldquo;Somehow in these repetitions, then, several contradictory things occur at the same time: a waning away of traumatic significance and an opening out to it, a defending against traumatic affect and a producing of it.&rdquo;In the waning of the traumatic, Foster is referring to Warhol&rsquo;s own remarks about the diminishing effect of the &ldquo;gruesome&rdquo; when viewed &ldquo;over and over again.&rdquo; However, Foster also perceives these sites of repetitious unpleasantness to be instances of &lsquo;traumatic realism&rsquo; &ndash; a reenactment of the death depicted in the horror of the semelfactive seeing again and again. Such a trauma is reminiscent of the film ending of Graham Greene&rsquo;s &ldquo;Brighton Rock&rdquo; in which Rose goes to play a recording of Pinky&rsquo;s voice to console her after his death, only to hear a partial truth as the record hits a scratch and repeatedly jumps with static rupture saying &lsquo;I love you&rsquo;. Similarly, the protagonists of Warhol&rsquo;s portraits become forever frozen in a permanently repeated death with the question of salvation or damnation deferred. A viewer of &ldquo;Brighton Rock&rdquo; is forced to relive a trauma both numbed and accentuated by the dramatic irony of the situation; we know that if the record were to play Rose would not hear Pinky say how much he loves her but would instead hear him tell her &ldquo;I hate you, you little slut&rdquo;. The initial horror of the dramatic realisation, as the record is played and the abrupt relief of the jumping needle, both softens the feared finality of the death of the illusion and at the same time deepens the trauma by continually reminding us of the emptiness of the words embedded in Rose&rsquo;s mind. Similarly, the banality of Warhol&rsquo;s repetitive and softened, &lsquo;Hollywood&rsquo; endings are in themselves traumatic instances. A singular image of Monroe as colourful clown could have been seen as a celebration, or at least a monument to mourn, multiple Monroes (proliferating forever more at grotesque rate of speed) become a yawning sorrowful emptiness, a morose stuck record. As Hannah Charlston says in her introduction to the catalogue which accompanied the V&amp;A&rsquo;s exhibition &ldquo;Che Guevara: Revolutionary and Icon&rdquo;, &ldquo;The story of the Che image is in part the story of the growth of visual literacy.&rdquo; Whether or not Che was a good man or a bad man, a hero or a psychopath, the trauma which is repeated in the proliferation of the image through a continual reordering of the linguistic, denoted and connoted, as Barthes might suggest, results in a deadening loss of aura and history. The multiple instances of Che&rsquo;s reworking in poster form, by activists (on all sides), admen, artists, designers, becomes an essay in contemporary textual fracturing. Following on from Barthes, the retelling of Che as image may indeed be best understood as a symptom of our visual literacy, our ability to digest and read all as textual mirror.Discussing Che as icon is becoming as clich&eacute;d as the image itself. If one wants to discuss the rabid force of commercialisation, the ubiquity of celebrity, the reduction of the revolutionary spirit to image, then &lsquo;Che&rsquo;, via Korda, via Fitzpatrik, via Warhol, is too exemplary to ignore. As we attempt to move forward heroically, tragically, romantically, pathetically, tragically, comically, then we may easily find ourselves picturing ourselves as Guevara, in Elvis stance, through Warhol, as an act of trauma magnified; three one-dimensionalities compounding our own.

In a TIME cover article of August 1960 Ernesto (“Che”) Guevara, was described as the “Brain” behind Castro’s Cuba. Whilst Castro was the “heart, soul, voice and bearded visage”, and his Brother Raul was the “fist that holds the revolution’s dagger”, Ernesto took control of the countries ideological and fiscal policies, although in a particularly maverick way.

Guevara In Art

&ldquo;This work I call a looking glass In which each fool shall see an ass&hellip; Whoever sees with open eyes Cannot regard himself as wise For he shall see upon reflection That humans teem with imperfection&rdquo;Sebastian Brant &ldquo;The Ship of Fools&rdquo; 1494Who is the fool? In the tarot pack, he is shown as a figure setting out on a journey, with a bundle on his back and a little dog tugging at his ragged clothes. Sometimes he is about to step off a cliff. The dog, symbol of social domesticity, is trying to drag him back home. But is the fool making a mistake, or taking a leap of faith? Is he actually wise? Verbal and visual genealogies of the fool link him with other figures &ndash; the beggar, the madman, the mascot, the scapegoat, the seer, the poet. Many of these figures intersect with Romantic images of the creative artist: the inspired outsider, at once absurd and magnificent. So, among other things, the fool is an artist, and the artist is a fool.As a historical figure, the court fool is a parasite, a professional dinner guest. In Ancient Greece, parasitos was originally a dignifed term, applied to someone invited to official banquets because of his personal merits. It soon became debased, a word for a flatterer, a wit, someone who would use his talent for clowning, mimcry or telling jokes in return for a free meal. The fool is an entertainer, sitting at table with the nobility, his position privileged but precarious. He must never be ordinary, never dull. The artist sits at table next to the collector, then goes back to his underheated studio. The fool has a very special position at court, or the gallery dinner. He is &lsquo;all-licensed&rsquo;, empowered to say and do things others wouldn&rsquo;t dare. Sometimes he is a wise fool, cleverly telling truths under the guise of wit. He may also be a &lsquo;natural&rsquo;, a dwarf or a cripple or a moron. His physical or mental deficiencies place him outside the normal social system, depriving him of both rights and responsibilities. The fool speaks truth to power, but since he is dressed in motley, a caperer in cap and bells, no one is obliged to listen. &ldquo;This is nothing, fool&rdquo; says Kent in King Lear, and the fool knows as much. His words can be ignored if they are too near the mark. &ldquo;Then tis like the breath of an unfeed lawyer,&rdquo; he quips. &ldquo;You give me nothing for it.&rdquo; No one need draw his sword: there&rsquo;s no honour in avenging the fool&rsquo;s insults.Above all, the fool is the only one who can insult the king. His jokes lay bare how the regime functions &ndash; the political regime of power, the aesthetic and economic regimes of value, the epistemological regime of meaning. Only through the fool&rsquo;s clowning is the regime made visible to itself. The king needs the fool, for he is surrounded by sycophants. Yet however wise he is, the fool must never mistake himself for someone influential, who can wield power like ordinary men. This was the error of Archibald Armstrong, court fool to James I. Armstrong went as far as travelling as part of a royal embassy to Spain, where an off-colour quip to the Infanta about the sinking of the Spanish Armada undermined months of careful negotiation. Nevertheless, he thought of himself as a masterful diplomat, signing himself paradoxically &lsquo;youre best foole of State&rsquo; in a letter to his royal master. His talent for making enemies finally tripped him up when he insulted the Archbishop of Canterbury and was permanently banished from court.Armstrong tried (and occasionally succeeded) in bridging the gap between foolery and political power, never accepting their essential opposition: if the fool is taken seriously, he will be hanged for his insolence. To be a fool is to be homo sacer, an exile from the Law. In the formulation of Giorgio Agamben, the ordinary person has two types or levels of life, basic biological existence (zo&euml;) and political or social life (bios). The fool is denied bios, the life of the subject or the citizen. He has no status, no rights or responsibilities, only bare life. What he does has no significance. Nor what is done to him. This is why, as Erasmus says in In Praise of Folly, &ldquo;the most violent tyrants put up with their clowns and fools, though these often make them the butt of open insults&rdquo;. Since the fool is homo sacer, under a state of exception from the Law (the Law of courtly honour, of social propriety), he is a living demonstration of the sovereign&rsquo;s power to give the Law, to enforce it or suspend it at his pleasure. So the fool is related to several figures from our contemporary period of permanent emergency - the stateless person, the untouchable, the unlawful combatant, the concentration camp inmate, the mental patient, the refugee. All live under the same suspension of the Law, isolated from social and political existence.Though, he is only a &ldquo;poor, bare forked animal&rdquo;, sometimes the fool can be a king. In his role as the Lord of Misrule he is, as Mikhail Bakhtin puts it, &ldquo;the constant accredited representation of the carnival spirit in everyday life&rdquo; For Bakhtin, &ldquo;Carnival celebrates temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marks the suspension of all heirarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions. Carnival [is] the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It [is] hostile to all that [is] immortalised and completed.&rdquo; The fool is productively disruptive. He just won&rsquo;t let things be. At the feast of fools, the slave is master, women are men, excrement replaces incense at the ritual and the dignified clergy are paraded about the streets in carts. The fool inverts the king, and during the period of his carnival rule, the iron network of moral, physical and social law feels temporarily as light as air. The powerful art collector becomes a puppet. The heroic artist is a tramp. The great names of the past are no more than waxworks.If the fool is an artist and the artist is a fool, that was never more true than now, after conceptualism. The Romantic artist struggles with the raw material of the world, transmuting it into art through the heroic operation of his genius. The conceptual fool reduces this to absurdity, by eschewing the noble work of transmutation. He may claim an everyday object as art. He may utilise comically humble materials or use noble ones to fashion humble things. He may reproduce an artwork that already exists. He may reduce his art to the simplest artistic gesture of all, that of signing his own name. So Duchamp is a fool. Warhol is a fool. Foolish Piero Manzoni says shit is gold. Beuys is a fool, though often he forgets. People get angry at this motley crew of artists, who say art can be made of repetition, boredom, or banality. Artists should be hacking away at a block of marble, not sleeping late and getting drunk on promotional beer. Art should involve craft. Craft should involve skill, difficulty. Conceptualism makes craft look foolish &ndash; mere dexterity, juggling. &ldquo;When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools.&rdquo; This is Lear&rsquo;s realisation, the truth that bawling babies know and adults forget as we get caught up in the serious mummery of our social and cultural lives. Only the fool-artist still knows the truth, and we carry him about in an international charivari, the pope of piffle, the sultan of senselessness. The artworld (the very term is a carnivalesque inversion of the real world) is a veritable ship of fools &ndash; gallerists and curators and collectors and writers and artists all stroking their long velvety asses ears, taking the fool seriously, buying his golden shit. No accident that Brant&rsquo;s medieval poem was first published in Basel. What could be more ridiculous than the consensual hallucination of artistic value? Hey nonny!

“This work I call a looking glassIn which each fool shall see an ass…Whoever sees with open eyesCannot regard himself as wiseFor he shall see upon reflectionThat humans teem with imperfection”Sebastian Brant “The Ship of Fools” 1494

The Fool

&ldquo;Starting today you are a brand. You're every bit as much a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop. To start thinking like your own favourite brand manager, ask yourself the same question the brand managers at Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop ask themselves: What is it that my product or service does that makes it different?&hellip;Take the time to write down your answer. And then take the time to read it. Several times.&rdquo; - Tom Peters, &ldquo;The Brand Called You&rdquo; in Fast Company, Issue 10As a culture, it sometimes seems that we value the image of people more than we value people themselves. In response to this, we are inundated with frameworks for &ldquo;identity management&rdquo;, self-help advice, and the language of personal branding, while the concepts of success and status in the modern era have increasingly become inextricably dependent on the image we create of ourselves. Wealth and power are predicated on a well-honed &lsquo;brand-you&rsquo; to use the unsettling language of management guru Tom Peters.Beginning with the Enlightenment cult of the personality, which saw characters such as Lord Byron come to personify an early notion of celebrity, as new technologies breakdown the barrier between the public and private, the concept of personality as brand which can be edited and shaped to suit the image of ourselves we&rsquo;d like to project has pervaded our culture and consciousness to the point where we are so accustomed to it that we have appropriated it into our common vernacular, applied it to ourselves and the people around us, and in some cases elevated it to the supreme arbiter of success. Regardless of inclination or occupation, our collective merit system awards on the basis of fabricated personas rather than authenticity of self. A number of myths have arisen around the notion of Brand You which seek both to justify and celebrate it as a rational and pragmatic response to a fast paced, attention-scare mediated world, where the power of the image is supreme. Think you are immune to Brand You? Think again. Myth One: We are all brandsThis first assumption is the most perilous. Defining our individual personalities, complexities, and nuances in the simplistic language of branding is not only a misapplication of the definition of brands ; it is a distortion of our identities. The key distinction between brands and personalities is that brands are built top-down; they are collectively decided upon by brand-managers, their values are considered and measured by committees, they are formalized in board rooms and ad agency sofas over cappuccinos and over-priced catering. Personalities are created bottom-up. We are products of our unique histories, our experiences, our relationships, our geographies, our circumstances, our genetics, our world-views. We lose the organic nature of our identity when we inverse the natural order of how we come to be.One only needs to look at the plethora of social networking sites to see the extent of our manufactured identities. A generation of youth have internalized the lessons of &lsquo;brand-me&rsquo; and rigorously apply them to these &lsquo;identity incubators&rsquo;. They are thinking about, manipulating, and editing who they are and what image they want to portray before they register their first digital profile.The great irony in the common (mis)application of brands to personalities is that while individuals stamp out the genuine and natural elements of their identities, brands are desperately trying to become more like humans in order to create stronger emotional bonds. Brands have been humanized, empathized, and personified in the hopes we will choose them over their less human rivals. They have evolved from the old-school notion of the &lsquo;unique-selling proposition&rsquo; towards a more complex, multi-dimensional narrative. As brands become more like humans, humans have tried to become more like brands &ndash; self-edited, pruned, hyper self-aware &ndash; resulting in shallow identities that are often not even as interesting or nuanced as the brands contrived in marketing laboratories. Myth Two: Personality brands help us navigate within societyIn extolling the virtues of personality brands, we are taught to believe that clearly delineated identities not only help us determine who we are; they are sign-posts for the outside world to know what we represent. In practice, when we consciously fabricate our identities, in a social arena of other pre-fabricated identities, we collectively reduce our interpersonal relationships to commoditised transactions. The people we spend our time with, who we are seen with, whose pictures occupy the precious real-estate of our social networking profiles, are vetted not by our genuine, altruistic desires for friendship, but the symbolism they emit to the outside world.The other inherent fallacy is our belief that we determine decisions about our identity in complete isolation. This forgoes a fundamental truth of identity: we are formed not for people but because of people. Our identities do not exist independently of concomitant actors in a social world, but because of exposure, interaction, and interdependence.The transactional nature of relationships and the artificial belief in our independently created identities corrodes our intentions towards each other. We relegate treasured relationships to curated accessories that either hinder or augment our personas. Once we start treating each other like joint ventures in a branding exercise, we start denigrating the very edifice of human relations.Myth Three: Creating personality brands differentiates usIn the collective race to find the thin layer of identity that represents us, we are constantly barraged with the same stimuli. What is considered aspirational in one social circle is the result of cues and cultural reference points targeted by the media to that very audience. Paradoxically, as we forge our brands, our identities look strikingly similar to the person next to us. The clairvoyant investment banker, the billionaire real estate mogul, the aspiring hip hop artist, the stay-at-home mom turned novelist are all reinforcing their archetypes (or more accurately, stereotypes) rather than differentiating themselves from the mould. When everyone is applying the same aesthetic strategies, with the same props, affected by the same trends, in hopes of appealing to the same audience, we homogenise the personalities that should be the source of creative variety in our culture. Even the dissidents of our counter-cultures have veered away from their once idealized purpose of subverting the mainstream; they evaluate their success by the cultivation of their brands, their commercial prowess, and their popular legitimacy.As our mavericks are muted, the rest of us look around at our generic brands and find ever more novel ways to stand out. Our increasing exasperation leaves us feeling alienated and ineffectual, as we replace our identities for attention-seeking stunts, distinct idiosyncrasies, and peculiar behaviours that will have us remembered by others, but forgotten by ourselves. What must be done? Does it even matter?As language philosophy suggests, the words we use to articulate our world are reflections of our societal values, and they propagate those values in a powerful way. As Wittgenstein famously remarked, &ldquo;Like everything metaphysical, the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.&rdquo; The words we use determine our behaviour and ultimately culture. We cannot talk about identities as brands without reducing our behaviour to brand mimicry.The creative industries that play a formative role in culture creation, in defining the grammar of language &ndash; from art to journalism to advertising to entertainment &ndash; are co-authors in staking out our collective values. They can help champion a return to embrace what&rsquo;s beneath the social veneer. But there is also an onus on us as individuals, as consumers, as identity-generators, to become conscious again of how we come to be. We must recognize that who we are is a result of the communities we are a part of. And the quality of those communities is a direct result of our contribution. There is a fluidity and flux, a give-and-take, that defines our social fabric. The narcissism of brand-me must give way to a broader social purpose. There is no easy way out of our current situation. The idiom of brands as personality is well entrenched. However, we can start to question the values it dictates &ndash; we can foster a consciousness of the effect of fabricated identities and the misapplication of branding to personalities. After all, recognition can be the strongest form of rebellion.

“Starting today you are a brand. You're every bit as much a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop. To start thinking like your own favourite brand manager, ask yourself the same question the brand managers at Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop ask themselves: What is it that my product or service does that makes it different?…Take the time to write down your answer. And then take the time to read it. Several times.”- Tom Peters, “The Brand Called You” in Fast Company, Issue 10

Brand You

One might imagine that as Joseph Conrad typed together the character of Mr Kurtz at the back end of the 1800&rsquo;s he had no notion that his equatorial phantom, the diseased and mythic antagonist of what would become his best known book, would survive and even thrive as one of the great enigmatic figures of all time. But I like to think he knew what he was doing; that he had seen enough of human nature and the colonial process to understand precisely how our species&rsquo; instincts would unfold and repeat themselves over the coming century. And from that knowledge he forged a character whose fall from optimism into fevered anarchy could survive a hundred years of academic study and even the great mutating lens of Hollywood and continue to beguile. I think he knew that we had lived in fear of Kurtz-within us and without us-long before his book was begun, and he knew that fear would abide. For those without the inclination to navigate the 96 pages of Conrad&rsquo;s Heart Of Darkness the abiding image of Kurtz will be that of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now; skulking in the shadows to hide his own obesity rather than from any cinematic intention, transported from Conrad&rsquo;s Congo to Coppola&rsquo;s Vietnam but muttering the same last lines about &ldquo;the horror&hellip;&rdquo; in the face of a civilising mission gone wrong. But while the movie begins and ends in Asia the book opens on the Thames estuary where its narrator, Marlow, invokes Drake, the Romans and anyone else who ever sailed past the Essex marshes in pursuit of foreign goals, it is a story that from its outset is rooted in antiquity, greed and the persistence of pain. As the sun sets over England Marlow tells his shipmates the tale of his voyage along the Congo as a kind of ghost story, one that led him the spectre of the man his mission set out to relieve, and one that concludes in literal and figurative darkness. Marlow explains how he went to Africa to work for &ldquo;the company,&rdquo; whose colonial endeavours seem to represent the process of civilization itself, a process Conrad paints as futile and insane. Everything Marlow sees points toward chaos. An armoured gunboat fires artillery into the jungle at invisible enemies; a man tries to extinguish a fire with a hole in his bucket; everybody lies, everybody gets sick. Their attempts to tame the jungle with bureaucracy for profit drive the company men to murder. &ldquo;When one has to make correct entries, one comes to hate these savages, hate them to death.&rdquo; But at the end of the river waits the rumour of a man who sees things differently, Kurtz. Kurtz is &ldquo;a prodigy,&rdquo; &ldquo;an emissary of pity, science and progress.&rdquo; Most importantly though, Kurtz gets results for the company, &ldquo;he had stolen more ivory than all the agents put together.&rdquo; Marlow, a good guy-but a pragmatist is surprised to discover that Kurtz had set out, &ldquo;with moral ideas of some sort,&rdquo; and wonders what this Renaissance figure could have done that the company might want stopped? In the end Marlow doesn&rsquo;t get to see the enigma in action, but he gets an eyeful of the aftermath. Kurtz comes to him on his hands and knees, &ldquo;not much heavier than a child.&rdquo; Kurtz&rsquo;s station has dissolved into anarchy, decorated with severed human heads and great bales of ivory patrolled by a native army, loyal to the ailing Kurtz, who seems to have gone insane. Having threatened to kill Kurtz it is Marlow who nurses him and protects him from the company, &ldquo;that imbecile crowd,&rdquo; who seek only to extinguish the man, assimilate his profits and press on.Marlow assures his audience that Kurtz, &ldquo;was a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk.&rdquo; By the time we meet him though he has nothing left to say, a shattered optimist run wild and destroyed by experience. It is a Russian adventurer who fills in Marlow the details of Kurtz in his prime before he too abandons the scene. He speaks of a reader of poetry, a painter, a visionary who had tamed the wilderness, at least for a moment, until it bit back like a snake un-charmed. As he watches Kurtz die Marlow takes possession of his most telling artefact, a report he has written for, &ldquo;The International Society For The Suppression Of Savage Customs.&rdquo; Seventeen pages long, the document is all positive prognoses for the company project, &ldquo;we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,&rdquo; and applied insights set out in neat handwriting until, at a later date, it&rsquo;s author scrawls across it his ultimate conclusion, &ldquo;exterminate all the brutes.&rdquo; &ldquo;His mind was clear,&rdquo; says Marlow, &ldquo;but his soul was mad,&rdquo; yet he offers a less lyrical analysis as well. He suggests that Kurtz&rsquo;s intellect became subordinate to his greed, that he suffered from, &ldquo;images and wealth and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble and lofty expression,&rdquo; although that could also be Conrad discussing his own dilemmas as a writer, it&rsquo;s still a valid point. For all his abilities and aspirations, Kurtz is just another dictator undone. He might be a resonant character but in the end though Kurtz is a just a symptom, an example of what can and will go wrong, the product of an environment that exceeds the imaginations of those who try to tame it. The jungle itself, and what it represents are the real enigmas of the story as it calls the characters &ldquo;to the profound darkness of its heart.&rdquo; Conrad&rsquo;s tale hints at a malign wisdom at the core of life that mocks the living. Marlow even berates his audience when he thinks they&rsquo;re missing the point, &ldquo;the inner truth is hidden&hellip;I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks, just as it watches you.&rdquo; The notion of Kurtz as colonial metaphor still has resonance, but if you look for instance at the occupation of Iraq you can see how potentially Kurtzian figures in the American military-people who might have spoken the language, grasped the culture and gathered popular support before it all went wrong-were overlooked, replaced and overruled by feral bureaucrats from back home. This is Kurtz&rsquo;s fate in the end as well. The company men dismiss his ivory as inferior product and with a gift for euphemism any modern speechwriter would recognize they assess that, &ldquo;he did not see the time was right for vigourous action&hellip;the methods are unsound.&rdquo; This is why invading countries means never having to say you&rsquo;re sorry-if you&rsquo;re quick enough to replace and blame the people who prepared the ground. Never mind the fact that you employed them in the first place, the beat goes on. You might find comparison too in the demise of frontline capitalism, see Kurtz as a mad accountant, surrounded by the wreckage of his fantasy, apologised for by the same legislators that encouraged him to be all he could be. We will all know better next time perhaps. Except, as Conrad continues to inform us, we probably won&rsquo;t. In an ending that could stand alone as a master class in modern fiction Marlow tells how he had taken Kurtz&rsquo;s widow a painting he had entrusted to him, but when she asks him for her husband&rsquo;s last words, he hides the truth, &ldquo;the horror, the horror&hellip;&rdquo; and says instead, &ldquo;The last word he pronounced was, you name.&rdquo; And so while one character at least is spared acquaintance with heart of Kurtz&rsquo;s darkness, more than a century since its completion we cannot read the book, or even watch the news and say the same. Follow Michael Holden @thewrongwriter thewrongwriter

One might imagine that as Joseph Conrad typed together the character of Mr Kurtz at the back end of the 1800’s he had no notion that his equatorial phantom, the diseased and mythic antagonist of what would become his best known book, would survive and even thrive as one of the great enigmatic figures of all time. But I like to think he knew what he was doing; that he had seen enough of human nature and the colonial process to understand precisely how our species’ instincts would unfold and repeat themselves over the coming century.

Kurtz Text

I only ever saw one performance by Gavin Turk. He came on stage and shat a string of sausages to the sound of Scary Monsters. Of course every exhibition private view is a strained performance by everyone present. In After Theory Terry Eagleton writes about our increasingly self-conscious performance of temporary selves. How we now accept a loosely connected relationship to whatever self it is we're supposed to be performing, as opposed to a previous era of modernity when more repressed and un-self-knowing types suffered endless traumatic shocks from the realisation that a persona is precisely not a real self. Artists who performed an artist-role in the past include Marcel Duchamp and a lot of European figures whose names I can't remember; one I never know what the sex is: you see those photos of her or him all the time, from the 1920s. Claude Calhoun? Then there's Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein and Marcel Broodhauers: the mythic Euro-proto-conceptual-art figures that Gavin often invokes. The last one died of stomach cancer; having been a great gourmet he couldn't enjoy eating anything at all for a long period before he finally caved in. Both Manzoni and Klein died very young, barely thirty; Klein from a freak heart attack, Manzoni the same, caused by over eating. Manzoni signed boiled eggs with his thumb. He signed cans of his own excrement. &quot;Excellent!&quot; he said -- &quot;I think I&rsquo;ll call it Artist's Shit!&quot; Every artistic self-portrait is a performance of a certain kind, obviously not a profound one: the profundity is in the achievement of the work as a work, on its own terms, more than in the success or failure of the performance as such. But a Rembrandt self-portrait is always a kind of staging of the profession of &quot;artist&quot; -- what do they do? Their job is to look. You're very aware of how light falls in his Self-portrait at Age 63 in the National Gallery, and how forms relate: those are the key skills for a painter in those days. When he dresses up it's to elevate the status of the skills: they deserve a bit of grandiosity he's saying. He dressed up in his period of commercial success more than in his period of commercial decline. We believe he gets more honest but it's more that he gets older. The description of a face aging is moving, and so is the incredible skill with which it's done.When Duchamp performs for photos, whether it's by Man Ray or whoever it was, so the photo is an artwork about a shifting sense of self, it's not to tell you what an artist is but to tell you something about how meaning works. When Gerhard Richter tells you about meaning in photos by painting a photo so that it has the allure of a photograph but is obviously only a painting, Richter himself remains this rather boring character which he is in real life. When Duchamp is photographed as a woman the whole idea of Duchamp as a figure becomes intimidating, impressive. He makes all these intuitive moves. It's surprising how lo-tech his whole act is, how little there is to it, how scruffy his objects are, how anyone could have done them. They're all about staging some kind of inroad that meaning makes into art, with the figure of The Artist like some constant slightly disturbing dream you wake up from, anxious that there's something you ought to remember. The message is about changing conditions in society, mass production, industry, the different ways in which art is now spot-lit, ritualised and celebrated. Light is cast onto art so it can cast light on everything else. How did we used to see it? In a court or a cathedral or a private chapel, then in the Salon, and then in salons organised by literary lesbians and rich Russians and so on, and now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but before that in some store room prior to the Armoury Show: &quot;Hey there's a urinal.&quot; &quot;Chuck it out!&quot; &quot;OK.&quot; Obviously Matthew Barney's imagery is great. It's the filmic timing that's wrong, the lumbering, non-Rembrandt blind grandiosity. It's A Knockout giants with ginger beards crossing the sea endlessly to Orkney; dressed-up poseurs taking far too long to pretend to be sperm. How are you supposed to respond? A black and white photo of Manzoni signing an egg with his thumbprint: now that's show business! What kind of a figure should an artist be? Many of the YBAs have had a stab at this problem, the top ones perhaps with the least success in Duchampian terms: that is, instead of interrogating meaning they keep trying to make themselves seem like Arthur Rimbaud. Someone shrieking on Big Brother is the same as Tracey Emin shrieking outside Munch&rsquo;s house, there&rsquo;s no difference at all in depth of feeling. (She made a film in 1999 of herself nude screaming on a wooden jetty outside Munch&rsquo;s summer house, called Homage to Edvard Munch and all my dead children.) Someone getting depressed on Big Brother is the same as Emin being depressed. But unlike them she produces a lot of slogans about it &ndash; You forgot to kiss my soul &ndash; My cunt is wet with fear &ndash; Every part of me is bleeding - Exorcism of the last painting I ever made -- and sometimes makes them into needlework: the depression still isn&rsquo;t interesting but the pleasure of the art object is. When these slogans or sound bytes are made into neon signs like Nauman&rsquo;s, or videos like Acconci&rsquo;s, or driftwood sculptures like arte povera or little gouaches or oil paintings by any art-world Me-Too striver, it&rsquo;s possible to feel impressed by the confidence but at the same time completely unengaged emotionally. The artist's real unmade bed transposed from the private space of the bedroom to the public space of the gallery, but otherwise untransformed. What is it? A manufactured saintly relic: the great power it memorialises or stands for is St Pain, St Class, St Gender, St Femininity, St Abjection and St Ethnicity (English mother, Turkish father) and of course St Victim. Her devil muses are Drunk, Raped and Can&rsquo;t Spell. The popular audience receives all this simply as glamour &ndash; simplicity is pretty powerful. For this audience (as expressed in a sublime moment in Spinal Tap when the band&rsquo;s manager tries to sum up ideology) the operating notion when it comes to loving Emin is that we live in a sexy world or maybe a sexist one, and art like hers exists on some kind of edgy interface between the two. In a book of interviews Damien Hirst and the writer Gordon Burn perform a kind of authenticity act, each outdoing the other in macho talk. &quot;Grr&quot; is the basic sound all the way through. &quot;Fucking fuck!&quot; &quot;I fucking thought fuck that!&quot; &quot;Yeah fuck that fuck.&quot; &quot;Death fuck.&quot; The design follows the rough fuckiness of the apparently coke-fuelled fake frenzy of honesty. The illustrations are grainy and look like they might have just fallen on the page with a load of post-it notes. (Album covers used to sometimes stage this look). This method-acting of meaning -- the combination of shouting out impulsive imitations of truth for hour after hour because you're so fucking crazy that finesse or politeness is just fucking bullshit for phonies, with illustrations of artworks that aren't arranged in a coldly glossy way like advertising but have a calculated designer wonky graininess instead -- is different to the feel of Hirst's actual work, which is always factory finessed, and is in fact very like advertising. As if cold distance, a total lack of anything meaning anything, occasionally needs a bit of direct raw meaning in the picture so you can see more clearly what the meaning of true meaninglessness really is.

I only ever saw one performance by Gavin Turk. He came on stage and shat a string of sausages to the sound of Scary Monsters. Of course every exhibition private view is a strained performance by everyone present. In After Theory Terry Eagleton writes about our increasingly self-conscious performance of temporary selves.

Scary Monsters Performing

In Gavin Turk&rsquo;s &ldquo;Pop&rdquo;, the artist is cast as Sid Vicious via Warhol&rsquo;s &ldquo;Elvis&rdquo;. While Warhol sourced a still from the 1960 film &ldquo;Flaming Star&rdquo; for his silk-screened multiples, Turk reproduces Sid&rsquo;s most iconic moment: the filmed performance of &ldquo;My Way&rdquo;, 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&rsquo;s images in their various forms: doubled, tripled, colour, black and white are prime exam-ples of Pop Art, while Sid Vicious&rsquo; 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&rsquo;s high Sixties Factory. Many of the musicians and fans were Velvet Underground obsessives who had followed Lou Reed through 1970&rsquo;s hits like &ldquo;Walk On The Wild Side&rdquo; into his later, more self-destructive &ldquo;Rock&rsquo;n Roll Animal&rdquo; 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. &lsquo;You wanna ruin me in the magazine,&rsquo; Johnny Rotten sung in his anti-media tract &ldquo;I Wanna Be Me&rdquo;; &lsquo;you wanna cover us in margarine&rsquo;. 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: &lsquo;now is the time to realise,&rsquo; Rotten exhorted; &lsquo;to have real eyes&rsquo;. Hence all the groups with names like the Adverts and Magazine, hence songs like &ldquo;EMI&rdquo;, Subway Sect&rsquo;s &ldquo;Nobody&rsquo;s Scared&rdquo;, and the Slits&rsquo; brilliant &ldquo;FM&rdquo;. Both the Factory and early Punk exhibited a blistering, amphetamine derived hostility. Think of Mary Woronov as Hanoi Hannah in &ldquo;The Chelsea Girls&rdquo; as she assaults Ingrid Superstar and Pepper with a non-stop: &lsquo;shut up shut up SHUT UP&rsquo; 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 &ndash; nofuturenofeelingsnofun &ndash; 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: &ldquo;Brass Tracks&rdquo;. Apart from valuable footage of the early Manches-ter scene, the programme is remarkable for the array of adults &ndash; preachers, councillors, journalists, almost every kind of adult au-thority figure &ndash; condemning these animals. Punk is disgusting, worthless and indicative of a sick society.The actual punks &ndash; Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks, Alan Deaves of the Worst, and Electric Circus amazon Denise &ndash; 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&rsquo;t know what you&rsquo;re talking about; you&rsquo;ve been pro-grammed by the media; we&rsquo;re not the problem, you are.Behind the blank fa&ccedil;ade, 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;ve got something, bring it to the table.Hence the proliferation of fanzines and punk groups. Participation was the key: &lsquo;I wanna destroy the passerby&rsquo;. 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 &ndash; soma for the masses. &lsquo;Everybody&rsquo;s sitting round watching television&rsquo;, Joe Strummer howled on &ldquo;London&rsquo;s Burning&rdquo;. 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 &ndash; 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 &ndash; the postwar Social contract &ndash; and that something new and malign was waiting in the wings. Britain&rsquo;s fascist party, the National Front, was making electoral gains, while Mrs. Thatcher&rsquo;s Conservatives prepared for power.The whole dysfunction between national image and reality was dramatised by the Sex Pistols &ldquo;God Save The Queen&rdquo; in June 1977. With almost no support &ndash; certainly not from the radical left-wing - the group stood on their hind legs and laid bare the lie behind the pomp: &lsquo;England&rsquo;s dreaming&rsquo;. 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 &ndash; 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&rsquo; &ldquo;The Wild Boys&rdquo; mixed with Orwell&rsquo;s &ldquo;1984&rdquo; &ndash; the year manically apotheosised by the Clash in their song &ldquo;1977&rdquo;. And yet, in the blasted inner urban spaces &ndash; when not blocked off by serried ranks of police &ndash; there was freedom.Occurring just before the massive regeneration programme that began in the 1980&rsquo;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.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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s peak performance of &ldquo;My Way&rdquo; 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 &ndash;whom he shoots in the ultimate act of punk media loathing &ndash; and himself.In this instance, the twinning of Sid with Elvis doesn&rsquo;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&rsquo; final overdose, Punk Rock is, like Gavin Turk&rsquo;s &ldquo;Pop&rdquo;, 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 &ndash; 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 &ldquo;Pop&rdquo; was part of a show &ndash; Saatchi&rsquo;s &ldquo;Sen-sation&rdquo; &ndash; 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 &ndash; perhaps Sid Vicious the most. People do not want too much cultural reality, but for the true artist &ndash; or numinous performer &ndash; there is no choice but dive deep into the collective subconscious.

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.

Punk

Eggs incarnate pure balance. Their harmonious simplicity of form is only rendered more poignant by their function: they hold and protect life. The strength of the shell that harbours the makings of a living creature is all the more impressive because although it can withstand surprising levels of pressure &ndash; the egg of the ostrich is reputed to support up to 20 stone &ndash; it can not resist the impact of a drop or a knock. Once the ovoid shape has been cracked by an external force, the life it was meant to protect no longer exists. Once it is broken from the inside, this life begins. Although the shell itself is made of minerals, essentially calcium, and can sometimes have the rough texture of a stone, it also has thousands of pores through which oxygen can get to the embryo. The nurturing virtues of the egg have carried over to various cultural beliefs. Although eggs are most often perceived as tokens of affection, exchanged as an expression of love by the Alsatians or used to announce the forthcoming birth of a child by the Chinese, they are sometimes destroyed as a form of protection. Indeed, the Romans crushed their shells in their plate to ward off evil. Many other cultures have later adopted the tradition in the belief that witches could use intact shells as boats on which to navigate at sea in order to sink other vessels. Art appropriates the egg as a material for painting (egg tempera) as well as a basic form that conveys certain ideas of femininity, maternity and protection. When I was a child, my father was given a bronze sculpture of a giant egg which is in fact a self-portrait by Salvador Dali. Indeed, the egg is cracked and through this fissure sprouts a twisted lock of hair, the infamous moustache and an eye of the artist, forever struggling to hatch. Symbolising both birth and inspiration, this work uses the egg as an emblematic origin for the artist and his genius. It is no coincidence that a number of mythical characters originated from eggs. Legend has it that Castor and Pollux, the sons of Leda and Zeus came into the world out of eggs. Rather fittingly, the birth of Eros, God of Love, is sometimes spectacularly described as a hatching: &ldquo;Of Darkness an egg, from the whirlwind conceived, Was laid by the sable plumed Night. And out of that egg, as the seasons revolved, Sprang Love, the entrancing, the bright, Love brilliant and bold, with his pinions of gold, Like a whirlwind, refulgent and sparkling.&rdquo; (Aristophanes, The Birds)The egg itself is most often an unassuming, familiar object but it can sometimes aspire to the status of work of art when it is decorated. Of course, the Easter egg painstakingly adorned with wax and vegetable dyes is perhaps the most familiar version but it comes as no surprise that the Romanov Russian imperial family established an upscale take on this tradition during the nineteenth century. The obscenely precious jewelled eggs that Carl Faberg&eacute; fabricated for them to exchange on special occasions might not have concealed a life but certainly held a wealth of surprises: clocks, jewellery and miniature replicas of palaces. Although eggs are usually rather modest symbols, the Faberg&eacute; egg highlights their wondrous side: that out of such a modest and simple thing can spring the most precious and mysterious gift, whether is a jewel, inspiration or life itself.

Eggs incarnate pure balance. Their harmonious simplicity of form is only rendered more poignant by their function: they hold and protect life. The strength of the shell that harbours the makings of a living creature is all the more impressive because although it can withstand surprising levels of pressure – the egg of the ostrich is reputed to support up to 20 stone – it can not resist the impact of a drop or a knock. Once the ovoid shape has been cracked by an external force, the life it was meant to protect no longer exists.

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 &ldquo;Gavin Turk, Sculptor, worked here 1989 &ndash; 1991&rdquo;. 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ndash; melons, burnt matches and two pence coins &ndash; 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, &ldquo;Waiting For Gavo&rdquo;.A playful, anarchist mischief-maker, in 1998 Gavin turned up to the private view of Saatchi&rsquo;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 &ndash; the &ldquo;starving artist&rdquo; thrown amongst rich collectors, Daniel to the lions &ndash; in a move that caused as much embarrassment as it did entertainment, his newspaper stuff shoes and piss-stained trousers (the artist&rsquo;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&hellip;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 &ndash; a joke on the viewer, bringing into question both perspective and perception and the by presenting something that is not. Yet behind it&rsquo;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 &ldquo;if (only) the doors of perception were cleansed&rdquo; for then, &ldquo;man would see everything as it is; infinite.&rdquo;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 &ldquo;beyond&rdquo;, 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 &ldquo;indestructible other&rdquo; 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&hellip;Eggs recurs again and again in Gavin&rsquo;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 &ndash; 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 &ndash; it is not really a question of either/or, real or fake but both/and &ndash; 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 &ldquo;noumenal&rdquo; reality outside of us.Hence Turk&rsquo;s interest in trompe l&rsquo;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 &ldquo;wooden&rdquo; melons or private views where all the exhibits are shrouded, Christo-style, in cloth or presenting himself camouflaged as Warhol or as Warhol&rsquo;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&rsquo;s affinity with punk belongs a bigger narrative &ndash; the narrative of the revolutionary, the outsider, the lunatic, the scapegoat, the artist as martyr, offered to the world as the sacrificial &ldquo;Other&rdquo; in order to simultaneously remind us of our own inner rebel, while reassuring us of our safe position &ldquo;inside&rdquo;. Here, it is not his own death that Turk enacts but that of revolutionary icons, Che Guevara and David&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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, &ldquo;Gavin Turk was here&rdquo;, it reads. Authorship is all, it implies. Only who is the artist? Who is Gavin Turk? And besides, Stain 1992 isn&rsquo;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 &ldquo;parergon&rdquo; or &ldquo;parasite&rdquo; upon the work, which in Greek is &ldquo;ergon&rdquo;. 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&rsquo;s &ldquo;signature&rdquo; is his repetition of works by other artists. Even his artist signature is not his &ldquo;real&rdquo; one. Acknowledging the tenuous and fluid nature of identity, Gavin&rsquo;s work expresses the idea that we frame things but that we are also framed by things. &ldquo;A Portrait Of Something I&rsquo;ll Probably Never Really See&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;sees&rdquo; is that he cannot see himself in all his totality. What he sees is that representation is necessarily false. And this, Gavin&rsquo;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&hellip; and yet, there is that niggling, parasitical &ldquo;probably&rdquo;. . .Derrida described this invisibility at the heart of seeing as an &ldquo;aporia&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s cat, both dead and alive, chicken and egg, real and unreal both at the same time.

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.

Which Came First? 

In the immediate wake of 9/11, Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan hastily declared an end to The Celebrity Culture. His polemical wager centred on the dawn of a new age of serious thinking. It cut directly against the grain of tabloid thinking and effectively signed his own newspaper death-knell, as The Mirror&rsquo;s sales fell directly into freefall. Ignore The Celebrity Culture at your peril. Celebrate it with caution. Attempt to defy it and you will hastily become enveloped by its Faustian embrace. Seven years after declaring its end, with an irony arch enough to drive a double-decker bus under, Piers Morgan is a central figure in Britain&rsquo;s Celebrity Culture. He makes his living mostly as a judge on The Celebrity Culture&rsquo;s favourite medium, reality TV shows, and interviewing celebrities for a glossy magazine. Soon he will consolidate his own niche in The Celebrity Culture, replete with the requisite spray tan and teeth whitening signifiers, by hosting a chat show in which one self-made Celebrity of the age will talk to others. His brassy soundbite, so potent in the eye of international tragedy, meant nothing after all.At the risk of glibness, just as the words were dropping out of the Editor&rsquo;s mouth, 9/11 was confirming temporary celebrity status on previously unfound icons. The good. The Mayor of New York, the Head of The Fire Department, individuals showing previously unseen displays of bravery and heroism. And the darkest celebrity of them all: &lsquo;the baddie&rsquo;. Bin Laden&rsquo;s celebrity was such that a distant relative of his became a momentary newspaper obsession herself in the UK two years later, simply on the strength of sharing his surname. The Celebrity Culture endeavours to keep a moral temperature between good and bad, but as it twists through the national psyche &ndash; encompassing such unlikely candidates as &lsquo;The Canoe Wife&rsquo; who hid her husbands identity from her children, the lapdancer who the comedian informed her grandfather he had fucked live on national radio, the nurse who dated the TV presenter on a rape trial, a multiplicity of footballer&rsquo;s spouses and a pantheon of young folk for whom fame constitutes a dream in itself &ndash; it bestows its arbitrary 15 minutes with slapdash abandon. The Celebrity Culture was not about to go down in the aftermath of the fall of the Twin Towers. It had already acquired too much personal significance for a nation that had bought into the idea of the self as brand. It had begun developing its own serious agenda, becoming at once synonymous with the idea of personal identity and community empathy. (Go on. Start an argument in the pub. Say the words &lsquo;Victoria Beckham.&rsquo; Everybody cares, one way or another). The Celebrity Culture satisfies a deeper need for a narrative we can all share, a story in which reward for the good and judgement for the bad becomes modern folklore. These stories of the most public beacons of our age frame the moral temperament of the nation. They are stories of redemption and absolution. They satisfy age-old hopes that justice will be done and that the good guy will get the girl and eventually save the world. In this way, there is an argument for the case that The Celebrity Culture is the most honest arbiter of the time we live in. The psyche has become a modern instrument to be mastered. Playing it and shaping it is its own talent. Those living in the bookmarks between reality and celebrity have become living works of art. We can point at them and adjudicate ourselves against them. One of the most fun aspects of a Celebrity Culture that embraces not just the extraordinary but the ordinary in extraordinary circumstances is that we can measure how we might behave in a similar predicament. The Celebrity Culture as it stands is embodied in a South London dental hygienist that became one of the most recognisable names in the country after three months of public vilification in the Big Brother house, a subsequent turnaround, a further public shaming and redemption through illness. She is the first woman that has lived her entire adult life and may well die in the full public glare. Even her name feels weirdly symbolic or ironic, depending on the public&rsquo;s mood towards her at any given moment, as if to prove that &lsquo;Reality&rsquo; and &lsquo;Celebrity&rsquo; have conspired to become the Dickensian fable of our times. Start a fully blown pub fight. Say the words &lsquo;Jade Goody&rsquo;. Everyone cares, for better and for worse. A graph point somewhere between &lsquo;Celebrity&rsquo; and &lsquo;Reality&rsquo;, not yet named, has become the esoteric watchword of our era. The Celebrity Culture itself has replaced The Fairy Tale as the modern day fabulisation of moral and social codes. Heat, OK!, Hello and the daily coverage of The Celebrity Culture&rsquo;s superstars in the tabloids and beyond act as its very own Hans Christian Anderson.One of the most recognisable Fairytale narratives is that of &lsquo;rags-to-riches&rsquo;. But the pot of gold at the end of the modern rainbow is not only about money, however much the deification of cold and charismatic businessmen Alan Sugar, Roman Abromavich and Simon Cowell might suggest otherwise. In a fractured social state, validity is reached through remuneration &lt;and&gt; recognition. A side order of both remains The Celebrity Culture&rsquo;s holy grail. The glamour model Katie Price, or Jordan in her Fairy Tale Princess guise, has become the most significant beacon of the acquisitive modern urge for both. The reason young girls look up to her more than other icons of her generation is a complicated combination of business acumen, show-and-tell shamelessness, an implicit understanding of the demands of her epoch and simply fulfilling the affably sexual, game-lass role in culture that calls to mind anyone from Diana Dors to Samantha Fox &ndash; those Fairytale princesses of yore, both beacons of an older, more innocent incarnation of The Celebrity Culture. Within Jordan&rsquo;s and Goody&rsquo;s stories and with all the Princesses that try their hand at living this year&rsquo;s model of the Fairytale, a democratisation of Celebrity has taken place. In an age where the self has become the centre and mass communication fulfils the grand Warholian prophesy to the letter, Fame has become something that is no longer about People Like Them. It is about People Like Us. Public recognition has become about personal recognition. The cycle completes itself. Fame for everyone and everyone for fame. If there is an element of narcissism in not wanting Celebrities to be elevated and choosing to take them Just Like Us, then it is counterbalanced by the needling reality that it presents hope for everyone. And who doesn&rsquo;t really want that?The Celebrity Culture has now delivered its own hard-edged appeal. A collective game of good vs evil has emerged within it. So Fairytale! Sorry to hark back, but no-one quite fulfils these age-old tales with more tenacity and slyly intuitive public exuberance than Mrs Beckham. Her transformation from pock-marked, flat-haired, unremarkable Spice Girl to aerodynamic fashion plate has been a stealthy Ugly Duckling anecdote for our times. And there was her handsome Prince, waiting patiently and compliantly, to conduct her down the aisle in a chariot of gold, paid for in an unprecedented deal by The Celebrity Culture&rsquo;s favourite magazine. Before long her happily-ever-after is interrupted by Rebecca Loos, who instantly slips into the role of the dragon that needs to be slain by the withering, icy disapproval of the public. In The Celebrity Age silence has become the most potent weapon of choice against interrogation. It has invested the blonde model, the graffiti artist and the author of her generation with their own modern superpower. So Mrs Beckham follows the lead of Moss, Banksy and Rowling and keeps schtum on her husbands infidelity, styling out the impasse with a gravity that is both distinctly old fashioned and uniquely modern. Letting us be the judge. Clever girl. In an age of transparency, where every aspect of the art of living has its price, to be auctioned off in an insane Sotheby&rsquo;s of the psyche, silence is the only tool left to keep a myth in tact and protect a fantasy of living the perfect life. At the other end there is the serial confessor. Tracey Emin has removed any sense of enigma or mystery about her life by revealing it down to every last artful detail. In The Celebrity Culture, the public has chosen the role of priest in the confessional. We still await Amy, Britney and Kerry to say their rosaries. To lend Mrs Beckham&rsquo;s Fairytale ending a strange intertextual twist, Loos&rsquo; final public dressing down after public rejection was delivered by another formerly betrayed wife (Sharon Osbourne) who had entered the public faculty and The Celebrity Culture by way of a reality TV show (The Osbournes), on a reality TV talent contest (Celebrity X Factor) in which &lsquo;real&rsquo; celebrities imitated the motives of the &lsquo;hopeful&rsquo; celebrities of Saturday night light entertainment. Did the whole hall of mirrors come crashing down after this? Of course not. It simply ripped up another chapter of The Modern Book of Fairytales and started over the process of replication, this time with another footballer, Ashley Cole, and another rags-to-riches reality Princess, Cheryl Cole, feeding the public need to cast villains and victims and deify the righteous. Is modern day Celebrity any worse than Fairytales of old in presenting unrealistic ideals? Or is it just a more complicated variant of the same? No matter how much a Celebrity chooses to control their own myth, no matter how much they shroud it in mystery or unknave themselves completely for public consumption, the judgement is left to the moral hordes. Who stays and who goes? We decide. The Celebrity Culture is just a filter, a storytelling exercise, a picture book to turn the pages of and come to conclusions about the deep seated sense of right and wrong, good and bad, that has always been passed down from generation to generation in one form or another. Same as it ever was. So rest assured. Night, night and God bless. Good, in the end, will always triumph over evil.

In the immediate wake of 9/11, Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan hastily declared an end to The Celebrity Culture. His polemical wager centred on the dawn of a new age of serious thinking. It cut directly against the grain of tabloid thinking and effectively signed his own newspaper death-knell, as The Mirror’s sales fell directly into freefall.

Celebrity

The allegory of Plato&rsquo;s Cave, as told by the Greek philosopher in The Republic (approx 360 BC) goes right to the heart of human existence by seeking to answer the question: what is truth? The story of the philosopher-poet-king&rsquo;s ascent from the ignorant pit of humanity to the sun, followed by his subsequent return to share the knowledge, it deals with ideas about consciousness, perception, perspective, representation and truth and has influenced thought in philosophy, psychology, art, sociology, science and education.The story begins with a cave in which man is imprisoned. His neck and legs are chained in a way that he cannot move while he can only see what is before him. Behind the chained prisoners, a fire burns providing a degree of light with which they are able to see. On a shelf in the cave between the prisoners and the fire, a series of marionettes in the shape of animals and plants are moved by an unseen carrier. The shadows of the marionettes are cast by the fire onto the wall directly ahead of the prisoners in order to create a series of moving images in the manner of a primitive cinema. Unable to see anything else, the prisoners take these shadows for real and play games naming them as they appear on the wall, judging each other on their speed and skill in identification. They also believe the echoes from the unseen carriers to be the speech of the shadows. A rare prisoner manages to break from his chains. Standing up and turning around, he is able to see past the fire and the puppets to an opening in the cave, through which he can glimpse the sun. Accustomed to darkness and shadows, the released man finds the experience painful. But despite this, he is compelled to climb out of the cave towards the light. His journey is a difficult and tortuous one but the prisoner would rather suffer it than remain in the misery of the cave. Coming into the sunlight outside the cave, he is able to see plants and animals as they really are and understands that what he had formerly taken to be real as mere shadows of representations. Finally turning directly towards the sun, the prisoner perceives the sun as the ultimate giver of life and enters into a state of total understanding.Once enlightened, he can&rsquo;t help but return to the cave to free his fellow inmates. However some resist enlightenment and taunt the returned prisoner because, having become so used to sunlight, he performs badly at the game of identifying shapes. Not only that, but the other prisoners threaten to punish anyone who attempts the ascent with death. Central to the allegory of the cave, is Plato&rsquo;s belief that an absolute truth which exists outside of man underlies all things, with the sun as a metaphor for Good and man&rsquo;s ascent, a rigorous philosophical and intellectual journey to enlightenment. An undemocratic elitist, Plato held this journey to be a laborious and difficult one, which only philosophers, poets or kings were capable of. The completion of this journey, in turn would qualify them to be leaders of men. Wrote Plato in The Republic: &ldquo;But whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world.&rdquo;At the heart of Plato&rsquo;s allegory is his belief that art is a false illusion and artists, myth makers who obfuscate the truth. Instead, truth is to be revealed through open-minded reasoning which Plato explores through his Theory of Forms. According to this theory, we don&rsquo;t understand a circle by looking a wheel but, like Pythagoras and Euclid, by thinking about the ideal circle. In just the same way a geometer imagines the true form of the circle, therefore a philosopher might imagine the true form of Good which is timeless and impervious to subjective interpretation or change.The allegory of the cave went on to influence Ren&eacute;e Descartes, who, like Plato, believed the senses to be misleading and who rationalised his existence with the proposal &ldquo;I think therefore I am.&rdquo; However, the Empiricist thought of John Locke and David Hume, on the other hand rejected the allegory of the cave by supposing that some (or all) knowledge does comes from the senses. Christianity has taken Plato&rsquo;s Cave as a metaphor for Christian truth, with God as the sun and moral authority given to those who have seen The Light. As mere mortals, the true mystery of God will never be fully revealed to us but we are able to see &ldquo;through a glass darkly.&rdquo;The Romantics &ndash; notably Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake &ndash; chose to interpret Plato&rsquo;s Cave as a visionary approach not to any Heavenly kingdom but to this. In this light, art does not obfuscate, it illuminates while eternity is revealed not through any abstract Platonic ideal but the infinity of &ldquo;a grain of sand&rdquo;, instead.In the 21st Century, where increasingly we experience the real through the prism of TV, the modern relevance of the cave can be taken as an allegory not so much for deception by art as deception by the media. &ldquo;Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato&rsquo;s Cave, still revelling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth,&rdquo; wrote Susan Sontag in &ldquo;On Photography&rdquo; of the gap between the photographic enterprise and understanding the real. &ldquo;Photography,&rdquo; she went on to say, &ldquo;Implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks.&rdquo; Further Reading&ldquo;The Republic&rdquo; Plato, &ldquo;Essence of Truth: On Plato&rsquo;s Parable Of The Cave&rdquo; Martin Heidegger, &ldquo;On Photography&rdquo; Susan Sontag, &ldquo;Consciousness Explained&rdquo; Daniel Dennett

The allegory of Plato’s Cave, as told by the Greek philosopher in The Republic (approx 360 BC) goes right to the heart of human existence by seeking to answer the question: what is truth? The story of the philosopher-poet-king’s ascent from the ignorant pit of humanity to the sun, followed by his subsequent return to share the knowledge, it deals with ideas about consciousness, perception, perspective, representation and truth and has influenced thought in philosophy, psychology, art, sociology, science and education.

Plato's Cave

Everyone is familiar with the image of the writer or artist confronted with blank page or canvas. We see it on TV, at the movies, in comics or in magazines. When we read a description of the particularity of the experience, we might identify with it or we might not. Sometimes the emphasis is on a preconception and sometimes on a void: there&rsquo;s a difference between having a clear image of exactly what one wants to create and being stuck at the moment of materialising it and just knowing one wants to create but not having any idea of what. Both of these suppose the encounter with the blank page, but isn&rsquo;t this blankness itself something that involves a complex process of creation? Is a page with nothing on it a blank page from the start?Blankness, like silence, needs to be created. You might enjoy the silence of your garden every morning until one day you notice that it isn&rsquo;t silent in the same way anymore: the birds have suddenly stopped twittering. The silence you feel now has a weight to it, created by the absence of birdsong. In other words, it&rsquo;s the noise that creates the silence, that frames it. To take another example, you might be pleased to spend the day at a spa where mobiles are banned and there&rsquo;s only a vague background hum of New Age music. But what would happen if when you checked in, the receptionist just stared at you and said nothing? The absence of noise at the spa wouldn&rsquo;t be silence, but the receptionist&rsquo;s non-response would be. Isn&rsquo;t the blankness of the blank page quite similar?It only becomes blank at the moment we feel the weight of an expectation to fill it, to put something there. It&rsquo;s the expectation that creates the blankness. This means that the same blank sheet of paper will only become a blank sheet of paper at a certain moment in one&rsquo;s life. Perhaps it will then stay blank forever, perhaps not. But the moment that it becomes blank will be specific and unique to each of us. For some, the accent is perhaps less on expectation than on necessity. Paul Klee would find it impossible not to draw, covering any available surface from menus to newspaper borders with configurations of lines. Klee explained that he felt looked at from all sides: even on his trips to the country, he said, &ldquo;it was not I who looked at the forest, since the trees were looking at me&rdquo;. This feeling of being submerged, of being invaded, was why he had to make marks. They protected him from an intrusive and enigmatic presence. With such high stakes, the page, for Klee, could not stay blank.We often make marks at moments when we feel overwhelmed. This goes beyond the idea that we make narratives to protect ourselves from trauma. It is less about making meaning than about making an inscription, less about making stories than about making marks. Something can be fixed or arrested by making a mark, as we see, for example, in the feeling of relief sometimes experienced by self-harmers after they have made a cut in their body surface. This could be seen as a form of discharge, but a better term might be barrier or limit. Isn&rsquo;t the crucial moment in the act of inscription, after all, the moment when one ends a line or mark or brushstroke? This is less an art of representing than an art of stopping.Sometimes, it can be the very blankness of a page that needs stopping. The page itself becomes a conduit for an anxiety that has its source somewhere else. The blankness calls us like a siren: say something, write something, do something. This solicitation requires us to represent ourselves, yet representing always involves a loss. We can never represent ourselves perfectly, only inadequately and incompletely, and this margin of loss can both bind us to the blank page and inhibit us to go further. Whatever we do will not be enough, so we remain at the edge of what seems like an abyss. Writers sometimes speak here of how they feel taunted by the blank page. And yet without this blankness, how can a creation emerge?Gavin Turk&rsquo;s blue plaque provided an elegant solution to this apparent impasse. Instead of displaying works that would necessarily fail to represent their maker, he simply indexed the fact that works had been made. That way, no one could judge whether the works had done their job or not. Naturally, this solution was a transitory one, as the association of the plaque with renown opened up a thread that the artist followed with some tenacity: his later works explored iconic images and what it would mean to inhabit them.The parsimony of the RCA installation of course raised the question of the missing works. Where were they? How could the artist conjure himself out of representing himself? What was there to interpret? This coalescence of blankness and creation brings into focus nicely the main psychoanalytic approaches to making. Analysts tend to fall into two camps here. Those who believe that we create from our phantasies, unconscious scenarios that mould and shape what we produce, and those who emphasise less such unconscious templates than their absence. For them, it is precisely the points at which our phantasies fail us from which the work of creation springs. Where we are unable to explain to ourselves key questions such as birth, death and sexuality, we create works in the place of the missing solutions. This would explain why classical psychoanalytic readings of literary and artistic works seem so reductive: they put the emphasis on phantasy and meaning rather than the experience of a hole.Again, the stakes can be quite high at this point. Confronted with a hole, we can make something out of it or we can jump into it. And can&rsquo;t the blank page be both the substance and the metaphor of these options?

Everyone is familiar with the image of the writer or artist confronted with blank page or canvas. We see it on TV, at the movies, in comics or in magazines. When we read a description of the particularity of the experience, we might identify with it or we might not. Sometimes the emphasis is on a preconception and sometimes on a void: there’s a difference between having a clear image of exactly what one wants to create and being stuck at the moment of materialising it and just knowing one wants to create but not having any idea of what.

The Blank Page

At six o’clock on a cool evening at the 53rd Venice Biennale in the Gervasuti Foundation, sixty neo-classical clay busts stood upon plinths in regimented rows. The effect, through uniform repetition, was that of an army of heads, eyes unblinking, expression fixed. The busts and their number were facts. In the solid realm of physical reality, they could be seen and counted. This much was certain. 
 
<a href="/files/2022-08/708.pdf">Read the full essay</a>

At six o’clock on a cool evening at the 53rd Venice Biennale in the Gervasuti Foundation, sixty neo-classical clay busts stood upon plinths in regimented rows. The effect, through uniform repetition, was that of an army of heads, eyes unblinking, expression fixed. The busts and their number were facts. In the solid realm of physical reality, they could be seen and counted. This much was certain. Read the full essay

CAVE DRAWINGS Gavin Turk2 Nov 22

Dear Theseus… yours faithfully, AriadnePaul Millett, Fellow Emeritius in Classics at Downing College, Cambridge14 Sep 22

An Ariadne for CambridgePrerona Prasad14 Sep 22

Interview - Gavin Turk in conversation with Louisa BuckLouisa Buck 14 Sep 22

Ariadne, again and againCharlotte Higgins14 Sep 22

In Search of Ariadne – A PrefaceDeborah Curtis14 Sep 22

Ben Okri, KERZE, 2022 Ben Okri 1 Jan 22

Floating in Custard, a conversation betweenSarah Lucas and Gavin Turk18 Jan 19

Gavin Turk, POP, POP & POPMatthew Collings 6 Jun 16

Test Article Museum VitrinesMartineE Rouleau1 Jan 15

Sue Le Dandysme Aujourd'huiRocio Gracia, Sergio Rubira and Martadela Torriente1 Dec 10

The EndMatthew Collings1 Jun 08

The Union JackDmitri Galitzine1 Jun 08

Redundancy of SymbolismCharlie Porter1 Jun 08

Masks or How To Be A DandySebastian Horsley1 Jun 07

The Myth of Zeuxis and ParrhasiusRikke Hansen1 Jun 07

Waste Not Want Not Ben Cranfield1 Jun 06

Museum VitrinesMartine Rouleau1 Jun 05

Gavin Turk Is Not A Common ThiefMatt Mason1 Jun 05

Chewing GumDixe Wills1 Jun 05

Polystyrene CupsMartine Rouleau1 Jun 05

Chip Trays And Chip ForksDixe Wills1 Jun 05

Kicked Out (after “Pile” by Gavin Turk)James Flint1 Jun 04

SouvenirTony Marcus1 Jun 03

This Is Not A Story About The MilitaryHardy Blechman1 Jun 03

Trompe L'oeilRikke Hansen1 Jun 03

The OutsiderAmber Trentham1 Jun 00

Sid ViciousJon Savage1 Jun 99

Guevara In ArtBen Cranfield1 Jun 99

The FoolHari Kunzru1 Jun 98

Brand YouAlnoor Ladha1 Jun 97

Kurtz TextMichael Holden1 Jun 94

Scary Monsters PerformingMatthew Collings1 Jun 94

PunkJon Savage1 Jun 93

EggsMartine Rouleau 1 Jun 93

Which Came First? Rachel Newsome1 Jun 91

CelebrityPaul Flynn1 Jun 91

Plato's CaveRachel Newsome1 Jun 91

The Blank PageDarian Leader1 Jun 91

These Deformed Clay BustsGavin Turk16 Mar 91