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

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? 

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

CelebrityPaul Flynn1 Jun 91

Plato's CaveRachel Newsome1 Jun 91

Which Came First? Rachel Newsome1 Jun 91

The Blank PageDarian Leader1 Jun 91

These Deformed Clay BustsGavin Turk16 Mar 91