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

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.

Scary Monsters PerformingMatthew Collings1 Jun 94

Kurtz TextMichael Holden1 Jun 94