Just as he draws links between himself and celebrities from the art world, which can be seen in his work “Pop”, Turk is also interested in exploring our perception of, and relationship with, less privileged members of society. With “Another Bum” he does this by putting himself in their shoes.
This piece didn’t have the glamour of “Pop”, this time Turk created himself as someone most people would avoid in the street, which I don’t see as controversial, but different. The waxwork forced people to confront their feelings of discomfort.
When I met Gavin he explained how for one night this piece of artwork was put out onto the streets to see how people would react to it as it looked so life like. He told us of how a drunkern man just having left a night club, mistaking the bronze work for a real man, kicked it. This is a perfect example of what Turk is trying to highlight the fact that people have prejudice towards what people look like or their status in society.
It was at Walsall Art gallery I met Gavin. He was on his first major solo exhibition since 1998 “copper jubilee”. He took me and the rest of my art group on a preview tour of his exhibition and also invited us all to the opening night.
As we have seen Warhol was a huge influence of Turks. It was once said that Warhol became more famous than the celebrities he depicted yet everyone he touched became bathed in a shining glow of glamour. This created great speculation in the art world and Turk is using the influence Warhol had to promote his ideas of authorship and originality.
“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintingsÉ and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”
In his “Faces” portfolio, Gavin Turk cleverly plays with Warhol’s legacy. In 1980, for example, Warhol produced prints based on his own photograph of Joseph Beuys, then the only living artist to match his celebrity status. By turning Beuys into a diamond dusted “Warhol”, the American triumphed over his German rival, undermining the seriousness of Beuys’s political commitment by presenting him as the latest celebrity image. Here Warhol suggests that the artist’s publicity image is more important than his work.
Turk has escalated this process, trumping both Warhol and Beuys along the way. In “Red Beuys” and “In Memory of Silver Beuys” he not only unashamedly mimics Warhol’s image, technique, materials and colours, he also substitutes his own face for that of Beuys. If Beuys was originally turned into a “Warhol”, now Warhol and Beuys have been turned into a “Turk”.
Unlike otherpolitical figures such as Mao,Che Guevara never featured in Warhol’s work, yet in Turk’s hands his iconic image is both Warholised and Turkified. Although this image has the look of a Warhol, the face of Guevara is actually Turk’s.
This becomes even more interesting when we note that Che has already been the target of some of Turks older work. In 2000, he displayed a waxwork of himself as the revolutionary and exhibited a billboard poster based on the same famous image.
Turk is not alone in exploring this kind of role-playing. Douglas Gordon does likewise in his 1996 photograph of himself in a blonde wig entitled “Self Portrait as Kurt Cobain, as Andy Warhol, as Myra Hindley, as Marilyn Monroe”. Austrian artist Irene Andessner’s takes this even further when she “becomes” Marlene Dietrich for a few months in 2001 and marries a Mr. Dietrich to officially change her surname!
Turk has produced a very moving and quite chilling self portrait named “portrait of something I’ll never really see”
This is the one piece of work he has done that portrays him as himself. I love this piece not only because of it’s sheer simplicity but because the title is so fitting.
Turk uses Ariadne in Nomad to examine and distort principles of perspective and, at the same time, brings the image of her sleeping figure into the twenty-first century, placing her, not in swathes of opulent drapery, but in a sleeping bag.
Just a few months after we met him Turk was said to be selling A4 prints which showed a liquorice pipe, nomad, and other images for just 10p. hundreds of prople formed an orderly queue outside the Tate Modern art gallery to pay 10p for this piece of Brit Art. When asked Turk said:
“The main point is to try to make sure lots of people can get works of art for a little amount”
This comes back to how he is interested in the way that fame and celebrity affect the understanding of art and the artists that make it.
Whilst queing for these small items of Brit Art the public got to admire one of turks most recent works Oeuvre (duck)
This was also an item in Turks Copper Jubilee tour. Oeuvre (Duck) is the third in an on-going series of giant eggs. The first of these was a hen's egg, which he made in response to being asked to design a coffin.
The egg is often interpreted as a symbol of birth and creation, but at the same time it also suggests fragility and mortality.
Turk's egg, ,in a natural open-air environment, is made comic and surreal by its sheer size. Presented on a human scale, the egg refers back to the artist as creator, and hints at the familiar conundrum 'which came first, the chicken or the egg?'. It becomes a metaphor for origin and originality
