GAVIN TURK
The Negotiation of Purpose
3 June - 2 September 2007
from Tuesday to Sunday, 2 -7 pm

This exhibition by British artist Gavin Turk (b. 1967, lives and works in London) presents a wide selection of his highly varied work from the last fifteen years, ranging from waxwork portraits of himself to his recent screen printed self-portraits on canvas.

Turk is engaged in a constant investigation of what it means to be an artist. Much of his work has to do with issues of authorship, authenticity, originality and value.
At the beginning of the 90s, when Young British Artists like Damian Hirst, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas were launching themselves as cult stars, Turk set out to parody the art world’s fixation on things like the personality cult surrounding artists. It often seems as if more cultural and economic value is ascribed to the artist’s signature than to the work of art itself.
At his degree show in 1991, Turk presented a completely empty studio containing only a Beuys-type showcase displaying a blue English Heritage plaque inscribed ‘Borough of Kensington / Gavin Turk Sculptor / Worked Here 1989-1991’. The Royal College of Art was not amused and refused to give Turk his MA.

This exhibition shares its title with the sculpture, The Negotiation of Purpose (2002) in which a knife spins round and round on a tabletop as in the game of chance. For Turk, it also seems like one of those Dada or Surrealist titles for something that is like a machine. A kind of modernity that obviously never quite arrived, it just became something else, it turned into what we have now.
Gavin Turk uses quotations from the works of the Surrealists, and particularly René Magritte, because of their influence on the art of the 1960s and 70s. He does retreads of the Belgian artist’s clichés, such as the egg, or the famous Ceci n’est pas une pipe, which he converts into This is not a melon. He also evokes the experiments of these artists who were excluded from the commercial art system. Take for example Oscar (2000), a figure taken from Magritte’s so-called “vache” period, when the artist attempted to break away from his known style.
Turk also likes to repeat and vary his signature so as to parody those of famous artists, as if to question the myth of the artist as demiurge and the concepts of originality and authenticity: “does genius lie in a signature, an identifiable style, a remarkable identity? (…) I think one of the interesting things about doing this show is that people won’t know my work so maybe they’ll receive this signature for the first time, and wonder, when they see it, large across the front of a canvas, “what’s so good about this artist’s signature?” It will be a hieroglyph. I was trying to question the authority of the artist to make an artwork, to make an artwork that was valuable. Obviously I was questioning myself but I was also questioning the audience in terms of how they could develop their systems of value and what was valuable. A signed work is ostensibly more valuable than something that is not signed, but at the same time a signature on the front of a picture actually defaces it. ”
At times Gavin Turk seems virtually indistinguishable from other artists. He quotes freely from the work of major predecessors. His spectacular waxwork self-portraits, objects, photographs and screen prints offer – as it were – a tour of art history, with references to the work of Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Robert Morris, Marcel Broodthaers, Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol (to name but a few).
Font (2006) is a quotation of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), which for Turk is an emblem of art’s alchemical power to transform a banal and value-less object into a work of art. He updates Duchamp’s method by choosing to represent objects rather than displace them. He takes them from the everyday and privileges things that society likes to ignore, such as leftovers (cf. Ariadne, 2006, showing the core of an Ariane, a variety of apple created by the French agricultural research body INRA in 1979), bin liners (Pile, 2004 and Waste 2006) or a sleeping bag evoking a homeless person (Nomad, 2003). Turk often works in bronze, which is synonymous with classical sculpture and, more even than a pedestal or frame, bestows artwork status on the object. And when it is covered with paint, the identical reproduction creates a perfect illusion.
In Turk’s exhibitions elements (pedestals, frames, paint rollers, etc.) and concepts (signature, the question of reproduction, etc.) that have been theorised by artists ever since the avant-gardes of the early 20th century are juxtaposed with references to historical heroes and rebels such as Che Guevara. Is art being celebrated or depreciated here? Turk seems to oscillate between the two.