Your 15 Minutes Are Over: Gavin Turk "White Elephant" At Sean Kelly Gallery.

"Wasted space is any space that has art in it."
Andy Warhol







Gavin Turk, the english post-pop art monger, is in New York these days for a very late first solo at Sean Kelly Gallery, entitled "White Elephant".

Remember him ? You may remember his participation in the worldwide famous Sensation exhibit, when he presented his wax replicate of himself as Sid Vicious in a Warholian Elvis pause, called "Pop", a sculpture from 1993 that was already the summary of his career, which revolves around attacking some loose ends of modernism, notably the notion of originality as a criteria of value for art.


In other words, and this is why I admire this artist very much, a lot of his works
function more like "replies" to previous artists's works, or styles, rather than art standing as immediately recognizeable as his.

The major issue at hand is a re-valuation of the object, against its own concept, since that concept lost of its value for being "re-hashed" as it is, under Turk's hands. Or does it? This is the question left to answer: what is the precise value, be it artistic or monetary, of a work of art made by Gavin Turk ? The artist will soon trick you on your own wish to debase his art.


The Sean Kelly exhibit presents a few works from his recent series that already made the press in Europa last year.


The first, I don't know if it has a name ("golden thread"?), but you could call it an april's fool series, are his casts of thrash, where he transforms the most mundane and banal objects into highly desireable icons, mostly made of bronze, that is than painted to make sure that the final product ressembles the original object ("abject") as close as possible. Now that would mean, very close, because I swear some of these "clones" are practically seamless, unless you know that they are Turk sculptures.


Here are presented the already famous "Pile (2004)", which consists in the ultimate pop extremism of reconfiguring a bunch of garbage bags into a slick bronze sculpture, a work that with "Pop" probably constitute the opposite edges of his carreer: identity of a work of art and its intrinsic value.

"Pile" is probably the last nailed attempt at replying to Duchamp's readymade, and certainly an occasion to consider the opinion of those convinced that a great majority of contemporary art is thrash. What is you want ? Your big monument for a park ? Turk lends it to you. What could encompass better every ends of humanity than garbage bags offered in a deluxe format?

Following from "Pile" (an intriguing form for a bronze, for those who wish to read it from an abstract horizon), we get to the next "ready-made", which is "Box" (2002), which really looks like an average small box, and when you come really close to it, it actually seems more like made of ceramic rather than bronze, but whatever, still an item that evokes the usual wrapping of luxury objects, now turn into the luxury itself. Close to it are two blasted beer cans, also made of bronze, and finally, a pillow made in aluminium ("Somewhere Between Sleeping On The Streets And The Silver Clouds" (2005)), which unfortunately distracts from the corpus for sharing too much of a ressemblance with Koons (though the title re-affirms the artist's statement, and apparently nods at a work by Warhol that I'm abashingly ignorant about).

The best of these ready-mades, or rather, secondary to "Pile", was actually hidden from public view, and consisted of the most vain of tiny styrofoam glass ("Drunk And Bitten", 2005), also casted in bronze. I thought that owning it means you can actually drink out of a sculpture: that is pretty genuine !


Basically, the show could have presented a dozen more of those objects,
and it would have formulated a great case about the aura of art itself,
insisting on both the joint and dichotomy between the handmade and the readymade, the replicated and the found, the signed solennel stance of sculpture brought against art's contemporary behavior at recycling objects of poor material value.


But instead, the checklist cuts short into another series
of Turk, presenting two works from an earlier "signature" corpus,
when he focussed on presenting his signature as the work of art itself.
First, simply by writting his name in white paint over a canvas that once
enclosed a print by Andy Warhol , thus authentificating the canvas itself as his forever (though the Warhol print could be inserted anytime beneath its glazed surface), but the best work is the piece of paper directly nailed into the wall, which to me is much more of an update on Ben Vautier than the previous. Called "Metaphysical Nail" (2004), the whole power of the work lies in that urgent, even violent, gesture of the artist at claiming his space on the gallery wall. You may laugh at will that only a signature is offered as art, or you may turn upset, but the form obviously insists on being intimidating. You may rispost, but this artist ain't kidding.


Past a small work delimitating black and white contours ("Positive Negative A4" (2005)) that I didn't understand, and could really well be a replicate or a reply to some minimalist painter (or is it just some sort of ying and yang play on dividing the proportions of a standard page size?), we move to the end room where are presented the huge canvases of the artist's most recent series: "White Elephant"

"Big noizes for nothing" is a phrase that could capitulate what the expression
"white elephant" means, and by thoroughly re-appropriating pop art, the artist seems to aim at attacking it in some peculiar ways.

At first sight, you will wonder if all these canvases depicting Che Guevara ("Pink Che" (2005)), Elvis Presley ("Elvis Blue" (2005)), or Joseph Beuys ("Double Beuys" (2005)) (Beuys? Hmm... already an indication that something is not right..), are not simply from Warhol, or if the artist isn't perfectly appropriating the colored silkscreen style of this giant to explore his own pop idioms.

Well, you're halfway there, but there is a punch. And the more you look at them, the more you'll discover the trick (if like me, you never read the press release prior to watching the exhibit).

These canvases are fake, they are no pop art at all: they represent all the same person, disguised. It's all Gavin Turk! There's even a series (not shown in gallery) of Turk disguised as Warhol ("Fright Wig Purple", 2005)! (I think he left them out because it's the one where it's the most obvious that it's him).

Nothwithstanding the fact that some of these paintings (that "Yellow Diamond Elvis" (2005) ) sparkles almost like there is sandglass stuck in the painting, the room now really looks like the artist's own narcissistic temple, if you can't smoke self-indulgence, but as a relocation for pop art it couldn't be better established. "Who are all these people, anyway, that made up history at my place ?" seems to whine Turk. But by re-using Warhol's palette, the artist seem to want to extirpate contemporary art from all of its fallacies, or if indeed all of Turk's art is based on fallacy , it's one that is more apt at glancing towards an improbable truth than anything that happened in contemporary art since Ben Vautier.



Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com


(PS: Go ahead and peruse Sean Kelly Gallery's site for extra images of the work shown)


Gavin Turk: "White Elephant"
February 3 - March 5 2005
Sean Kelly Gallery
528 West 29th Street
Chelsea, New York
Tuesday - Sunday, 11am - 6 pm