Gavin Turk makes what I like to traditionally refer to as 'art'. And I don't mean contemporary art, or fine art, or modern art, of some definitional sense but Turk uses the tropes of 'art' (what could be historical, or fine art) and moulds and adapts it to work within his own sense of how art should be made today. Like Duchamp, there's the embedded notion in Turk's art of restyling the classical with contemporary reference. The result (for both artists, indeed any artist who can manage this successfully, and in this I count artists such as Grayson Perry) is work that is fun, engaging but actually also succeeds in saying something about how art is produced, exhibited and consumed.
For this, a show of new work by Turk at Ben Brown Fine Arts, the artist has taken as his starting point the Italian conceptualist Alighiero Boetti. Boetti, whose most famous work 'Mappa' is an embroidered map of the world with each country made from its own flag, was also Duchampian in his outlook: Believing the core of the work should be the concept rather than its execution.
Turk and his collaborators (both real and imagined, hence the industrial echoes in name of the show) have created for this exhibition a series of small tapestries, most that refer in some way to the artist himself, with others that work as a conceptual canvas to support the others. Made up mostly of embroideries, there are a number of detailed works of biro on paper, a couple of oils and - in one marvellously Duchampian ejaculation - Turk has created his own version of the fountain: A life-sized bronze depicting Turk mounted at the peak of pile of stones, raising a running hose above, and onto, his own head. How marvellous.
Gavin & Turk is at Ben Brown Fine Arts until 20 April.
