The Mews Rooms 1& 2
Curated by the The Mews Team
Sara & André and several works that the The Mews team was able to get from Gavin Turk's Shop with Gavin Turk´s Agreement.
Private View: Saturday 26th May 16h-21h
Open: Saturdays 12h-18h, 26th of May until the 9th of June or by appointment.
The act of intentional transference of an Aura associated with an other (other viewed as object not subject) is well visible in the relation between Sara & Andre's tagged line Sara & Andre Killed Gavin Turk and Gavin Turk.
The simplicity of the gesture, a sentence written on a wall, mirrors the apparatus inherent in the act of assimilation by death. A primeval action of possessing ones strength by overpowering them, by murder, by eating their heart and drinking their soul.
These consumptions, methods of exposing power over an other becomes in itself a form of originality that allows for a continuum in the production of consumables. The production of objects that borrow the something we are calling aura in this text enables the artist as an epitome of his own work. The artist as a figure that represents and accumulates the so-called aura absorbed in the act above mentioned.
He/She enables by proximity, touch and intent, the projection of his accumulation onto the newly produced works.
By the act of killing an other, even if symbolically, the aura associated with the one which is killed transfers and concentrates in the work of the killer. The killer as a conduit, a battery that absorbs and enables the production of something new.
A homage is in such manner created. As an assumption, I would assume that whenever there is homaging of an author there is an elevation of the authors status, if cannibalism is mixed then there is an assumption of the cannibal assuming the value of what the author stood for and produced. By creating this homage, the borrowed aura gets, through the author as accumulator and conduit, directed to the work being produced. Sara & Andre Killed Gavin Turk is in itself the result of this formulaic homage making and a work on it's own right. It is a reflection of the apparatus utilized time and time again in the act of production.
If in Triple Gold pop, Gavin Turk openly exposes the apparatus of the work by effects of layering. In Fright Green Wig he simplifies the process into the simple assimilation of Warhol's work into his person.In Triple Gold Pop , not in the show but also to be found in Gavin Turk's online shop, Turk dresses up as Sid Vicious in the pose of Andy Warhol's Elvis Presley drawing a gun. Elvis as the glamourous star of the 1960 movie Flaming Star, a film where he walks into the wild to die. Andy Warhol assimilated the poster image to produce his work that Gavin alludes to, it was one of his first flat silkscreen repetition works.
The idea of death and cannibalism is inherent to Gavin Turk work. A self-cannibalization that creates the conditions to become a self-aware catalyst of aura to the mundane. While not present in this show, the Blue plaque produced by Turk while still at the Royal college of Art, is a key piece that enables the projection of the aura assimilated by the artist onto any and such product and situation produced by him.
The awareness that both Gavin Turk and Sara & André demonstrate of the apparatuses being used, it exposes a critique of the status of the artist as Icon and Celebrity.
