Website review: Gavin Turk ponders what it means to...
laodan discovered this in Arts
•1 reviews since Sep 13, 2007
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•arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,21...
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laodan discovered 8 months ago- Why be an artist?
in the Guardian-art by Gavin Turk
The cave walls became not windows to the outside world, but some form of testament to the inside one, in both senses of dwelling and mind. These pictures were made to last, made to remember something. The author was making something for the community to use as a thinking space ... As this philosophical space grew, so the community created what might be called gods: "special forces" that explained the presence of certain unfathomable phenomena. These gods needed to find some earthly stasis and certain characters in the community had the provision and vision to create forms that could represent these life-affirming powers. These people were simultaneously in contact with the gods while being servants of the social group - producing objects and images for people to use in the act of worship. ... Eventually powerful parties in societies started to employ the services of artists to represent not just the gods, but also themselves as some historic marker of their existence. The images of kings, queens and men of the cloth gave way to nobles, lords, barons and businessmen, in fact anyone who had the finances to employ artists to depict the subject of their desires. ... In the 1920s a collective group of artists formed and called themselves surrealists. Headed by Andre Breton, they wrote manifestos claiming that through art a radical shift in political reason could be achieved. Culture was the life-affirming glue between people and art was a major part of its political make up. ... Recently, art has become a kind of last bastion to the real. Its contemporary status has been cast by former challenges to "the perceived reality of things". Art is always a picture making, once an object is situated in an artistic context it is fated to be an artistic version of its former self, for instance, the cliched image of Fountain, the 1917 sculpture by Marcel Duchamp. Why be an artist? A brief history of art ... Gavin Turk with his 2000 work Death of Che. Photograph: Sean Smith In this article Gavin Turk follows exactly the same approach towards art as mine. In summary the artist produces visual signs of the knowledge of the day about reality for all to share. In other words art has a societal functionality. But it seems to me that Gavin Turk's presentation of late-modernity is flawed by weakness. I have to confess that it feels good, at last, to see one's ideas starting to enter the mainstream.
- Why be an artist?
