Drawing on the past

Turk Frottage 2009

Gavin Turk, Frottage, 2009

Though he’s made a pretty wide range of work in between, I was interested to find that my altogether half-arsed research for the previous post threw up an image of a recent work I didn’t know and whose existence surprised me. Frottage, made in 2009, close to two decades after Cave, is a rubbing of that same blue plaque. I’m guessing of course (yes, yes, I know, research is good but sometimes the path of least resistance is just so much more appealing) but I rather suspect this is a work made in order to use the title and the amusement to be gained from using a term that is technically correct in art terms but which also has sexual connotations. And why not?

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Marking territory

Gavin Turk, Cave, 1991 (installed at the RCA)

Gavin Turk, Cave, 1991 (installed at the RCA)

The oblique reference to cave painting in the title of that last point was entirely to allow me to segue somewhat untidily from wall drawings to Gavin Turk’s Cave, an English Heritage style blue plaque that formed his degree show when he finished at the Royal College of Art in 1991. The show essentially consisted of an empty studio with a sign declaring that ‘Gavin Turk, sculptor, worked here 1989–1991’.

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