Failing to get beneath the veneer

Gavin Turk is famous for his disguises. He made a mannequin of himself in the guise of Sid Vicious standing in the gun-slinging pose of Warhol's iconic image of Elvis. He's also been Che Guevara and Marat, revolutionaries whose images have defined them in the public imagination.

In all these 'portraits', it's the persona rather than the personality that Turk wants to capture. Rather than seeking to get beneath the veneer, it's the notion of celebrity itself that appeals.

This might subvert the idea of portraiture, which traditionally aims to get under the skin of the subject - but it's all now become too much of Turk's shtick to be more than momentarily amusing.

Not surprisingly, Turk now 'does' Warhol. He's donned a 'fright wig' and, against a swirly camouflage pattern, his silk-screened image takes on the pose of his hero in his last series of self-portraits.

Warhol, of course, was all about exploiting image, rather than getting beneath a veneer. It was the glamorous façade that fascinated him, not the fragile egos beneath.

Turk has certainly got the dead-eyed look down to perfection, but by simply concentrating on surface what Turk fails, somewhat ironically, to capture is exactly the fragility beneath the cracked veneer that is so evident in Warhol's last images of himself.

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Gavin Turk: Me As Him
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