Watch: The Book Voucher with Gavin Turk

It seems like Gavin Turk has done this before, or has at least been here before. Except he has never set foot in the Reference Point library, and as far as we know, has never taken part in a Book Voucher challenge, in which artists are given a token to spend as they wish on art books (a genre for which a £100 budget won’t get anyone very far).

Turk has spent the last 30 years sampling history and the banal stuff that furnishes everyday life to question authorship, authenticity and value. Today, he is demonstrating the depth and width of his literary interests. “I was in the pre-internet generation when I was in college and I was always in the library,” says the artist, who studied at Chelsea School of Art and later at the Royal College of Art before garnering attention as part of the Young British Artists cohort. Among his greatest hits are his graduation piece, Cave (1991), a white space featuring a solitary blue plaque (for which Turk’s tutors refused to award him his degree); Pop (1993), a waxwork sculpture of Turk as Sid Vicious posing as Andy Warhol’s Elvis Presley, which was exhibited in the landmark RA show, ‘Sensation’; and Pile (2004), an ensemble of bronze-cast bin bags.

Within two minutes of stepping into Reference Point, Turk has spotted a Giorgio Morandi book. To be precise, it’s a 2015 book by Joel Meyerowitz in which the American photographer recorded 250 of Morandi’s objects in his Bologna home using natural light and a backdrop of the artist’s table, where he worked for 40 years.

Turk’s obsession with Morandi has recently come into sharp relief; his new show ‘Still Life’, in Knokke, Belgium, is dedicated to the Italian painter. But where Morandi’s muted paintings depict humble ceramic vases, bottles and bowls, Turk turns his attention to empty, unbranded product packaging. It’s about disposability, the stories of household objects, and how “we are what we throw away,” as the artist puts it.

As he glides past shelves and combs book spines, he oozes anecdotes and eloquence. “I get quite aware of the way that artists get reduced to just their names,” he says, singling out Es Devlin’s new book, An Atlas of Es Devlin, and a shelf dedicated to Marcel Duchamp, before moving on to more fictional realms with Georges Perec’s A Void. Turk finds more relevance in Joe Sweeney, Still, Life, which meditates on life under Lockdown, and Martin Parr’s Small World, which captures the extremes of human mundanity.

It’s decision time and Turk wants Meyerowicz’s Morandi, but sadly, this signed edition comes in over budget. Instead, he opts for two books, Rose Salane’s first monograph, Slugs, a catalogue of images of counterfeit coins that are used to trick coin-operated devices (Turk loves collecting “round things”) and Life: A User’s Manual, Georges Perec’s most celebrated novel.

It all comes full circle when Turk offers three of his own books as a donation to the library: Cave Drawings, a self-published collection of drawings created during lockdown; In Search of Ariadne, a recent book exploring the cultural meme of the reclining figure in art, and Turk’s original 2013 monograph.

In just under an hour, Turk had offered a window into what fuels him, which, boiled down, is a curiosity for how artists see. It was a fitting challenge for Turk, whose bread and butter is quoting the work of others, and reimagining their ideas into something entirely new, entirely his own.