Has Narcissus taken over London’s art world? Adrian Searle reports
Top TV prof Jonathan Miller, the gangling polymath, does it again: how can a mind be so full without exploding? His latest project, the exhibition Mirror Image: Jonathan Miller on Reflection, at the National Gallery in London, is a great idea. If you want to know why the eyes in painted portraits follow you round the room, or why mirrors don’t invert things as well as reversing them, the exhibition, the accompanying catalogue and a series of tie-in TV short films will tell you all this and more.
Reading the catalogue, you also learn about early child development, about autism and the cognitive capacities of the chimpanzee. Why early Renaissance northern European painting is more concerned with the depiction of surface splendour, the glint and gleam and shimmer of light on rich surfaces than its southern European counterpart, and how it is that the mind decides that mirrors are shiny when they have no inherent lustre at all. In short, On Reflection is brimming with ideas, inferences, theories and scientific facts.
The exhibition itself, using works from the National Gallery’s collection and augmented with loans, re-productions, photographs and models, is a walk-through illustrated lecture. As an art exhibition it is pretty horrible. One minute you are contemplating Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait or discovering two astonishing little paintings of a polished granite bowl in the Lustgarten in Berlin, the next striding through a cheap 1970s disco corridor, decorated with tacky mirrored walls, floor and ceiling.
Most artists today have only a few ideas; Miller has lots. His thesis takes us from optics, and the nature of glimmer, gleam, shine and shading, through to the psychological and moral implications of self-regard. “The mirror has assumed complex meta-phorical significance, epitomising both the vice of vanity and the virtue of prudent self-knowledge,” he writes. And, elsewhere: “The role of the mirror is much less mysterious than it is cracked up to be.” You’d think he couldn’t have it both ways, but of course he can, especially if he can make a pungent joke along the way.
The catalogue to the show is likely to stand as a primer on the subject for a long while. I wish it were twice as long, written at less of a manic pitch and a bit more aware of contemporary art. Lucian Freud’s 1960s self- portraits, an appalling John Bratby multiple self-portrait and a Helen Chadwick photo-piece don’t offer much when so much contemporary art really does deal with matters of representation. Ideas about the gaze, about looking at art as well as in mirrors, have been central to a great deal of the best contemporary work. But then every project has its limits. Sometimes, it’s good to be left wanting more.
The best gag in the catalogue concerns Narcissus. Having discussed the fact that only human beings and chimpanzees appear to recognise themselves in mirrors, Miller tells us that Narcissus’s fate was not to fall in love with his own reflection, but rather to perceive his reflection as belonging to someone other than himself. “No narcissist he,” says Miller. “Pretty as a picture maybe, but not half as smart as a chimpanzee.”
Is Gavin Turk a narcissist? His own image, and his own signature, appear time and again in his much-hyped solo show at the South London Gallery. Turk undeniably knows who he is, although I get the feeling he’d rather be someone else, someone named Piero Manzoni perhaps, or Sid Vicious. You can’t be a young Turk all your life. Turk’s reputation really rests on two early works. The first, a blue plaque installed at the Royal College of Art in Turk’s famously failed MA show, which stated that Gavin Turk Worked Here 1989- 91, and Pop, his 1993 life-sized mannequin of Turk as Sid Vicious.
This was most recently shown in Sensation at the Royal Academy. At the opening to that show, Turk turned up posing as a dosser, unshaven, filthy, dressed in rags. A life-sized, realistic mannequin of Turk as the tramp stands in the South London Gallery, and there are photos, either of the living Turk or his waxen doppelganger, on the walls.
In the 1994 catalogue of Charles Saatchi’s collection of contemporary British art, Shark Infested Waters, Turk’s work was reproduced next to Mark Wallinger’s, and one series of works by Wallinger was a 1990 group of paintings depicting various artist friends as tramps, bag ladies and winos. Turk’s recent representations of himself merely repeat the idea. But that, perhaps, is the idea.
Turk has also signed surveillance mirrors, written his signature in little white polystyrene balls and in broken eggs. His signature, and the realistic life cast, are his two major modes. His work, to my mind, is aEpiddling little idea about self-reflection, self-image and self-representation in the art market. He has a signature style all right.
Turk’s South London Gallery show is a mistake. Guests at the private view found the work under wraps, every exhibit parcelled in canvas and tied up with string. It was an amusing enough ploy (no one looks at the art at openings anyway, they’re too concerned with the psychology of social interaction), but it made you ask whether Turk had merely been afraid to go public.
A mannequin of Turk as David’s Death of Marat, supine in the bath and encased in a vitrine, was yet another reiterative gesture. Vitrines and life-casts are about the most boring thing you can do now. But when you don’t really have any new ideas, you have to plough on with the only ones you’ve got. Change the work radically and you’ll only frighten your collectors.
The rest of the show doesn’t get much better. Turk’s homages to Piero Manzoni, his Duchamp jokes, his maps of Britain tweaked out of frangible dried white paint are signal to a terrible emptiness and impoverishment. The work has lost its freshness, which was all it had in the first place. This is modern art as a hall of mirrors, offering endless reflections of itself, and stuck with endless replications of its own self- image.