“Gavin Turk was denied an MA certificate by the Royal College of Art in 1991. For his degree show he hung a fake English Heritage blue plaque on the wall that read: ‘Borough of Kensington Gavin Turk Sculptor Worked Here 1989-1991’, while his studio space remained conspicuously empty. By beginning his career with its metaphoric completion - in effect memorialising it - Turk announced his artistic programme: a critique of authorship and the myth of ‘the artist’ within the history of the European avant-garde.
In the early 1990s Turk made paintings based on his own signature: self-reflexive comments on the value of an artist’s name, as well as the authority of his own. With Piero Manzoni (1992), Turk plagiarised the Italian artist’s signature and then signed his own name to…