Gavin Turk is an authority on anti-establishment jibes and art-world puns, so it is fair to expect any tribute to the Queen in his retrospective show, Copper Jubilee, to be particularly acerbic. Yet his new work Heads! is disappointingly polite. An oversized two-pence coin with the Queen's profile rendered faithfully in copper-plated bronze, the work manages only quiet irony, elevating lowly copper to the status of the royal commemorative plaque.
In the adjacent gallery, Turk has planted Oeuvre (Wild Turkey), one of his recent series of giant eggs modelled on different bird species. This is probably the artist's most ridiculous egg-art concoction to date. Goofy and cartoon-like, the giant Flintstone egg rocks precariously as people reach to touch its obviously fake surface.
Turk's turkey tribute extends far beyond flippant wordplay. For the artist, the egg parodies the perfect minimalist form and oozes symbolic associations and artistic references. But the painted fibreglass egg itself appears ignorant of any such merit: it sits awkwardly next to other, more skilfully realised material puns.
One of these is Nomad, a more recent work. A disarmingly realistic bronze cast of a rough-sleeper buried inside a battered sleeping bag, Nomad huddles in the corner of an otherwise empty room, a down-and-out affront to the gallery's well-heeled whiteness. The statue is so lifelike that when it was placed in a doorway on London's Charing Cross Road, passers-by left a small pile of copper coins. Those coins in turn were the inspiration for Heads!.
Like much of his work, Turk's witty sculpture ultimately falls foul of its own intelligence. We got the joke years ago; for Turk what began as a critique of art's skewed value systems has become an impossible trap. When he was a nobody artist from Guildford, his pranks had poignant irony, but as one of Britart's golden boys, Turk has become just another marketing toy for the system he sets out to critique. His worthless Copper Jubilee tribute must be worth thousands.
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