If Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is a play where nothing happens, twice, then the same was almost true for Waiting for Gavo, a puppet adaptation of the work unveiled by the innovative British artist Gavin Turk in Austria this past week.
The night before the first scheduled performance in the cloisters of Schloss Eggenberg in Graz, one of the puppeteers tripped and ended up in hospital with an injured knee, while another almost put an eye out on a tree branch. Then, as curtain time approached, blue skies suddenly gave way to a torrential downpour. But the show went on.
In Turk's version, Vladimir and Estragon, the tramps in Samuel Beckett's original, have been transformed into Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys; the vile plutocrat, Pozzo, is a greedy art patron named Scratchy (the echo with Britain's Charles Saatchi is no coincidence), while Lucky, his slave, has become Andy Warhol.
As with all Turk's figures, such as his waxwork of Sid Vicious, which appeared in the Royal Academy's "Sensation" show, or his reworking of David's Death of Marat, the faces are modelled on his own; but Gavo, of course, does not appear. The dark shadows of the cloaked puppeteers are the only human presences glimpsed.
There are references to Munch, Caro, Koons and Rothko, and when Duchamp and Beuys start abusing each other their insults include not only "moron" and "cretin" but also "curator" and "critic" - that last term is meant to be particularly offensive. The performance has humorous elements, but Turk's characterisation of Scratchy and Andy is scathing, to say the least. "I would not associate with artists such as yourselves unless you were going to make me a great deal of money," says Scratchy at one point. "Guess who taught me all these beautiful things," he says later. "My Andy."
This is the same Andy who admits: "I'll endorse my name with any of the following: clothing, cigarettes, sound equipment, food, helium, whips, money. If you want to look at Andy you just look at the surface. There's nothing behind it."
Noting the "vampiric" tendencies of Warhol's working method, Turk tells me he chose Warhol, Beuys and Duchamp because "they've become caricatures of artists - they've crossed the bridge from their art being separate from their lives to their lives being artworks in themselves".
Why Beckett? "He's one of those important cultural influences on me, and I share that with other people in the studio," says Turk, who shared the writing with members of his studio. "Beckett turns five minutes of thought process into 30 minutes on stage. It eludes any resolved philosophical portrait, so it's much closer to conceptual art in that way."
The next performance is at the Spice Festival in Hackney on 13 July. After that, who knows - the West End, perhaps? "It could become a tourist fixture," jokes Turk. "Perhaps we should recreate the Mousetrap next."
