Gavin Turk: Master of illusion

Gavin Turk's studio lies beyond a grubby black door on the Charing Cross Road, in a block of gently mouldering 19th-century buildings that, until a whoop-de-doo police raid three years ago, also housed Central London's most notorious narcotics speakeasy. Inside, there are rambling staircases bereft of banisters and Newell posts, walls thick with blistered emulsion, floorboards that jigger about under your feet, and rooms with an ambient temperature that would challenge the resilience of a brass monkey. It must be one of the last spaces like it in the whole of central London: a little fragment of Pinter's England, undrowned by the tide of Costa Coffee.

The rooms were offered as storage space; the landlord didn't object to the artist's decision to store himself on the premises. Turk has been a resident here since 1992. Long enough to remember when the backyard was filled with dope-smoking Norwegians; long enough to have shared the premises with an escort agency and a more mysterious bureau from which a group of Nigerian entrepreneurs promised to improve their clients' luck with the use of lottery systems and sympathetic magic.

"We lived in here for a while," he notes, as he and I poke our noses into a tiny antechamber adjoining the main studio. "Our first kid was probably conceived here." He indicates the point on the wall that once bore the brackets that supported the bunk he shared with his wife Deborah. They slept directly above a dinky kitchenette: fry-ups must have lent their bedding an interesting, savoury quality.

In 1992, Turk was a scruffy obscurity from Guildford who'd just failed his Masters degree at the Royal College of Art. One year later, however, a remarkable reversal of fortune had taken place. By 1993, he had made the eye-catching work for which he is still best known: Pop, a waxwork of himself as Sid Vicious, posed to mimic Andy Warhol's celebrated image of Elvis-as-Gunslinger - and, perhaps, the scene in The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle, in which Vicious peppers his audience with revolver bullets. Charles Saatchi, the sweetest sugar daddy on whose metaphorical knee a Young British Artist could hope to sit, had taken an acquisitive interest in his art. By way of a finale, Turk's firstborn, Curtis, slipped into the world on Christmas Eve 1993. "We were in hospital in Paddington," he recalls, "and came out carrying this baby, not really knowing which way up it went or how to hold it. It was raining, and there was no one around. It was like being around after the bomb had gone off and emerging from the shelter. Like being the only people in the world." Maybe there's something in mail-order ju-ju after all.

Since that annus mirabilis, Turk has produced a large body of work which expresses his twin interests in illusion and allusion. The trompe l'oeil is one of his favourite wheezes: the last decade has seen him take paint rollers, copper coins, cardboard boxes, Coke cans and rubbish-engorged black plastic bin bags, and recreate them in the studio using steel, bronze and paint.

The influence of other artists is always legible in his work: Magritte lurked in Wood'n'Melon, a watermelon cast in bronze but painted to appear as a hybrid of fruit and briar wood; Duchamp was concealed inside Pimp, a carefully-constructed sculpture of a skip, masquerading as a ready-made dragged from a building site. Alberto Korda was the inspiration for his billboard-sized portrait of Che Guevara - though the revolutionary's face had been supplanted by Turk's own. Christo was a spectral presence at his 1998 Stuff Show, where the box-wine bibbers at the private view were greeted by a series of exhibits neatly wrapped in tight white canvas. Turk is a bricoleur with both fists in the art-historical scrag bin - and that anyone should bother to allude to an artist like Christo says something about the cheerful promiscuity of his references.

One of Turk's most endearing qualities is his capacity for being baffled and surprised by his own work. He sometimes speaks about the objects he has made as if he were a punter who had been passing through Hoxton Square and wandered into the gallery for a lark.

Some of his past shows, he thinks, have been too fussy and crowded. He has mixed feelings about his last big project, The Che Gavara Story (sic), a mixture of political symposium and Sixties "happening" performed at London's Foundry art space three years ago, which attempted to examine the commodification of Guevara's image.

"I don't know whether it was wholly successful," he muses. "It did fall down in certain ways." Many critics agreed, in less gentle terms, and perhaps that matters to him. "Art is something that happens between people," he says. "When I make art, it's part of a social contract. It's not something I would do on a desert island."

His new exhibition, which opened yesterday at White Cube, is a sparse, disciplined undertaking. He tells me that the gallery's main space will be dominated by a great stack of bronze bin-liners. The lobby area will f accommodate an empty sleeping bag, lovingly cast in the same material. On the green area outside the building, he plans to erect a giant representation of his own name, formed from bronze simulacra of fizzy drink cans.

They are variations on familiar themes. Turk's interest in the occult power of the artist's signature goes back to his student days. Visitors to Charles Saatchi's Brit Art fun palace on the Thames will recognise that Turk's sleeping bag is a cousin of Nomad, a sculptural recreation of a rough sleeper cocooned inside something cheap and nasty from Millets, which now lies low by the gallery entrance. (Turk tested the prototype Nomad by placing it in a doorway opposite his studio, and videotaping passers-by as they tossed it coppers or kicked it.) Anyone who attended his Copper Jubilee show at the New Art Gallery in Walsall in 2002 will be familiar with Turk's delight in what happens to black biodegradable plastic when stretched by its cargo of foil curry trays and pizza boxes.

"I wouldn't like to say I was moving into a vacuum," he ventures, "but I feel more and more like I'm having to work from my own standpoint. The more I keep making art, the more I feel there are fewer authorities to consult to see whether I'm making the right kind of art or not. When I was at college I took the Fine Art option because I really wanted to know what was good art and what was bad art. But I never managed to work that out. All that happened was that I got a more sophisticated take on it. But I still have trouble working out what's good art and what's bad."

It wasn't a problem shared by his tutors. "When I was at the Royal College, there were people up in the main building who had a quite old-fashioned way of looking at art. There was a gap between the students and the permanent members of staff." One, it seems, that he fell into. His MA show consisted of a single work entitled Cave: an empty gallery space, in which was mounted a blue plaque bearing the words, "Borough of Kensington, GAVIN TURK, sculptor, worked here 1989-1991". His examiners awarded him a less attractive memorial by deciding that he "had not produced enough work of the standard required" and making him the first MA student in the history of the institution to be failed on the strength of a final exhibition.

"It was," Turk explains, "an unfortunate accident." He didn't know that the outgoing rector of the RCA, Sir Jocelyn Stevens, had just accepted a job as chairman of English Heritage. "There were levels of personal paranoia at work," he muses. "I think it was the use of the plaque rather than the empty gallery that caused the trouble. I think he thought I was trying to make some sort of comment about him." (Either that, or the examiners simply thought Turk's ideas were rubbish.) The progress of his case was not helped, Turk suspects, by the illustrated talk he gave to the examination board, in which he showed a slide of a disposable cup bearing the English Heritage logo and a picture of Stonehenge.

We've nudged one of his favourite subjects. He scoops up a polystyrene cup from his desk and offers it to me. The object, as it makes contact with my fingers, reveals itself as a bronze fraud. The pitted, granular surface is a chameleonic effect achieved through the careful application of paint. (The founders who cast these objects for him, he reports, are always horrified by his desire to add colour to them.) Once he's filled it with equally chimerical tea, it will be ready to go into a gallery - or an abstruse edition of Beadle's About. "Polystyrene is brilliant," he grins, with boyish enthusiasm.

"One of the reasons why I like this is that it's something that's completely spent. The only thing you would think of doing with it is throwing it into a black bin liner." (Round here, it would probably bounce off it with a clang.) "A polystyrene cup comes in pretty low in the value charts, but as an abstract form it has a series of ellipses, a tiny curve, and when you look at these qualities you suddenly think, 'Gosh, it's really beautiful'." The irregular bulges of a filled bin liner inspire a similarly Keatsian reverie. "A black bin bag with stuff in it has formal issues. I quite often look at them and think, 'This one's incredibly cubistic'. Maybe it's like seeing the shape of an elephant in a cloud ... I've argued with my mum about this."

He grabs another conversation piece from his desk: what I had taken to be a small scrap of newspaper is exposed as a further piece of metallic forgery. I turn it over in my hands. If he wants to draw attention to the formal qualities of everyday objects, why not just exhibit the originals? "There was a point in the Seventies at which a bag of rubbish could have been shown in a gallery. I don't think that's possible any more. There's a quality of preciousness that I'd like to keep hold of, rather than undermine."

He trails off. "Why am I trying to keep that in?" he muses. "Why? Why? Why am I doing this?" There's a ruminative silence, during which time I have a feel of a scrumpled piece of newspaper under my feet, just to check it's not an exhibit fresh from the Turk crucible. "To make the same comment today," he continues, "we have to go to more perverse ways to do it. By going in a more oblique route to something, you hit the nail on the head ... " The sentence fizzles out. "What am I talking about?" he exclaims. "I don't even understand it myself."

We get down on our hands and knees for a more concrete expression of his point. By the wall, next to a plastic crate containing dozens of books about Che Guevara, is a cardboard box. Turk rips off the parcel tape with a loud farting noise. Inside is a pale plaster cuboid: the ghost of a smaller cardboard box, across the top of which can be seen a band of wrinkles formed by some older length of parcel tape. Turk rocks back on his heels.

"Amazing thing," he breathes. "Isn't it?"

Gavin Turk is at the White Cube, 48 Hoxton Square, London N1 (020-7930 5373; www.whitecube.com) until 28 February.