Luke Turner

Luke Turner’s practice involves institutional critique in the form of performance art, large-scale manipulated photographs, and video work. His 2011 manifesto, Metamodernism, laid out the artist’s understanding of our present age: it’s a moment characterized, he has said, by a desire to be “both ironic and sincere in the same moment”—a pull between modern and postmodern ways of engaging with the world. Given his ideas’ overlap with the concept of celebrity, Turner and his co-creators later found an ideal collaborator in the actor Shia LaBeouf, whose #iamsorry performance catapulted Turner onto the pop-cultural national stage. Through his writings, his internet-influenced techniques evident in series like “Ruins” (2012), and the droll conceptual messages of works like Every Beloved Object (2012), Turner addresses not just the art world but the experience of living in an image-saturated culture.