When Gavo met Godot

Take artist Gavin Turk, add puppets of Beuys, Duchamp, Warhol and the collector 'Scratchi', spice with Beckett - and the result is a knowing stage satire on the art world.

Fifteen years ago, Gavin Turk flunked his MA at the Royal College of Art. His final degree show consisted simply of a whitewashed space, empty but for a single blue commemorative plaque that read: "Gavin Turk, Sculptor, worked here 1989-1991".

While the audacious stunt failed to impress his tutors, it succeeded in attracting the lucrative patronage of Charles Saatchi, who later included Turk's work in his headline-grabbing Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy.

Now, for his latest project, the irreverent artist has created a satirical puppet show about the absurdities of the art world based on Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, featuring the artists Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and a mercenary and "tasteless" art collector by the name of Scratchi.

Turk and his partner and fellow artist, Deborah Curtis, came up with the idea of Waiting for Gavo when he was asked to appear at the quirky Port Eliot Literary Festival in Cornwall last year. The final product is, he stresses, "a real collaborative project" with the artists who work with him in his East End studio in London. They used to have a studio band: "A kind of improv thing, a bit messy." That "started everybody off thinking about some sort of collective performing," Turk says. Further creative impetus came from closer to home, in the puppet shows he and Curtis created for the birthday parties of their three children.

Beckett might not seem a natural candidate for transfer for the puppet booth, but Turk's treatment draws on the traditions of the theatre of the absurd, highlighting the notion that man is powerless to control his fate. Beckett's fellow absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco once cited the Punch and Judy shows he saw as a child as a major artistic influence: "It was a spectacle of the world itself... which presented itself to me in an infinitely simplified and caricatured form, as if to underline its grotesque and brutal truth."

Since Godot's premiere at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris on 5 January 1953 (its English stage debut came later, at the Arts Theatre in 1955, directed by Peter Hall), Beckett's most famous work has spawned numerous productions, versions and parodies, including some where Godot actually arrives.

The Beckett estate, managed by the playwright's nephew, is notoriously protective of his work. Most famously, Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw found themselves in hot water in 1994 when they dared to disregard Beckett's original minimalist stage directions in their production of Footfalls. This year, the estate took an Italian theatre company to court over their casting of two female actors as Vladimir and Estragon.

Turk feels an affinity with the dour playwright's style. "I like Beckett's particular take on minimalism; the way he is able to take moments and stretch them out into a whole play." Waiting for Gavo will be recognisably Beckettian but is "quite slapstick, with ridiculous caricatures and silly accents," trading on the music-hall echoes found in the original play.

Vladimir and Estragon become Duchamp ("cynical bastard") and Beuys ("guilt-ridden Nazi peasant"), and the script is peppered with humorous painterly references. The story of the two thieves crucified alongside Jesus becomes the tale of the thieves "who stole Munch's Scream". Instead of sharing a carrot or turnip, the tramps munch on a "Caro" and "some Turners".

The two are momentarily distracted from their eternal waiting by the arrival of the autocratic Scratchi (Pozzo), with his slave Andy (Lucky) in tow. "I bet he was important in his day," says Beuys of the oppressed Andy (Warhol). "For about 15 minutes maybe," answers Duchamp.

Lucky's nonsensical rant is replaced by an unflattering glimpse into Warhol's soul. "If you want to know about Andy, you just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me and there I am. There's nothing behind it."

But it is Scratchi who is given the most damning lines. "I would not associate with artists such as yourselves unless you were going to make me a great deal of money," he proclaims haughtily as he arrives on stage.

His despicable behaviour is later punished with blindness. "I used to have wonderful taste... one might even say sensational taste... I woke up one day tasteless. My mind turned into primetime ITV."

So is Turk the former young British artist expressing his disillusionment with British art since the heady days of Sensation? "There's always an uneasy relationship between art and the market," he says. "It's inherent within a modern project to question the commercial element of art within your art."

Scratchi is apparently no more than a "stereotype" of a collector, his name a last-minute invention. Comparisons with Saatchi are, Turk says diplomatically, "not unuseful", but "it would be unfair to suggest that Scratchi's lines are what we really think of Charles Saatchi."

In his choice of characters, Turk appears to be paying homage to those who have wielded a significant influence over his work. He freely names Beuys, and there are echoes of Duchamp's "readymades" (utilitarian objects the artist declared asworks of art, most famously the Fountain urinal) in Turk's Pimp, a builder's skip painted glossy black, and his last major show, which featured bin bags and empty plastic cups. (The difference is that Turk's objects had been meticulously made and cast in bronze).

He has also extensively mined Warhol's iconography, not least in his multilayered 1993 breakthrough work Pop, which was a waxwork of Turk as Sid Vicious standing in the gunslinger pose adopted by Elvis in Warhol's famous Pop Art image.

But, according to Turk, the artists are merely easily recognisable "archetypes" who sit easily with the caricatured nature of puppet shows. "All the characters in it are people who in life have become fictionalised. All of them are artists whose lives have been discussed as art in themselves," he says. So the puppets are a miniature Warhol with his bleached-blond thatch and black specs, Beuys in his floppy felt hat, Duchamp in a rakish red polka-dot bow-tie and the mysterious Scratchi in a thin black tie and expensive suit, with artfully mussed dark hair.

Apart from these distinguishing adornments, the puppets all have the same face - that of the artist - and are "a caricature" of Turk's earlier works, which have seen the artist portray himself variously as Marat, Che Guevara and a homeless man.

From the degree show in which he seemed to kill himself off as an artist before his career had begun, the question of identity has informed his work, with paintings based on his signature and constant reworking of his own image. Waiting for Gavo is a natural step for an artist who has never been afraid of causing a scene. He turned up to the media circus of the opening of Sensation dressed as a tramp. A year later, guests at the private view for the Stuff Show were prevented from seeing the works as the artist had decided to wrap them all in canvas.

Turk operates one puppet and does some voiceovers for the show, but he describes the cast as "proper amateurs" and the performance as "quite improvised". One can only imagine what the famously precise Beckett would have thought of the project, but it is heartening that in his centenary year, the playwright (via Turk) offers a succinct diagnosis of the modern British artist's condition: "They give birth astride a canvas, the oils gleam for an instant, then it's in storage for ever more."

'Waiting for Gavo', 7.30pm today and tomorrow, Acorn Theatre, Hackney Empire, London (020-8985 2424); 21-23 July, Port Eliot Literary Festival, Cornwall ( www.porteliotlitfest.com). Turk and Curtis present the puppet-based 'House of Fairy Tales' at the festival