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The Age of Anxiety- BOOM
In 1947 when W.H.Auden wrote The Age of Anxiety, where four characters prop up a bar and put the world to rights, the war was over and New York was suddenly in full swing. American abstract expressionist artists were just about to appear in Life magazine and Jazz music filled the airways. Modernity and the future were back on the agenda but how was Man to understand and learn from yesterdays ills
In the Nostalgic and somewhat wishy-washy medium of watercolour, the bastion of old school colourists, Gavin Turk has created a suite of cloud paintings that tease at the creative and destructive forces of scientific and artistic progress. The Cloud paintings of John Constable are often understood as artistic excellence or pedigree, however, in Turks case the cloud as a slow metaphor for Englands country life and the great out-doors has mutated into the fast rolling torrent of an atomic blast smashing the earth and turning the air poisonous. The blasted cloud is both compulsive and repulsive as a timely portrait of mankind.
In BOOM, Turk quotes the Auden prose to find titles for the pictures. The mushroom cloud a man made act but with the appearance of other worldly power, is the loudest scream that ultimately ends in deafness. It is a culmination of politics and action, a kind of full stop. But it is also beautiful; the visual masking for a moment the harsh reality of its implementation.
The Font, standing still, timeless and elegant at the centre of these works aiming to capture a pivotal moment in 20th century history, was conceived in 2006 to encapsulate 20th Century museum sculpture in one pure form. It also serves as a kind of end game. There is one addressed to every modern art museum, capable of collecting it, across the globe. The font is here to be the culmination or the residue of modern sculpture as the bomb was the culmination of political will and a defining moment of the 20th Century.
The publication _The Font Project_ with Texts by Toby Clarke, Ossian Ward, _Deborah Curtis, Sadie Murdoch is available by contacting FAS, 148 New Bond Street, London W1S2JT. It was Published by the Fine Art Society _and Live Stock Market Ltd, in 2006
tc@faslondon.com
www.fascontemporary.com
 Gavin Turk: 'The Font Project' 2006 |
