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 yesterday's 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 Turk s case the cloud as a slow metaphor for England"s 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 these works, 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.