The artist is a fascist, naturally.
2007
A Short Piece on Storm Gold’s exhibition, 'Dumb Cloud Win Affection', at Victoria Park Gallery
The artist is a fascist, naturally
Is a closed discourse necessarily a fascistic discourse? A fetishistic one, even? The title of Storm Gold’s show at Victoria Park gallery, Dumb cloud win affection, struck me dumb, as I guess many of his painting’s and titles are meant to do: unsettle and destabilise the viewers expectation that there must be a meaning, a pay-off, if only we could concentrate hard enough. Alas, there are no easy rides for Storm’s guests when we look at his competent, humorous and acerbic works, where meaning is caught somewhere inside the nexus of viewer, work, title and artist.
We could wax lyrical about the modernist aesthetic of the work and its inherent critique. We could speak about the way Storm, with William J Mitchell, explodes the spurious link between title/caption/language and picture (but the Herald-Sun newspaper already does that for us). The good-old postructuralist constant-deferral-of-meaning flight of thought might be thrown into the argument. Because what is art without argument? It’s a wall hanging. And sometimes I suspect that that is where the crux of storm’s art lies. It confuses the viewer past the web of language to a point of equivalence with their fellow animals. Who also perform in front of the wall hangings (art), scratching for language to describe their experience (or just to fill in the silence), as they do sometimes their jobs, their families, and their friendships. The performance, of course, is an important one though. It wards off the emptiness that exists outside of knowledge.
I think this artist figures that emptiness. And although at first his aesthetic may seem impenetrable as if it’s part of his own well of secret fetishes writ large (modernist fascism), Storm asks us all, from his closed discourse, to step out of our fascistic, atomized individual performance pieces (our lives) and admit to our common failings: we are prone to confusion, bodily breakdown and eventually, even dispersion. Be good to others.
Cameron Bishop 2006
Is a closed discourse necessarily a fascistic discourse? A fetishistic one, even? The title of Storm Gold’s show at Victoria Park gallery, Dumb cloud win affection, struck me dumb, as I guess many of his painting’s and titles are meant to do: unsettle and destabilise the viewers expectation that there must be a meaning, a pay-off, if only we could concentrate hard enough. Alas, there are no easy rides for Storm’s guests when we look at his competent, humorous and acerbic works, where meaning is caught somewhere inside the nexus of viewer, work, title and artist.
We could wax lyrical about the modernist aesthetic of the work and its inherent critique. We could speak about the way Storm, with William J Mitchell, explodes the spurious link between title/caption/language and picture (but the Herald-Sun newspaper already does that for us). The good-old postructuralist constant-deferral-of-meaning flight of thought might be thrown into the argument. Because what is art without argument? It’s a wall hanging. And sometimes I suspect that that is where the crux of storm’s art lies. It confuses the viewer past the web of language to a point of equivalence with their fellow animals. Who also perform in front of the wall hangings (art), scratching for language to describe their experience (or just to fill in the silence), as they do sometimes their jobs, their families, and their friendships. The performance, of course, is an important one though. It wards off the emptiness that exists outside of knowledge.
I think this artist figures that emptiness. And although at first his aesthetic may seem impenetrable as if it’s part of his own well of secret fetishes writ large (modernist fascism), Storm asks us all, from his closed discourse, to step out of our fascistic, atomized individual performance pieces (our lives) and admit to our common failings: we are prone to confusion, bodily breakdown and eventually, even dispersion. Be good to others.
Cameron Bishop 2006
