FORMS OF IMAGINING 05.11.14–17.01.15 PROJECT ARTS CENTRE
Chris Evans Curated by Kate Strain
Clerk of Mind List of Works Biographies
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Forms of Imagining provides a suitable opening gambit for a reflection on the work of artist Chris Evans; a reflection that is particularly concerned with power and its multiple, complicated representations. Evans acts like a contemporary court painter – giving us revealing and sometimes grotesquely humorous portraits of the people who run our states, our newspapers, our legal systems and our luxury brands. But with one difference, his are portraits where the sitter is notably absent. Not content with evoking the identity or personality of, say, a political figure or a wealthy patron, Evans has evolved representational strategies that transcend the real and act on the imaginary. His output appears as collections of designed objects and airbrushed images of things. Yet his concern is with the domain of signs and symbols that code the life of these objects through discourse in relation to other cultural domains (ideology, economics, class etc.).
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In the history of fine art, portraiture has been the domain in which the ruling classes have sought to immortalise their self-image. Portraiture, representing the figure more or less how it is, tends towards representations of the sitter in isolation, and therefore cut off from the world of objects and people upon which his power is enacted. As Erhard Friedberg writes in his essay on the nature of power, “no actors ‘store’ power as a substance or as if it were crystallised in structures, they exercise it, extracting ever-asymmetrical resources… As with love and trust, power is inseparable from the relationship through which it is exercised and which links actual people to each other around specific objects’.1 That is to say, power can neither be represented within a person nor within an object, but must find its articulation within a semiotic domain. In his work, Evans’ artistic agenda is to intervene within, and give new form to, this system of signs and symbols that bind specific objects and people through chains of asymmetrical power relations. Consider the ring exhibited by Chris Evans as part of his solo exhibition at Project Arts Centre. It is made of platinum, yellow gold, diamonds and yellow sapphires and displayed on a lightly imprinted jesmonite tablet within a large rosewood and steel vitrine. On one side of the ring is a little ‘Flowergirl’, peeking out from beneath the burdensome jewel crowning her.2 The pattern on the alabaster jesmonite seems familiar
Hans Memling, Maria Portinari, c. 1470 (detail), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Image retrieved from WikiCommons
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CEO: “What’s in it for me?” Quoting the press release, Evans: “You can disrupt many of the conventions and assumptions of what you do in your work”. CEO: “Well, why would I be interested in doing that?” From this point on, the artwork becomes about mediating the language of contemporary art in an arena where art’s values may be seen as irrelevant, and the resulting conversation takes the form of the ring that is produced and then exhibited upon the tablet within the vitrine. It’s important to note that Evans rarely works within public art commissioning contexts, where an artist enters into a contract with a funder to produce a work with a clear and demonstrable public benefit. Evans extends the relationship between art and power beyond instrumental uses of art (as in religious iconography, symbols of state power, ideological propaganda etc.) to include expressions of art’s own power (semiotic, aesthetic, ethical etc.). A Needle Walks into a Haystack presents a conundrum; in its form and expense, the ring seems to dismiss Liverpool Biennial’s mission to democratise art. Yet, it presupposes the relevance of the
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– somehow domestic – an empty cardboard tissue box was pushed upon it. What a curious assemblage it is! But it is also made of something else. It consists of two incongruous sign systems. It is a contemporary art press release appearing within the coded systems of finance and luxury goods. Commissioned by, and first displayed at the 2014 Liverpool Biennial, with this work (of the selfsame title A Needle Walks into a Haystack), Evans was interested in working with one of the festival’s sponsors. Patronage of art events by high end companies can occasionally cause unease among participating artists, should their ethical position stand in opposition to that of the company’s – or indeed – in opposition to any enterprise whatsoever in the business of extracting profit for private gain. Evans is less interested in confrontation, preferring to reframe this tension in terms of a design project where he can find a form to make two incommensurable sign systems intelligible to one another. And so he invites Boodles, luxury jewellers and sponsors of the Biennial, to create a piece of jewellery using the biennial’s press release as a creative brief. In an interview with the biennial’s curators, Evans sets the scene for how the process began.3 The artist is sitting in his studio, the CEO of Boodles in his yacht. Evans telephones and extends his invitation for Boodles to craft something based on the exhibition’s premise, as set out in the written media release.
intellectual and ethical values of contemporary art within all spheres of human life and activity, very much beyond the industry of contemporary art in and of itself. Alongside his solo exhibition at Project, Evans organised police recruitment drives at the three major art colleges in Dublin. This project continues Evans’ confidence in non-vocational education. Whereas the premise of A Needle Walks into a Haystack was for Boodles’ employees to reflect upon the motivations behind the city’s art biennial, Coptalk begins with the assertion that “for a country to have an effective police force, its employees should reflect the demographics of society”.4 In a fantastically simple manner, Evans asserts that arts education is an entirely appropriate preparation for entering into the police force, or indeed any other career. Should this form of education narrow its remit purely to the production of artists – or, could it be a place for developing people and ideas who might then choose any number of different roles to take up in society? The idea of policemen and their symbolic relationship with duty and law also appears in another artwork series by Evans. In The Rock & The Judge, three drawings of judges are commissioned from three policemen, one from the UK, one from Germany and one from Estonia. The drawings have an almost metaphysical quality, as if we are not looking at portraits of actual people known to the officers, but rather seeing a personal yet generalised idea of justice. Each drawing is paired with a sculpture by Evans – squat, mute, white approximations of rocks – creating a dynamic whereby it appears as if the judges represented are passing judgement on Evans’ artwork. Evans repeats this process in the series CLODS, Diplomatic Letters, exhibited at Project Arts Centre. This series also pairs commissioned drawings with sculptures made by the artist. Evans is perhaps best known for working with individuals from certain professions, choosing them on the basis of the public or symbolic role they play. Nowhere is this more clearly articulated than in international diplomacy, where an official stands as a representation of her country abroad. Evans extends an invitation to these officials to make drawings of invasive plant species. He then photographs each drawing, inverts the colour, and finally reproduces them as exquisite silver bromide prints. How might such a work stand within the lineage of portraiture? In his Aesthetic Digressions, Dürer writes that, in producing a portrait, the artist ought to be meticulous in their depiction of all parts of the human body: “the breast, belly, the back and behind, the legs, feet, arms and hands with all that they contain… the tiniest wrinkle and speck should not be omitted insofar as is possible”.5 By attending to the visible surface of things,
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by capturing every facet of each individual part, the painted world then becomes both a repository for the likeness of the sitter and for his reality. Indeed, this representational magic is noted in an anecdote from Dürer’s contemporary, Christoph Scheurl, who once described a moment when Dürer’s own dog mistook the artist’s self-portrait for his master and gave the canvas a welcoming lick.6 Evans’ project seems intent on enacting a reversal to this process of representation through verisimilitude. He has no desire to make present the likenesses of the ambassadors and diplomats referred to in the work’s title – nor is he concerned with the processes through which these figures manage and organise their own public image. A very different type of visual thinking is at work here – one that seeks to realign a general understanding of ‘the diplomat’ along different lines of logic – both to an audience and to the diplomats themselves. By making the figure absent, Evans uncouples portraiture from its utilitarian ends, allowing it to become an arena for thought experiments, where ideas of the foreigner and the native, or the emissary and the exile can be contemplated on their own terms. The inversion of the typical exchange between artist and sitter when creating a portrait is captured at every moment in these ‘diplomatic letters’, even down to Evans printing each drawing as its own negative image.
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Hans Memling, Chalice of Saint John the Evangelist, c. 1475 (detail), The Louvre Museum, Paris, Image retrieved from WikiCommons
As with The Rock & The Judge, Evans introduces his own sculptural response to the drawings solicited from each diplomat. Like collage, these sculptures put each element of the artwork into new relations of meaning with each other. Arranged nearby on low-lying plinths are blocks of concrete mixed with marble, each with a borehole, resembling chunks of pavement that have been ripped out by metal poles. These sculptures reference destroyed flagstones that the artist saw in the aftermath of riots that took place in Hull some thirty years ago – although they could equally be stand-ins for any act of civil uprising and social protest. An edition from the series CLODS, Diplomatic Letters is permanently installed in a lobby at the Lithuanian Parliament in Vilnius and includes a drawing by the Lithuanian Ambassador to UNESCO. The fine polished surfaces of the CLODS are harmonious with the décor of formal spaces such as a governmental building or a contemporary art gallery – yet their referent is an antagonist to such spaces. Indeed, as with all acts of collage, of bringing incongruous sign systems together, each constitutive element must belong to a number of different worlds simultaneously. As a viewer, we may read each element in CLODS, Diplomatic Letters using our understanding of their characteristics in each of these worlds – diplomacy and rebellion, letters and weapons – depending on our own histories, backgrounds and knowledge.
Hans Memling, Portrait of a man with roman coin, c. 1480 (detail), The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. Image retrieved from WikiCommons
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Chris Evans, New Rules 5, 2011, Bronze with pale grey patina, 49 × 48.5 × 1 cm, Courtesy of Carla and Hugo Brown collection Cobra to Contemporary
Hans Memling, Young woman with a pink carnation, c. 1485 (detail), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Image retrieved from WikiCommons
Various grammatical operations run through Evans’ work, with rarefied and isolated elements becoming representations of a whole. In Kenneth Burke’s A Grammar of Motives, he notes that all theories of political representation are a matter of synecdoche, i.e. a part of the population representing the whole.7 This theme of representation is particularly relevant to any discussion of Chris Evans’ work and why his work is never content to rest upon any one mode of representation, any singular rulebook from which to decode meaning. Evans warns us against a formalist’s illusion, where, although it may be possible to establish a grammar or set of rules for any discourse, we cannot be fooled into thinking that discourse can be reduced to these rules alone.8 As one character in Evans’ 2007 film The Freedom of Negative Expression notes: “At least we used to be able to see the rules, and thus at rare moments the structures behind these rules, but today we do not even see the rules, only the individuals who represent them.”9 The final artwork exhibited at Project Arts Centre, a medallion calling for New Rules, appears to echo this sentiment. The letter ‘L’ of ‘Rules’ extends into the stem of a wineglass in a pattern where context and content are interchangeable (a trompe-l’œil where the content of a wine glass is simultaneously the
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landscape within which the glass sits). As a form of portrait, if we choose to view it as such, the wineglass might call to mind that common convention of portraiture of depicting a sitter with some trinket in his hand – a flower, a ring, a wineglass, a weapon – representative of who he is. With this medallic form, the evolution of representations of power comes full circle in Evans’ work. Even today, painted portraits remain a rare commodity and so it seems apt to pay heed to the form where portraiture is most pervasive and commonplace – the coin. Medallic portraits, being durable and easy to produce in multiple, can be easily exchanged between the ranks of society. They become, quite literally, the currency and the means by which a likeness of an individual can be transformed into an economic signifier. A recurrent starting point in Evans’ exchanges with state officials, media men, financiers and corporate sponsors is to subtract money from the equation and replace it with something else. With New Rules, Evans returns the coin into a purely cultural domain, curious as to exchanges that might then emerge. To encounter Clerk of Mind on the most basic visual terms, one would find a plant, a ring, a wineglass and a weapon. Yet the interpretations these objects elicit brings us along a dazzling chain of meaning. At first glance, Evans’ work can appear allusive, yet he never seeks to misdirect us. He explains his work with as little mystification as possible and yet never compromises by using tired-out tropes. In that, he is a truly moral artist. With a call for New Rules, perhaps we have a call for new signifiers, for new forms of imagining and for new ways to act within the world. Claire Feeley
1 Actors and Systems: The Politics of Collective Action. Micheal Crozier and Erhard Friedberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. 2 ‘Flowergirl’ is the name given to the ring by Boodles 3 Interview between Chris Evans and curators Mai Abu ElDahab and Anthony Huberman, Liverpool Medical Institution, 5 July 2014. https://vimeo. com/113484746 [retrieved 22 February 2016] 4 www.chrisevans.info [4 January 2016] 5 Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p.142
6 Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p.163 7 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives, California: University of California Press, 1969, p.508 8 See discussion in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Hubert L. Dreyfus & Paul Rabinow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, p.83. 9 See film script for Chris Evans’ video The Freedom of Negative Expression, 2007, co-written by Chris Evans, Will Bradley and Tirdad Zolghadr.
Chris Evans, Clerk of Mind Installation view, Project Arts Centre, 2014
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Chris Evans A Needle Walks into a Haystack, 2014, Platinum and yellow gold ring with diamonds, sapphires and heliodor (‘Flowergirl’) commissioned from Boodles responding to Liverpool Biennial’s press release as a creative brief; displayed on jesmonite tablet encased in rosewood and powder-coated steel vitrine. Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial
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List of Works Chris Evans 1. A Needle Walks into a Haystack, 2014, Platinum and yellow gold ring with diamonds, sapphires and heliodor (‘Flowergirl’) Commissioned from Boodles responding to Liverpool Biennial’s press release as a creative brief; displayed on jesmonite tablet encased in rosewood and powder-coated steel vitrine. Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial 2014. 2.
CLODS, Diplomatic Letters, 2012–ongoing: CLOD I (light), 2012; CLOD II (light), 2012; and CLOD III (dark), 2012 Concrete, marble, PVC mats, painted wooden platforms. Dimensions variable. Diplomatic Letter I, Lantana Camara, commissioned drawing by Angelo Tromp, Diplomatic Attaché for Aruba in the Netherlands, inverted, 2012 Silver Gelatin Print, framed, 53 × 44.5 cm Diplomatic Letter III, Lily of the Valley, commissioned drawing by Jasmina Pašalić, Swiss diplomat for Bosnia Herzegovina, inverted, 2012 Silver Gelatin Print, framed, 53 × 44.5 cm Diplomatic Letter IV, Ambrosia Artemisiifolia, commissioned drawing by Arūnas Gelūnas, Ambassador for Lithuania at UNESCO, inverted, 2014 Silver Gelatin Print, framed, 53 × 44.5 cm
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New Rules 5, 2011 Bronze with pale grey patina Originally commissioned for Fettes College Edinburgh by Collective, Edinburgh
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Chris Evans, CLODS, Diplomatic Letters, 2012–ongoing. Detail of Diplomatic Letter IV, Ambrosia Artemisiifolia, commissioned drawing by Arunas Gelunas, Ambassador for Lithuania at UNESCO, inverted, 2014. Silver gelatin print, framed, 53 × 44.5 cm
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Chris Evans, detail of CLODS, Diplomatic Letters showing CLOD III (dark) and CLOD II (light), 2012. Concrete, wooden platforms, pvc mats, framed silver bromide prints. Dimensions variable
Biographies Chris Evans (b. 1967, Eastrington, UK) lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Hat, Hat, Hat, Uniform, Praxes, Berlin, 2015; Markus Lüttgen, Cologne, 2015; Untitled (Drippy Etiquette), Piper Keys, London, 2014; CLODS, Diplomatic Letters, The Gardens, Vilnius, 2014; CLODS, Diplomatic Letters, Juliètte Jongma, Amsterdam, 2012; Goofy Audit, Luettgenmeijer, Berlin, 2011; The Cell That Doesn’t Believe In The Mind That It’s Part Of, Marres, Maastricht, 2010; I Don’t Know If I’ve Explained Myself, Mala Galerija, Ljubljana, 2010; Take A Bureaucratic Bow, Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp, 2009. His work has also been included in group exhibitions, recently including: At Home, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK, 2016; Good luck with your natural, combined, attractive and truthful attempts in two exhibitions, CRAC Alsace, 2015; Regenerate Art, Kunstverein München, 2014; A Needle Walks into a Haystack, Liverpool Biennial, 2014; Bourgeois Leftovers, De Appel, Amsterdam, 2013; Specific Collisions II,
Marianne Boesky Uptown Gallery, New York, 2013; Radical Conservatism, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, 2013; The Narrators, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 2013; Surplus Authors, Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2012; and The Indirect exchange of uncertain value, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, 2011. In 2012 a monograph on the artist was published by Sternberg in conjunction with his exhibitions at Marres and Objectif Exhibitions. Chris Evans is represented by Juliètte Jongma, Amsterdam and Markus Lüttgen, Cologne. Claire Feeley is a curator, writer and producer based in London. She works closely with artists from early research, to realizing large-scale new works outside of typical art venues. Recent production credits include Katie Paterson’s Future Library, a hundred-year publishing project, Oslo; Michael Sailstorfer’s Folkestone Digs, Folkestone Triennial, UK; and Annika Kahrs’ A Concert for the Birds, Bristol.
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Clerk of Mind Chris Evans Published as an edition of Forms of Imagining, a series published by Project Press based on the exhibitions program of Project Arts Centre. Dublin, March 2016 ISBN 978-1-872493-57-2 Editor: Kate Strain © The Artist, Writer and Project Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission of the publishers. Text: Claire Feeley Designed in Ireland by WorkGroup Series Editor: Emer Lynch Clerk of Mind Chris Evans 5 November 2014 – 17 January 2015 Project Arts Centre, Dublin Acting Curator (2014): Kate Strain Assistant Curator (2013): Emer Lynch Production Manager: Joseph Collins General Manager (2013): Claire O’Neill Artistic Director: Cian O’Brien
Project Press Project Arts Centre 39 East Essex Street Temple Bar Dublin 2 Ireland + 353 (0)1 881 9613 gallery@projectartscentre.ie www.projectartscentre.ie Project Arts Centre is supportedby The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon and Dublin City Council. With warm thanks to Chris Evans and Claire Feeley. The artist would like to extend special thanks to Liverpool Biennial, Juliètte Jongma, Markus Lüttgen, Lab’Bel Collection (Laboratoire Artistique du Groupe Bel), Boodles, Carla and Hugo Brown Collection – Cobra to Contemporary, PRAXES Center for Contemporary Art, The Gardens, Vilnius and Collective, Edinburgh.