Art Review - March Issue - (Page 100)
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CHARLESWORTH hris CHRIS EVANS IS ONE OF THOSE RARE ARTISTS WHO MANAGES TO
ADDRESS SUBSTANTIAL ISSUES ADDRESS about the context he works in, while
doing it with a compelling, if mischievous, sense of humour. about Heir to
such masters of playful art-institutional subversion as General Idea, or
the artworld ersion equivalent of media-prankster Sacha Baron Cohen,
Evans’s work explores how complicity, deceit and moral ambiguity can be
worked in and out of the circuits of art’s institutions cuits
institutions. Evans probes the tensions between artists and the
institutions they have to work with, and casts a satirical eye on the
narrow liberal pretensions that often underpin right-thinking
‘critical’ artists. For UK Arts Board Agency 2000 , Evans advertised
for artists’ proposals for work that needed funding, with the vague
proviso that the proposals would have to involve trees. Evans took these
ideas and turned them into applications to funding bodies. Freed from
having to balance the chore of making an application against the chance of
success, artists put forward wild flights of fancy, such as Alan
Currall’s proposal to build a bridge from Plymouth to Cape Cod. Evans
explains: “I was trying to intervene between artists and state funding,
to work my way into the set-up that decides what gets made. What kept me
going was the thought of an arts board o cer faced with an inexplicable
rush of interest in the tree as a contemporary theme.” More recent
projects include Radical Loyalty 2003– , in which Evans has bought a
piece of land outside Tallinn, Estonia, in order to turn it into a
sculpture park. Evans has designed maquettes for sculptures as the result
of conversations with the managing directors of international companies
such as Schlumberger Oil and Starbucks, now moving into Estonia’s
emerging market. Evans asked how each would envision loyalty and how
loyalty might be thought of as radical. In an added twist, the maquettes
will be produced by Estonian artists responsible for building the
country’s monuments during the Soviet era: art, commerce and power tied
in an ambiguous and suspect contract. Right now, Evans’s ongoing
residency project, Militant Bourgeois: An Existentialist Retreat 2006–
is at the International Project Space in Birmingham. A Portakabin hut
where artists can spend time alone in order to facilitate a more
‘authentic’ artistic reflection, Retreat questions both the pressure
for artists’ residency projects to benefit the community, and the idea
that artists need to be granted free time to make better art. Asking
uncomfortable questions about the artworld’s most cherished assumptions
of freedom, egalitarianism and autonomy, Evans makes us laugh, even as we
realise that he may just well be right. Militant Bourgeois: An
Existentialist Retreat, 2006. Courtesy the artist and Stedelijk Museum
Bureau Amsterdam Evans ARTREVIEW C Future Greats_p100.indd 2 5/2/07
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - March Issue
Manifesto
Dispatches
Consumed
Tales from the City
David Lynch
Marcel Dzama
Future Greats
Art Pilgrimage: Moscow
Mixed Media: Moving Images
Mixed Media: Photography
Mixed Media: Digital
Reviews
Book Reviews
On the Town
On the Record
Art Review - March Issue
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