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This complete survey of his unique career is long overdue, and reveals a wealth of innovative and powerful work, much of it previously unseen in print. As narratives of British sculpture are reconsidered, Evans is emerging as one of the most creative and influential artists to bridge the generation of Antony Caro and Philip King with that of Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Antony Gormley, Alison Wilding and Bill Woodrow.
Citation preview
Garth Evans Sculpture Beneath the Skin
Garth Evans is a sculptor as capable of evoking
intimacy and simplicity as he is of dealing with
the monumental and the timeless. This complete
survey of his unique career is long overdue, and
reveals a wealth of innovative and powerful work,
much of it previously unseen in print. As narratives
of British sculpture are reconsidered, Evans is
emerging as one of the most creative and influential
artists to bridge the generation of Antony Caro
and Philip King with that of Tony Cragg, Richard
Deacon, Antony Gormley, Alison Wilding and
Bill Woodrow. This investigation into Evans’s
hugely varied, visually eventful and challenging
practice explores connections across geographies
and timeframes as well as contextualizing major
changes and new departures in his work.
Garth Evans was born in Manchester in 1934 and
settled in the USA at the midpoint of his career.
He has exhibited widely in Europe and America
since the early 1960s, and his work is represented
in major public and private collections in Australia,
Brazil, Portugal, the USA and the UK (including
the Arts Council Collection, Leeds City Art
Galleries,The British Museum, the V&A and Tate).
Evans has been the recipient of numerous awards
as well as holding a number of distinguished
teaching positions. Since 1988, he has taught at
the Studio School in New York City where he is
Head of Sculpture.
Ann Compton (ed.) is the originator and
Project Director of the digital research project
Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture
in Britain and Ireland 1851–1951 (sculpture.
gla.ac.uk). She has written widely on British
painting and sculpture, particularly of the
twentieth century, and her publications in-
clude The Sculpture of Charles Sargeant Jagger
(2004). She is an Honorary Fellow in the School of
Culture and Creative Arts, University of Glasgow
and a Visiting Scholar at the Victoria and Albert
Museum. Prior to moving into research, Compton
worked as a curator at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge,
the Imperial War Museum, London, and University
of Liverpool.
Philip Wilson Publishersan imprint of I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd6 Salem RoadLondon W2 4BUwww.philip-wilson.co.uk
Front cover: Untitled No. 1, 1974. Photograph by Anna Arca, courtesy Arts Council Collection Back cover: Little Dancer No. 84, 2003–8Inside covers: Four Bodies, installed at Lori Bookstein Gallery, New York, 2006. Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson9 781781 300046
ISBN 978-1-78130-004-6G
arth E
vans Scu
lpture Beneath
the Skin
Edited
by Ann
Com
pton
02_Garth_Evans_Front_Cover_FINAL_V.5.indd 1 18/12/2012 19:04
Garth Evans Sculpture
Beneath the Skin
© the authors 2013
Published by Philip Wilson Publishers an imprint of I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd6 Salem RoadLondon W2 4BUwww.philip-wilson.co.uk
ISBN 978-1-78130-004-6
Distributed in the United States and Canadaexclusively by Palgrave Macmillan175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission of the publishers.
Designed by Pippa Kate Bridle
Printed and bound in China by Everbest
This book was published to coincide with Garth Evans, an Arts Council Collection exhibition curated by Richard Deacon, Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 22 March – 28 April 2013
Caption note: All the works are in the artist's collection unless otherwise stated. Metric dimensions (height x width x depth) are given first, followed by measurements in inches (or a few instances in feet).
Preface and Acknowledgements 7
Author Biographies 8
Penelope Curtis Introduction 10
Jon Wood The Sculpture of Garth Evans: Jon Wood in conversation with the artist 16
Richard Deacon Localized changes of condition 36
David Hulks Breakdown: analysis of a crisis in the work of Garth Evans 52
Rhona Warwick Closing the Gap: Garth Evans and the interstitial spaces
between decision and execution 70
Anna Lovatt The Migration of Meaning: Garth Evans’ Sculpture of the 1980s 86
Michael Brenson Dramas of Desire and Disorder: the Yaddo Drawings of Garth Evans 126
Leila Philip Geography of the Imagination: biography of a studio 142
Ann Compton In the beginning... 168
Notes 174
Garth Evans Archival texts 178
Chronology 209 Bibliography 213 Exhibitions 217
Contents
It was a catastrophe which gave a wrong direction to all
medieval thought and threw it out of its course when, owing
to the Renaissance, thought, which till then had been an end
in itself, was degraded to a mere means to an end, namely, the
knowledge of external scientific truth, when the purpose of
knowledge became everything and the process of knowledge
nothing. Thought then lost its abstract autonomy and became
a servant: it became the slave of truth ... In short, it was
condemned to be a mere intellectual copy of the true, that is to
say, of objective facts – like the line in painting, which also had
once lived by its own particular expression alone, and now, in
the same circumstances, also lost its arabesque existence to
become a limiting outline, a reproduction of the world of natural
forms, a mere handmaid of the objective...
– Wilhelm Worringer, Form in Gothic3
I first met, or at least saw, Garth Evans on 22 September
1969. Garth was one of a quartet of lecturers at St. Martin’s
School of Art (the others being Peter Kardia, Peter Harvey
and Gareth Jones) who had drawn up a radical new course
for the first year sculpture school intake. Garth was there
that morning, along with Gareth Jones, to induct us, the
selected group of first years into that course. There was
an air of some curiosity and expectancy. On arrival at
St. Martin’s, the incoming sculpture students had been
directed to the A2 studio. One end of this large and, at that Detail: Untitled No. 38, 1967–68, fiberglass, pigment, 182.8 x 61 x 61 (each element 72 x 24 x 24)
Localized changes of conditionRichard Deacon
Garth Evans Sculpture – Beneath the Skin Localized changes of condition38 39
time empty, studio was closed off by a barrier of wooden
screens. On the left-hand side of this screen wall was a
padlocked door with a notice pinned to it saying ‘PROJECT
AREA. KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING.’ Sculpture students
from all three years of the diploma course assembled in the
room, those returning talking, those new sitting or standing,
mostly silent. At about 10.15 two men came into the studio
both wearing name badges – Garth Evans and Gareth Jones.
The first year students were asked to return at 11.20.
At the appointed time we gathered in the studio. Garth
Evans and Gareth Jones reappeared. Gareth held a
small box of name badges. He picked these out one at a
time, reading the written name aloud and giving it to the
responding student. All having received badges, Garth read
an introduction to the project from a piece of paper that he
held in his hand. In this statement he emphasized that the
project would be demanding and require self discipline on
the part of the students to make it successful. His hands
shook as he read. The door to the project area was then
unlocked, Garth and Gareth entered followed, one at a
time, by the students. As each entered they were handed,
from piles either side of the door, a cube of 20 inches on
the side wrapped in brown paper. The project area was
bare of furniture save for notices pinned at various points to
the walls and saying ‘No drawing or writing materials to be
used’; ‘Punctuality is essential’; ‘No verbal communication
between students’; ‘Verbal communication is allowed
between individual student and member of staff’; ‘The
project area will be open 10.00 – 11.00, 11.20 – 1.00, 2.00 –
3.00, 3.20 – 4.30’. Pieces of card pinned at various points to
the floor each contained the name of an individual student.
I took my cube, placed it by the card containing my name
and sat down on it.
It was not stated, but the material provided changed sporad-
ically – evidence of the previous encounter being removed
and, presumably, destroyed. The supplied materials were:
Polystyrene (and brown paper)
Kraft paper
String
Plaster and water
Stopwatch
This first project lasted twenty-four days. Further projects,
with variations in the rules, were introduced throughout
the year. The project area was only used during the
project periods, outside of those times it was locked and
inaccessible. During the projects at least one of the four
members of staff was always present. No one ever told
us what to do, but, more importantly no one ever told us
what not to do and we were never ignored or not attended
to. In retrospect, I realize that it is relatively easy to teach
people what to do but it is enormously difficult to place
someone in a position where they can learn what not to do
for themselves rather than through a prescribed process.
However, if this can be achieved the benefit is the great gift
of ‘what to do’ becoming an arena of endless possibility.
Throughout the ‘A Course’ (as it has become known) Garth
was hard to read. He never frightened or overawed us as Peter
Kardia’s intense and commanding presence sometimes
could nor did he appear, as Gareth Jones and Peter Harvey
occasionally seemed, either vulnerable or insecure and thus
a potential target. (In an effort to construct an explanation
for what was happening our participation was sometimes
an attempt to undermine.) Garth remained inscrutable, but
clearly attentive and engaged – as the suppressed passion of
his opening remarks had revealed. It was a complex position
which nevertheless commanded respect.
Looking back I see in Garth a natural observer – open
and curious, slow to form judgements. Over time, in other
contexts, it became clear that a part of his teaching method
lay in his being able to observe and to make deductions from
those observations. In his studio practice I think that Garth
accepts that the activity of art making is rule bound as a
state of things rather than the consequences of authority.
In other words he embraces such constraints as the
number, type and size of modules in a work, the demands
and limitations of materials (only this or only that) as well as
the starting conditions of the genre and discipline (such as
wall relief, three-dimensional figure, portrait). Garth equally
strongly rejects external voices dictating concept, image or
process (this or that form, this or that technique etc.). In
the intense teaching situation of that first year course at
St. Martin’s Garth’s clear acceptance of the rules of the role
he had been instrumental in building and his wide-eyed
curiosity about where that would take him, and us, were,
perhaps, what we understood. Neither an authoritarian
imposition nor a misunderstood friendship, but just how
it was in that situation at that time.
The rigours of that first year course produced, quite
naturally, a strong sense of solidarity amongst us students.
We became an awkward and demanding year group.
During our third year we began meeting regularly to discuss
collective actions and to think about how we might continue
to be together after graduation. This loose discussion
group slowly formalized into a limited company called The
Manydeed Group, with the objectives of being a mechanism
to provide mutual support and a public face or umbrella for
our activities. Peter Harvey, Gareth Jones, Peter Kardia and
Garth Evans, who had now become known as ‘Group A’
staff, had resumed their tutorial contacts and initiated some
further projects with us during that final year. Although
we knew they were aware of our regular meetings, it was
nevertheless unexpected when The Manydeed Group
received a formal application from all four ‘Group A’ staff
to join. Given the sustained and formative intensity of our
contacts, it’s perhaps not so surprising, some might say a
variant of the Stockholm Syndrome was in play. In any case
there were undoubtedly strong connections and it seemed
an appropriate development so, after some discussion, the
four were welcomed into the group.
The Manydeed Group (Richard Deacon, top left, and Garth Evans, middle row right), 1972
Next spread: Babar, 1965, fiberglass, pigment, 81.3 x 584.2 x 43.2 (32 x 230 x 17), Paul Minyo, Courtesy of Poussin Gallery, London
Garth Evans Sculpture – Beneath the Skin Localized changes of condition42 43
Post St. Martin’s, The Manydeed Group met weekly
and, apart from complex and arcane issues of our own
governance, the substantive problem we faced was finding
somewhere to work. Here Garth proved invaluable. He had
relocated his studio several times and was very connected
to the mass of artists jostling for affordable space in the
bleak and straitened property market of 1970s London.
It was Garth who provided the contact and made the
introductions that led us to a church hall (a former primary
school building) in Baldwins Gardens, just off Chancery
Lane, where the high ceilinged fourth floor assembly room
had long stood empty. Garth and I met the verger, Miss
Nesbitt, a crop-headed and engagingly sprightly woman
in her late sixties, many times prior to signing a lease on
the space. It was also Garth who helped with getting small
grants for paint, for a skip to clear the rubbish into and for
small propane heaters and the deposit on (much larger)
gas cylinders. These were greatly needed as the hall was
woefully under heated. A large, pot-bellied Victorian cast-
iron stove could, with continued stoking, be made to glow
almost red with no discernible benefit (sweeping the floor
was a more effective method of warming up, though the
benefits were short lived). In trying to find a way for us to
show something of Manydeed’s collective activities and to
help us to transition to another plane in the art world, Garth
used his position to bring us to the attention of curators and
art officers. Garth showed an unusual collegiality towards
us as artists, treating us as neither more nor less than equal.
As my own practice has developed I have come to realize
that one of the ways to make art is to apply (selected) rules
and deal with their consequences. I think this is as true of
the welter of marks that build up on the surface of a painting
by Cézanne or Giacometti as it is of Mbuti bark cloth images
from Zaire, Yuan dynasty bowls, or Bruce Nauman videos.
There is also a sense in which the recognition of pattern
(a fundamental part of perceptual processes) has to do
with the application of acquired, or given, rules. Although I
did not learn this from Garth, as I began to see more of his
work in the context of our developing friendship, something
which might at some time have seemed wayward, quirky or
even downright stubborn became compelling.
One of the first (two) sculptures by Garth that I saw was
Babar (1965).4 Exhibited in Bristol in the summer of 1968 in a
show titled New British Sculpture/Bristol. In the accompanying
catalogue, a photograph by Derek Balmer shows the
work behind a prominent ‘No Entry’ sign being quizzically
examined by two parking attendants (as if about to issue a
ticket). So the attribution of a stubborn, quirky waywardness
does not seem unjustified. In the accompanying statement
Garth says:
The obvious theme of these sculptures concerns the local
softening and distortion of hard forms. It should be clear that
they are in no way portraits of events – they do not attempt
a representation of what would have happened to the forms
concerned if they had been treated in the way described. In
fact these sculptures originated conceptually as structures
related to ideas about and sensations of events rather than
their appearance.
In other words he reminds us that although it is relatively
simple to say what it is that these sculptures resemble,
that resemblance is misleading. The phrase ‘structures
related to ideas about’ implies a studied distancing from
Babar, on cover of new British sculpture/Bristol, courtesy of Derek Balmer and Arnolfini, Bristol
Garth Evans Sculpture – Beneath the Skin Localized changes of condition44 45
St. Mary’s No. 1, 1978, welded polythene sheet, 8.5 x 307.3 x 314 (11.4 x 121 x 123.5), Arts Council Collection, installed at Longside gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Photograph by Anna Arca, courtesy Arts Council Collection
appearances whilst using the constraint of a particular
imagined condition, ‘local softening’, to generate con-
sequences. In helping to select an exhibition of Garth’s
work held at Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park in
2013 it was noticeable that such local softening, the sensory
impact of imagined or enacted area-specific changes of
condition on structural form, had been a consistent device
in Garth’s methods – the use and limitations of the linear
polythene welder in making St. Mary’s No. 1 (1974–75) being
a particularly clear example. The distinction between
the purpose of knowledge and the process of knowledge
that Worringer points to in the paragraph quoted at the
beginning of this essay is apropos. There is no empiricism
or testing of results, the work is autonomous, an ‘end in
itself’ living ‘by its own particular expression’. When Garth,
on behalf of his colleagues, introduced the ‘A Course’, he
wasn’t starting an experiment, he was opening a door.
We build our perceptions of the world through the firing
of millions of neurons and their associated synapses in
our neural networks. This constant state of ever shifting
electrical activity corresponds to our perceptions of and
ratiocinations about our internal and external worlds as
they change, and our behaviour as it develops; the motley
palimpsest of our lives. One of the many remarkable things
about this barrage of neural activity is its consistency from
moment to moment, minute to minute, hour by hour, day by
day. It is an extremely stable system. I have often thought
that the reason people have, since pre-history, always liked
taking mind altering substances and pursuing extreme
behaviours of many sorts, is not so much to do with insight
or with forgetfulness but to do with the sheer enjoyment
of experiencing the creative and particular ways in which
the disrupted system restores balance and re-establishes
that consistency, however much it may fly in the face of
knowledge, expectation or experience. This is, in part,
the deep pleasure that arises for me in looking at much of
Garth’s work, that from a disrupted or enfeebled system, he
develops and sustains a process that conjures non-rational
or creative products that are, nevertheless, consistent.
Garth Evans Sculpture – Beneath the Skin46 Works 1964–68 47
Eclipse, 1965, fiberglass, pigment, 55.9 x 182.8 x 182.8 (22 x 72 x 72), Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia
Counterfeit, 1964, fiberglass, paint, 152.4 x 152.4 x 12 (60 x 60 x 28),Leicestershire Education Authority
Tilt, 1964, fiberglass, paint, 101.5 x 127 x 43.2 (40 x 50 x 17), private collection
Garth Evans Sculpture – Beneath the Skin48 Works 1964–68 49
Untitled No. 37, 1967, fiberglass, paint, 185.4 x 320 x 274.3 (73 x 126 x 108), private collection
Untitled No. 38, 1967–68, fiberglass, pigment, 182.8 x 61 x 61 (each element 72 x 24 x 24)Maid of Honour, 1965, fiberglass, paint, 281 x 45.7 x 45.7 (111 x 18 x 18), private collection
Garth Evans Sculpture – Beneath the Skin Works 1964–6850 51
Untitled No. 39, 1967–68, fiberglass, paint, 213.3 x 309.8 x 243.8 x 20.3 (84 x 122 x 96 x 8), private collection
Untitled No. 40, 1968, aluminium, paint, 203.2 x 198.1 x 243.8 (80 x 78 x 96), Hirshorn Museum, Washington D.C.