Studio Visit: Peter J Evans
May 24th, 2011 § 1 Comment
Studio Visit: Peter J Evans
Thursday 17th March
Ouseburn, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
“You can’t speak of a reality independent of the mind, the mind is the only perciever of reality there is. We all belong to one mind and all that’s ever happened or been thought of since the beginning of the universe is in that mind and it’s all real…”
Russell Hoban, (1992), p.186
In Douglas Adams’ novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1981) the devastating effects of subjecting a sentient being to all of reality, and the true scale of the universe, are described in the operation of the torture device the “Total Perspective Vortex”:
“When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation and somewhere in a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, “You are here”.”
Adams, p.70
To say that Peter J. Evans’ is concerned with “…the entire unimaginable infinity of creation…” threatens to over simplify the concerns underlying his deft, pluralistic practice (which encompasses drawing, sculpture, installation and performance to name but some). However, Evans’ work operates from the position of someone standing on the brink of the infinite and the whole unknowable, unquantifiable universe. From this position Evans poses some big questions about the nature of reality and of our ideas of finite truth in an infinitely changeable universe. In his own words “…the size of the Universe underlines how little we know…”. As evolutionary Biology has demonstrated humans have evolved in such a way that our senses and brain operate on a very narrow band width (compared to the vast spectrum of reality) but one most pertinent to our survival on earth (1). As the writer, often quoted in relation to Evans’ work, Russell Hoban described it:
“Reality is ungraspable. For convenience we use a limited-reality concensus in which work can be done, transport arranged, and essential services provided. The real reality is something else – only the strangeness of it can be taken in and that’s what interests me…”
Hoban, (1992), Foreword
This “real reality” which Hoban alludes to – the strange, flickering, incomprehensible reality beyond our limited version of percieved reality – is something which Evans endeavours to uncover in his work. From early drawings such as The universe and you IV and There’s all of this Happening to later sculptures such as Für Immer and Waveformer a dialectic is set up between the precise, systematic rendering of the work and their lyrical titles which offer the first “key” into these interior realities… Whilst science and religion clothe reality in finite, comprehensible units (names/numbers/equations etc) and paradigmatic rules, this assumes that reality, nature and the Universe are essentially predictable, orderly and explicable. In Evans’ pseudo-scientific ontology he utilizes a wide variety of these axioms (of science, maths and technology) to go beyond themselves in order to deliver glimpses of that infinite, incomprehensible, often contradictory “real reality”. This polymathic approach to making work and exploring ideas reminds me of Paul Feyerabend’s disavowel of entrenched scientific approaches and his stress on the need for “pluralistic methodology”, diversity and “theoretical anarchism” to develop human knowledge and understanding of science, ourselves and the greater universe (2).
In works such as The Universe and You and Making Twenty the slight irregularities, chance encounters and imperfections of the hand-drawn elements – within a very precise and regular system – hint at the innate contradictions of received ‘truths’ and ‘scientific’ observations; i.e. that a prevailing, fully formed scientific truth can never be fully realised as there is no such thing as these laws or systems in nature (these are merely conceptual frameworks applied by mankind) and because there is always a relationship between the observer (be they scientist or artist) and the observed phenomena. No matter how immaculately rendered the pieces, or how assiduously they stick to a pre-prescribed systems of rules (as in Making Twenty) the works are never conclusive or didactic but subtle, multifaceted and open-ended. They exist, therefore, simultaneously as sign, signifier and signified entity, as a whole reality, but one which is entirely changeable depending upon the subjective interpretation (and internal reality) of the individual viewer (3).
Looking at Evans’ work both as separate entities and as a whole body there is a palpable bleeding between the disciplines: Drawings and Prints often take on a time-based or performative quality whilst his performances just as often resemble the primacy of mark making and the symbiotic thought-gesture of drawing (see Arrivals). Whilst there are unifying concepts between all of his disciplines there is also a certain rigour, beauty and sense of the – essentially non-visual – passage of time which permeates all his works. Through a process of delimitation, time is arrested by his choice and use of materials “…with wood you’re holding time… and I guess a lot of the work is about holding time…”. The “time” Evans seemed to allude to in this comment was the continuum of time; the ever-flowing river which carries in it the expansion of the universe, the decay of isotopes, the constant flux of human experience, and whose continuous motion eventually obliterates everything. But time in Evans’ work is also the latent, embodied time of the work’s construction. In pieces such as Making Twenty repeated gestures, marks or meticulous production techniques serve to meter the real, lived time invested in the work.
“Differences induced or produced by repetitions constitute the thread of time…”
Henri Lefebvre (2004) p. 8
The time invested in Evans’ work is rarely short or fleeting*, though it may be composed of many repeated, ephemeral moments or gestures. His work is intricate, elaborate and highly laboured, indicative of the long, slow and measured processes invested in its manufacture. Accepting the invitation to engage with the work on a similarly enduring, dedicated process of scrutiny provokes not only feelings of awe in the viewer but also immerses them in a meditative time-space – contrary to the fast, ‘Western’ time of production, communication and consumption – where the key to the multiple, unnameable connections between these forms before us and the rest of the universe begin to unfold.
In his 2007 TED talk, Murray Gell-Man the Nobel Prize winning Physicist described how, though chance and accident tell us as much about the Universe as the fundamental laws, there is an inherent relationship between beauty and truth in the nature of the universe as understood by science:
“…what is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant…”
Whilst it admits the essential uncertainty, unfixedness and indeterminacy of reality, the beauty of Evans’s work is similarly equivalent to the ‘truth’ of it:
“…A lot of the work is in some way beautiful…the works have something about them, the truth of beauty… an aesthetic hook, a moment of contemplation, [and] part of making the work ‘right’, not to do with meaning but completion, balance… These works have to be perfect, not contrived but part of what happens…”
Evans, (2011)
This seems to connect with the idea of the artist as being a locus for the whole of reality or as Taoism would describe it: “man as a microcosm for the universe”(4). The beauty of Evans’ work and pieces such as The Hart of the Wud and Supernova Moment is not the calculated beauty of style so embedded in commodity culture and exchange but the beauty of balance and harmonics in nature, the beauty of the pure idea and of physics. What Evans achieves in his practice is not the creation of beautiful work, but the meeting of beautiful truths. These are not simply the artistic rendering, or the representation of virtuality but objects and images whose meaning is “equivalent to the object itself” (Evans); they are delimited fragments of reality, time and human experience full of layered ideas, influences and meaning.
* Though with pieces such as his wall drawing for Feedbacker deliberately and self-consciously both.
Iris Aspinall Priest ©
References
Adams, Douglas (Reissue 2010), The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Macmillan Children’s Books, London.
Dawkins, Richard (2007), Our Queer Universe, Lecture for TED talks, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1APOxsp1VFw (last accessed 24th May 2011).
Elkins, James (1997), The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing, Mariner Books, New York.
Feyerabend, Paul (3rd Edition, 1993), Against Method, Verso, London.
Gell-Man, Murray (2007), On beauty and truth in physics, Lecture on TED.com, http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/murray_gell_mann_on_beauty_and_truth_in_physics.html, (last accessed 24th May 2011).
Henri Lefebvre (2004), RythmAnalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, Continuum, London.
Robinet, Isabelle, (1997), Taoism: Growth of a Religion, Stanford University Press, Stanford.
Notes
(1) Dawkins (2007) “…As an evolutionary biologist I’d say this: Our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude of size and speed which our bodies operate at…”
(2) Feyerabend (1993) p. 39 – 53.
(3)Elkins, (1997) p. 33
(4) Robinet, (1997) p.0
..Something I have found interesting, but haven’t addressed in this blog, about meeting Pete and the other Chance Finds Us artists is the ways in which they negotiate issues such as slowness and a rigorous adherence to the truth of their practices (“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” Lao Tzu) in relation to an art market which demands fast, consistent and prolific production of (mainly sellable) work. This fine balancing act between allowing the work to have the time and mental-space it requires to manifest (and having the time to make mistakes) and the necessity of profitability, sustainability and meeting the requirements of the gallery can sometimes be difficult and I didn’t want to write about it in a post because I didn’t want my observations to be seen as reflecting the ideas or opinions of any of the individuals interviewed, or the group as a whole. And it is a tricky subject. But I have had along time to think about it since these meetings and, though it may not be entirely relevant to the writing as a whole, it’s something I’m interested to examine as the project progresses and I meet/ write about the work of the other (both represented and unrepresented) artists in the group. Though I’m painfully aware that we have to make money to survive as artists, writers and human beings, I also think increasingly that – perhaps contrary to that necessity – the adherence to the truth of the work has to come before the commercial concerns… even if it costs us greater public visibility or our breakfasts. Something I’ve been happy to see in the work of all these artists (though unhappily that it hasn’t always afforded all of them that dirty word ‘success’ they deserve) is the unwavering commitment to the process and to finding the truth at the heart of what they do…
Iris