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DEPT. OF COOL PEOPLE
Cerith Wyn Evans comes to town
BY CAMILLE DODERO

Cerith Wyn Evans pulls back the translucent plastic sheet covering the first piece in his homonymous Museum of Fine Arts show, and his brow swells, his mustache shrinks, and his forehead expands as though he were an asymmetrical alien. It’s an optical illusion created from the fun-house-like refractory properties of Inverse, Reverse, Perverse, Wyn Evans’s signature "big, incredibly delicate" concave mirror, which he first exhibited in 1996. The mirror is so big and the effect so encompassing, swallowing up the viewer in a disarming, almost darkly hallucinogenic way, that when the exhibit’s press release suggests the looking glass evokes "dislocation, disorientation, and ambiguity," it’s not exaggerating. But this isn’t the original mirror Wyn Evans first displayed eight years ago; every time he showed the piece, the bowl-shaped sculpture inevitably got destroyed. One time, a child ran into it. Another time, a clueless custodian tried to clean it like a bathroom mirror. Even worse, Inverse, Reverse, Perverse once hung beside Marcus Harvey’s Myra, a controversial portrait of notorious child-murderer Myra Hindley rendered from juvenile handprints. Protesters egged Harvey’s representation, and Wyn Evans’s innocent-bystander mirror got yolked, too.

Born in Wales, in 1958, Wyn Evans is a conceptual artist whose work has a kind of edgy, intellectual, minimal elegance. A lean man with a matter-of-fact lip tickler, confident posture, and an unpretentious, conversational manner, Wyn Evans studied sculpture at St. Martin’s School of Art, in London, in the late ’70s, and graduated with a filmmaking degree from the Royal College of Art in 1984. His work eventually evolved to integrate elements of video, sound, text, technology, photography, sculpture, neon, and fireworks into site-specific exhibitions.

But one of the more intriguing aspects of Wyn Evans’s background is that in the early ’80s, he made videos for the likes of the Smiths, the Pet Shop Boys, the Fall, and Wire ("They’re all old men now"). And since that was back when record companies didn’t have control over every aspect of a band’s image, Wyn Evans had free rein. "Much more so than any bands who tend to go through the record company because they want to have a hit," he says. "I had absolute total freedom. None of that, ‘Oh, can we re-edit that because my hair didn’t look right in that shot.’ They’d say, ‘Here’re the lyrics, come up with something.’" Though Wyn Evans has established himself in the contemporary-art world, he still takes pride in those cinematic collaborations. "I’m very proud to be a little footnote for those artists. Especially with how great some of these bands are — it’s great to feel that you played a tiny little part in any of that." He’s perhaps proudest of the time when Throbbing Gristle ("TG — they’re old mates") performed on stage in a London theater to one of the student films he’d made at Royal College. He smiles indulgently, possibly out of surprise that anyone under 30 cares about his days working with Genesis P-Orridge. "That was fucking great."

But back to the present. Also this week, Wyn Evans opens a complementary exhibition, which features another variation of Inverse, Reverse, Perverse, at MIT’s more-experimental List Visual Arts Center. "What’s been great about [these exhibitions] is taking two institutions that don’t normally have so much to say to each other," says Wyn Evans, his shoes echoing on the hardwood floors of his MFA exhibition. "They let me borrow stuff from each other’s collection and take it over there and vice versa. Masterworks from the Asian collection here — they actually let me take them!" For its part, MIT allowed Wyn Evans to dig into its archives and pull out The Slide Rule Man, a "very, very strange" audio recording of a man who used to visit MIT dorms and engrave students’ names on their slide rules for 35 cents apiece ("That one’s pretty wild"). And he uprooted the wood-paneled studio from MIT’s student-run radio station, installed it in a corner of the List Visual Arts Center gallery, and named it WMBR Radio Station. "It is a relic of so much," says the artist, who recently designed a record cover for young British band the Xerox Teens. "It was the first college radio station to devote a show exclusively to punk or reggae. And it’s got this smell. That’s another thing that’s kind of sexy about this radio station — this smell."

MIT also let Wyn Evans transplant into the MFA a cut-away coaxial telephone cable, an object that sparked his curatorial curiosity because it’s possible the wire could’ve transmitted Marcel Duchamp’s voice in 1936, when it conveyed phone calls from New York City to Philadelphia. "Marcel Duchamp lived in New York for six months then," reasons Wyn Evans, looking over the cable’s display case. "And I bet he had friends in Philadelphia." Such possible connections mesmerize Wyn Evans: in another MFA room, where an arrangement of intermittently illuminated chandeliers "reads" texts in Morse code, the Welsh artist suggests that one antique chandelier was in use at the right place and time to have hung over Sophia Loren’s head.

Of course, even though each institution gave Wyn Evans total freedom to transplant its objects, he can’t have everything. Tonight is Monday and his old friend Moz is across town, but Wyn Evans can’t go. "I had a ticket," he whispers. "But this curator here is giving a talk. He came to see the show earlier, he was like, ‘Will you be at my talk tonight?’ He’s a very nice man, so I’ll go. But it’s a shame that Morrissey’s in town and I have a ticket. Oh well. I guess I’ve seen him enough before."

Cerith Wyn Evans’s works will be at the Museum of Fine Arts through January 30, 2005, and at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center from October 7 through December 31, 2004. Also, Wyn Evans will lecture this Saturday, October 9, at noon at the List Visual Arts Center and at 2 p.m. in the Museum of Fine Arts’ Remis Auditorium; adult admission is $13, or $10 for members, seniors, and students.


Issue Date: October 8 - 14, 2004
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