Cerith Wynn Evans

At the Venice Biennale 2001

This was the eighth Venice Biennale attended by Audio Arts in order to make 'on the spot' recordings with artists, participants, critics, curators and commentators, thereby communication the issues, agendas and preoccupations of contemporary art and the debates that surround it.

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 20 Numbers 1 & 2, 2001

Transcript

Jean Wainwright: I’m here with Cerith Wynn Evans to talk about his intervention at the Venice Biennale in the Art Newspaper. Cerith I wanted to relate primarily what you did, with your whole idea of coding and metaphors; what prompted you to do it in the particular way that you did?

Cerith Wynn Evans: Well the whole idea came about because it was suggested to me by curator Rachel Thomas. I suppose we were looking for a space that coincided with Venice but there wasn’t a physical space; it wasn’t a building. The space became a space in a journal and it was suggested that we make a space, a contribution, within the Art Newspaper. Those who know the Art Newspaper will understand that it’s a sort of trade magazine; trade rag. Insiders of the art world buy it; it relates gossip, auction house figures and news that’s interesting to people who are within the business. It was interesting to examine what that context was and then work within that. If it had been in another magazine I suppose the results would have been different. Instead of taking a page and putting some kind of image or illustration of a previous work into it I thought it would be more appropriate to slip inside that sort of context and try and do something that was on the threshold of visibility within that. The initial kind of impetus behind the project was to look at issues of nationalisms and identity. To look at the problematics of the Biennale; it’s history structured around notions of national representation. In the Giardini you have these pavilions, and even the appearance of the pavilions represent the various national traits in a cartoon sense. The ugly neo classical building that represents Britain looks like a mini version of the British Museum and the rather elegant and clean and pure space of the Nordic pavilion reaffirms certain cartoon traits. I felt would be interesting to confront that. I had this idea then of the Welsh language; it is my first language and it’s a very important thing, it’s a fundamental thing for me on all sorts of levels. I grew up through a process of translation, a dual understanding of various fundamental concepts of what it is to be able to communicate with other people. So in a slightly cheeky way I was looking for things that might trigger a sort of Welsh response and it came in the most unusual form. We found a page in a previous issue which spoke about the insecurities which major auction houses have in the West, about China, which is about to enter the World Trade Organisation, which will involve major auction houses losing money, because they no longer have the monopoly on trading in Chinese antiquities. The trigger was the title of the piece, so you’ve got a page right at the back, which talks about prices in auction houses which says ‘when the dragon awakes’, referring to the Chinese emblem of the dragon, that made me think of the Welsh dragon which is also the national emblem of Wales and (Welsh for dragon) the red dragon, which is on the flag. It conflated a certain sense of stereotypic nationalisms, because we’re looking at potent and very loaded historical, social and cultural symbols. It’s the first time that I ever thought about the Chinese dragon and the Welsh dragon in the same breath. Those gaps between language recognition, interpretation, the spaces in between, the space that is a breath between a syllable, two words or whatever. We’re talking about what Du Champ would call (‘an infra this space’?) to work in here. We’re looking at spaces that are narrow. What I tried to do, was, as efficiently as possible, translate the entire page, keeping absolutely everything in place, but just to make a literal translation of the page from the previous issue, and publish it in the next one. Now one of the things, on another level but intriguing to me, was the fact that the auctions that had these ads, (that were at the bottom of the page) one for a Guido Renée painting and another for a Henri Michaux drawing, would have passed by that time, so to a certain extent there was a revival of information. It was interesting to, not merely take the simplistic of saying ‘dragon dragon’ and the cheeky thing of twisting information into a certain shape that very few people would understand, but to take the whole page as a material property, of being a translated ready made, if you like. As the Art Newspaper was being launched during the Biennale, it was about pointing out the nationalisms, regionalisms, localisms within the context of Venice, It was albeit slightly subtle, an invisible pointer towards these kinds of issues. Venice is a kind of mixed blessing I think. The show travels also; it’s an intervention that happens in a newspaper so the life of the newspaper is also, to a certain extent, the life of the work. I think the work is buried, it’s a bit likes some kind of junk; bit of genetic code which you choose to put a picture into. This notion of the work being, in a sense, encoded, you know buried within the large meaning, but there are layers in the cake and one layer which is one particular thing, which is a strand that runs through something.

One of the first works I ever made when I was a student at St. Martin’s were fake pebbles. I took them down to Brighton on the train and put them on the beach. The moment they were down on the beach they become instantly invisible but in fact they were hand crafted and sort of polished. I made them as absolutely pebble like as they could possibly be. In a sense the work hasn’t changed from that time. There’s a certain level of playful subversion, I mean this is one of the things that impresses me so much about the situationist writer (Gidé Bor?) is that he says ‘some of us are at war with the world but some of us take that lightly’. Taking it lightly is still a strategy that’s appealing to me. Of course it produces these incessant anecdotes that keeps me going and makes me still a social being.