Written by Michael Darling for Ripe Exhibition
Smiles by the Miles
In a recently drafted artist's statement, James Evans concluded a round up of his aims and concerns by writing that he is "seeking to produce work . . . which can give rise to a smile." There is no doubt that Evans accomplishes this feat, however minor it may seem (the phrase was, in fact, purged in a later version), but not by giving the viewer something merely cute to look at or by making cheeky jokes. The smiles generated by Evans' work are responses to the profound number of references, allusions, and sensations he carefully builds into each piece, smiles of amazement at the 0cross-cultural fluency and sheer economy of his forms. The works can be enjoyed on a variety of levels, limited only by the viewer's willingness to loosen the strictures of material, artistic, and even social hierarchy. A likely first smile comes from the outgoing sensuality of Evans' glazed ceramic sculptures. Their lurid pink and naughty black skins hug curvaceous contours that beg to be caressed and held at the very least, while some invite multi-limbed embraces or even oral appreciation. These urgings come in part from the bodily scale of the works, mimicking as they do natural formations. Evidence of direct hand moulding contributes further to their empathetic aura, a method that seems strategically opposed to the mechanical precision yielded by a potter's wheel. Likewise, Evans offers up ergonomic bulges and creases that reciprocate manual touch and suggest some (purposely ambiguous) sort of use. Many are poked with holes and most vacillate between hollow, fragile vessels and sturdy mounds of matter. The play between function and form has characterised Evans' work for many years, perhaps most humorously in his "thigh-grasp comforters" of some years ago which were hypothetically meant to be placed between the legs and filled with hot or cold water, depending on one's needs. Remnants of such implied use are found in recent works such as Comforter (1998), a less-anatomically-engineered yet still suggestive totem of fired, lustrous clay with a seemingly useful aperture at its top. The sensuality of the works are amplified by titles such as this, and by others with apt names like Succulent, Beauteousness, and Disco.
Another cause for smiling, although perhaps with an accompanying blush, is the decided eroticism of the works. Often alluding to genitalia and other erogenous zones, the artist's confections nevertheless maintain a degree of decorum through deft abstraction, keeping them from the brink of offensive mimesis. Loosely phallic, testicular, mammary and vulvic forms morph in and out of focus in Evans' sometimes tantric sculpture, accompanied by less aggressively sexual body parts such as belly-buttons and good old rolls of fat. Simple Pleasure (1999), for instance, could read as a stylised detail from one of Lucian Freud's portraits of the corpulent Leigh Bowery, a mid-section close-up of a struggle between gravity and unstructured blubber. At the same time, it evokes a set of bee-stung lips or a short stack of glazed jelly doughnuts. Evans' sculptures, despite their high sheen and glamorous gloss, are always imbued with a humanistic
imperfection which contributes greatly to their geniality. The artist's forms slump and quaver and tilt in ways that are perceptibly hominine, even though they have been essentialized away from direct representations of human biology.
Those attentive to art historical high-jinx are given plenty to smile about in Evans' work as well, mostly as a result of his conscious rejection of boundaries between fine art and craft, high and low, seriousness and jest. Ceramics are often regarded as second-class citizens in the world of fine arts, yet Evans confronts this bias by taking on issues germane to other artistic practices. The richly allusive sculpture of Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon (whom Evans worked for as an assistant), and Martin Puryear, for example, shares with Evans' pieces a reverence for painstaking craft, but also an openness to interpretive ambiguity. These artists also promiscuously court non-traditional, even banal materials and forms, from Cragg's plastic debris to Deacon's industrial derivations and Puryear's predilection for basket weaving and other out-moded woodworking techniques, an approach equally central to Evans' practice. Similarly, the blob paintings of Carl Ostendarp, the gooey accretions of Lynda Benglis' early works, even the splatters in Jackson Pollock's classic canvases can be seen as the anti-heroic, non-classical brethren of Evans' insistently contemporary ceramics, a lineage he directly and unmistakably engages. Which is not to say that Evans has delusions about the more specific arena in which he works. The fact that his creative output is made of clay, fired in a kiln, and takes advantage of an in-depth knowledge about all manner of glazing techniques attaches him to a tradition of ceramics that he alternatively honours and defiles. The artist has said, "I follow tradition, using proper materials and staying true to the medium, but I take my work into areas that ceramics doesn't usually recognise. I am not out to upset anyone, just interested in exploring other directions." Ceramics, as with other visual arts, comes with its own inherent hierarchies and prejudices, ranging from fine arts explorations of technical and formal issues to amateur forays with vases, bowls, and plates, to mass-production objects of practical use, on down to the cheap decorative tchotchke. Evans is not afraid of being associated with any of these categories, rather, he flaunts his appreciation of them all. Some of the shiny, metallic glazes he has favoured of late, for instance, might be better suited to a mock-elegant tiger standing guard over a white-shag-rugged Palm Beach condominium than a vase in a display case at the Victoria & Albert, yet when said glaze is matched with an abstract cluster of orbs that suggests both maggot eggs and the reclining form of a Henry Moore bronze, what you have is a hybrid sculpture that defies categorisation. Add to this object coloured orifices which could serve as receptacles for salt, pepper, chutney, or a flower, as the artist has done in Untitled (1998), plus a range of art historical allusions from Rene Magritte to Lucio Fontana, Ken Price, and Louise Bourgeois, and suddenly a lump of clay becomes an articulate oracle attuned to the ramblings of an entire century of style and expression. Evans advances ceramics as any self-respecting member of its avant-garde is committed to do, but his undiscriminating stops along the way allow a raucous bunch of conscripts to join the campaign.
In all of his recent work, Evans negotiates mergers between wildly disparate entities. Constantine Brancusi, chairman of pristine ideals, shakes hands with Claes Oldenburg, proprietor of slouching anti-forms. The noble, minimal volumes of Navajo baskets commingle with the lumpy functionalism of porcelain toilets. Harmless domestic flower vases trade secrets with ominous nuclear reactors. Ancient, spiritual talismans dialogue evocatively with the artificial junk foods of today. By engineering such structural shake-ups, Evans ensures that value judgements lose credence and everything is capable of making relevant contributions to the production of meaning. There is an intoxicatingly democratic ethos bubbling up under the slick surfaces of Evans' objects that threatens to render classist distinctions of quality obsolete, replacing them with a free market reverence for the most provocatively communicative creations imaginable. It makes me smile just to think about it.