Like many of us, Cerith Wyn Evans found himself, at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, wondering: “Why am I doing this? Why do I have to please everybody?” It was a good question, for Evans had volunteered to go on stage and sing an a cappella version of the Welsh national anthem to introduce Throbbing Gristle, the art-rock band fronted by Genesis P-Orridge. The audience’s response was, he recalls, rude.
But Evans, 48, does seem to revel in the oddest situations. Take his new show at the ICA in London, Take my eyes and through them see you. In the main downstairs gallery that borders The Mall he is simply going to remove the picture wall so that visitors can — most unusually — look out through the windows to the goings-on outside. “I want to take out that wall where so many thousands of things have hung,” he says. “What you get is a strange perspective; you see The Mall as a kind of film in real time, you see cars going by, processions, people going by with their heads cut off.”
And in another corridor usually full of art there will be “a single magpie sitting on a branch coming out of the wall — one for sorrow!” he says. “I want to curse the corridor.”
Born in Llanelli in South Wales, Evans says that he didn’t speak English until he was 8. “ I went to a Welsh language school which forbade English to be spoken.”
He remains fiercely proud of where he comes from (his English preserves a lovely warm accent), and recognises that his upbringing carried the seeds of who he is today.
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“My father was a tailor and a keen photographer,” he says (and given the fine charcoal suit he was wearing when we met, it seems that it wasn’t just images his father schooled him in). “My mother was a hard-working housewife, who nursed her own mother for the last 15 years of her life. So, really, I grew up in a house with two mothers. My dad spent his time in a darkroom in a shed in the garden.”
Nevertheless, he describes that upbringing as “confining”, so when he came to London in the late 1970s it was not surprising that — shall we say — the lid came off. He enrolled on a sculpture course at St Martin’s College, but little got done, and after two years letters were sent to his parents.
Meanwhile, he spent time hanging about with the likes of Leigh Bowery. “He would go to McDonald’s,” he says, “then go to Häagen-Dazs, then to a movie in Leicester Square, then to Burger King, then Häagen-Dazs, then another film before catching the night bus home.” Once Evans was talked into attending Top Gun with him and walked out, disgusted.
The years he spent in a particularly lively London squat at 64 Warren Street were perhaps the high tide. “That was with Boy George,” he says, “and with the film-maker John Maybury, the transsexual 1980s pop star Marilyn, the performance troupe the Neo-Naturists and the milliner Stephen Jones. We’d go out every night, there was lots of dressing up and showing off, but eventually it was closed down because it was getting out of hand. The beginning of the end came when Iggy Pop’s girlfriend overdosed and died in the house. I wanted out at that stage.”
Today, Evans’s personality seems an extraordinary amalgam of those two contrasting periods of his life: the neat, receding hair, the moustache, the suit, the confident stride almost lend him something of Colonel Blimp. You know, of course, that for Evans this is a gay man’s mask of stock masculinity, that it’s a kind of satire, but this is also the real Evans, through and through, and nothing feminine betrays it.
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Evans has put himself out for his friends: he spent many years working with Derek Jarman (he worked on The Last of England, on videos for the Pet Shop Boys and the Smiths, among other projects). He squandered an entire year’s student film budget to take a biplane above the clouds so that the dancer and choreographer Michael Clark could have a filmed cloudscape backdrop for one of his earliest productions.
Later this year he will design backdrops for another Clark production, at the Barbican, based on Stravinsky’s Les Noces. But for now Evans himself is the centre of attention.
At the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, a retrospective has just come to a close that charted more than ten years of his work since he began to devote himself to art rather than film. His neon sculpture How to improve the world . . . provides the title for the Art Council survey of modern British art that has just opened at the Hayward Gallery. (Evans roared with laughter when he recalled how the other day he informed a curator that the title comes from a note in John Cage’s diary. Cage adds, parenthetically: “You’ll only make matters worse.”)
Evans wants the ICA show to be a peaceful refuge from the hubbub of artistic activity in October: the opening of the big autumn fair, Frieze. The place has always been important to him: Jarman introduced him to the possibilities of showing short films there, and when he came to London one of the first exhibitions he saw was at the ICA: it was to have a profound influence on him: Décor, by the late Belgian poet turned conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers, was a witty reflection on exhibition-making that was acutely sensitive to its context.
It included a film that featured footage of the Trooping the Colour entitled The Battle of Waterloo, and cannons were installed in the upstairs galleries.
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Evans wants his show to be equally sensitive, and thus upstairs (in another otherwise empty gallery) he is again drawing attention to the view over The Mall with a set of Venetian blinds that are wired to a computer so that they flicker out a message in Morse code. Elsewhere, there will be a film that comprises a black screen enlivened only by the flecks and scratches of the film stock’s degradation. A perversely black-painted neon will gesture to Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Chile, and one of Broodthaers’s signature motifs, a potted palm, will sit spotlit with red light to turn it into a ghostly grey.
One suspects that Evans would once have worried about mounting such a spare presentation: he told me that it disappointed him in the past that critics have been impatient with his work, seeing it as wilfully obscure.
But he is also masterful in evoking moods, and the latter always trumps the former. His installation for the Art Now room at Tate Britain in 2002, Cleave 00, had a text by William Blake tapped out in code by a light flashing on to a disco mirror ball. Blake’s sun became the ball; his vision was translated into a contemporary imagining.
At the ICA we can surely look forward to something similarly memorable. Evans has spent many years getting where he is today, but a route that once might have looked like a series of detours — through film, pop videos, set design — now looks like just about the best training a contemporary artist can have. He lives with his boyfriend of 11 years, but he shows no signs of a midlife mellowing. “I’ll never settle,” he says. Thank goodness for that.
Cerith Wyn Evans: Take my eyes and through them see you is at the ICA, London SW1 (020-7930 3647), from Sept 20-Oct 29