PREVIEW ART
_ New
angles
Beatrice Colin meets pioneering photographer ; Gavin Evans. ' i
‘What hit me when I went to Yugoslavia was that the spirit of the person is the same wherever you go in the world. We were all together in ? one room — Serbs, Croats and 3 Muslims— and a few months later ' war broke out. Essentially we all
have this rational spirit in us and then 5 something sparks and makes us turn i irrational, but there is a gap there. We are born into this world the same, and what changes us? Information.’
Gavin Evans is a compassionate man. When he was approached by New Arts at Kelvingrove to put together a show of his photographic work, he put forward instead a proposal for something much more I provocative: a collaborative i exhibition examining the ' manipulation of the individual and society through the disemination of E
Gavin Evan’s print of a DNA molecule- photographic representation is not necessarilytruthlul information. Now nearing completion. the exhibition has taken almost a year to organise and Evans has managed to enlist some of the world’s brightest writers and artists. The result is dis. , ten huge photographic images including a female nude. a swastika, a cross and a child, taken by Evans and then subtly altered — using the latest in computer technology — by Evans and his collaborator, Peter Ross. A plaque will hang below each image and text written in verse from writers as diverse as Wole Soyinka, the first black author to win the Nobel prize, the feminist writer Rosalind Miles, Tariq Ali and Jamaican Jean ‘Buita‘
Breeze.
Evans is highly regarded for his striking portraits of pop stars, celebrities and the circus troupe, Archaos. But, as we chat over coffee, he is reluctant to ‘come on down’, insisting that he is simply the director, not the spokesman for his project. ‘What I’m trying to do is put forward opinions, creative viewpoints from people who are coming from very different backgrounds and different parts of the world. to create an independent cross-cultural viewpoint.‘
Evans hands me a print ofa DNA molecule to illustrate his argument about misinformation. With a felt-tip pen he makes one of the blobs square to make the point that not even a photographic representation of the blueprint of who you are can be relied upon to be truthful. ‘Dis. aims to give the viewer a new way of looking at information, a new angle so that they can re-evaluate what they see.’
These ten images are only the starting point. The exhibition will tour around the world and, in 1995, a book will be produced of 50 images and related texts by internationally recognised writers. ‘It‘s a big project’, says the infectiously motivated Gavin Evans ‘and this is only the beginning.’
Dis. A Collaborative Project is at the Art Gallery and Museum, Kelvingrove, 30 Jan—I4 Mar
:- The art of a
woman
What strikes you first about the work of the live Scottish women artists represented in Through Women’s Eyes is it’s variety. Helen Flockhart’s still, ; stolid, menacing figures, influenced by i folk art and East European religious l ' icons and a little like grimmer versions ol Beryl Cook's work, compellingly disrupt expectations of the lemale torm’s aesthetic role, while Margaret Hunter’s Expressionist-influenced drawings suggest oppression and uncertainty faced by human resllience in spare, etched or scribbled lines. June Hedlem’s richly-coloured canvases, evoking and exploring the unconscious human response to natural lonns, contrast with Kate Downie’s minutely detailed or , dynamically kaleidoscopic cityscapes, a while Dorothy Black’s Pop-Arl-esgue paintings of women eating, holding llowers or lingering cloth convey, in 9 their vivid colours and loving detail at ‘ hands or bent necks, the deliciousness of sensory experience. The exhibition’s title, says the 3 accompanying leallet, ‘could be read ' more as a question than a delinitive statement. Is an made by women dillerent lrom that ol their male counterparts? Is there really such a thing as a lemale viewpoint?’ Certainly , with much at the work here it would be surprising to discover that it had been produced by men, such is the variety of
approaches to the lemale term, the evident interest in dillerent aspects ol femininity, lemale existence, the relationships between women and their environment- it’s rare in any medium to find male artists concentrating on such concerns.
The conllation of physical, emotional and symbolic elements in Margaret Hunter's drawings suggests a distinctively lemale view of the body— men’s bodies are rarely subject to the same social and cultural pressures. Dorothy Black's drawings - Scales, Birthing Stool and Rubber Gloves i Hanging - signily and dignity areas of g predominantly lemale, and ollen l
Helen Flockhart's Woman Holding Flower
‘ marginalised, experience. A recurrent
preoccupation in the works is the historical association between women and nature, as in Helen Flockharl’s
, Woman In Landscape, where a naked,
pregnant, wounded, exhausted- Iooking lemale ligure lies in a blighted-looking setting. June Hedlern's work suggests a more harmonious, pleasurable relationship, with the incorporation oi lemale lorrns within her lush semi-abstract
, landscapes. However such questions, ; though interesting, are secondary to
the fact that this is simply a stimulating show ol work by live line contemporary artists. (Sue Wilson)
V IN PRINT
Marguerite, mother ol Lee Harvey Oswald, photographed by Diane Arbus
I Magazine Work Diane Arbus
I (Bloomsbury £16.99) Better known
as an artist-photographer, Diane Arbus began taking photographs for magazines in the early 19405 and was one of the first photographers to combine business with her own interests in long features on Coney Island, for instance, a flea circus, eccentrics and, memorably, a camp for overweight girls. All the now-familiar freaks, neurotics, religious fanatics and film stars are here — the kind of thing that makes you say ‘only in America’.
I Hebdomeros Giorgio de Chirico (Peter Owen £12.95) The only novel by this founding father of Surrealism is an important complement to his artistic output. The ‘plot’ - Hebdomeros’s search for Eternal Truth - is fraught with non sequiturs and dream-like episodes, but then that’s what Surrealism was all about. I Boudin at Trouville Vivien Hamilton (John Murray £29.95) A modest, though prolific artist, Boudin made no claims to greatness and expected little of posterity ‘I’m very much afraid it will be oblivion,’ he once said. In this thoughtful and beautifully illustrated study, Hamilton examines the series of paintings Boudin did in the South of France, where he went to recuperate after a long illness in later life. The book is a companion to an exhibition of Boudin’s work currently showing at the Burrell Collection.
Portrait by Montage Glover
I A Class Apart: The Private Pictures ol Montagu Glover James Gardiner (Serpent‘s Tail £15.99) An unextraordinary man in himself. Glover‘s large collection of homo-erotic photographs. his diary
. and letters go some way to 5 documenting gay life in the first half
l
of this century. Gardiner puts them into context with his research into
gay history and literature. l__isl :28 January I993 51