The Horny and Homicidal World of Cerith Wyn Evans

“My old friend Leigh Bowery would ask: ‘Where is the poison?’ And that’s a question I keep asking myself”

Cerith Wyn Evans and London’s Institute of Contemporary Art go back a long way. This is where, in 1975, as a seventeen-year-old schoolboy visiting London from Wales, Wyn Evans saw an exhibition by Marcel Broodthaers: plants, firearms, and garden furniture accompanying a screening of the Belgian artist’s film La Bataille de Waterloo, the latter focusing on a rehearsal for Trooping the Colour. This ambivalent concatenation of effects profoundly influenced the course of his art, and thus his life. (As Wyn Evans told Hans Ulrich Obrist in a 2002 interview, “I felt I had discovered something very exhilarating… this work was somehow forbidden, unsanctioned, not allowed. It seemed very stimulating that the pieces didn’t add up, that there was room to move, or if there were connections, there were weak connections.” ) Six years later, in 1981, having studied film at St Martin’s and made works that drew on his experience of Broodthaers’s art, Wyn Evans was an exhibitor at the ICA; he’d impressed then-director Archie Tait with his degree show. And now, when the time has come for his first exhibition in a British public space, he is there again.

In the quarter-century between his two exhibitions at the storied venue, Wyn Evans has gone from being an experimental filmmaker to a respected visual artist, if not exactly ever a known quantity. His artworks problematise the flow of meaning from maker to audience: they are not only fairly open-ended but also variously employ restriction, encryption and obstruction. They have often involved language. A phrase by one of Wyn Evans’s personal pantheon of artists, writers and cineastes (among them Kenneth Anger, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Raymond Williams, and the eighteenth century Welsh cleric Ellis Wynne) may be spelt out fleetingly in fireworks, or beamed into the sky in Morse code by a Second World War searchlight. Or, as in one work using the poetry of William Blake, projected onto a spinning glitter-ball that bounces it back onto the gallery walls in splintered and unreadable fragments. Sometimes a multiplicity of texts will be combined, creating an open-ended polyphony allowing for collisions of meaning. At other times Wyn Evans privileges the viewer’s subjectivity by resurrecting visionary portals such as Brion Gysin’s hallucination-inducing ‘Dreamachines’.