Contemporary British artist Chris Evans is all about encouraging conversations: helping artists forge social and working relationships with bureaucrats, corporations and other artists. This exhibition catalog, a comprehensive survey of his work since 1996, includes sculptures, letters, drawings, film scripts, commissioned essays and other writings. Evans gleefully confuses the roles of artist, collector, philanthropist, patron, art dealer, and public funding body. For example, in his ongoing series “Cop Talk,” he arranges for members of the police force to go on recruitment drives around European art colleges, a potential culture clash if there ever was one. Evans’s whimsical-seeming projects are dead-serious comments on the art world today.
Included are three pivotal texts by Penelope Curtis, Marina Vishmidt, Tirdad Zolghadr, making this a thoughtful and informative artist monograph.