Audio Tour Is a Work of Art at Frieze

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/arts/11iht-rartevans11.html

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When asked to respond to the artist Bertrand Dezoteux’s new video work, “The History of France in 3D,” the American financial analyst Max Keiser, who presents RT network’s “Keiser Report,” did not hesitate to speculate.

“Well, this is clearly the future,” he says on the audio guide that is being provided to visitors at the Frieze Art Fair in London, which runs through Sunday. “France creates a space program, and while they are exploring space there’s a thermonuclear war on planet Earth and everything is destroyed so the only representatives in the universe are these French people in the spacecraft. This is how they recreate the universe — in the image of a French person.”

Whether or not Mr. Keiser’s interpretation coincides with the artist’s intention is sort of beside the point. For Cécile B. Evans, 29, the creator of the audio guide, it is the fact that Mr. Keiser is creating his own personal narrative that she finds really exciting.

Ms. Evans, who was born in the  United States to Belgian parents and raised in Florida, was selected as the winner of the 2012 Emdash Award, the Frieze’s annual prize for emerging artists, to present a site-specific installation for this year’s Frieze fair. Her winning proposal was an alternative audio tour that does the opposite of what audio tours typically do. That is, it does not provide names, dates and other contextualizing historical information. Instead, it offers voices of people from outside the art world, responding to works of art in an entirely personal way.

“My main interest is in putting emotional value into the fair,” Ms. Evans said. “Art fairs are usually weighted with economic or theoretical value. With this audio tour, what I’m doing is basically taking subjective or not really relevant information and pumping it in as though it’s objective or as though it’s factual.”

The purpose of the project, she explains, is to encourage viewers to respond to art in whatever way feels most genuine, without mediating their responses based on preconceived or learned ideas about art.

“Sometimes people are afraid to talk about art in their own voice or in their own way,” Ms. Evans said . “This is allowing people to say, ‘to me, that looks like … or ‘this reminds me of … , and not to be afraid to be wrong or right.”

That populist emphasis was precisely what appealed to the Emdash judges, who selected the project from among 750 proposals this year, said the Frieze’s project curator, Sarah McCrory.

“We have a situation that’s fairly unique for an art fair, in that we have a huge general public that attends,” Ms. McCrory said. “That’s different from other art fairs, which mainly cater to people in the art business. The art world can sometimes be full of jargon or otherwise indecipherable, and this kind of project makes it much more accessible. We thought this was a generous project.” As winner of the Emdash award, Ms. Evans received production costs of up to £10,000, or about $16,000, to create the piece specifically for Frieze, as well as an artist’s fee of £1,000.

The 10-year-old art fair, expected to attract about 65,000 visitors this year, is devoted to selling the work of living contemporary artists. Its importance has resonated beyond the boundaries of its physical home in Regent’s Park to become something of a Londonwide event, known popularly as Frieze Week. Its impact is felt at museums and galleries, but also within in the worlds of design and fashion.

The voices on Ms. Evans’s audio guide are all recognizable figures from other spheres of culture. That is another reason, Ms. McCrory said, the project was particularly appealing. Along with Mr. Keiser, participants in Ms. Evans’s project include Rabbi Lionel Blue, the first openly gay British rabbi, the American television producer Caryn Mandabach (behind hits like “The Cosby Show,” “Roseanne” and “Third Rock from the Sun”), the author and television cook Sophie Dahl, the astronomer Patrick Moore (“The Sky at Night”), the “cat biologist” Roger Tabor and the geneticist Hugh Montgomery. The author and historian Simon Schama is the “host” on the tour, with his voice and his likeness to appear as a hologram in three locations at the fair.

The free tour lasts about 30 minutes and includes about a dozen works of art, selected from the displays of the 175 galleries participating this year. Unlike a museum audio tour, it will not dictate how listeners move through the fair. Ms. Evans said she would rather people make a haphazard trip, locating the galleries’ booths on a map and looking inside for selected artworks that will be tagged as being part of the tour.

“The main qualification for me was that the artworks had to be work I respect, and that they’d be things I’d selfishly want to have explained to me,” she said. The desire to ask for commentary from experts in other fields was inspired, she said, by the panel format on British television shows like “The Big Fat Quiz of the Year” or “Never Mind the Buzzcocks,” in which questions are raised but, “the goal isn’t necessarily to find an answer, it’s more just to come to an interesting conversation.”

Ms. Evans did not attend art school, she says with a tinge of pride. She studied theater and has worked as an actress since she was 5 years old, and then attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts before moving to Paris. It was only about four years ago that she moved from performing to doing what might be termed performance art pieces, like “Straight Up, 2011,” an interpretive sign language performance of Paula Abdul’s 1988 hit single of the same name.

Ms. Evans says it is not the subject matter but just the format of her work that has changed since she left acting. “I’ve always been so interested in emotions and how they get produced,” she said. “So, in the film industry how they produce tears, and in medicine how scientists study the chemical in the brain that produces the sensation of love. Why do we need to know this? When I made the move from acting into art, that’s what I took with me.”

Even though she now feels comfortable calling herself an artist, she says she still feels a certain remove from the culture surrounding art, because it is often resistant to the expression of feelings.

“In the art world, we’re starving for a new sincerity or a new sentimentality that just hasn’t been there for a long time,” she said. “If you look back at the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, it was very common for people to value their emotional response to painting or other forms of art. I think people want to get back to that. To me, sentimentality is just the ability to look at or respond to something and to be transported somewhere else.”

<NYT_CORRECTION_BOTTOM> <p>This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 10, 2012

<p>A previous version of this article misstated the birthplace of Cécile B. Evans. She was born in the United States to Belgian parents, not in Belgium. The article also misstated where Ms. Evans moved to after studying in New York; she went to Paris, not Los Angeles.