Conversation with a Renaissance Man, Pt. 2

In which Seattle artist Dennis Evans and I talk about arts journalism, art education, art as a career, and art that makes people say, "WTF?" Also: Recommended reading!

Dennis Evans at work on an encaustic piece in his Seattle studio at Utopian Heights. [Photo courtesy of the artist]

This is the second part of my interview with Seattle artist Dennis Evans, whose 50-year retrospective exhibition is at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem, Oregon through Aug. 31. My story about the exhibition appears here at Oregon ArtsWatch. The first part of this conversation appears here.

A couple of contextual notes: 1) Near the end of this interview, I read a quote from a book to Evans for his response: The book is Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice by the Canadian filmmaker, art theorist and teacher J.F. Martel, co-host of the Weird Studies podcast. Also, 2) Evans below refers to his work for something called MD². That’s a national concierge medical network that hires Evans to produce art for their facilities.

Our conversation here resumes from Part I with a question I asked Evans about Apocrypha: The Art of Dennis Evans, by the Seattle art critic Matthew Kangas, whose book was, in fact, the inspiration for the Hallie Ford show.

The chapter in Apocrypha that deals with the arts journalism scene in Seattle in the 1970s was fascinating. 

Good, because my editor wanted to cut that.

No!

Matthew is a character, a piece of work. The reason he was the right writer for my book is that he saw everything. He was around at the beginning, and he wrote critically about my work. He and I were on two sides of a fence for a long, long time. I would argue with him, and we’d discuss it, but he was very critical of my work. 

Then when my work went to New York, and New York ‘got me’ better than Seattle, because Seattle was a backwater town and the writers there half the time were restaurant critics and music critics. A newspaper would say, ‘Why don’t you write about that art show?’ And they didn’t have a clue. 

Matthew was a professional arts writer from the get-go. He went to Reed College, he went to Oxford for graduate work, and he’s also a really opinionated guy who says things to piss people off, and he’s really happy about doing that. So he had a target on his back all the time around town, because he still writes ridiculous things. I even told a friend, I said, ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if Matthew writes about this show in a bad way.’ That’s the kind of character he is, he’d do that just to show people, ‘I wrote the book, but I don’t like his work.’ That’s the kind of character he is. But he was the right guy. He also had a lot of axes to grind with colleagues in Seattle, so he used that chapter to talk about that.”

Well, as an arts journalist I was fascinated by that chapter. So my question: He writes in the book that your work basically forced art critics and journalist to take their game to new level. Would you agree?

Yeah, I do agree. Because they were used to writing about the fin and fur art, a lot of pretty pictures, and all of a sudden here’s a guy out in Puget Sound recording splashes with sounding stones. It was challenging for them. At first they just said, ‘This guy’s crazy, he’s a bad artist.’ And then when I went to New York and was in the Whitney Biennial and I was getting good reviews, they started going, ‘Hey, maybe we ought to take a different look at this guy.’ They had to up their game with my work, and I think that’s what he was referring to. And it even changed him, his opinion about me.

What is the state of arts journalism today?

The arts in the Northwest in bad shape. Galleries are closing. There’s not very many places to publish your work. Newspapers are still doing their little bit, but they're not arts writers. That’s why people like Matthew and yourself are so important because you kinda know what you're talking about. Somebody just came from the Seattle Times to talk to us, and she’s basically a home/culture writer, you know? She doesn't have a clue about the history of art. 

So it’s never been good in the Northwest, and it’s no better now. I’d hate to be a young artist right now. There are so few places to show your work. Now, in Seattle, the galleries are built for people like me who have been around who have higher prices. There’s not places for young artists to break in. And frankly, I have no galleries right now. I had galleries in Portland, Seattle, Sun Valley, I’ve shown in New York, but all those galleries have either closed or aged out. They’re gone. So I don’t have representation, which is fine with me.

Because you have plenty of work.

I have plenty of work to do with MD². My wife is an artist, and we’re fortunate to have stayed in the same place for 45 years. When I got out of grad school I bought a little house for $17,000 near the University of Washington, a nice little sweet neighborhood. It’s on a hill, so I have a view looking east. In 1980 I built 3,000 square feet onto that and built my studio, and 18 years ago we bought a house next to it and added a wing to the big house and built a glass shop, a welding shop, a ceramics shop, an elevator. It’s a factory that we live in. 

The lady who lived in the house across the street from us moved out, so we bought it and we converted that to a gallery. The garden has my wife’s outdoor sculpture. And before we got married, my wife lived in another house about five blocks away that we kept, she bought it for $28,000. We added on to that, and that’s a 1,250-square foot gallery full of art. So we have two galleries, plus our factory. We don’t need a local gallery to sell our work. We’ve been around long enough that people come to us to look at art. So that’s how our life works. 

The installation, The Sultan’s Library. [Photo courtesy the artist] Two pieces from this 2011 show is included in the exhibition at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art.

You say in the book that the most difficult question for both you and your audience to come to terms with was whether it was your intention to create art that was too esoteric and ‘definitively uninterpretable.’ You said that that was a fair question about your early work, but that it didn't apply to your entire body work, and that your intentions had changed. Is that a reference to the cosmology stuff? 

My early work was really dense. I was young and trying to impress myself. I wasn't intentionally trying to make it obscure, but my references were pretty obscure. That's why some critics said, ‘What's up with you? Are you just trying to be obscure?’ I was also in the Dada part of my life where things were absurd, and they weren’t logical, and I thought that was okay. 

Then slowly, as Joseph Campbell and Jung became stronger influences in my work, I realized how important story is in art, for me. As that story sense developed in me, I realized, ‘I want my audience to be on board this train.’ I want them to be involved. Some of these shows I did with Nancy had a mythic basis, for instance, Imagine After the Deluge. How would you recreate a society? Who would be the perfect people? You’d need a holy man, a calendar keeper, and I’d write stories about those, and Nancy would make pieces like the water carrier that’s behind you. We found that audiences would come to these shows and stay for hours. They would get involved in the story, and I said, ‘This is what I want to have happen.’ So I moved from a guy making art that kept you out of it to saying, ‘Come in here and share this story with me.’ So, I did change, yeah.

I ask because it seems to me a viewer could come in here and look at something like that, or this one over here and say, ‘What the hell is that?’ 

Yeah, yeah.

It’s still very dense. 

Yeah, and I knew that, so I would help you. I’d have a wall panel giving you a context for that piece and how it operated within my story and imagination. I wouldn’t just give you that and say, ‘Figure it out, buddy.’ I would try to help you. And I had pushback from some dealers who said, ‘I won’t want that cluttering up my walls talking about it, I want them to just like that red.’ And I said, ‘It’s not going to work. This is too complicated, this is not just a red piece to go over the couch. It’s got a whole trainload of baggage coming with it, so either you give them help with that, or we’re not going to work together.’ People loved those shows.

Later today you're going to be walking through here with a group of people talking about your work. Not all artists like to do that.

Yeah, I like talking to people. 

Do you see that as part of the work? 

When I was doing performances, I would go out all alone with my wife, who is documentarian, just start performing in a pond. But I knew there were joggers and people coming, and slowly after maybe an hour or two there would be 30 people standing around. At that point in my life, that’s where the art was, talking to them. I’d say, ‘I’m making art,’ and they’d say, ‘There’s no art here.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, let’s talk about it.’ I love that engagement, and I especially like that engagement with kids. I taught art for awhile, and I love teaching art to kids. Because most kids …

… are already artists!

They’re born artists! They’re full of creativity. And our culture and society spend the rest of our lives ripping it out of them. I know that’s a grand cliche, but it’s true.

In all the reading you’ve done, and thinking about all this stuff, have you arrived at anything that even approximates a ‘theory of everything’?

No. The older I get, even less. I have a bench with a bronze plate that says, ‘I don’t know.’ I call it my I Don’t Know Bench. There’s so much, as I get older, that I don’t know. That’s what the quantum world has taught me. The quantum world has taught me that we really don’t know shit.

What would you like people to take away from this show?

That it’s not a group show. (Laughs) That it’s one guy, one man’s journey for fifty years, and holy shit, what a curious mind! 

Of all the people who were influential early in your life are there any you would say today are still absolutely relevant if you want to be an artist?

I would want (students) to get a liberal arts background before they went to art school so they had some philosophy. I look at a lot of art, and I’m going to sound like a 77-year-old man, but it’s just crap. It just doesn’t speak to me at all. Educate kids to think and also paint. 

I always like to ask people what was the last book they read, but you’re reading a lot of cosmology, so I’d ask you to recommend two or three books for the lay person. Just any book you’ve ever read that you loved.

Everybody’s got to read Ulysses.

I’ve read that! I read it ten years ago.

Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon.

I haven’t read that one.

Oh, you’ve got to look at that. He wrote it in the 1970s, got a Pulitzer for it, it’s one of the greatest books of all time. I read it in grad school, and it informed my work immensely. 

Did you read it for a class, or just on your own?

I was in an art seminar class that was pretty boring, and an English major came into the class. He said, ‘I want to hang out with some artists.’ He was looking for something wild. He brought Gravity’s Rainbow in, and he’s like, ‘You haven’t read this? Geez, this is art!” So I started reading it, and oh my god. I read it forwards, backwards.

One more to wrap it up.

Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari. Everybody should read that book to figure out who we are.

I do a lot of reading, and one quote I’ve come across is, for me, anyway, is the best definition of art I’ve ever read.

Let’s hear it!

‘Art is the name we have given to humanity’s most primal response to the mystery of existence. It was in the face of the mystery that dance, music, poetry and painting were born.’

Perfect! Yeah, send me that, will you? I love that, that’s excellent. Truly, that just does it. It covers it all.

---

Thanks to Dennis Evans for taking the time to sit down with me in June to have this conversation, and also thanks to Oregon ArtsWatch, for letting me take this story on, and to Andrea Foust and John Olbrantz at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem for handling my usual onslaught of questions, requests for more info, images, etc.