A bold investigation into the changing meaning of public sculpture across 50 years
In 1972, British artist Garth Evans (born 1934) temporarily installed a public sculpture in Cardiff, Wales, as part of the UK-wide City Sculpture Project. The next morning, he made a recording of responses to the sculpture from passersby. In 2015, Evans set out on a mission to return the sculpture to the same location in order to make a second recording-how would people respond to it nearly 45 years later? What he discovered in 2019 was just how much had changed, from cultural understandings about public art to the site, the sculpture and himself. The Cardiff Tapes (2019) presents the transcript of Evans' second recording along with the artist's reflections on the experiment and art historian Ann Compton's framing of it. A follow-up to Soberscove's The Cardiff Tapes (1972), this book explores the stakes involved in artistic redisplays and the changing nature of public art.
"In 1972, artist Garth Evans installed a public sculpture in Cardiff, Wales, for six months as part of the UK-wide City Sculpture Project. The next morning, he stood beside the sculpture and recorded responses to it from passersby. After being reminded decades later of the long-since forgotten tapes, he published the transcript of these responses in 2015, and he was curious: how would people respond to the sculpture in the present, nearly 45 years after its original presentation? He set out on a mission to return the work to the same location in Cardiff in order to make a second recording, and in 2019, he succeeded in doing both. Yet, while he had taken pains to replicate the making of the transcript in exactly the same manner as in 1972, everything else had changed-from cultural understandings about contemporary art; to the sculpture's physical context; to the passersby, the artist, and the work itself. The Cardiff Tapes (2019) presents the transcript of responses to the reinstalled sculpture, along with Evans' reflections on the experiment and art historian Ann Compton's discussion of the issues around the redisplay and the task of contextualizing it within public art practice since 1972. Raising questions about artistic success and failure, this book asks what the stakes are in artistic re-dos and whether they are ever really possible"--
