REL THING: Iwan Bala on the art of Carwyn Evans and Bedwyr Williams, 2002

Duw am gwaredo, ni allaf ddianc rhag hon. (T.H. Parry-Williams, Hon.)

Over the last few years I have attempted in these Planet essays to introduce new visual artists and ideas to the reader, partly because of the lack of a dedicated art magazine for Wales, as a result of which, younger artists go unnoticed outside a small world of the cognoscenti. Yet in as much as my writing about art is closely involved with my own art practice, I still consider myself an artist and not a writer. Perhaps this is debatable, but a great deal of the work produced by visual artists today inhabits a debatable territory. Sometimes, indeed, it is not visual at all in any accepted sense. This has created a growing feeling of alienation among a large section of the traditional art-loving public who lack the skills necessary to interpret, or even recognise, the work of these artists. Wilful misrepresentation by the media doesn't help either. Is it art? that's the question the media come up with time after time, pouring scorn on experimental work they don't understand while simultaneously suggesting much of it is a scandalous waste of public money.

Artists today intervene in many different areas of cultural practice. They have seen how writing about art creates an aura around certain artists and their work, for example, which exists in a dimension parallel to the physical work of art, while emphasising its importance. Many artists now include text within and around the work, preferring to add their own footnotes, commentary and references rather than wait for the attention of critics and reviewers who are often (they feel) ill equipped to do this.

As is the case with American artists Mike Kelley and Raymond Pettibon or Scottish artist Bill Drummond, words are used, not simply to imply the meaning of the work, but to add another level of interpretation, to make the reader/viewer work a little harder to gain insight. Thus when Bedwyr Williams sticks the word nude onto the cover of my book Certain Welsh Artists, or offers a pencil drawing containing two training shoes with the trademarks Kyffin on one and Bala on the other, he pricks at a perceived establishment while at the same time placing himself outside it. It might not be a deeply thought-out attack but its overall purpose is to deflate with irony rather than impose some kind of theoretical deconstruction. By adding to the visual language, it becomes part of the currency of culture, questioning the established parameters of Welshness and success as the press release tells us.

Parody, pastiche, hybridity, inter-textual reference: the classic characteristics of Postmodern art are Williams's stock in trade. This may partly be the result of his decision, a tricky one as he says, to return to Wales after six years in London and Europe, and finding himself totally at odds with the craft-based, tourist-pottery scene he found in north Wales, as well as a fine-art hierarchy which from the outside seems impregnable.

Another artist who has emerged since Certain Welsh Artists in 2000 is Carwyn Evans, who also reflects on cultural/social shifts in contemporary Wales, even though his work might be thought of as slightly more traditional and even respectful. While Willams' work seems to adhere to the French philosopher Lyotard's dictum in its avoidance of the solace of good forms, Evans embraces it. In comparison to Williams' eclectic randomness there is a near formalist discipline and rigour to pieces like 'Unlliw' exhibited at the Eisteddfod in Meifod in 2003, and in 'The Meaning of the Land' exhibition in Brittany in July 2002.

Two artists, both Welsh speakers, both in their twenties. How do they respond to being visual artists in and from Wales, and linguistic culture aside looking at their work, what does it tell us about that culture now? Carwyn Evanss art is deeply rooted in the place of his birth, in agricultural west Wales, yet he himself now lives in Cardiff where he works as researcher for BBC Wales Digital Storytelling Project. Bedwyr Williams is as concerned with the actuality of living in Welsh-speaking Wales (he currently lives in Caernarfon) despite attending art courses at the prestigious St Martins School of Art, London studying painting, followed, by an MA at Ateliers Arnhem where he became interested in performance art. It struck him that practicing contemporary art was as valid in Wales as in Arnhem or Utrecht where he was performing at the time. Despite being a surprising inclusion in the Royal Cambrian Academy's Young Wales exhibition in 2001, however, he has exhibited more frequently in London, Amsterdam, Eindhoven and Grizedale. He claims that it is his return to Wales, combined with his sense of always being an outsider that drives his questioning art.

Carwyn Evans, on the other hand, seems to slot comfortably into the National Eisteddfod structure: he is already a member of the standing committee. Bedwyr Williams remains slightly on the fringe though Rl Institute, which he helped found, showcasing art films in town halls and pubs around north Wales, which he comperes, indicates a strong, if alternative community base.

Both artists utilise the everyday object to create new meanings,Y' and perhaps more importantly both make use of canonical Welsh texts such as Gweddi Tros Ein Gwlad and torn up pages of Kate 'Traed Mewn Cyffion randomly stapled into a work called 'Tirlun' by Carwyn Evans. 'Hon' by T.H. Parry-Williams is given the spell-check treatment by Bedwyr (aka Bawdier) Williams and re-presented in a strange patois that amazingly retains some of its resonance.

In 2002 Bedwyr Williams was commissioned by Ffotogallery, Cardiff, to make a work based on the Year of the Artist in 2000 a much-touted non-event some might say. In order to do this he became a private detective gathering evidence. He recorded his findings in a book, Operation Ferrule, which mimics the style of a hard-boiled thriller a la Dashiel Hammet or Raymond Chandler. The book, coupled with an office exhibited at the Arts Council of Wales pavilion, was the artwork, though it was of secondary concern to the information gathering and its publication. A real private eye might have come up with similar evidence documented in a similar way; the office interior was a moviegoers version of a tatty down-at-heel P.I. office a stage set in effect. Something evocative was suggested, which was surely the work of an artist.

Seeing Horn exhibited at the Eisteddfod in Meifod induced a slight sense of unease at this desecration of an almost sacred text, coupled with the urge to smile at the transgression. The artist enjoyed the double joke of English viewers trying to decipher what they thought was Welsh, which many appear to believe is largely made up of English words anyway, while Welsh speakers struggled with the assumption that it might be Breton. Should this work be taken seriously? Yes and no might be the answer. Horn has much in common with Dada, or the irreverence of punk. It is also fun and why shouldnt art be fun?

Carwyn Evans, who graduated from Cardiff College of Art in 2001, was born in Carmarthen in 1979 and raised in the nearby village of Llandyfriog where his father is a tenant farmer. Awarded the Young Artist of the Year prize at the National Eisteddfod in Llanelli in 2000 he became the first recipient of the Ivor Davies Award at the Eisteddfod in Meifod in 2003. That prize would indicate that his work is politically aware - a certain Welsh artist continuing in the Beca tradition, in particular the tradition established by Tim Davies, where a minimalist aesthetic is utilized to carry political comment.

'Un-lliw' made a considerable impact at the Eisteddfod Arts and Craft pavilion in Meifod. The work consists of 6500 brown cardboard bird boxes, which were devised by the artist, but manufactured by others and then dumped in a pile in the corner of the gallery. As objects they have a certain attractiveness: gift boxes, containers for toys? But it is slight. Their true value is as indicators of a textual scenario which isn't made apparent, but which exists in the minds of a good number of Eisteddfod visitors. Its stated aim is to draw attention to a proposed allocation of 6500 new houses in Ceredigion, which it is feared will attract non-Welsh speakers into the area and lead to the destruction of the indigenous community.

Works like this have several layers of meaning, the art-viewing experience becoming a series of unfoldings, so that there is always a danger of misrepresentation and misunderstanding. The boxes are for migratory birds - they arrive in summer and depart in winter. Peter Lord, writing a review in Planet 161, seems to have missed this allusion and saw it instead as an environmental protest. The artist himself says:

'With the majority of the farming community getting older, the agricultural crisis and social influx are obvious threats to the economic structure and culture of rural Wales. Further influx could cause even greater changes, which will be irreversible. As a young person who has left Ceredigion because of difficulties finding work within the area, I would like to return home, but will that be at the cost of definite cultural changes?'

As this suggests, Carwyn Evans is deeply connected to a sense of Welsh-speaking Wales, but he is one of an increasing number of young people from this background who now live and work in the predominantly English-speaking city of Cardiff. This is an aspect of the cultural change he refers to, in which the young are forced out of Welsh-speaking Wales by a combination of lack of work and high house prices. One result of this is a leeching of Welsh speakers from the heartlands to Cardiff and elsewhere. How it feels to be one of these internal emigres has become Carwyn's dominant theme in recent work. In a characteristically economic piece, 'Argraff', from his degree show in 2001 there is a reflection on cultural demise - a book consisting of a photocopy of a family photograph which gradually grows fainter as it is repeated from page to page, until it disappears completely.

This year on the field of the Eisteddfod in Newport, in a Cywaith Cymru commission, Carwyn proposes to utilize four large shipping containers, perhaps emphasising the in transit nature of present-day Welsh culture, but which by serving as containers for art-works, impromptu exhibition venues and performance spaces, also reflect the peripatetic nature of the Eisteddfod itself.

There is still a strong tendency to equate art with skill and toil. How long did it take you to do that? is a common question which usually has as its sub-text no time at all. (The answer should of course be, All my life.) Its a hangover from a work-ethic particularly rife in Nonconformist Wales, which makes adages like 99 per cent perspiration, 1 per cent inspiration very popular. But the work is done because artists have a need to do it, and therefore its never perspiration in the way that working down the pit used to be, or mucking out a cowshed. Hours are spent making things that may never be shown, but its all there somewhere in the work which does get shown. The piece chosen for exhibiting lifts itself above the others, and we might push it a bit and say that it is inspired because of that, but no amount of perspiration by itself will make real art, though inspiration can as long as the artist is experienced enough, intelligent and/or intuitive enough, to know what to do with it.

At the Eisteddfod in 2000, as student prize-winner, Carwyn Evans exhibited a stack of chairs and drew detailed schematic diagrams on the wall. When I happened along to the Pabell Celf a Chrefft before the opening, he was busily erasing the drawings because, on consideration, he decided the chairs operated best without the added layer of meaning. I witnessed a work in progress, as he pared down the installation in situ. Neither artist is studio bound, producing work in one place to exhibit in another; each is capable of making his art where it is to be viewed or witnessed might be a better word.

In comparing these two artists' work there is a distinct feeling of encountering the yin-and-yang of Welsh culture. The no-nonsense didactic and aesthetically pared down work of Carwyn Evans, on one hand, and the anarchic, irreverent yet equally telling work of Bedwyr Williams on the other. The latter manifests the world as viewed by the outsider. For him the adoption of the private eye as persona is no coincidence, as the latter operates in a similar way in film noir, commenting pithily on the American Dream. Its a position which generates endless questioning rather than essentialist statements. The voice of certainty comes not from the ribbon development coast of north Wales but from the heartland of agricultural Ceredigion and there are no surprises there. The coast of north Wales is a strange, hybrid place of scouserlike vowels and Cymric consonants, trashy Rhyl, Butterfly Jungles, imposing castles and Iron John Tattoos, all this against the magnificent background of Snowdonia:Y'a Welsh Wales, even a chapel culture, inhabiting the same space as the trailer parks, car boot sales, all-in wrestling, drugs and porn; the world of Blaenau Vista Social Club.

Both artists respond to their situation and to the condition of the place they live in. There is a sense that Parry-Williams' words about Wales, quoted at the beginning of this article God help me, I cannot escape from her holds true for both. Or perhaps as Bawdier Williams puts it: Due am Gerard, in aloof Edenic rag on.

Iwan Bala

www.iwanbala.com