Author Description

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