ON LOYALTY
Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt

(Interview for Matters Magazine, Spring 2003)

At this stage in advanced capitalism, it is hard to imagine how many companies are being born every day, exactly what they do and who regulates them. One new company is being conceived as an artistic project and has all the trappings of a multi-national corporation. Initiated by Chris Evans, Radical Loyalty is in the process of accumulating a board of directors (with honorary patrons helping to ensure that exactly the right people are invited) comprised of high-powered representatives of global businesses in Europe in each of the main sectors: telecommunications, energy, finance and pharmaceuticals etcetera. In today’s knowledge-based economy, the concept of loyalty is highly prized amongst corporations hoping to profit from the ideas of individuals and Evans’ project plays on this, hoping to attract those who want to associate themselves with values like loyalty, personal motivation and drive.

Radical Loyalty’s only asset at the moment is a 1200 m2 plot of land 80Km south of the Estonian capital Tallinn, purchased for the princely sum of £600. Estonia has been strategically chosen as a country, poised on the verge of joining the European Union, awaiting the influx of global capitalism. Rather than build corporate headquarters, however, Evans intends to turn this into a sculpture park – with all its regenerative connotations – where he will design each sculpture in close consultation with the individuals (rather than the companies they represent) on the board. Early examples include Will Davie (from oil giant Schlumberger) and his proposal for a large score that reads 9-0, with the nine in wood (a humane material, symbolising the essential good of those who triumph through efficiency), the zero in stone (luddite and inflexible) and the versus in a transparent material to denote, well, transparency. Kari Vaiha from Nordic telecom giant Sonera has requested a sculpture of a giant rat and cockroach, a metaphor for the power to adapt in order to sustain oneself as these creatures are notoriously resilient in the event of nuclear holocaust.

Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt
Can I ask you about the spirit in which the board members are being recruited for Radical Loyalty. You have said that they are fully informed about the project but isn’t there a sense that they are being mocked slightly, through their willingness to participate in some kind of overt power-sharing exercise, the often scary aspirations which come across in the sculptures they envisage and through their understanding of art?

Chris Evans
There has to be a spirit of open-ness with Radical Loyalty. Each board member to date is fully aware of the other participants involved and is suggesting other potential members. What might appear like a scary aspiration to some would appear progressively aspirational to others.

RGN
You have said that Radical Loyalty ‘projects the image of what it stands for’ which means that it is a company set up with the sole aim of making a sculpture park that embodies the wishes of certain corporate individuals on the board. Could this be viewed cynically in the context of public image manipulation and spin doctoring that is manifest in corporate and government thinking?

CE
I am deliberately avoiding going through the press and marketing departments of companies to avoid their 'spin'. Conversations with the board members go beyond generic corporate language and promotion of each person's respective companies. Working under the precept that creativity isn't the monopoly of artists, we discuss personal motivation and beliefs and develop ideas and concerns into visual form. How this reflects back on the companies is secondary and it's currently very doubtful whether it would be anything approaching spin.

RGN
Could you talk a bit about the way you are choosing to mediate this project in an artistic context – through dramatisations, paintings and maquettes – rather than perhaps letting the company and sculpture park simply exist in itself.

CE
I'm thinking here about a duality of audience, people that will pass Radical Loyalty on their way to the town's shops every day of the year, and alongside this an expanded audience that can mentally envisage Radical Loyalty, through the initial hypothetical realisation. The paintings and maquettes are also vital in the process of visualising the ideas in order to work first with the board members and then with a collective of Estonian artists in producing the park. The dramatisations involve setting up meetings with people peripheral to the project. The discussions are then given fictitious settings with invented characters. The plan is to expand the context, a vehicle for talking about, for example, the literal burying of Estonian public art to protect it from the incoming Russians in the '40s. This is part of the geographic and historic context of Radical Loyalty yet I want to separate things out or slow things down so that the sculptures can, perhaps in contradiction to the context, aspire to Robert Morris's notion of the object as 'autonomous and indifferent'.

RGN
The precursor to Radical Loyalty was the Gemini Sculpture Park, a modest proposal for a small industrial estate in Leeds. Do you see a big shift in the attitudes of the global players who are on the board of Radical Loyalty?

CE
Absolutely. Modesty flies out the office window. Where the directors of the small companies on Gemini Business Park are very conscious of their modest positions, the board of Radical Loyalty want to steer the direction of planet Earth.

RGN
In recent years, there seems to have been a shift in artistic practice away from institutional critique, towards corporate commentary, with approaches ranging from critique to celebration. Where do you situate yourself as an artist dealing with the corporate world?

CE
In a broad sense I am interested in the social relationships inherent in the production and purchase of artwork which informs meaning and how it is impossible to separate artworks from the social and political context in which it exists. A previous project - the UK Arts Board Agency - was set up in relationship to the governing ideology of state arts funding. 7000 flyers were distributed via various art magazines asking artists to put forward ideas for work that needed funding from regional and national arts boards. UKABA took these ideas, usually not more than one or two lines in length and turned them into fully costed applications to the appropriate funding bodies. The only restriction was that the proposals should relate to the theme of 'trees'. Projects included 'to build a bridge from Plymouth to Cape Cod using only English Oak Trees' and 'to photograph every tree in Scotland so that the exhibition is like a forest'. With the UKABA I wanted to effect the artist- institution relationship to see what would happen if the necessity of being a good application writer were taken out to the equation of making artworks.

Regarding the relationship between art and the corporate world a certain inevitability follows from it often being this entity that collects, sponsors or engages with art directly for its own mediation (for example the artist commissioned promotions with the Becks and Absolute labels or the corporate sculptures outside the global HQ's). For Radical Loyalty I am setting up a system of exchange based on ideas not funding and seeing where the new meeting point is between sculptural ideas and corporate pragmatics, in a country that following the Russian withdrawal feels new and enlivened. A place that global businesses are eager to get their teeth into.