Christopher Williams
The World in Eighteen Lessons
Christopher Williams
Conceptual photographer Christopher Williams is an artist’s artist. Ever since he moved to Germany, his measured work, which both reveres and examines the art of photography, has more and more easily found its way into European art institutes, such as this spring at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium.1.‘Rien n’échappait à son ambition encyclopédique, qui était de constituer un catalogue exhaustif des objets de fabrication humaine à l’âge industriel.’ Such is the task that the main protagonist of Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, La carte et le territoire, assigns himself in the early stages of his education as an artist.[1] The description reads uncannily like a summary of artist Christopher Williams’ ongoing series entitled – after another French author, Raymond Aron – For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La société industrielle (2003-). Williams’ project explores, through photographs and other works – notably radio programming and architectural interventions – material culture in Western Europe since the Cold War. Although Dix-Huit Leçons… seems to fall partly in line with the ambition of Houellebecq’s character Jed Martin to produce ‘la photographie systématique des objets manufacturés du monde’,[2] the same cannot be said of Houellebecq’s own practice in comparison with that of Williams’. For whereas Houellebecq in La Carte et le territoire seems to rely on a systematic recourse to quotations, Williams, by contrast, develops an intricate web of sometimes obscure references to explore a particular set of aesthetic and political issues. And whereas Houellebecq’s book is replete with descriptions of art works that transparently cite those of Luigi Ghirri, Mark Tansey and others, Williams’ images fascinatingly trigger an endless and diffuse process of free association.Dix-Huit Leçons… began – as Mark Godfrey has retraced in a detailed essay on the series – as a project on the iconography of the Cold War.[3] Within and beyond this primary theme, other areas are investigated: Western Germany in the 1960s, post-colonial politics, the Capitalist Realism of Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, the cinema and video work of Jean-Luc Godard and the imagery of advertising designer Charles Wilp, to cite a few salient points in this constellation. References to these sources appear, often obliquely, in the professionally produced colour and black-and-white photographs that form the bulk of Williams’ output. These images are both elusive and loquacious, much like the captions that accompany them and that always give, as Williams once remarked, far too much or far too little information.[4]2.Like his earlier series entitled For Example: Die Welt ist Schön (1993-2001), the photographs of For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons… display, beneath their apparent realism, a critical engagement with photography envisaged both as an art with its own history and as an industry with many possible fields of application, such as advertising, fashion etc. This critical perspective relates the series to other, perhaps more openly conceptual projects undertaken by the artist, such as modifying the interior architecture of the buildings in which his photographs are exhibited (as in the Museo d’arte moderna di Bologna in 2007) or defining arbitrary rules to select photographs from an archive (SOURCE: The Photographic Archive, John F. Kennedy Library…, 1981). Projects such as these bring to mind the long–lasting influence of Williams’ formative years in Los Angeles, at CalArts. There, as Williams has recalled, his interest lay more in the development of a studio-based art practice than in photography, particularly in its more socially engaged versions then being developed in California by the likes of Allan Sekula, Martha Rosler and Fred Lonidier. Taught by Michael Asher, John Baldessari and Douglas Huebler, among others, Williams was closely exposed to institutional critique and the ‘pictures’ generation as well as to conceptual art.[5] An early work such as Angola to Vietnam (1989) testifies to the permanence of these movements in his work by combining political concern, arbitrary classification and postmodern quotation. Presenting a selection of botanical models of exotic plants made in glass, Williams rearranges the collection, following alphabetically a list released by Amnesty International that compiles countries in which data on political disappearances have been collected, from Angola to Vietnam. Photographed in close-up views and in black-and-white, the photographs evoke the abstracted views of botanical elements produced in the early 20th century by Karl Blossfeldt. The reference to Blossfeldt alongside practices of classification that owe more to institutional critique and conceptualism points to a key feature of Williams’ art, namely the fusion of a legacy of conceptual art with that of a more realist, documentary tradition in photography. This double reference accounts for his essential position in the field of contemporary art today. Williams’ work is often read in terms of a re-skilling of photography in art, a practice generally defined as the gradual introduction of colour and the aesthetic image in photography in the art context, following the deliberately poor image of most photoconceptualism of the 1970s. For many artists, this re-skilling has developed on a par with either the embracing of pictorial tradition of monumental painting (Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth), or with a sustained glance towards documentary realism (Rineke Dijkstra). Christopher Williams, by contrast, intricately and powerfully combines a strong visual sense with a highly conceptual approach, and the originality of his position also makes him an important figure as a teacher, both formerly in California and currently as a professor of photography in Düsseldorf – a post previously occupied by the late Bernd Becher.3.Within the photographs, but also the catalogues and publicity materials that are included in Dix-Huit Leçons…, advertising plays an important role. It appears through borrowed or inspired imagery, graphic design, but also within the aesthetic of individual images, which Williams obtains through working with studio photographers specialized in different objects such as food, still-life and fashion. Using a range of strategies that include remake, détournement and pastiche, Williams’ pictures are detached from any direct purpose and intention. The juiciest apples (Bergische Bauernscheune…, 2010), the most mouth-watering chocolate (Ritter Sport…., 2008) and glowing sun seen through a chestnut tree (Garten im Voigtmichelshof, Alpirsbach…, 2010) present themselves flawlessly (or almost so) to the viewer, revealing nothing more than their glossy perfection and a highly abstracted typology of commercial photography.While there is a long-standing (if not well-known) tradition, at least since Andy Warhol, of people training in advertising and then moving to art practice, Williams reverses the process. Educated in the fine arts, he resorts to advertising photography technicians to ‘re-skill’ his images and give them a professional look. The resulting pictures more or less openly reveal this process. Recent photographs of foot models showing off coloured socks on blemished skin made apparent the gap between art and advertising images. The process is more complex in the images of Ritter Sport chocolate bars. The photographs produced by Williams of stacks of Ritter Sport chocolate bars sliced to reveal their fillings reproduce, using analogue photography, a digitally composed advertising of Ritter Sport chocolate that was coincidentally posted on billboards at the same time as Williams’ own version was presented in solo shows in his Berlin and later Cologne galleries (respectively in March and April 2009). Virtually indistinguishable from one another (save for the different heights of the stacks of bars in the ads), the ephemeral, widely circulated image and its more durable confidential remake (produced with all necessary authorizations) raise the issue of similarity and difference between craft and industry, art and advertising, purposefulness and autonomy.The Ritter Sport ad could, at a pinch, have been an advertisement for Williams’ exhibition, but the similarity of the images also points to a historical period when a greater fluidity between photographic practices existed. In Weimar Germany, for instance, in photography’s golden age, a photographer like Walter Benjamin’s friend Sasha Stone was able to simultaneously produce politically biting photomontages and commercial ones destined for theatre posters, or, in a different register, vigorously modernist still lifes that were immediately used as advertising images.Differently from Ritter Sport…, the earlier Untitled, (Study in Yellow/ Berlin…), 2007, also raises questions of resemblance and divergence between art and advertising. The photograph shows a lingerie model posing to advantageously reveal a translucent white bra and knickers set. Or so one imagines, since the model is shown from the back, revealing dirty feet, pins holding the garments in place and a bare back speckled with conspicuous moles. These immediately visible flaws are ‘wrong’ in the same sense that John Baldessari’s 1967 painting Wrong defied the basic rules of composition in amateur photography. Seen from the back, the image suggests a ‘behind the scenes’ view of a photo shoot in the same way that Colette depicted the undersides of show-business a century ago. Showing the dribbling make-up and strained limbs of the performers, invisible to the pleasure-seeking audience, but that revealed themselves in the dreary aftermath of the spectacle, L’Envers du music hall (1913) described bodies plied by their professional activity like body-part models used in the advertising trade. The strangeness of Williams’ Untitled, (Study in Yellow/ Berlin…) comes from the way in which, although it presents the ‘wrong’ side of the model, the picture is as flawlessly professionally produced as the ‘right’ side would be. This mirror image of a ‘right’ advertising image faintly evokes the kind of distorted mirror effect that fashion photographer Helmut Newton achieved in his naked/dressed pictures. Extending his professional photo shoots a little, Newton would make a few extra images ‘for himself’ in the same settings and with the same models, thereby creating an ‘artistic’ variation of his commercial images. The Newton anecdote evokes somewhat cynically the fine line between commercial and art photography, but the use of a female model also points back to the history of art. The dirty feet in Williams’ image recall those in Courbet’s nudes, when critics accused him of showing ‘a washerwoman masquerading as a nymph’, along with mid 19th-century erotic photography that took pains to idealize its settings and frequently let appear dirty feet and house slippers.[6] Professional photography usually erases real-life details, but Williams’ pictures disrupt these conventions by showing the other side of its flawless images.4.The stress on the ‘sidelights’ does not only appear in photographs concerned with advertising, fashion and other professional practices but is a mechanism that more generally pervades Williams’ practice. Behind each image lies a story that may be traced with the aid of captions or factual details in the picture. That the interest of a given photograph may lay in the sidelight of the image also explains Williams’ recurring interest in depicting photographic equipment.The increasing number of images dedicated to this subject matter is also seen in Dix-huit leçons…. The series opened in 2003 with three views of a Kiev 88 (a Soviet replica of the famous Hasselblad camera), a triptych that Williams envisaged as one half of the couple of works introducing his Cold War culture iconography.[7] In time, photographs of various photographic tools have been added to the series, including, recently, a light meter, Weimar Lux CDS, VEB Feingerätewerk… (2010); a view of a photo lab in Aachen, Fachhochschule Aachen, Fachbereich (2010); and most spectacularly, images of photo cameras sliced up to reveal their shiny insides.Pictures such as these, literally depicting the inside of the photographic process, display, alongside his exploration of typologies of picture making, Williams’ extensive reflection on the purpose of photography both in and outside art. Williams’ claim to autonomy in art practice is a necessary requirement for institutional critique, since, as he once explained, ‘The art context is one of the few places where speculative thought and disinterested observation can still happen.’[8]Sophie Berrebi is an art historian, AmsterdamChristopher Williams. For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 13) Museum Dhondt-Dhaenes, Deurle (B) 27 March-5 June
Sophie Berrebi
