The first artwork one sees in Christopher Williams’ new exhibition in London might be mistaken for the title of the exhibition itself. It is also a column of condensed, all-caps, sans-serif text that lists the materials Williams uses in his practice, painted on the reverse of a sheet of glass and fixed high above our heads. “It was painted by hand here in London,” Williams tells me. “One of the few cities which still has an active culture of this kind of signage.” The idea for the work came from the sign, placed above the studio door of the 19th-century French photographer Eugène Atget, “Documents pour artistes”. Williams also wanted one that listed what he provides: wallcoverings, radio, printed matter, picture frames, photographs, films and arrangements.
If Atget’s humble sign betrays little of the visual sophistication of his work, then the same is true of Christopher Williams’, too. For more than 40 years, Williams, who has been based in Cologne since 2008, has been making work of great visual and intellectual acuity, which is owned by some of the world’s most important museums.
Despite this success, his name might be less familiar to a gallery-going public than some of his contemporaries’, yet his importance to generations of younger artists has been wide-ranging and profound. The British artist Simon Starling, who won the Turner Prize in 2005, has created work that makes reference to Williams’ art, and has often spoken of him as a formative influence.
“Christopher Williams has been of huge importance to me as an artist tussling with the use of photography in the contemporary visual arts,” Starling told me recently. It is a tussle in which many contemporary artists are engaged, producing images to make sense of a world that is itself increasingly made of images. This is just one of the reasons why Williams’ work is so important, and why more of us should look at it. He may be the epitome of an “artist’s artist”, but the artists want to share him with us, too.
And how generous his work is, how giving of its pleasures. While contemporary conceptual art might have a reputation for being cool and somewhat forbidding, Williams ensures that his work is especially attractive, that it gathers and accommodates its audience. The photographs for which he is chiefly known are captivating, often immediately so and from a distance, yet they hold us long enough that they might then draw us in, slowly revealing aspects that we had not seen at first. The bright red of a Falke sock might attract our eye — or is it the Bernini-elegance of the fingers, the raised arch of the foot? — but what we notice next is the small, scruffy scab on the back of the model’s heel. It rubs against our expectations, and leaves them a little disfigured. It is this enquiry, subtle and insistent, that has marked out Williams’ work over five decades. He uses photography, mostly, but also the mediums of radio and theatre, in order to understand how they help us understand the world.
Williams’ exhibitions become not simply the places in which his art is shown, but often works of art in themselves. He will often take the display systems and mobile walls from previous exhibitions and use them within his own. His elegantly framed photographs are placed upon walls that bear the traces of previous displays, screw holes and scuff marks and strips of old paint. Williams makes visible what is at work in our world of consumption and display, and that we now no longer see. As we look around our cities, his photographs seem to be everywhere — in shop displays, on advertising hoardings — and most of them are not his.
He was born in Los Angeles in 1956 and attended the legendary CalArts art school, where he studied under Michael Asher, John Baldessari and Douglas Huebler, perhaps the most important West Coast conceptual artists of the period. Their influence was to be profound and long-lasting.
For his Master of Fine Arts show in 1981, Williams exhibited a single work, which we shall call “SOURCE”; four photographs — three monochrome and one colour — placed in traditional window mounts and wooden frames. (The actual title is far longer, and explains that the source of the photographs was the Kennedy Presidential Library in Massachusetts, and they were chosen using the following criteria: that the president is shown with his back to the camera, and that the photograph was taken on May 10 1963, which Williams considered a politically neutral day. The title also notes how the original photographs were then rephotographed, cropped and enlarged, and where they were first exhibited.)
Later that year, the work was exhibited in a group exhibition at the Vienna Secession, alongside works by Williams’ CalArts classmate Mark Stahl. An administrative error meant that their work was returned together in a single package, something of which they only became aware when they received a request for a $300 charge from the Los Angeles customs authority.
As Williams and Stahl could not afford the charge, they decided to wait until the package was auctioned off along with other unclaimed items. What they did claim, however, was that the event was now a new artwork: “Unclaimed: 1 Pkg. 88lbs, Identification Number 085—65950006”. They invited the local art community to the US Customs Depot to see it “performed” and arranged for another artist-friend to bid $50 for the lot, although he was unexpectedly beaten by a member of the public who did not know what the package contained.
For such an early work, it is remarkable to see how it touches on a number of concerns that have continued throughout Williams’ practice, whether in the production of the work itself, or in how it is displayed and distributed. First of all, the subject might be at the very centre of the photograph but is also somewhat withdrawn (back to camera) and so its meaning remains uncertain. Then there is the fact that photographs are not simple fragments of reality but make up collections and stories and archives, and are dependent upon the captions, explanations and rules that help create their meaning and value. And finally, there is the inescapable truth that artworks are also objects in the world, objects that can be crated, stored and sold on like any other. Nothing is stable and everything moves.
From 2008 until his recent retirement, Williams was professor of photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, a position also held for 20 years by the German photographer Bernd Becher, who worked in collaboration with his wife Hilla. (It is said that “policy matters” prevented her appointment.) The Bechers’ cool typological photographs of industrial buildings — water towers or blast furnaces — combined the early 20th-century German photography of the Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity) of August Sander and Albert Renger-Patzsch with the more recent concerns of the minimal and conceptual art of the time, such as grids and repetition. As someone whose work was developed within the West Coast conceptualism of CalArts, and who later borrowed a title from Renger-Patzsch — Die Welt ist schön (The World is Beautiful) — Williams was ideally placed to continue and develop the legacy of the institution. In an interview, Hilla Becher was once asked who releases the camera shutter; she said it didn’t matter and that they could never remember anyway. It is an attitude of withdrawal of authorship, of self-expression, that appeals to Williams. He may control every aspect of the image, how it is made and how it is displayed, but his presence remains discreet.
There is a self-conscious knowingness about photography and its histories within Williams’ work. He is keen to remind us that although photography is often said to present the world just as it is, it is entirely dependent upon meticulous staging and forms of technology that are largely hidden from view. Williams places these in such a way that we cannot avoid them: light meters are arranged in front of and obscure what we might ordinarily assume is the “real” subject of an image, or a Kodak three-point reflection guide becomes part of the overall composition of a picture rather than simply providing a calibrated colour reference for it. Elsewhere, a still life might be made from the coloured planes of developing trays, sink and safelight in a darkroom, albeit one which is here cleanly lit.
Even works that do not seem, at first glance, to have anything to do with the world of images sometimes actually do. One of the most striking photographs in the exhibition is of a rather extraordinary rooster standing in front of a pale blue background. The rooster is white, mostly, and though the edges of his feathers look black, a closer inspection reveals a swirling iridescence, like oil on wet tarmac. The idea for the work came from a habit Williams had of looking at magazine covers on newsstands and seeing there images that represented entire lifestyles. “There’d be hot rod people, and people who knit blankets,” Williams tells me. “There’d be automobiles and Hi-Fis and fashion.” It was among these publications that he found a poultry magazine, and then began to collect them, looking at the images and beginning to think like a poultry photographer. “It was a way of thinking differently. I came of age when there was a great deal of feminist discourse around the predatory use of the camera. Many photographers at that time were being celebrated for going into communities which weren’t their own and exploiting those they found there. It made me very uneasy.”
Williams did not want to become part of the poultry-breeding community, but rather settled into a respectful adjacency. The photograph was made with a large-format camera, using 10”x8” film and an abundance of care, to produce an image of extraordinary detail, far in excess of what would be required for most such magazines. But Williams was always mindful of what he shared with this community. Of course, these are birds that are bred to be shown and looked at, and those who do so are as concerned with the making of images and visual discernment as any artist. The breeder and Williams also both understood titles, and how they alter our relationship with the things that we name. The bird is identified by a code on the green ring around its leg — EE-D13 13-901. When Williams asked if it had another name, the breeder looked at him incredulously: “We breed them to show, but we cannot show them for ever. Then we eat them.”
Williams has described his work as being about how the surface of the world intersects with the world of photography, and I think this is key to what he is doing. He wants us not only to pay greater attention to the world, which is why he presents it so clearly, but also to attend to his methods of presentation. A photograph shows us something of the world, and the title tells us how the photograph was made. This is why his titles are always detailed, particular and excessive to the point of mania. He wants to show us his workings.
This is apparent even in a photograph as seemingly casual as the one of some hands washing at a sink. It may suggest visually that it was made in East Germany — the old-fashioned fixtures; the wallpaper rather than tiles on the wall — and the first part of the title seems to confirm this — “Untitled (Study in Yellow and Green/East Berlin)”. But then we read the name and address of the studio in which the scene was recreated, and the date the photograph was made. It may not look like much, but its simplicity belies the efforts that went into its creation. Williams called upon a production company in Berlin that produces sets for film and television for cultural accuracy, to ensure it could be read by almost every German as an image belonging to the former East.
“What a magnificent way of life soap shows us!” wrote the French poet Francis Ponge, while working for the Resistance against the German occupation. Williams quoted the line in a lecture given in 2006, six years before he made this photograph. The soap is the shape of an East German brand and was cast especially in Kodak yellow. I’m reminded of a comment that Simon Starling made to me about Williams’ work: “Everything’s considered, everything’s perfectly pitched, but with space to breathe, think and smile.” That yellow is the colour of photography, and it is the colour of memories. Perhaps it is the colour of happiness, too.
“Christopher Williams: Hand Painted Signs, Photographs, Long Play Vinyl, Audiophile Bar, Printed Matter” is at The Perimeter, London, until December 20, theperimeter.co.uk
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