You may well think you’ve walked into a show that’s still being installed on entering this 35-year survey of Christopher Williams. But fear not, the unfinished feel of the galleries is intentional.
Relatively unknown to a UK audience, the LA-based artist employs a display strategy that gives insight into the infrastructure of exhibition-making, while addressing image-making as a whole. The reuse of walls from the artist’s previous exhibitions means the overall effect is pristinely imperfect. This in turn mimics the immaculate photographs on display, which divulge the devices of the commercial photography that bombards us in daily life.
Some of the photos are the artist’s own. Others are pre-existing images that Williams has re-photographed to disclose the technical requirements and trickery involved in creating an image. The subject of a photograph, whether it be a majestic cockerel or a giggling topless girl, is displayed alongside shots revealing the apparatus used to create such images, including a cross-section of a camera lens and darkroom developing kit.
All the photographs are hung at a noticeably lower level than normal convention and lack any title labels. Indeed any accompanying text, by which you might plot the trajectory of the artist’s career and concerns, is absent. Instead, wall texts from the Whitechapel’s previous show, ‘Adventures of the Black Square’, remain behind coloured vinyl, a sort of exhibition branding that for this show is green, the same as Fuji film – for previous shows Williams’ has used yellow for Kodak and red for Agfa.
As much about the presentation of the work as the work itself, ultimately Williams’ practice questions our approach to classification. If you like your hand held where art’s concerned this show might not be for you. But if you like to be caught off-guard, prompted to pay attention, or reminded that art serves to question the world around us, then step inside.
Freire Barnes
Read Time Out New York's interview with the artist about the exhibition at MoMA here.