«Christopher williams»
Artforum, New York, November 2000, p. 148
For example: What relationship is there between a French car from the '60s,
a Japanese student posing for a fashion photo in 1993, papayas (of the Carica
papaya Linné sort), and a dishwasher tray filled with brightly colored
plates? This is the sort of question raised by Christopher Williams's first
solo exhibition in a French institution, "Couleur Européenne, Couleur
Soviétique, Couleur Chinoise" (European color, Soviet color, Chinese
color)-a title that is already somewhat confusing in light of the images presented.
What was found on the walls of Le Magasin's rooms, hung ("orchestrated,"
one wants to say) at reduced height and with irregular spacing, were sixty or
so photographs in black-and-white and color. (I counted sixty-one, though the
brochure available at the entrance to the space mentioned sixty-four, an ambiguity
that could no doubt be easily resolved but that gives some sense of how difficult
it is to come up with a reliable reconstruction of the show.) Some of the photographs
have previously been shown and/or reproduced, others have not. Hence the feeling
that one is in the presence of a "state" of a project -in the sense
of, say, the nth "state" of an engraving- that is undergoing constant
expansion and modification, rather than a totality that has been completed once
and for all. What this might be, then, is an extension of For Example: Die
Welt ist schön, the work undertaken by Williams in 1993 (whose title
refers to the famous book published by Albert Renger-Patzsch in 1928), which
had several versions and notably gave rise to "For Example: Die Welt ist
schön" at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, and the Kunsthalle
Basel in 1997. (The aforementioned papayas were pictured in one of the images
shown there that reappear in Grenoble.) Let's accept this hypothesis and try
to grasp a few strands of the narrative that seems to have been assembled here.
The first room, perhaps, constituted the core from which the viewer could begin
to deduce or develop the rest of this "album mural." It contained
four photographs, each to varying degrees emblematic of the whole construction
it introduces, each endowed with its own reflexivity. Mobile wall system,
1996 -I am abbreviating the often extremely long inscriptions that serve as
titles to Williams's works, which are meticulously presented in their entirety
on small cards next to the images- is an interior view of the Boijmans, showing
how the arrangement of some of the institution's partitions can be transformed
at will. The image alludes at once to the artist's 1997 exhibition as well as
to the modularity with which the work is endowed, each image or group of images
forming a cell that can be integrated and reintegrated into a new set of connections.
This figure of a general, ineluctable nomadism finds echoes in the nearby Main
Staircase for the Arts Club of Chicago, 1998. The image features the eponymous
element from Mies van der Rohe's corpus, built between 1948 and 1951 and later
moved to another part of Chicago. To these displacements of people, works, even
places themselves, the Calder sculpture represented here superimposed a notion
of in situ (a reminder of the great Calder installed in front of the Grenoble
train station). As for Folding stool of steel with yellow nylon seat,
1998, subject and title of the third photograph, the respective card pointed
out that this was the model for the seat designed by Jorgen Gammelgaard that
Michael Asher -one of Williams's teachers, and a figure to whom his artistic
strategy is deeply indebted-used for the intervention that comprised his contribution
to the 1976 Venice Biennale. Finally, we find ourselves face to face with an
industrial icon of postwar France, Model: 1964, 5 Renault Dauphine-Four,
2000. The car-with California license plates-was photographed turned over on
its right side, thereby suggesting at once movement and the interruption of
movement (or of the possibility of movement), both travel and stasis.
Setting out from this ensemble -and transformed in the process into a character
lifted from a Robbe-Grillet novel- one could bring together a few threads of
the fable in which one found oneself dropped, as it were (provided of course
that the viewer was willing to play along, which meant accepting the fact that
the puzzle would remain obstinately full of holes and the enterprise of elucidation
doomed from the start). Connected -for example- via the photographic
medium to the open or closed Boeing stowage bins, to the portico marking the
entrance to a Chinese movie theater in Havana, or the Grande Dixence dam in
Switzerland, the Renault and the Gammelgaard/Asher stool, which reappeared throughout
the rooms in photographs that differed almost imperceptibly in angle and lighting,
composed a narrative at multiple levels (autobiographical, aesthetic, historical,
political) where the motifs of impermanence, metamorphosis, and the irremediably
illusory character of appearances dominate. In this herbarium of the contemporary
world, which may be beautiful or ugly by virtue of the same objects or faces,
I make out certain principles, certain recurring motifs. Others elude me and
scarcely provide a handle on interpretation. What should one make of E.A.
(Billy) Hankins III, M.D., Curator of Vertebrate Zoology, 1999, hunched
over, pencil in hand, before a giant and turgescent plant (unless the answer
is simply that, as I copy this title in my notebook, I assume the same posture
in front of his portrait)? I have no idea, but -an obvious sign of the pleasure
afforded by Williams's work- I'm still wondering.
Jean-Pierre Criqui
Translated from French by Jeanine Herman.