Christopher Williams: Normative Models
Deeply political and historical, Christopher Williams’ photographs evoke a subtle shift in our perception by questioning the communication mechanisms and aesthetic conventions that influence our understanding of reality. Deploying a style of photography that references multiple sources and precedents, including the carefully composed and well-lit images of the 1920s New Objectivity movement, the photo-conceptualism that he encountered as a student at CalArts in the 1970s, and the advertisement industry, Williams creates layered works that critically, but also playfully, reveal the conditions of the medium in post-industrial society.
Each of the two volumes in this slipcased publication by Christopher Williams (born 1956) comprises an identical image sequence, but each contains a different text: the first volume includes Brecht's The Trial of Lucullus, and the second David Crowley's essay "Applied Fantastic: On the Polish Women’s Magazine Ty I Ja."
Publisher: WALTHER KÖNIG, KÖLN
Artists: Christopher Williams
Contributors: Bertold Brecht, David Crowley
Publication Date: 2018
Binding: Softcover (2 volumes in slipcase)
Dimensions: 8 x 8 in
Pages: 144
Reproductions: 16 color
ISBN: 9783960983705
Retail: $40 | £30
Status: Not Available
Christopher Williams
In the 1970s, Christopher Williams studied at the California Institute of the Arts under the first wave of West Coast conceptual artists, including John Baldessari and Douglas Huebler, only to become one of his generation’s leading conceptualists. Williams’s work is a critical investigation of the medium of photography and more broadly the vicissitudes of industrial culture, in particular its structures of representation and classification. Using the process of reproduction as a point of entry, the artist manipulates the conventions of advertising, the superficiality of surface, and ultimately the history of Modernism. Deeply political, historical, and sometimes personal, the photographs are meant to evoke a subtle shift in our perception by questioning the communication mechanisms and aesthetic conventions that influence our understanding of reality.
All Christopher Williams books