PHOTO:Christopher Williams-Standard Pose

Christopher Williams work spans the impressive 40-year career of one of the most influential cinephilic artists working in photography. Williams studied at the California Institute of the Arts in the mid to late 1970s under the first wave of West Coast Conceptual artists, including John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler, and Michael Asher, only to become his generation’s leading Conceptualist and art professor. Deeply invested in the histories of photography and film, architecture and design, Williams has produced a concise oeuvre that furthers a critique of late capitalist society in which images typically function as agents of spectacle.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

Christopher Williams’ exhibition “Standard Pose”  is his first solo show in Paris since 1999. Somewhere between a film director, a picture editor and an art historian, Christopher Williams investigates photography as the defining medium of modernism. Williams’ exquisite prints reveal the unexpected beauty and cultural resonance of commercial, industrial and instructional photography. Often working with set designers, models and technicians, Williams’ technically precise pictures recall Cold War era imagery and 1960s advertising, as well as invoking histories of art, photography and cinema. His photographs are elements at play in a larger system including architecture, exhibition design, books, posters, videos, vitrines and signage that investigates the stage sets of the art world and the publicity structures on which they rely. Operating through the medium of photography, Christopher Williams’ work is an investigation of the current condition of pictorial representation and production. Functioning as both conceptual art and institutional critique, Williams crafts historically and politically referential photographs that analyze aesthetic conventions and the contemporary context of image making. A range of references are at play in Williams’ photographic style; 1960s advertisements come to mind, as well as histories of film and fine art. His carefully crafted, technically precise images take ordinary objects, scenes and people as their subjects, rendering them with great detail and precision, making them appear almost eerily perfect and uncanny. Williams mimics the ultra-sleekness of the synthetic commercial world — set slightly off balance, reminding us of the ingrained conventions of modern image making. Williams’ medium is not merely the taking of photographs, but also the construction of the setting with extreme care and precision, and the staging of the finished works. Extensive descriptive titles, unusual hanging heights, and interventions in the exhibition architecture are usual for Williams. In demonstrating how dependent art objects are on their methods of production and contexts of display, the ‘constructed-ness’ of images is revealed. Williams draws attention to the staged nature of his photographs, foregrounding the technical production process and the process of photography itself. Williams’s work does not end when the photograph is taken, but includes all elements of its display, such as printing, matting, framing, hanging height, titles, and so on, as crucial aspects of the reception of the image. Much in the same way that a playscript is adapted for each new performance, the reception visual images are dependent on their methods and context of display. Each of Williams’s exhibitions represents careful stagings and restagings of the photographs, constructing a montage-like relationship between images that, underscored by an explicit relationship to contextual elements such as architecture, exhibition design, and institutional frameworks, demonstrates the provisional nature of the meaning of images.

Photo: Christopher Williams, Bergische Bauernscheune,  Junkersholz Leichlingen, September 29, 2009, 2010, Archival pigment print on cotton rag paper, Print: 17 1/4 x 22 inches (43.8 x 55.9 cm), Framed: 32 7/8 x 37 inches (83.5 x 94 cm), Edition of 10, 4 AP, © Christopher Williams, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 108 rue Vieille du Temple, Paris, France, Duration: 22/11/2021-29/1/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.davidzwirner.com