Angola to Vietnam is Christopher William’s 1989 artist’s book based on his photographic piece of the same title featuring twenty-seven images of glass flowers from Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. “Drawing from the Peabody’s cache of sculptural specimens, Christopher Williams selected only those plants native to countries in which state-sponsored murders occurred in 1984. The information affixed to each photograph mimics the museum’s labels, but here Williams places the country of origin above the flower’s Latin name, subtly foregrounding the political over the natural. By referencing government-sanctioned atrocities, Williams calls attention to the flowers’ colonial origins, as the science of botany is rooted in the tangled and often exploitative history of international exploration and trade”.
Program was produced by Bergen Kunsthall on the occasion of the exhibition For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 10), curated by Solveig Ovstebo. With texts by Solveig Øvstebø, Diedrich Diederichsen, John Kelsey, and Christopher Williams, and design by Christopher Williams and Petra Hollenbach.
Christopher Williams’ work operates within the conventions of advertising, the superficiality of surface, and, ultimately the history of Modernism. In photography, film, performance, sculpture, graphic design, and video, the process of reproduction is the artist’s point of entry; from there he exposes the flaws in a near-perfect, carefully constructed reality. Each image, whether architectural or figurative, natural or manufactured, is subject to the conditions of production and the inevitable boundaries of the pictorial surface.
Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Kunst Aus Los Angeles Der 60Er Bis 90Er Jahre at the Kunstverein Braunschweig, 2 December, 2006–18 February, 2007, which concentrated on artistic positions from the Sixties to the Nineties and on works which explore conceptual approaches (Bas Jan Ader, Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Douglas Huebler, Larry Johnson, William Leavitt, Bruce Nauman, Maria Nordman, Stephen Prina, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha, Christopher Williams) as well as on Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy and Raymond Pettibon’s more recent Pop-Art-based assemblages which expose everyday myths, prejudices, and tenets of belief as lies that serve to perpetuate social oppression.
Designed by Yvonne Quirmbach.
As part of his practice as an artist and professor Christopher Williams’ art is founded in historical research, and the manifestations of realism in relationship to theatrical, cinematic, and photographic production from the late 60s and early 70s in Germany. Thus he inevitably came across the plays of legendary German author Franz Xaver Kroetz, this first English language translation of his play Inklusive (1971) is the product of his curiosity. Inklusive consists of seven scenes of tightly scripted dialogue of a West German couple on a prepaid all-inclusive vacation package in Italy. It is the 2nd part of a new series of books edited, designed and produced by Christopher Williams.
Produced on the occasion of the exhibition De Afstand, at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 1 September 1990–7 October 1990.
De Afstand investigated the relationship between photography and reality, by way of the concept of distance. The selected works focused on the representation of nature. Historically, the genre of the landscape painting had presupposed a specific viewing distance as well as the display of a changing continuity and unity in a tableau. The camera, however, cannot present such a unifying picture of nature. It cannot keep a distance. It functions rather as an analytical instrument, cutting like a scalpel into the continuity of the visible world.
Participating artists were: Jean-Marc Bustamante, Paul-Armand Gette, Andreas Gursky, Raoul Hausmann, Craigie Horsfield, Jean-Luc Moulène, Thomas Struth, Christopher Williams.
Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Christopher Williams: Footwear (Adapted for Use) at David Zwirner, New York, 2020.
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.
More information on the exhibition can be found here.