Yet another art review -- from this week's Terminal City

Difficult "Beauty"
Christopher Williams' daunting complexities
by Christopher Brayshaw

Christopher Williams
For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons sur la Société Industrielle
Contemporary Art Gallery, 555 Nelson
To March 6

Los Angeles-based artist Christopher Williams doesn't identify himself as a photographer, though almost all of his works are photographs, images mostly made by assistants or commercial photographers. "Sometimes I press the shutter release, just as a joke," he says in an interview with artist/curator John Miller. While many of the photographs in Williams' current exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery are undeniably beautiful—specifically, three "still life" studies of a Kiev 88, a Russian medium format camera (and unabashed Hasselblad knock-off), and the industrial study Lodz—Williams' practice puts the word beauty into quotation marks, thereby inspiring a certain uneasiness in the critic who wants to use it in a discussion of Williams' pictures.

Indeed, there is a sense of rigor to this exhibition that begins with the plastic display case across from the gallery attendant's desk, in which scripts of a performance, receipts, letters, memos from David Zwirner Gallery (Williams' New York dealer) and so forth are gathered and exhibited without any kind of interpretive apparatus, or "help" for the audience.

Williams has been fortunate enough to generate a substantial and generous body of criticism on his work, including several essays by the Los Angeles-based art historian Thomas Crow and Vancouver's Claudia Beck. So I came to Williams' exhibition intellectually forearmed, as it were, and yet I still found myself walking from picture to picture, shaking my head and feeling somehow inadequate, while simultaneously suspecting that that sense of inadequacy, of not getting it, was an important aspect of the exhibition, one that Williams hopes to generate.

A group of photographs typically represents many localized elaborations of a larger theme. In this respect, most photographic series are like poems in which similar themes or symbols are repeated from line to line. Williams’ photographs, however, seem at first to have nothing in common. They are mostly still lifes or studies (of a modernist apartment block, all grey concrete; three views of the Kiev 88; a prefabricated German mailing box which I at first mistook for a box of Kodak photo paper; ears of corn stacked in neat little pile; a Los Angeles dance performance by three Balinese dancers; a pencil diagram on the back of an index card, etc.) They are not like poems, in which meanings spark off in a dozen different directions, but like prose, in which whatever significance an individual word might have is always subordinated to the meaning of the sentence. A Williams series is like an electrical wire that passes a current along. It would be a mistake to ask what the wire "means." Similarly, it is a mistake to ask the meaning of individual pictures, at least at first.

The photographs are made with outmoded techniques. The specific techniques—dye transfer (the Kiev camera, the corn) and platinum prints (Balinese dancers) will be obvious to anyone who has spent time studying or handling photographs. Platinum printing is associated with a fine tonal range, and, consequently, with artisanal or craft techniques, and dye transfer is associated with a certain richness of color (for example, William Eggleston's groundbreaking color works, among the first color photographs to be exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art.)

Kodak no longer produces the film or chemicals the dye transfer process requires, and platinum printing is mainly used today by technically minded amateurs or artists interested in emphasizing characteristics of an image's printing or toning. Both processes have become part of Benjamin's "just passed." Belatedness clings to them like a weak shadow. This belatedness shares parallels with other Williams subjects—the notoriously cranky Kiev; Olivetti's good-looking but practically useless Valentine typewriter; Braun's Snow White's Coffin record player: objects that look good, but are functionally flawed.

By photographing these objects and juxtaposing them, Williams has created an enormous archive of cultural and historical cross-references, an archive of industrial culture's transformation, under modernism, from a "handmade" to a "machine made" aesthetic. The technical processes his photographs are made with imply handmade origins, but Williams' disinterest in any overt signs of authorship or of little touches or flourishes of expression (as shown by his deadpan presentation of objects under neutral lighting, or the farming of the actual work of making the pictures out to commercial photographers or technical assistants) pit his images' form and content against each other in a kind of low ontological comedy or farce.

Williams' works reward detailed thinking, but are hard to love. I admire the rigor of his approach, and the thoughtful criticism his practice regularly attracts, but I don't want to meet his students or, God forbid, any locals who take his work as authorization to create huge baggy photo-archives dedicated to collapsing industrial modernism from within. Williams' most memorable photographs (the Kiev; the pile of corn; the much-reproduced images of the Valentine typewriter) work precisely because of his ability to perceive cultural and historical complexities within apparently artless industrial artefacts. Though his photographs often appear neutral and pedestrian, they in fact are anything but.

- posted by cjb @ 2:24 PM