CAMERAS, CORN, CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS, - Specialized Research AI at MIT

CAMERAS, CORN, CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS,
AND THE COLD WAR

MARK GODFREY

“It’s about things not connecting
and people not connecting.”

—Christopher Williams1

“Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle.”

—Guy Debord2

Prologue

In the summer of 2006, I was invited to be on a jury of a photographic com-
petition at the Museu Serralves in Porto. When I arrived, I discovered that the
proceedings were taking place largely in Portuguese, which somewhat challenged
my participation. Thankfully, this circumstance allowed me to spend the bulk of
my two days in the museum’s temporary exhibition: Christopher Williams’s For
Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 4), the fourth iteration
of Williams’s presentation of a series begun in 2003. Previous exhibitions had
been held at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, the Kunstverein
Braunschweig, Germany, and the Vienna Secession, and though the Serralves
show contained many of the same photographs as had been displayed at these
venues, it was completely different as an exhibition.

I was grateful for the opportunity to spend time in Williams’s show because
up until that point, though I had admired his work from afar, I had never seen a
solo exhibition in the ﬂesh. Instead I knew some catalogs and had read various
essays on his work.3 Seeing the work at Serralves was an extraordinary and very

1.
This is Christopher Williams’s description of John Baldessari’s work, but the comment speaks to
many of the subjects of this essay. See John Baldessari, Ann Goldstein, and Christopher Williams, “The
Things We Sweep Under the Rug: A Conversation with John Baldessari,” in John Baldessari: Life’s
Balance, Works 84–04 (Graz: Kunsthaus Graz, 2005), p. 90.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1995), p. 20.
2.
3.
For example, Thomas Crow’s essays “The Simple Life: Pastoralism and the Persistence of Genre in
Recent Art,” October 63 (Winter 1993), and “Unwritten Histories of Conceptual Art,” in Oehlen Williams 95
(Wexner Center for the Arts, 1995).

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116

OCTOBER

perplexing awakening. Included in the show were photographs of cameras, jelly-
fish, plastic corn, Polish apartment blocks, German postal packages, women
with shampooed hair, soap bars, wallpaper factories, bicycles, and so on. All
these subjects were obviously important to the artist, and their juxtaposition
certainly provoked me to ask why. But equally, the show raised questions with
no obvious connect ion to the photographic subject s. How were the pho-
tographs made? What photographic histor ies and genres did they br ing
together? How were they installed? What other interventions had Williams
made around them? What was the importance of the texts that surrounded the
presentation of photographs?

The importance of these questions seemed even greater when I attended
the opening of Williams’s next exhibition, held at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna
di Bologna (GAM): For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle
(Revision 5). The focus here was on extensive architectural interventions and a
special performance scripted for the opening night. It was now abundantly
clear that to think about Williams just as a photographer was to radically misun-
derstand his practice. Indeed, it was evident that Williams’s shows could be set
against at least three tendencies: the concern with obsolescence in recent pho-
tography, the combination of sculpture and photography in various artists’
practices, and the phenomenon of artists undertaking historical research as a
crucial part of their work. Williams’s photographs used nearly obsolete printing
technologies and pictured an outmoded camera apparatus. His shows brought
together critical tendencies in recent photographic and sculptural practice
without mixing these mediums into a multimedia mélange; they suggested a
new model of the kind of historiographic activity an art installation might con-
stitute. What follows is a response to these encounters with Williams’s work.

Towards a Philosophy of Photography

I will begin by sett ing aside the iconography of this new ser ies and
addressing the very subject of photography. It became clear to me while walking
around Williams’s exhibition in Portugal that there was a strange range of for-
mal photographic conventions at work in the series, deriving from different
historical moments, whose co-presence—though initially confusing—reveals a
great degree of deliberation and strategic thinking on his part. The most obvi-
ous formal component of Williams’s work is the deployment of a st yle of
photography related to the Neue Sachlichkeit of Albert Renger-Patzsch and
Karl Blossfeldt.4 Williams makes photographs that are carefully composed, and

4.
Williams’s strategic response to Renger-Patzsch and to Walter Benjamin’s critique is discussed
by Timothy Martin in “Undressing the Institutional Wound,” in Christopher Williams 97 For Example:
Die Welt ist schön (Final Draft) (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1997).

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Cameras, Corn, Christopher Williams, and the Cold War

117

which show their subjects clearly, well-lit, and in focus. The photographic sub-
ject is usually pictured head-on: there are none of the downward and upward
vertiginous angles associated with Constructivist photography. Their specific
size also indicates an afﬁliation with Neue Sachlichkeit. Williams’s images are
larger than domestic snapshots, but too small to suggest any afﬁnity with the
wall-filling images produced by his contemporaries Jeff Wall and Andreas
Gursky, whose works (as many have commented) aspire to resurrect traditions
deriving from the history of painting. Williams’s prints are placed under white
mattes and shown in black-painted wooden frames—an extremely conventional
presentation device for photography that Williams chose to adopt at a time
when many others were showing photographs as posters, on billboards, and as
projected slides.

Alongside these signs of Neue Sachlichkeit, there are other formal strate-
gies indebted to the photo-conceptualism that Williams encountered as a
student at CalArts in the 1970s. While some of the photographs in the new
series are single shots, others are part of diptychs, triptychs, and other mini-
series, which suggests a relation to the serial photography of Dan Graham and
Ed Ruscha.5 The titles that Williams gives his images are unconventional and
function as separate texts rather than as simple captions. In catalogs, they are
printed in full in a separate section from the images, and in his installations,
they appear on the wall at some distance from the framed photographs. Some
are extremely long, even cumbersome, packed with information providing the
speciﬁcations of the pictured object, the location of the photograph, and the
dimensions of the print and frame, while others have a comparative paucity of
information. Many of the longer ones lead off by naming an object that one
would not assume to be the main subject of the image, thus reversing the hier-
archy that the picture might seem to offer. Dissonant relationships are created,
both between a single title and its corresponding photograph, and between the
long title for one work and the short one for another. These text/image and
text/text relationships indicate the importance to Williams of the work of
Douglas Huebler and Robert Smithson. Another evident afﬁliation is to the re-
photography of the “Pictures Generat ion.” Williams’s ser ies includes one
photograph of a 1969 Dacia 1300 car brochure. The artist simply photographed
the brochure and rotated the image by ninety degrees: rather than illustrating
the car’s spaciousness, the image gives an impression of compression, as the car

Ed Ruscha’s impact on Williams extends beyond the importance of serial photography. As a
5.
Californian interested in New York work in the 1960s, Ruscha did not feel compelled to choose
between the different modes emerging on the East Coast: he could work within the frames of Pop art
and Conceptualism. From a similar geographic vantage point, Williams has not had to choose one
manner of historical afﬁliation, and has instead been able to produce work in dialogue with various
generational predecessors.

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Christopher Williams. Brochure for Dacia 1300I, Dacia 1300:
Licensed model of the Renault 12. 1289 cm3, 39.7 kW, 142
km/h max speed. First presented simultaneously at the
Expozitia Realizarilor Economiei Nationale, Bukarest, and
at the Mondial de l’Automobile, Paris (as Renault 12) in
1969. Produced 1969–21.7.2004 at Uzina de Autoturisme,
Pitesti, Romania. Spare parts being produced until 2014 in
Mioveni, Romania. (On July 2, 1999, Renault bought 51%
of Dacia) Douglas M. Parker Studio, Glendale, California
August 5, 2005. 2005. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York.

seats appear to be on the verge of falling onto the dashboard. Meaning is there-
fore altered by an act of (literal) détournement.6

The coming-together in Williams’s work of these various photographic
strategies—some initiated in the 1920s, and others in the 1960s and 1970s—is
particularly remarkable insofar as the later artists had critiqued and rejected

6.
Williams has used re-photography throughout his career. One of his earliest works, 1982’s
SOURCE: The Photographic Archive, John F. Kennedy Library (the full title is much longer), comprised pho-
tographs sourced by the artist in this archive according to particular selection criteria—Williams re-pho-
tographed all the images of Kennedy taken on May 10, 1963, in which his back is facing the camera.

Cameras, Corn, Christopher Williams, and the Cold War

119

the premises of the earlier ones:7 Graham, Huebler, and others had pursued a
deskilled kind of photography, taking photographs with inexpensive cameras,
avoiding elegant photographic compositions, printing at run-of-the-mill labora-
tories, and framing the resulting shots as expediently as possible.8 Given the
photo-conceptualists’ crit ical rejection of the st ylistic principles of Neue
Sachlichkeit, and the fact that Williams’s work uses devices associated with both
movements, it is clear that he is presenting a deliberate position in regards to
photographic history. Williams’s practice involves a re-skilling of photography,
yet this is neither a reactionary nor a crude rejection of the premises of photo-
conceptualism, but a strategic and rhetorical move. Williams invites his viewers
to consider, critically, how viable such photographic strategies are now. Rather
than simply taking photographs for the sake of beauty, he might be suggesting
that the only way to analyze the workings of photography in the culture at large
is to make images that look almost as elegant as those produced elsewhere.

Looking at Williams’s work, I also became interested in the character of the
prints themselves. It would be possible to take elegantly composed, well-lit, and
sharply-focused photographs, in the manner of Neue Sachlichkeit, but to print them
inexpensively. However, this is patently not the case here. Williams’s juxtaposition of
color and black-and-white photographs makes us think about this distinction as a
subject in and of itself (were the images all in color, one would perhaps take “color”
for granted), and as we consider it, we are sensitized to the prints’ chromatic accu-
racy and intensity.9 This is perhaps most noticeable in prints showing yellow towels
and red plastic wrappers, where it seems that the very dye used to color these prod-
ucts was also used on the photographic paper (in other words, the photographs are
not just images of the objects they show, but are materially related to them, a mode of
material relationship quite distinct from indexicality). The blacks behind the jellyﬁsh
and motorcycle are just as remarkable: velvety and intense. Williams uses dye-transfer
color printing and Pyro black-and-white printing. Currently only offered by specialist
printing laboratories, these processes are on the very verge of obsolescence, as they
are time-consuming and materially expensive. Soon, it will no longer be possible to
produce this kind of color saturation or this intensity of tonal range.10 Williams uses

7.
Renger-Patzsch’s photography had met with a critical response much earlier on, most famously
in Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay “A Small History of Photography.” Benjamin had complained that
Renger-Patzsch’s photography aestheticized the world, and while it could “endow any soup can with
cosmic significance,” it “cannot grasp a single one of the human connexions in which it exists.”
Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” in One-Way Street (London: Verso, 1979), p. 255.
On the deskilling of photography in photo-conceptualism, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,
8.
“Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,”
October 55 (Winter 1990), pp. 105–43.
Another reason that we are prompted to attend to “color” and “black and white” is that nothing
9.
in the subjects seems to motivate the decision as to whether to use one or the other. Photographs with
the same subject vary in terms of this division: some photographs of cameras are color, others of lenses
are black and white.
Since the ﬁrst draft of this essay was completed, Williams has produced new color photographs
10.
for this series. These have been made as C-prints, because the chemicals for the dye-transfer printing
process are no longer available.

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such processes neither out of a fetishistic concern with quality nor of a particular fas-
cination with archaic techniques: again, his selection of these processes is rhetorical.
The prints provoke viewers to think about the future and ask what will be lost as
more efﬁcient and cheaper photographic production methods displace the ones he
has used. But at the same time, his photographs give us a sense of photography’s
past. The quality of his prints is such that we feel a genuine sense of photography’s
magical ability to replicate the precise appearance of an object. Williams gives us a
glimpse of what the original nineteenth-century developers of photography might
have felt as they invented the new technology, allowing us to be re-enchanted by a
medium we usually take for granted.

The third aspect of the Serralves exhibition that intrigued me was the range
of photographic genres in play. Dix-Huit Leçons included some photographs that
resemble the kinds of images found in mail-order catalogs, scientiﬁc illustrations,
and fashion and architectural photography. This range of genres should not be
confused with the diversity of subject matter. A photograph of a building, for
instance, is not the same as an architectural photograph, which has particular styl-
istic features and is the product of particular production methods. Williams has
attributed this tendency in his work in part to his contact with John Baldessari,
whose work Fugitive Essays (1980), a wall-based collage using re-photographed and
enlarged images from various sources such as ﬁlm stills and nature books, was par-
ticularly important to him.11 Williams was taken with Baldessari’s strategy, but,
rather than just sourcing images of diverse kinds, he became determined to pro-
duce images this way as well. This means that his current series expands what can
now be thought of as collage. If 1920s photo-collages juxtaposed different images
over one surface, and Baldessari’s 1980 work spread a collage over a wall,
Williams’s ser ies collage together different photographic genres over the
expanded space that is the entire exhibition. Each individual photograph might
appear as a smooth plane with an afﬁnity to a single photographic genre, but over-
all a sense of collage—and fragmentation—pervades.

Williams works on set with the technical, lighting, and laboratory conditions
employed by fashion photographers, architectural photographers, and so on—
even employing professional photographers to operate the apparatus—but his
photographs indicate that he uses these modes of production in order to produce
small forms of disturbance. A model in a shower has a dribble of shampoo run-
ning down her neck; a postal package is shown after it has been opened; a ﬂower
stand is pictured from the side, foregrounding discarded stems and foliage rather
than its beautiful display. Precisely because the photographs so closely embrace
the production techniques and qualities of non-art photographic genres, the

11. Williams discusses this work in a conversation with Baldessari: “It was in that show [Fugitive
Essays] that you broke the collage format by introducing the wall as the support for the collage. You
used three different types of photos—such as nature, people, and product photography—and three
different types of frames . . . . What so impressed me and interested me about that project was that you
made installations that functioned like a collage.” John Baldessari, Ann Goldstein, and Christopher
Williams, “The Things We Sweep Under the Rug,” p. 95.

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Cameras, Corn, Christopher Williams, and the Cold War

121

slight yet radical distance between the “normal” advertisements, for instance, and
Williams’s images becomes crucial. As a consequence, his photographs provoke us
to think about the kinds of photographs produced in contexts other than the art
world, and the relation of ﬁne-art photography to such images.

Another provocative aspect of the series is the question of photographic
location. Some photographs have been taken on streets, in museums, and in
other speciﬁcally chosen locations either near Williams’s base in Los Angeles, or
far away in Eastern and Western Europe. Other photographs have been taken in
photographic studios. Objects are brought to the studio, placed upon glass, and
pictured in such a way that all traces of location disappear. The impression of a
neutral place is created, as if the object were in a vitrine sealed off from the world.
On ﬁrst glance it seems that there is a clear division here between images taken in
speciﬁc geographical locations and others photographed in non-speciﬁc ones. Yet
the titles of the studio shots name both the places where the objects were manu-
factured and the precise locations of the photographic studios.12 Just as some titles
underline Williams’s own displacement from Los Angeles to Poland (for instance),
so others underline the transport of objects from one location to the studio.

By raising the question of location, Williams indicates the entwinement of
photographic activity in discourses concerning globalization and transportation,
but, at the same time, he also signals an afﬁnity with another artist who has been
important to his formation, one not evident if we only concentrate on Williams’s
relationship to photographic histories: Lawrence Weiner. Since the late 1960s,
Weiner has made sculptures using the ideas of displacement, translation, and
shifting—just the ideas that Williams explores through photography. Weiner has
defined art as an activity that investigates “the relationships between human
beings & objects & objects to objects in relation to human beings.”13 We can see
how these relationships are at stake in Williams’s work most obviously when we
think of the photographs that juxtapose human beings and objects (for instance,
a woman and a shower door) or objects and objects (a bunch of corn and a Kodak
reﬂection guide). But, as I have endeavored to indicate, as much as these relation-
ships are evident within the images, they are brought into play through the very
activity of photography. Photography, as Williams invites us to consider, can
involve the movement of a human being to an object, or the movement of an
object to a photographic studio, where another object—the camera—lies in wait.
As for the act of displaying a photograph either in an exhibition or a publication,
this might well be re-described through Weiner’s work #143: “AN ACCUMULATION OF
INFORMATION TAKEN FROM HERE TO THERE.”

12. Williams sees the whited-out environments of his studio shots as “analogues” for the white cube
spaces in which contemporary art is so often displayed. Christopher Williams, in conversation with the
author, June 2007.
This statement appears in various closely related forms in many of Weiner’s statements and
13.
interviews. This particular quotation is from “[Media(Audio)],” in Having Been Said: Writings &
Interviews of Lawrence Weiner 1968–2003, eds. Gerti Fietzek and Gregor Stemmrich (Ostﬁldern-Ruit:
Hatje Cantz, 2004), p. 105.

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As I looked at Williams’s photographs and thought about the conﬂicting
photographic histories that informed them and that the artist had managed to
bring together, about their print quality, their approach to genre and production,
and about the question of location, it became evident that a primary concern in
Williams’s series was photography itself. Of course this was already made evident
by the iconography of the photographs: the series contains images of cameras,
camera lenses, and other apparatuses associated with photographic production,
such as Kodak color reﬂection guides. There is a photograph of a diagram for a
threading device used in a factory that produced photographic paper. There are
also photographs of display walls where photographs are conventionally exhibited.
Each of these objects is selected after intensive historical research. It is crucial,
for instance, that the camera comes from a particular factory. The accumulation of
images relating to the photographic apparatus and industry indicates a kind of self-
reﬂexivity at the heart of Williams’s project. This self-reﬂexivity invites comparison
with photo-conceptual works by John Hilliard, among many others, in its examina-
tion of the workings of the camera apparatus. Hilliard, for example, photographed
his camera in a mirror at each of its aperture and speed settings, producing a grid of
photographs displaying the technological facilities of the mechanism itself. Williams’s
work has a relation to modernist material self-reﬂexivity, but he extends its parame-
ters. Because he photographs the wider apparatus of the photographic industry
(lenses, color reﬂection guides, et cetera)—rather than just the camera he happens
to use—his work reﬂects on this industry as well as on the materials that he employs.
The viewer begins to appreciate the many factors that determine photographic
production: photographs are argued to be the result of the work of camera design-
ers, chemical engineers, studio technicians, lighting experts, specialist printers, and
so on.14 The person who clicks the button to expose the ﬁlm is only one in a chain of
producers. (Indeed, in producing his photographs, Williams rarely does this him-
self.) Reﬂecting on the wider aspects and structure of photographic production,
Williams manages to shift the emphasis away from the photographer-author, whose
subjectivity, intentionality, and artistic proﬁciency is at the core of so much photo-
graphic criticism. Likewise, Williams’s approach to photography invites us to discard
the notion of the “decisive moment” as integral to photographic criticism since it
acknowledges all the moments before and after the photographer depresses the
exposure button.

In much the same way, during the time that Williams studied under Michael Asher, the latter
14.
pursued projects that revealed the importance of people other than the artist in the production of an
installation. On his 1977 project at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Asher wrote: “By clearly distin-
guishing and speciﬁcally presenting the different participants (work crew, curator, artist) that make an
exhibition possible at such an institution, I wanted to show how these necessary but separate functions
are equally essential for the constitution of a work.” Asher, Writings 1973–1983 on Works 1969–1979
(Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary
Art, 1983), p. 178.

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Cameras, Corn, Christopher Williams, and the Cold War

123

The resulting vision of photography has a strong afﬁnity with the account of
the practice Vilém Flusser formulated in his 1983 book Towards a Philosophy of
Photography. Flusser’s account of photography is constructed around the notion of
“programs”: a camera is programmed to produce photographs—no matter the
aspirations of its operator, he or she can only use it to produce what it is pro-
grammed to do (“The camera is programmed to produce photographs, and every
photograph is a realization of one of the possibilities contained within the pro-
gram of the camera”).15 Photography is programmed by the photographic
industry; the photographic industry is programmed by “the industrial complex,”
which is programmed by capitalism, et cetera. Each link in the chain of photo-
graphic production is programmed, which means it serves the interest of the link
above it (even unknowingly). Photographs—which are the end result of the pho-
tographic industry—also program the world they enter, usually to the effect that
more photographs must be produced. Photographs, that is, program the world to
prolong, improve, and extend the reaches of the photographic industry. Flusser’s
vision of photography, therefore, is of a self-perpetuating, circular institution, con-
sisting of rings of activity, in which freedom is all but circumscribed, and in which
every move is programmed.

In the middle of these rings of activity, the photographer therefore emerges
as a functionary, for all he or she might think of the activity as an exercise of free
will. Williams has embraced the term—saying he likes to be thought of as a func-
tionary—and has also underlined his interest in Flusser by placing the word
“Program” on his catalogs, and in related textual material.16 Certainly, looking at
the images in his series, one becomes aware of photography as something that is
connected to the world of capital—photography as something that is pro-
grammed to serve the interests and requirements of corporations, tourist boards,
scientists, and so on. Photographs program more photographs. The key question
is whether Williams critically reveals photography’s un-freedom by showing how it
serves programs; or whether his interventions and disruptions of photographic
conventions, materials, and genres amount to an act of productive contestation.

Lectures on Industrial Society

I want to turn now, though, from all these questions about photography to
the other subjects of Williams’s new series, with his title serving as an introduc-
tion. Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle is the name of a book by Raymond
Aron published in France in 1962. Williams came across it after watching Jean-
Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), where this title ﬂashes
on the screen. Both book and ﬁlm connected to Williams’s long-held interests in

Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion, 2000), p. 26.
15.
16.
For instance, see the cover of the catalog for the Kunstverein Braunschweig exhibition.
Christopher Williams: For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision I) (Braunschweig:
Kunstverein Braunschweig, 2005).

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124

OCTOBER

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Williams. Kiev 88, 4.6 lbs. (2.1 Kg) Manufacturer:
Zavod Arsenal Factory, Kiev, Ukraine. Date of
production: 1983–87 Douglas M. Parker Studio,
Glendale, California. March 28, 2003 (NR. 1,2,3).
2003. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York.

the postwar era and the Americanization of European culture.17 With the title
as a kind of prompt, Williams, determined to make a representation of the
world of the Cold War, began the series with what he has called a “Cold War cou-
ple”—a Soviet camera and a plastic bunch of American corn—and continued it
by creating images of buildings, people, and products integral to a representa-
tion of that world. In this section, I will show how individual images function in
respect to the Cold War period and then identify some thematic strands across
the series.

The Soviet camera is photographed as a triptych and titled Kiev 88, 4.6 lbs.
(2.1Kg), Manufacturer: Zavod Arsenal Factory, Kiev, Ukraine. Date of production:
1983–87. Douglas M. Parker Studio, Glendale, California, March 28, 2003 (2003).18
Williams selected the camera because of its remarkable history. It is based on

During my interview with him in June 2007, Williams has discussed the inﬂuence of Hollywood
17.
on Jean-Luc Godard and others, the impact of Pop art on the Capitalist Realists, and of Claes
Oldenburg on Marcel Broodthaers.
18.
The photographs show the camera from three angles: at 45 degrees from the front left; at 45
degrees from the back left; and side-on. There is no frontal shot of the kind which would appear in an
instruction manual whose photographic conventions Williams has almost replicated.

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Cameras, Corn, Christopher Williams, and the Cold War

125

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Williams. Kodak Three Point Reﬂection Guide, © 1968 Eastman
Kodak Company, 1968. (Corn) Douglas M. Parker Studio, Glendale,
California, April 17, 2003. 2003. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York.

Hasselblad designs stolen from German photographic factories at the end of 1945
by Russian troops liberating the country. (Some believe that the Germans had ear-
lier stolen these designs from Swedish technicians.) Having appropriated the
designs, the Russians began to produce the camera in a former arms factory in
Kiev that had been the location of a 1918 strike during the Russian Revolution,
the subject of Arsenal, a film made ten years later by Aleksandr Dovzhenko.
“Within this one object,” Williams noted of the Kiev 88, “you have this political
history with a capital P: the Russian Revolution; a well-known ﬁlm representing
that revolution and reﬂecting upon the position of that revolution in history; the
appropriation and displacement of the means to produce photographic appara-
tus; and then you have the idea that it’s a collectable and a consumer product.
Built into my photograph of the Kiev 88, there is the idea of social change.”19

19. Williams, in conversation with the author, June 2007. Unless otherwise stated, all other com-
ments from Williams are from this interview.

126

OCTOBER

The other half of the couple is the picture of a nine-strong pyramid of plas-
tic corn on the cob, similarly photographed in a studio. A Kodak Three-Point
Reﬂection Guide protrudes down from the top of the image, and though the text
on the guide is upside down and runs right to left (suggesting that the negative
has been ﬂipped), the words “© 1968 Kodak Eastman Company” are visible along
its surface. This again is an image with a resemblance to an advertisement, but
with a difference: the color guide would usually not appear in a published adver-
tisement. Williams chose to photograph corn because this staple is bound up with
the history of colonialism, having been ﬁrst transported to Europe only in the ﬁf-
teenth century. He was also interested in the fact that corn remains the largest
crop in the Americas, being used not just for food, but also for a vast number of
manufacturing industries.20 Of particular interest to Williams is corn’s use in the
photographic industry. “The lubricant used to grind the camera lenses has a corn
by-product in it; the ﬁlm strip itself has a corn by-product in it, many of the chem-
icals associated with the production of a ﬁne art print also have corn in them,” he
has said. This means that though it shows fake corn, Williams’s photograph is in
all probability made from real corn. The photograph, in other words, dramatizes a
mater ial self-reflexivit y of an ent irely unexpected kind. The 1968 Kodak
Reﬂection Guide functions, in part, as another reference to the material appara-
tus of the photographic industr y, and also as a reminder of a moment of
attempted social change (1968) with some correspondence to those dates also
invoked by the Kiev 88 photographs (1917; 1928; 1945).21

Lodz, October 2, 2004 was one of the next photographs Williams conceived for
the series and one of the ﬁrst he made outside the studio. It shows a twelve-story
block of apartments in the Polish city with another similar block behind it. The
image is in color, but the impression of grayness predominates, as it is the color of
the sky, the concrete building, and the road. Lodz, October 2, 2004 is close to the
look of architectural photography and of the kind of images associated with stu-
dents of Bernd and Hilla Becher, but with a slight disturbance: the top of a
lamppost protrudes from the bottom right corner. Perhaps somewhat reminiscent
of the palm tree in Baldessari’s Wrong (1967), the lamppost disrupts the view and
serves as an indicator of the camera’s position (here it is important to note a dif-
ference from Gursky’s photography in particular, which offers god-like viewpoints
persuading viewers to forget the physical situation of the camera). Whereas

20. Williams learned this from Margaret Visser’s Much Depends on Dinner (Toronto: McClelland &
Stewart, 1986).
21.
Discussing this photograph, John Miller indicates that the history of corn production and
export is bound up with the economics and politics of the Cold War: “In the early 1970s, the world
economy shifted from multinational markets to transnational complexes. The United States respond-
ed with a ‘green power’ exporting strategy to help offset its trade deﬁcit and costs of the Vietnam War.
This strategy focused on exporting low-value crops such as wheat, soybeans, and corn at prices too low
for its competitors to meet. The 1973 Farm Bill ﬁnally removed production constraints on American
farmers, allowing them to undercut agricultural production in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and
the Third World.” Miller, “Mechanizat ion Takes Command: Modernizat ion, Terminable and
Interminable,” in Christopher Williams (Vancouver: Contemporary Art Gallery, 2005), p. 40.

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Cameras, Corn, Christopher Williams, and the Cold War

127

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Williams. Lodz, October
2, 2004. 2004. Courtesy
David Zwirner, New York.

Williams chose the Kiev 88 camera and the 1968 Kodak Color Reﬂection Guide
for their particularities, this block of apartments was selected exactly for its
generic qualities. Typical of Soviet-era Eastern European architecture, this kind of
apartment block might be found anywhere from East Berlin to Moscow. However,
like the ﬁrst two images, it was a product of the culture of the Cold War.

Williams populated his Cold War world with various photographs of people,
and the ﬁrst major group was a mini-series of ﬁve black-and-white photographs show-
ing a woman to the right of a shower door. Despite its proximity to advertising there
are again slight and important differences—the fact that the model is older than
most seen in shampoo advertisements; the dribble of water running down her neck;
the somewhat disturbing reﬂection of a slice of her nose and teeth in the side of the
shower door in some of the shots (advertisements tend to show the body whole, and
not fragmented by such reﬂections). Once again, everything that appears in the pho-
tograph is determined by speciﬁc research. Williams started with an interest in the
design and photographic work of Charles Wilp, who produced advertisements for
beauty products in the 1960s showing women emerging from showers, somewhat
inﬂuenced by Richard Hamilton. Williams divided up the elements of Wilp’s images
and worked to ﬁnd a shower door and a model. The woman was selected according
to the casting instructions that Jacques Tati supplied for Playtime: Tati had in mind a
female lead whose appearance suggested education and reﬁnement, qualities that

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128

OCTOBER

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Williams. Model # 105M—R59C, Keystone Shower Door, 57.4 X 59”/Chrome/Raindrop, SKU #
109149, # 96235. 970—084—000 (Meiko), Vancouver, B.C. Wednesday, April 6, 2005, No. 2.
2005. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York.

Williams discerned in this model. The shower door was produced by the Keystone
company and is a model called Chrome Raindrop, which simultaneously looks like
water dropping down a surface, and acts as a surface for such drops.

This intensity of reference to the particular histories and social realities rep-
resented in the photographs is extremely unusual, and all the more remarkable
because the photographs, at ﬁrst sight, look so simple.22 Whereas Jeff Wall’s pho-
tographs, for instance, announce their allusions very loudly, Williams’s are very
reticent: the compacted references in the photographs become apparent only
with time. Indeed, Williams’s work in reﬁning and paring his research down to an
essential and simple image is in direct inverse relation to the viewer’s work in

22.
In discussing Williams’s work while writing this, I have found that many people who admire it
ﬁnd the mismatch between the simplicity of the images and the intensity of the research carried out to
make them a source of considerable humor, especially because the subjects of the research are often so
obscure. Others, however, ﬁnd the reticence of the images frustrating.

Cameras, Corn, Christopher Williams, and the Cold War

129

opening out each image to discern its multiple referents. Sometimes, the viewer’s
task involves discovering a single object’s identity and history, but at other times
the viewer must confront the juxtaposition of two. I mentioned before that, as a
whole, the series presents a collage of different photographic genres, and that
those images that present two oddly juxtaposed objects also appear as collages.
However, whereas other photocollages associated with the Cold War period show
juxtapositions of dissonant objects and images across a fractured photographic
plane (for instance, the American interiors and Vietnamese exteriors of Martha
Rosler’s 1967–72 series Bringing the War Home), Williams’s photographs appear as
smooth surfaces containing disparate elements.

Various Cold War subjects can be identiﬁed across the photographs in the
series, primarily transportation, decolonization, sanitation, and design. These
four strands weave together in surprising ways. Car production was crucial to the
recovery of postwar France. As Kristin Ross has written, “Postwar French eco-
nomic growth was a direct result of having modernized sectors of production . . .
and the most vital of these was automobile production.”23 Though mass produced,
the car could be marketed to its consumers as an individual product that would
satisfy their individual desires. For Roland Barthes writing in the late 1950s, “cars
today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the
supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and con-
sumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as
a purely magical object.”24 The car’s main function, however, was to transport
workers to their workplaces, helping to create a mobile workforce, “available Man,
relatively indifferent to the distances where he’ll be sent.”25 Cars were consumed
to increase production. The importance of efﬁcient transport in the Cold War
period is marked by the photograph of the Romanian Dacia 1300, which is a
licensed model of the 1969 Renault 12. The image bears witness to the ﬂexibility
of resurgent French capitalism, for it shows that Renault found a way to sell and
market its product despite the political divide between Paris and Romania. There
is also a triptych of a 1964 Velosolex 2200 Nr. 1 motorized bicycle. Manufactured
to speed up the journeys of workers to their factories, this was the most commonly
used mode of transportation in Indochina and France’s African colonies.

Other photographs pick up on the late history of the colonies—for instance,
the image of the stacked sun shutters of Jean Prouvé’s Maison Tropique. Designed at
Prouvé’s Maxéville workshops at the end of the 1940s, Prouvé’s structures were light
enough to transport by airplane to Brazzaville in the Congo where they had stayed

Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge,

23.
Mass.: MIT Press and October Books, 1995), p.19.
24.
25.

Roland Barthes, “The New Citroen,” in Mythologies (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 88.
Ibid., p. 22.

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130

OCTOBER

until 1999, when they were shipped back to France. Prouvé’s idea was to create an
easily mobile structure that could be disassembled and repositioned, and whose shut-
ters could regulate light and enable air circulation, enabling French expatriates
working in the colonies to create domestic conditions approximating those of home.
(As it happens, the Maison Tropique was never mass produced). Another, less direct
indicator of the impact of colonialism can be detected in the pair of photographs
showing Africola ashtrays from the back and the front. These were manufactured in
Germany; Africola was a European brand of soft-drink whose name was chosen as a
marketing device because of its exotic appeal.26 As this image indicates, Williams
does not aim to represent the violence of colonial rule, nor the tumultuous condi-
tions of post-colonial existence; instead, he picks objects and buildings whose
innocent appearance at ﬁrst belies their implication in these histories.

A third theme in Williams’s series is sanitation, but it is a subject closely con-
nected to decolonization. Ross identiﬁes a logic whereby France told itself that it
needed to clean itself up in the wake of the German occupation, and that it had to
become hygienic since dirtiness was a feature of the colonies from which it had to dis-
tance itself. Through a process she calls “interior colonialism,” the “rational
administrative techniques developed in the colonies were brought home and put to
use side by side with new technological innovations such as advertising in reordering
metropolitan, domestic society, the ‘everyday life’ of its citizens.”27 Most importantly,
“the transfer of a colonial political economy to a domestic one involved a new
emphasis on controlling domesticity.”28 In a pair of color images, Williams’s model
“Miko” looks to the camera smiling, and then away mid-laugh. Wearing a bright yel-
low towel wrapped around her head, she appears next to another 1968 Kodak Three
Point Reﬂection Guide, whose red, green, and blue strips contrast with the towel’s
yellow (indeed, the blue strip has the word “yellow” printed on it, drawing attention
to this contrast).29

Despite the fact that the model’s veins and moles are slightly more evident than
would be the case in most advertisements, these images recall the advertising of Cold
War hygiene products, even while the over-directed facial gestures clarify the com-
plete artiﬁce of such photographs. The inclusion of the photographic apparatus in
the image underlines the ways in which photography was used not just to represent
bodies but to control and deﬁne them, subjecting the body to regimes of cleanliness.
The series also features a triptych of photographs showing a woman wearing 1970s
yellow curlers; meanwhile the international spread of these regimes is indicated by
the photograph showing two cellophane-wrapped Cuban Rina soap bars—the front

The manufacturer’s stamp appears upside down in the image, another “mistake” separating this

26.
image from the conventions of advertising.
Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, p. 7.
27.
Ibid., pp.77–78.
28.
29.
Christian Holler suggests that in this photograph, the date “1968,” with its connotations of social
revolt, serves as a “political counterpoint to the shimmering world of advertising and consumerism to
which the mise-en-scène refers.” See “World Picture Lessons: Christopher Williams’ For Example: Dix-Huit
Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle,” in Christopher Williams (Vienna: Secession, 2005), p. 66.

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Cameras, Corn, Christopher Williams, and the Cold War

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Williams. Three Point Reﬂection Guide, © 1968 Eastman
Kodak Company, 1968. (Meiko smiling), Vancouver, B.C.
April 6, 2005. 2005. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York.

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Williams. Lavar, Rina Jambon de Lavar “Lava, Limpia, Dura Mas,”
200 gr., Douglas M. Parker Studio, Glendale, California,
November 8, 2004. 2005. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York.

132

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Williams. Cologne, November 1, 2004.
2004. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York.

one of which is shown upside down in a position that nicely disturbs the product’s
own agenda of order. (Ross cites a statistic that “consumption of these items [soap]
rose 86 percent in the 1950s.”)30

Another strand in the series involves design, decoration, and display. One pho-
tograph shows a Polish factory where wallpaper passes through rollers. This will be
used to decorate apartments such as those shown in the Lodz image. There is also
the photograph of the Cologne ﬂower stand. Though the side-view onto the stand
reveals discarded clutter rather than privileging a ﬂoral display, this angle does allow
one to sense the efﬁciency of the ﬂorist’s trade, the careful organization of awning,
water buckets, and containers. These elements, alongside the ﬂowers themselves
point to the commercialization of “natural” products. The cost of this intrusion of
commerce and design into nature is expressed formally: though it is taken outside,
the photograph is so compressed that it induces a sense of enclosure and even claus-
trophobia. Williams’s series also includes images that show the display mechanisms of

30.

Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, p. 86.

Cameras, Corn, Christopher Williams, and the Cold War

133

the institutions in which it has been shown—the mobile wall system developed at
Vienna’s Secession gallery by Adolf Krischanitz in 1986.

Installations and Constellations

Imagine a real “Leçon Sur La Société Industrielle,” a lecture about Williams’s
work, structured broadly along the lines just mapped out, a lesson designed to
illustrate the various Cold War themes in the series. There would be a sequence of
slides of his soap bars, his “women-in-showers,” and his hair curler picture to
underline the theme of the sanitation industry, and a series of slides showing the
Velosolex, the Prouvé slats, and the Africola ashtray to illustrate Williams’s interest
in decolonization. There could be another sequence of images with connections
to Cold War sites in Poland, Vietnam, Cuba, and the U.S.S.R.; or another that
alludes to dates such as 1945 and 1968. Then slides of the camera pictures and of
those photographs with Kodak Reﬂection Guides would round off the lecture to
prove that post-war photographic culture is in a way the über-theme of Dix-Huit
Leçons, connected to and connecting all these subjects.

Such a lecture might well account for Williams’s historical research and
show how he has represented industrial society, but it would be a misleading
account of his work. This is because it would not grasp the importance of his
exhibitions and installations. When I saw this series first in Serralves, I was
reminded of Williams’s friend Thomas Struth and of Struth’s own recent retro-
spective, but only because of the differences in display tactics. While Struth
grouped works with similar themes or genres (street photographs were displayed
in one room, family portraits in another, museum pictures in a third, landscapes
next, and so on), no such thematic or genre groupings are to be found in
Williams’s installations. And while artists such as Struth tend to display their
photographs without any other interventions, in an exhibition by Williams, a
viewer sees architectural alterations, video “supplements,” and perhaps even per-
formance components alongside photography.

Williams’s architectural interventions owe much to the sculptural develop-
ments of the 1960s and ’70s, particularly to the work of Williams’s CalArts
professor Michael Asher, whose practice has involved subtle architectural alter-
ations that reveal the hidden ideologies of institutions, and also the movements of
objects from one site in an institution to another in order to represent forgotten
institutional histories. The broad range of Williams’s interventions can be seen in
the Porto and Bologna shows. The Serralves museum was designed by Alvaro Siza
in the early 1990s in a park attached to the Casa Serralves. Prior to his show,
Williams had been struck by the long wooden ﬂoor ramp stretching from the
upper galleries to a lower exhibition ﬂoor. This ramp was meant to facilitate the
ﬂow of human trafﬁc around the museum, as well as to advertise within the build-
ing one of Siza’s main architectural accomplishments. Siza managed to construct a

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134

OCTOBER

spacious museum with minimal damage to the env ironment al context .
Determined not to cut down trees in the park, working with the “slope of the ter-
rain,” he “enabled the building to be partially buried, thus minimizing its visual
impact on the surroundings.”31 In other words, the ramp is both an echo of the
topography of the park and a reminder of the architect’s respect for it .
Nonetheless, Williams knew that the ramp would direct viewers away from the
rooms immediately in front of the entrance, so he had a false wall constructed to
separate the slope from the upper room. The addition of this wall drew attention
to Williams’s work, but, somewhat paradoxically, it also emphasized the function
of Siza’s ramp by rendering it a separate entity.

The interventions in Bologna were rather more dramatic. Here, Williams
was working with a building in a city whose history had long interested him.
Bologna was the hub of Italian Communism in the 1970s, and the radical achieve-
ments of its government had been known to him through the 1980 Semiotext(e)
publication Autonomia: Post-Political Politics and the 1978 punk record by Scritti
Politti called Skank Bloc Bologna. One of the cultural accomplishments of this
period is the museum built by Leone Pancaldi in the early 1970s, opened on May
1, 1975. Pancaldi’s building was originally extremely spacious and well-lit, with
large windows opening onto a square and an extremely tall atrium whose skylights
illuminated the central display space. Between this atrium and the front window,
Pancaldi constructed another display space with a series of walls running perpen-
dicular to the windows, each elevated off the ﬂoor on short steel columns and
divided in two by a generous gap through which viewers could pass. By the time
Williams came to Bologna, these qualities and features of the building were hard
to recognize. The museum’s entrance had been moved from a side position to one
below the main space. To provide more space for display, curators over the years
had blocked up windows with Sheetrock and ﬁlled in the gaps of the display walls.
Other recessed spaces had been walled up, covering beautiful sections of golden-
smoke mirrored glass.

Williams was invited to make the ﬁnal exhibition in the Pancaldi building
before the institution moved to a more central, spectacular, and tourist-friendly
site in the middle of medieval Bologna. Aware both of the building’s past and its
imminent future (the space was scheduled to be given over to trade-fair organizers
who will undoubtedly demolish parts of it), Williams made a series of interventions
that at once recall Pancaldi’s structures and point forward to the building’s fate. He
reopened the original entrance, removed the Sheetrock from the front windows,
and uncovered elegant recessed spaces that had been shut off to maximize the avail-
able surface area. In the atrium, Williams installed ﬁve large white mobile display
walls and left each completely bare, a move that recalls Robert Rauschenberg’s White
Paintings of 1951. Usually reserved for the dramatic centerpiece of an exhibition,
the space became a trap for shifting light, the empty walls changing tones as

31.

Fundacao de Serralves, “Architecture,” http://www.serralves.com/gca/?id=62.

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Cameras, Corn, Christopher Williams, and the Cold War

135

clouds passed by high above. But, not all the artist’s interventions aimed to recap-
ture the beauty of the building in the manner of a sensitive restorer. Williams took
down false walls, only to reinstall them in another part of the building, making
them appear hastily boarded up. Towards the front of the space, the artist
knocked back the display walls to their original shape, but rather than smoothing
them down after all the hammering, he left them in a raw state, as if the galleries
had been visited by the ghost of Gordon Matta-Clark. Though Williams’s cuts
allowed the viewer to walk over the routes on the marble ﬂoor plotted out by
Pancaldi in 1975, the artist made no attempt to clean this ﬂoor: it was quite evi-
dent which sections had been polished over the years, and which covered up by
plasterboard display walls. In contrast to the structural interventions in Porto,
those in Bologna reﬂected on the
history, as well as the architecture,
of t he inst itut ion. In t his way,
Williams succeeded in sensitizing
viewers to the austere beauty of
Pancaldi’s architecture, a beauty
newly revealed just before t he
move to a new site in “historic”
Bologna. If the decision to move
can be thought of as a symptom of
contemporary spectacle culture’s
attachment to a romanticized idea
of histor y, Williams managed to
resuscitate the memory of a more
recent but less postcard-friendly
past, doing so without lapsing into
nostalgia, without pining for the
Communist Bologna of the 1970s
as a lost utopia: his activities were
as much acts of ruination as of restoration.

Williams. Installation view of
For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons
Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 5).
Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. 2007.

Williams’s installations include other kinds of interventions. In Porto, two
spaces were set aside for video works. In one, a gray Franz West sofa faced a single
monitor showing a video of a cooking program; in the other, a long bench faced a
trio of TV monitors showing three photographic books whose pages were turned
from time to time. The upper video, Supplement (2003), was produced by Ringier
Television and runs to 332 minutes. Williams was given the facilities to work with
the producers of a television cooking show, and as the video begins, the conven-
tions of such a program are adhered to. A cheerful and handsome host enters,
discusses mushroom varieties in front of a studio audience, and turns to a chef
who demonstrates the preparation of a stock by piling ingredients into a pot to
boil. At this moment, the cameras of a normal TV program would turn away as the

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136

OCTOBER

chef reveals “one that has been prepared earlier”; however, Williams instructed his
cameraman to record the pot right through the boiling and cooling process. In
the installation, a viewer might enter the room to see the most banal of sights:
chunks of carrots and potatoes bubbling in water. This might encourage them to
sit and wait for a denouement, or provoke them to leave the room immediately,
but either way, the video does its work in disturbing television conventions and in
introducing the subject of time into the exhibition: the viewer either feels the sen-
sation of waiting in front of something slow or of speeding by a video they have
chosen not to watch.

The other room of videos addressed photographic conventions rather than
TV. The ﬁrst monitor showed a book titled Blende auf für Guinea. Published in
1960, it shows images of the newly decolonized and socialist country—including
a photograph of an African worker reading Bertolt Brecht. The second monitor
displayed pages from a 1981 book titled Traditional Costumes in the Black Forest;
the third had pages from a 1971 issue of Der Spiegel and a technical publication
from 1968 titled Grosbild. The latter links to Williams’s concern with photo-
graphic culture in the Cold War period and its connection to colonialism, to the
reemergence of nationalist tendencies in Germany, and to manufacture and
advertising.

The main non-architectural interventions in Bologna also concerned the
Cold War period, but were again associated with the speciﬁc history of the city and
the museum. At the back of Pancaldi’s building, Williams displayed the architect’s
original blueprints on a low plinth. Nearby, there was a series of vitrines—also
designed by Pancaldi—that Williams had retrieved from GAM’s storage rooms.
One contained publications relating to the international reception of the politics
of 1970s Bologna, showing three translations of the 1977 book Red Bologna;
another had Scritti Politti’s single, arranged so its sleeve was displayed separated
from the vinyl. Other elements of the display in this section of the installation
functioned more self-reﬂexively. One vitrine contained a children’s photo-story
book titled Das Apfelmäuschen (The Little Apple-Mouse), and elsewhere, as a kind of
exhibition within an exhibition, there was a wall cabinet in which six tiny Asger
Jorn ceramic sculptures, all from 1971, were on display. These elements draw
attention to the very concept of intervention itself. The inclusion of Jorn’s works,
for example, reminds one of Situationist precedents for Williams’s interventions,
and the image of a mouse living in an apple on the cover of Das Apfelmäuschen sug-
gests by analogy that the artist is a kind of intruder burrowing into the museum.

Williams also treats the openings of exhibitions and its related events with
care, choreographing the speeches that are given by institutional figures. In
Portugal, he organized a performance at the post-opening dinner in which an
actor and actress gave speeches whose texts were collaged from generic Cold War
sources, including Jean-Paul Sartre’s lines “Il ne faut pas désespérer Billancourt,”
an expression of the view that the ugly truths of Soviet Communism should be

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Cameras, Corn, Christopher Williams, and the Cold War

137

kept from the proletariat, as symbolized by the workers at the main Renault plant
outside of Paris. In Bologna, the performance was more speciﬁcally formed out of
the institution’s history. Prior to the show’s opening, and with the help and
research assistance of the curator Andrea Villani, Williams asked the director,
Gianfranco Maraniello, to recite word-for-word the speech that the original direc-
tor of the institution had read at its inauguration in 1975; Maraniello resisted
somewhat , and he wanted to add comment s relat ing to the present t ime.
Williams’s response was to cut each sentence of the newly expanded text in half, so
that the speech was again at its 1975 length. Thus the exhibition opened with a
kind of Dada-esque performance—a recital in which a mixture of 1970s leftist and
contemporary institutional rhetoric was sliced into nonsense poetry.

Some of Williams’s exhibitions include objects; for others he makes architec-
tural interventions. Some viewers will witness the performances at Williams’s
openings; others will sit on Franz West sofas and watch his videos. There is much
to engage the viewer besides Williams’s photographs, but what is common to all
his installations is the way in which the artist arranges these photographs in con-
stellations. In a reasonably large museum room that would accommodate around
ten works the size of his own pictures, Williams might place no more than six pho-
tographs, hanging them slightly lower than standard museum practice. Coming
into such a room, a viewer immediately senses that this is a very carefully chosen
and positioned group of images because of the sparseness of works and bafﬂing
diversity of subject matter. One room at Serralves included a triptych of Velosolex
bicycle images beside an image of the woman wearing the yellow towel; on the
next wall was the Lodz apartment block, and on the ﬁnal wall, the corn. In a simi-
larly sized space in Bologna, Williams placed the Rina soap bars, the hair curlers
triptych, and the Lodz building. (In each exhibition, Williams places photographs
in new constellations, creating new juxtapositions).

Williams’s constellations disrupt any attempt to construct a reading of the
work along thematic lines. As soon as one begins to think about the connections
between the images of sanitation, for instance, a photograph that is completely
disconnected intrudes to interrupt a train of thought—the corn, for instance.
However, as much as our attempts to connect thematic strands are constantly
interrupted, we also become aware that we are trying to make other kinds of con-
nections, even if they seem quite random and based only on superﬁcial visual
details. We might link, for example, the images of the woman-with-towel, the corn,
the postal package, the ﬂower stand, and the Dacia car because each image con-
tains a bright yellow object. Or we might join the hair curlers, the camera lenses,
and the diagram from the paper coating factory—objects and images that have
nothing to do with one another, but all of which include circular forms. These

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138

OCTOBER

groupings are not meant to be secure: Williams does not provoke us to assemble
chromatically or formally similar photographs simply to “rejoice in games of juxta-
position”32 and to celebrate photography’s capacity to make dissimilar things
appear alike. Rather, these groupings are created rhetorically: that is, Williams
places us in a position where we begin to ask, what might be a valid, and what a
superﬁcial, connection of images?33

The creation of these constellations and their effects reveals another of the his-
torical figures important to Williams’s practice—someone who might seem
surprising given his usual association with New Objectivity. This is Georges Bataille,
who is thought to have guided the arrangement of photographs on the pages of
Documents, which he edited between 1929 and 1930. Indeed, Williams signaled the
importance of this journal to him by printing the text “Archäologie Beaux Arts
Ethnography Théâtre-Vérité” across the cover of the catalog to the very ﬁrst exhibi-
tion of Dix-Huit Leçons. The text is an allusion to the cover of Documents (1929–30),
which had as its subtitle: “Doctrines Archéologie Beaux-Arts Ethnographie.” As
Simon Baker has recently shown, “a primary doctrine of the magazine (its philoso-
phy of illustration perhaps) could be said to be abandonment to the possibility of
misrecognition: objects are reproduced in close-up, at confusing scales; illustrations
turn up uninvited in the wrong places; images act as spanners in the smooth work-
ings of earnest, determined arguments, and echo uncannily in the spaces between
unrelated ideas.”34 “The reader,” Baker continues, “is provoked into seeing non-exis-
tent relations between images from separately authored articles.” Bataille, he goes on
to explain, tempted readers to connect images in this way not in order to indulge in
the games of photographic resemblance played out across the pages of magazines
such as L’Art Vivant; rather, Documents’ arrangements of photographs tempted read-
ers to make connections so they could see how empty these connections were. “It is
the very concept of resemblance that is debased as it gradually makes less and less
sense . . . The Documents reader is encouraged to reach the conclusion that ﬁnding
afﬁnities between prehistoric rock art and avant-garde painting is symptomatic of a
disruptive glitch in the process of representation.”35

Baker’s account indicates incredible proximity between Bataille’s and
Williams’s photographic strategies, but the principle difference is of course that

32.
Simon Baker, “Doctrines [The Appearance of Things],” in Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille
and DOCUMENTS (London: Hayward Gallery and Southbank Centre; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2006), p. 38.
33.
A “superﬁcial” or visual connection might turn out to be more important than it ﬁrst seems.
The preponderance of yellow could refer to the yellow of the Kodak brand; the color is another aspect
of the series’ reference to photographic culture. Similarly, the circular forms are ways of suggesting the
idea of revolution conjured elsewhere through dates such as 1968.
Simon Baker, “Doctrines,” p. 36.
34.
35.
Ibid., p. 38. “This photographic culture [’20s magazines] rejoiced in games of juxtaposition and
the dissemblance of resemblance by which anything could be shown to be ‘something like’ anything
else . . . . DOCUMENTS, by contrast, chose to reveal such ludicrous sophistry for what it was . . . . Where
magazines of the time used photography to transform everything into aesthetic equivalents, DOCU-
MENTS opted instead to deny the symbolic functions of objects in favor of their tasks or use-values.”

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Cameras, Corn, Christopher Williams, and the Cold War

139

Williams arranges photographs mainly in space, rather than over pages. In the con-
text of the installations, the cumulative effect of Williams’s constellations is to give
the viewer the peculiar sense that for all the precision of his photographs, both in
terms of their appearance and their subjects, the heart of Williams’s work lies not
so much in the images he has created, but in the space between them. This really is
a strange realization in a photographic exhibition, as we are so used to locating the
core of a photographer’s ambitions within the images that he or she produces.
However, in a room of Williams’s photographs, one senses gradually that the most
important place to look is not towards individual photographs, but to the gaps
between them; we become conscious of asking ourselves how one image is con-
nected to another, or how it is separate. It is to the very concept of separation that I
now want to turn.

Six Degrees of Separation

Here are the key questions that I think recent exhibitions by Williams really
provoke. Are these shows to be understood as presentations of a series of pho-
tographs addressing Cold War history through themes such as sanitation and
domesticity, transportation and efﬁciency, and decolonization and design? Or
should the emphasis be placed on Williams’s radical approach to display, his archi-
tectural interventions, his performances, and especially his way of creat ing
photographic constellations that both interrupt thematic groupings and prompt
us into making more random connections? Are the exhibitions “leçons sur la
société industrielle,” or (taking account of the anti-didactic spirit of the shows) is
this title deliberately misleading? Should we attend to the photographs’ thematic
contents or to the ways these contents are separated?

When we begin to see how separation has become the overriding structural
principle of Williams’s recent work, we realize that these questions present false
alternatives. Separation operates in various ways, not just in the pulling apart of
thematic groupings in his installations. Its predominance suggests that separa-
tion carries particular meanings for Williams rather than just functioning to
interrupt thematic strands. What are these types of separation? Within each
photograph, there are apparently separate historical photographic impulses at
work—impulses that are not reconciled so much as held together in conﬂict.
There is a gap between the manifest quality of the photographic print and the
slightly wrong appearance of the image—a separation that in turn is linked to
the separation between the genre on which a particular photograph is modeled,
on the one hand, and the look of the image itself, on the other. There is the
separation between those photographs made in studios and those made outside.
There is the mismatch (or separation) between objects in close physical proxim-
ity: the corn and the reﬂection guide, for example, that are brought together
but cannot quite be reconciled to make conventional sense together in an

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140

OCTOBER

image. Related to this is the separation between diverse references suggested by
a single photograph: “1968” and “beauty-products” in the photographs of the
woman with the yellow towel. Then, there is the separation of products from
their use: a postal package shown without sender or receiver; a bicycle without a
rider. Finally, there is the separation of photograph from title which produces a
peculiarly bafﬂing viewing encounter. In front of a single image, a viewer recog-
nizes that an object is presented in absolute clarity, but its identity and the
reason for its selection are initially unknown. The Rina soap bar, for instance, is
in perfect focus and presented in disarmingly intense color, but there is nothing
that immediately indicates why Williams chose this object for photographic
scrutiny rather than any other soap bar, or anything else for that matter. The
object is just there, blunt and present.36

Commenting on this last kind of separation, Williams has said that “tradi-
tionally photographic practice associated with leftist politics approached the
muteness of the photograph as a problem. The problem was solved by using the
language or the caption as a corrective to this muteness (this approach comes
directly out of Brecht and Benjamin). Treating this muteness as a basic material
element not as a structural ﬂaw, I have attempted to construct meaning through
the use of negative form or absence much like a dub producer.”37 Williams wants
to agitate this sense of blankness before his images, deliberately aiming to gener-
ate an initial moment of confusion as to the identity and history of the pictured
object. This moment of blankness, he continues, “reﬂects or could represent a
viewer’s relationship to the world outside of the pictures.”38 In other words, just as
we do not at ﬁrst recognize the history and identity of a particular bar of soap,
model of camera, bicycle, and so on, in his photographs, we do not consider the
history and identity of the things we use everyday: toothbrushes, cell phones,
canned beverages, all of which have arrived in our hands after manufacture and
transportation that we rarely consider.

Separating images from titles and working with the “muteness of the photo-
graph,” Williams thus represents the structure of the relationship between human

36.
In passing, it is worth noting that Williams is relatively unconcerned with the two kinds of sepa-
rations that are often discussed in photographic theory—the separation of an image’s content from its
unexpected effect on the viewer (Barthes’s theory of the punctum) and the separation of image from
its referent (Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum).
The connections to dub exceed the parallel that exists between Williams’s use of separation and
37.
the space a dub producer inserts between beats and notes. Dub producers use the analog technology
of recording studios to rework audio tracks, playing this technology against itself to achieve results it
was never supposed to produce. This is analogous to Williams’s attempt to play camera technology
against photographic programs. Thanks to Simon Baker for this insight.
38.
These comments underline Williams’s distance from Allan Sekula, whose photographic repre-
sentations of industrial society function precisely through the combination (rather than separation)
of text and image. Williams’s presentation of blunt, initially confusing images suggests a skepticism
about the idea that photography could ever provide transparent access to the world, and a doubt that a
viewing subject implicated in the world around him or her could ever occupy a neutral, privileged posi-
tion from which to see and understand works critical of that world. On this second point, see Martin,
“Undressing the Institutional Wound.”

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Cameras, Corn, Christopher Williams, and the Cold War

141

beings and objects as it persists in industrial society.39 We might have supposed
that the “separations” in Williams’s exhibitions functioned to stop the shows from
becoming didactic and ploddingly thematic accounts of industrial society.
However, now we realize that his series of separations guarantees that his work
constitutes a profound representation of industrial society on a structural rather
than just on an iconographic level. To recall the centrality of separation to the Cold
War, we can turn to one of the key texts of the period, The Society of the Spectacle.
For Debord, the “spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social rela-
tionship between people that is mediated by images.”40 This social relation is one
of separation—the distancing of producer from product, of worker from fellow
worker, of urban resident from neighbor, and so on. “Separation,” Debord contin-
ues, “is the alpha and omega of the spectacle.”41 In Williams’s “collection of
images,” the separation at the center of spectacular society is represented every bit
as much by each individual photograph and by themes that join them, as by the
spaces within them and the gaps that keep them apart.

But crucial questions remain. To be sure, Williams’s work amounts to an
act of critical revelation, but does it also suggest alternatives to the situation it
describes? Is this a multi-faceted representation of industrial society, showing
how it works as well as what it comprises? Or does Williams also offer suggestions
on how such conditions might be challenged? And to reprise a question posed
earlier, if Williams illustrates how photography functions within industrial soci-
ety as a generator of separation and spectacle, does he also allow us to think
about how the photographic program might be resisted?

I believe that Williams sets in motion two processes of contestation. One
of these processes involves play. Towards the end of Towards a Philosophy of
Photography, having argued that photographic programs leave almost no space
for human agency, Flusser held out for “experimental photographers” who “are
in fact consciously attempting to create unpredictable information, i.e., to
release themselves from the camera, and to place within the image something
that is not in its program. They know they are playing against the camera.”42
Williams plays various games “against the camera.” He plays by creating pho-
tographs that manifest a flagrant self-reflexivity that is sometimes deadpan
(photographs of camera lenses) and sometimes absurd (the photograph of the

39.
Buchloh has written that it would seem “unthinkable to use photography to recognize a sub-
ject’s relation to objects under the conditions of an advanced universe of reiﬁcation,” but I suggest
that this is exactly what Williams has managed to do. See Benjamin Buchloh, “Cosmic Reiﬁcation:
Gabriel Orozco’s Photographs,” in Gabriel Orozco (London: Serpentine Gallery, 2004), p. 76.
40.
41.
42.

Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 12.
Ibid., p. 20
Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, p. 81.

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142

OCTOBER

corn); he plays by deliberately approximating photographic genres while dis-
turbing them. He invites his viewers to play too, when, for all the seriousness of
his work’s content, they ﬁnd themselves linking disconnected images because
of absurd reasons, such as the predominance of yellow things or the recurrence
of circular forms. Williams therefore works out a way of turning photographic
regimes or programs against themselves, even while he reveals how they work.

The mnemonic activity of Williams’s work is its second challenge to condi-
tions of spectacle. Certain photographs in the series, such as the yellow-toweled
woman beside the 1968 Kodak guide, may suggest that the memory of historical
radicalism has been muted because of the ways in which photography has pack-
aged it , but , in general, Williams’s project is less pessimist ic about the
potentiality of memory. Williams explores the past in various ways, picturing
objects bound up in particular histories and making installations which resusci-
t ate the achievement s of architect s such as Pancaldi and cit ies such as
Bologna.43 Memory is also put to use against the present. Williams’s entire rep-
resent at ion of the Cold War in For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société
Industrielle serves as a subtle provocation to consider the connection of that era
with our own. Since 2001, to what extent are we witnessing the reemergence of
the conservatism and nationalism that marked those postwar years? In raising
this question, Williams not only describes “industrial society,” he makes its
memory work against the politics of the present time.

I want to conclude with a passage from another recent work on the period,
Susan Buck-Morss’s Dreamworld and Catastrophe (2000). This is a passage that serves
as a description of her working method, which closely resembles Williams’s own,
as it speaks not only to his notion of a photographic constellation, but to his
approach to history as well:

Although historically grounded, these constellations are not history in
the traditional sense. They are concerned less with how things actually
were than with how they appear in retrospect. They reshufﬂe the usual
ordering of facts with the goal of informing present political concerns.
Such constellations rescue the past, but not for nostalgic reasons. The
goal is to blast holes in established interpretations of the twentieth cen-
tury, liberating new lines of sight that allow for critical reappropria-
tions of its legacy.44

It is also important to note that Williams selects for historical scrutiny many objects which his-
43.
torically had been associated with a release from the past. Ross comments that car consumers desired
“something absolutely (and eternally) new: the object outside of history, untouched by time,” in Fast
Cars, Clean Bodies, p. 106. Williams photographs objects looking brand new, thus representing the very
idea of newness, but situates this “newness” as part of Cold War ideology, countering this ideology,
ﬁrmly returning things that once promised to stand outside history to it.
44.
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), p. 97.

Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Massing of Mass Utopia in East and West

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