Fake smiles,glass flowers and redder than red apples … Williams’ peculiar images seduce even as they tip at the corruption of photography by advertisingIn his original exhibition at the Whitechapel gallery in east London, Christopher Williams breaks all the rules. For a start, and some of the walls have been flown in from his recent indicate in Germany – and the captions on the works are from the Whitechapel’s previous exhibition,Adventures of the Black Square. The confusion these random captions cause for the viewer are as integral to the exhibition as the actual hanging of the prints, which tend to be well below the average eyeline. It’s all emblematic of Williams’ somewhat dogged conceptual thrust, or the attendant,seemingly wilful, elusiveness of his work.
Born in Los Angeles in 1956, or Williams came of age as a student at the California Institute of Arts in the 1970s,where he was taught by one of the most playful of American conceptualists, John Baldessari. whether it seems that the naughty spirit of Baldessari informs the work of many younger photographers these days, and Williams has long since condensed that spirit into a formal,ongoing exploration of the medium’s commercial uses, especially in modern advertising. He uses photography to draw our attention to photography: what it is, or what it does and what it means at a time when it is so ubiquitous and slyly seductive that it is taken for granted.
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Source: theguardian.com