Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness

Christopher Williams (American, born 1956) stands at the forefront of contemporary artists engaged with photography. Deeply invested in the techniques and history of photography, he is just as profoundly committed to contemporary art as a domain of intellectual inquiry and thoughtful opposition—resisting, for example, a capitalist society in which photographs typically function as agents of consumer spectacle. Through exacting mimicry, Williams has occupied (as a foreign body) the realms of photojournalism, picture archives, fashion, and commercial imaging, creating “counter-productive” photographs that carry an outsized impact on artists and art historians today. The Production Line of Happiness, which travels on to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, is Williams’s first retrospective exhibition. It also marks a homecoming in Chicago for the artist, who had his first-ever museum showing in 1982 at the Art Institute.

The survey begins with Williams’ studies at California Institute of the Arts, where he earned his MFA in 1981 and took classes with John Baldessari and Michael Asher, making primarily video works. Alongside the videos and SOURCE (1981), Williams’s first mature work, will be a classic early piece, Angola to Vietnam* (1989), shown in its 27-part entirety; as well as works of the 1990s, mainly from For Example: The World Is Beautiful (1993–2001), an eight-year project inspired in part by the 1920s photographs of Albert Renger-Patzsch. This part of the exhibition will be held in photography galleries 1–4 in the historic building, which were built in 1982 by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and which the artist is transforming through interventions to the modular wall system.

The key piece, Bouquet for Bas Jan Ader and Christopher d’Arcangelo (1991)—in which Williams first made clear his conception of photographs as a form of installation art—will be shown by itself, a single photograph, in the Modern Wing’s Bucksbaum Gallery for Photography (Gallery 188). Additionally, extensive selections from Williams’ ongoing project, For Example: Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society (begun 2004), will be presented in the architecture and design galleries 283–285 on the second floor of the Modern Wing. The Production Line of Happiness thus extends across all three levels of the museum. Unifying these levels and spaces will be bold “supergraphics”—enormous vinyl lettering designed by the artist—that will bring to life, especially, the central space of the Modern Wing.

Organizers
Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, New York