: Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness
In addition, on September 15, as part of MoMA's Modern Mondays series, the artist will discuss his Super-8 films, made in 1979 while a student at CalArts, with MoMA's Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art, Stuart Comer. Witkovsky that reflect on Williams’s engagement with his artistic peers and predecessors, with cinema (particularly the film-essay), and with modes of display and publicity in the art world. As part of MoMA’s Carte Blanche screening series, Williams will organize a two-week experimental film program running July 23–29 and September 17–23, 2014, in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters. Deeply invested in the histories of photography and film, architecture and design, Williams has produced a concise oeuvre that furthers a critique of late capitalist society in which images typically function as agents of spectacle. After its presentation at MoMA, the exhibition travels to Whitechapel Gallery, London, where it will be organized by Mark Godfrey, Curator of International Art, Tate Modern. Williams studied at the California Institute of the Arts in the mid to late 1970s under the first wave of West Coast Conceptual artists, including John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler, and Michael Asher, only to become his generation’s leading Conceptualist and art professor; he is currently professor of photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness—the first retrospective ever mounted of Christopher Williams (American, b. 1956)—spans the impressive 35-year career of one of the most influential cinephilic artists working in photography. The evening will be introduced by exhibition curator Roxana Marcoci. At The Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibition was organized by Matthew S. Though the exhibition concentrates on photography, other salient aspects of Williams’s practice, such as extensive vinyl “supergraphics” and interventions with display architecture, are also represented.
