Christopher Williams at Capitain Petzel

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Williams once admitted in an interview to looking at Contemporary Art Daily every morning, and one wonders how he feels about it now having had the scene slip so far from his particular register of work. Does he even recognize his anomaly in the deluge of representation? Even what might be considered his progeny - say Cameron Rowland - have rid themselves of the Knightly Cold Cuts opacity, with work that clearly delineates itself. Because we don't want opacity anymore, we want clearly established intent. This probably makes Williams important to moment, a medicinal flavor. But the en abyme of institutional/self reflection requires an outside party to discern the navel's tea leaves. Otherwise it's just tying up the institution in your ornate slick personal knots to look at your button. Otherwise it's just kink. 

Christopher Williams at David Zwirner

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Williams' institutional mirroring - reusing walls, indexing the gallery, reflecting and marking the gallery - its ostensible critique also simply multiplies and reiterates its institutional halos.


Christopher Williams at C/O Berlin, Christopher Williams at MoMA

Christopher Williams at C/O Berlin

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"If I hang these pictures low maybe the workers will revolt" and here maybe if you post only two photos the art-polloi will re, uh, joice. Feel lucky, C/O Berlin's instagram got only the apples, posted like 4 times with differing amounts of, sigh, white framing around it. Read with sarcasm: "Williams’s work does not end when the photograph is taken, but includes all elements of its display, such as printing, matting, framing, hanging height, titles, and so on, as crucial aspects of the reception of the image." Isn't this all starting to sound like a brand package of institutional critique from the Pictures Generation? Blankness becomes its own commodity, its own bowtie. And you there, David Zwirner shopper, you get a lovely photograph and perhaps a piece of a museum wall to coronate it. That's right Williams ships the walls from the previous museum because one institutional halo is not enough. The curator is coming to elucidate it with a long text any moment now. Any moment now.

Oh and the greatest ploy of all? There are installation shots of the exhibition on Zwirner's website.


Playing CAWD like Golf, aiming for the lowest score possible: Ian Rosen at The Finley
Read too: Christopher Williams at MoMA

Christopher Williams at Capitain Petzel &Lucy McKenzie and Laurent Dupont at Meyer Kainer

Christopher Williams at Capitain Petzel, Lucy McKenzie and Laurent Dupont at Meyer Kainer

Commuting in the same deception, that no amount of looking will explain the object/image, they are representations, deferring elsewhere, and never conceding what lay beneath.  Images are treachery, sight can betray. A genericising only serves to underscore the point. And that old po-mo question what does it mean for art that seeing reveals so little.


Nina Beier at David Roberts Art Foundation

Christopher Williams at MoMA



MoMA finally succumbing to its role mass incarcerating tourists - its expanding culture-industrial complex finally warranting destruction of neighborly competition to further house its prisoner-patrons - yet, MoMA, still desiring relevancy to the system, art, whose name it bears and not merely to the throngs from which it happily accepts 25$, delivers the academic-respectable retrospective of Kapital p Photography godhead, Christopher Williams.
Walking through the space it’s a nice gesture but hard to see the decades’ work or installation subtlety amongst the brambles of families asking themselves aloud, literally “When do we get to see Matisse?” the Frenchman whose tickets are timed before you can even get in line and so the Williams show acts as a sort of slumbering-area for the masses awaiting the carnivale nearby. The punchline to this whole joke, is that there is no punchline at all, the wall texts have been eliminated, and so people stumble through blind, somnambulist mass searching for their trip but nothing does and awake to find themselves in line for Matisse. Whether because they are completely acclimated to the lie of photography or too tired to care who knows, but MoMA needs to stop doing these shows here for anyone who wants to actually see.