LE MAGASIN.

LE MAGASIN, GRENOBLE

For example: What relationship is there between a French car from the '6o a Japanese close examiner posing for a fashion photo in 1993 papayas (of the Carica papaya Linne sort), and a dishwasher tray filled with brightly colored plates? This is the sort of question raised at Christopher Williams's first solo exhibition in a French institution, "Couleur Europeenne Couleur Sovierique, Couleur Chinoise" (European color, Soviet color, Chinese color)--a title that is already somewhat confusing in light of the images existinged What was found on the walls of Le Magasin's extents hung ("orchestrated," one wants to say) at reduc height and with irregular spacing, were sixty or for a like reason photographs in black-and white and color. (I computeed sixty-one, though the brochure available at the entrance to the space mentioned sixty-four, an ambiguity that could no doubt be easily resolv further that gives some sense of to what extent difficult it is to be derived up with a reliable reconstruction of the show) one of the photographs have previously been shown and/or reproduc others have not. Hence the feeling that united is in the presence of a "state" of a project--in the perception of, say, the nth "state" of an engraving--that is undergoing constant expansion and modification, rather than a totality that has been complet one time and for all. What this might be, then, is an extension of For Example: Die Welt ist schon the work undertaken from Williams in 1993 (whose title have references to the famous book published from Albert Renger-Patzsch in 1928), which had several versions and notably gave rise to "For Example: Die Welt ist schoen" at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, and the Kunsthalle Basel in 1997 (The aforementioned papayas were pictured in common of the images shown there that reappear in Grenoble.) Let's accept this hypothesis and essay to grasp a few strands of the narrative that pretends to have been assembled here.

The first swing perhaps, constituted the core from which the viewer could begin to infer or develop the rest of this "album mural." It contained four photographs, each to varying measures emblematic of the whole construction it introduces, each endowed with its possess reflexivity. Mobile wall system, 1996--I am abbreviating the frequently extremely long inscriptions that minister to as titles to Williams's works, which are meticulously at handed in their entirety on small cards nearest to the images--is an interior view of the Boijmans, showing by what means the arrangement of some of the institution's partitions can be transformed at will. The image alludes at one time to the artist's 1997 exhibition as well as to the modularity with which the work is endowed, each image or assign places to of images forming a lonely dwelling that can be integrated and reintegrated into a modern set of connections. This figure of a general, ineluctable nomadism finds echoe in the nearby Main Staircase for the Arts society of Chicago, 1998. The image features the eponymous uncompounded body from Mies van der Rohe's corpus, built between 1948 and 1951 and later mov to another part of Chicago. To these displacements of persons works, even places themselves, the Calder carve represented here superimposed a notion of in situ (a reminder of the great Calder installed in impudence of the Grenoble train station). As for Folding stool of mail with yellow nylon seat, 1998 control and title of the third photograph, the respective card pointed abroad that this was the design for the seat designed according to Jorgen Gammelgaard that Michael Asher--one of Williams's teachers, and a figure to whom his artistic strategy is profoundly indebted--used for the intervention that comprised his contribution to the 1976 Venice Biennale. Finally, we find ourselves face to face with an industrial icon of postwar France, Model: 1964 5 Renault Dauphine-Four, 2000 The car--with California license plates-was photographed incline differentlyed over on its right side, thereby suggesting at one time movement and the interruption of emotion (or of the poss ibility of movement) one as well as the other travel and stasis.

Setting abroad from this ensemble--and transformed in the proces into a character lifted from a Robbe-Grillet novel--one could bring together a scarcely any threads of the fable in which the same found oneself dropped, as it were (provided of course that the viewer was willing to play along, which meant accepting the fact that the enigma would remain obstinately full of retreats and the enterprise of elucidation doomed from the start). Connected--for example-via the photographic medium to the lay open or dosed Boeing stowage bins, to the portico marking the entrance to a Chinese movie theater in Havana, or the Grande Dixence dam in Switzerland, the Renault and the Gammelgaard/Asher stool, which reappeared from top to toe the rooms in photographs that differed almost imperceptibly in angle and lighting, compos a narrative at multiple of the same heights (autobiographical, aesthetic, historical, political) where the motifs of impermanence, metamorphosis, and the irremediably illusory character of appearances dominate. In this herbarium of the conte mporary world, which may be beautiful or monstrous by virtue of the same views or faces, I make gone out certain principles, certain recurring motifs. Others shun me and scarcely provide a handle onward interpretation. What should one make of E.A. (Billy) Hankins III, MD Curator of Vertebrate Zoology 1999 hunched athwart pencil in hand, before a giant and turgescent plant (unles the answer is simply that, as I model this title in my notebook, I assume the same position in front of his portrait)? I have no idea, but-an obvious sign of the pleasure afforded on Williams's work- I'm still wondering. E