From 1960 until today , Stephen Willats has developed a pioneering practice based on collaboration, interactivity and participation within the variables of social relationships and settings. Willats creates multi-sensory, multi-dimensional environments to encourage viewers to engage with their own creative and cognitive processes, to re-examine and transform the way they perceive existing reality.

The show, which comprises more than forty works and is presented on all floors of the Badischer Kunstverein, concentrates on Willats’ works on the post-punk, night life and Wasteland scene of the 1980s. Several of these works have only been shown rarely or never at all and were selected together with the artist in a collaborative process.

The exhibited artworks range from photo, text and object collages to diagrams and large spatial installations. One room is especially devoted to Willats’ text production as an important component of his work. Seminal books and texts by the artist are displayed here along with issues of the magazine Control, which he has edited and published since 1965. The exhibition is augmented with documentary audio and film material created in the context of his projects.

The central focus of Willats’ works is the investigation of processes of communication, network formation and self-organisation. The influences for his interactive and participative projects are situated at the interface between art and other scientific disciplines such as cybernetics, computer technology, theories of behaviour and learning. With reference to the methods of these disciplines, Willats develops a specific visual and semiotic language that analyses and illustrates various systems of social interaction. The relationships of people to each other, to their private and professional environments and to the architecture of the residential buildings which surround them are investigated in close collaboration with the protagonists of his works in different directions and subsequently presented in exhibition spaces. This gives concrete form to parallel or “symbolic worlds” that arise beyond the bounds of planning and organisation: housing projects, office buildings, shopping centres or allotment gardens are the sites where Willats defines the possibilities of individual expression.

The artist is especially interested in “counter-cultures” as specific movements contrary to the dominant system – such as the post-punk scene during the Thatcher era, the creatures of the night in London or the occupants of various wastelands. The previously little known works created in this context of different counter-proposals offer a new and current perspective of the artist’s manner of working, as they are characterised less by the order and precision that he is well known for, than by an expressive handling of diverse colours, objects and materials. Priority is given here to the technique of collage: photographs are combined with texts and found materials, they are framed by coloured surfaces or developed sculpturally – as in Living Like A Goya or Secret Prima Donna – from the surface into the space.

A repeatedly occurring visual quotation consists of the towering facades of modern tower block architecture, which represent a counter-image to the collective and individual needs of their residents. Thus the biographies of the punks or glue sniffers are often linked to the reality of their lives in the tower blocks, and it is from there that they set out on their “journeys” to the parallel worlds in the clubs and wastelands. In the work A Difficult Boy In A Concrete Block, concrete as a material is even directly included in the wall installation. Once icons of the future, the tower blocks now epitomise ghettoisation and isolation, but also give rise to new processes of transformation: In Willats’ works on the phenomenon of the Doppelgänger the architecture is, for instance, the backdrop for a daily metamorphosis of demure office workers into bizarre creatures of the night.

In addition to the Night- and Wasteland Drawings which are collected together for the first time, the Kunstverein is displaying further determinative works of this context such as From The Day Into The Night And From The Night Into The Day, Model Dwellings or Taboo Housing on Club- and Post-Punk-culture, as wells as Four Pressures, Four Freedoms, Two Worlds. Camps or It Was Somewhere Where We Could All Go to the wastelands.

Cooperation partners for this project are the Centre d'art passerelle in Brest and Le Quartier, Centre d'art contemporain de Quimper, which will present their exhibitions with Stephen Willats in early 2011. Together with the presentation in the Badischer Kunstverein, the three institutions convey an extensive, yet also specific focus on the work by the British artist.

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Documentary

    The term ‘Documentary’ was not coined until the 1920s, and then used by the British film-maker, John Grierson, to refer to moving pictures. It has a long and continuous history in British photography, reaching back to the invention of the medium. Many critics claimed that the documentary impulse, which can perhaps be best defined as the systematic recording of visual reality for the purpose of providing information and encouraging understanding of the world, is inherent in the medium itself. It was this view which came to be known as the realist paradigm - the belief that a photograph represents a ‘slice of reality’ easily understood by the viewer. This belief governed understanding of photography from the moment of its invention in the era of positivism in the 19th Century, until it was itself subject to interrogation in the 1980s.

    Early British practitioners included John Thomson whose visual essay Street Life in London (1876) documented the life of the London poor, and Hill and Adamson who portrayed, in the mid 1840s, the customs and way of life of the fisher folk of Newhaven near Edinburgh. In the early 20th century, following the emergence of documentary film-making and Mass Observation (a study undertaken in the North of England by the anthropologist Tom Harrisson), this new aesthetic found its most persuasive outlet in the mass circulation weekly magazines, such as Picture Post and Life. In time, however, pressure from advertisers combined with the restrictions of group journalism and curtailed the independence of creative photographers, with only exceptional individuals such as Bill Brandt able to survive as both a photojournalist and an independent photographer. His images of Britain’s class-ridden society along with his more experimental nudes, portraits and landscapes had a profound influence on a younger generation and established Brant as a major creative force in the development of modernism in Britain.

    Mass Observation was designed to emulate the radical achievements of the worker-photography movement which had arisen in Germany during the 1920s. It proved influential on the evolution of British documentary, especially on those photographers associated with the Side Gallery in Newcastle. The gallery fostered a regional, community-oriented form of documentary practice. Its philosophy was rooted firmly in the notion that an authentic document can only be generated by those familiar with the local community. Photographers associated with Side Gallery included Sirkka Konttinen, Isabella Jedrecyck, Graham Smith, Peter Fryer, Chris Killip and Julian Germain.

    It was, however, across the Atlantic that the more enduring legacy concerning the ethics and status of documentary was to be found in the work of the photographers employed by the Farm Security Administration to document the plight of the American rural poor during the Depression. One of its outstanding photographers was Walker Evans whose use of signs and symbols (such as billboards and advertising hoardings) as images of desire created a text or narrative to accompany the careful sequencing of images. The direct inheritors of the photograph as social sign were the American photographers of the ‘social landscape’, namely Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus whose unsympathetic vision of the American landscape reflected the anxieties of urban life during the booming consumer decade - store fronts, billboards, graffiti and advertising. They chose to portray people, situations and artefacts in a casual and objective way that allowed the viewer to interpret the work freely; a strategy that became known as the ‘snapshot aesthetic’. One of those who experienced many of these developments first hand was the British photographer Tony Ray-Jones. His work was widely reproduced in the 1960s and his book A Day Off (1974) proved a particular inspiration for the generation of documentary photographers who developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

    Relevant websites:
    The work of early documentary photographs can be found in the collections of the Royal Photographic Society www.rps.org)
    The Mass Observation archive is held by the University of Sussex www.sussex.ac.uk/library/massobs/
    The work of the Side Gallery can be seen at     www.amber-online.com/gallery/
    The archive for the Farm Security Administration is now in the Print and Reading Room Collections of the Library of Congress in Washington www.loc.gov/rr/print

  • Film

    A transparent, flexible plastic material, usually of cellulose acetate or polyester, on which light-sensitive emulsion is coated, or on which an image can be formed by various transfer processes.

  • Installation

    An artwork comprised of many and various elements of miscellaneous materials (see mixed media), light and sound, which is conceived for and occupies an entire space, gallery or site. The viewer can often enter or walk around the installation. Installations may only exist as long as they are installed, but can be re-created in different sites. Installation art emerged in the 1960s out of Environmental Art (works of art which are three-dimensional environments), but it was not until the 1970s that the term came into common use and not until the late 1980s that artists started to specialise in this kind of work, creating a genre of ‘Installation Art’. The term can also be applied to the arrangement of selected art works in an exhibition.