Books by Christopher Williams
Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness
by Matthew S. Witkovsky, Mark Godfrey, Roxana Marcoci, Christopher Williams
A handsome volume charting the thirty-year career of a widely celebrated, American-born conceptual artist
Representing Christopher Williams’s first publication with a major American museum, this illuminating and unusual volume is equal parts artist’s book and exhibition catalogue. Over the course of his thirty-year career, Williams (b. 1956) has crafted photographs that engage—often through uncanny mimicry—the conventions of photojournalism, picture archives, and commercial imagery, as well as their sociopolitical contexts and implications. The book includes a trio of essays by curators Mark Godfrey, Roxana Marcoci, and Matthew S. Witkovsky, which explore Williams’s engagement with his artistic peers and predecessors, with cinema (particularly the film-essay), and with the methods and modes of display and publicity in the art world, in addition to a transcript of a talk Williams delivered on the work of John Chamberlain. These more conventional contributions are “interrupted” by additional historical and contemporary textual and visual materials that were selected by the artist himself and are occasionally presented in facsimile form. An exhibition history, bibliography, and illustrated list of works round out the publication.
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Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective
by Rachel Adams, Christopher Williams, David Grubbs, Annie Ochmanek, Andrew Lampert, Tina Rivers Ryan, Branden Joseph, Tony Conrad, Cathleen Chaffee, Vera Alemani, Constance DeJong, Diedrich Diederichsen, Anthony Elms, Henriette Huldisch, Christopher Müller, Tony Oursler, Jay Sanders, Paige Sarlin
An in-depth introduction to an artist who forged a unique path through numerous artistic movements and a vast range of cultural forms
Throughout his six-decade career, Tony Conrad (1940–2016) forged a unique path through numerous artistic movements and a vast range of cultural forms―from Fluxus to rock music, from structural film to public access television. Published on the occasion of the first large-scale museum survey devoted to works Conrad presented in museum and gallery settings, this richly illustrated catalogue offers an in-depth introduction to Conrad's life and career.
Including new texts and Conrad's own writings about selected works dating from 1966 to 2016, Introducing Tony Conrad surveys the artist's work in painting, sculpture, film, video, performance and installation. It includes the artist's early structural films; projects in which he treated film as a sculptural and performative material; his series of Invented Acoustical Tools, presented as sculptures themselves; his ambitious films about power relations, set in the military and in prison; and his final sculptures and installations, which evoke and critique what he perceived as an emerging culture of surveillance, control and containment. The list of contributors testifies to Conrad's wide and lasting influence; this volume includes texts by Constance DeJong, Diedrich Diederichsen, Anthony Elms, Branden W. Joseph, Tony Oursler and Christopher Williams, among many others.
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