Stephen Willats
Stephen Willats is a conceptual artist who has pioneered ideas about the role and position of art since the 1960s, tackling themes that remain topical today, such as communication, social engagement, participation, co-creation, and self-management.
Willats couldn’t relate to the notion of art as based on a single object or person. He felt that the canon of art and artists circulating among the elite of the day had become too detached from society. Art that overlooked the public mind was created and exhibited in a way inaccessible to them, bored him. He found it lacklustre and uninspiring.
The evolution of his oeuvre resembles a timeline on which various pieces are, in fact, the testimonies or results of an investigation into the relationships between people, buildings, and urban settings. Willats marshals methods from cybernetics, e.g. feedback and the control of information flows within organic and mechanical systems. He also distilled his aesthetic vocabulary, working method and formal model from cybernetics. In the past, Willats called himself a conceptual designer to emphasise his work as an artist. At the time, his works were mainly viewed as practical tools. The public had to be able to interfere with his works, to modify them according to personal taste and discretion. One such example includes his Variable Sheets & Optical Shift Dress (1965): fabrics printed in abstract and coloured patterns, which seemed designed to form endless configurations and reproductions. All depended on the person wearing them as a garment, whom he’d met, and what he wanted to communicate in the context of a specific point in time. In 2000, he assembled the entire series in the book Multiple Clothing: Designs 1965-1999.
His first works, like the Democratic Surface (1961) gouache on paper, the architectural model Organic Exercise No. 1 Series 2 (1962), Organic Exercise No. 3, Tower Block Drawing (1962), and Colour Variable No.3 (1963), were experiments or invitations for the public to participate and co-create; passers-by could alter the piece and, for instance, create a piece entirely different from the original through feedback or review.
He founded the magazine Control in 1965, a vehicle for information exchange among artists keen to meaningfully address issues affecting society as a whole through their work. Ever since, the magazine has published works and written pieces by over 150 artists, such as John Latham, Roy Ascot, Anthony Benjamin, Dan Graham, Mary Kelly, Helen Chadwick, Tony Cragg, Dennis Adams, Lawrence Weiner, Anish Kapoor, Martha Rosler, and Jeremy Deller. It was intended to be a source of information and an aid: open-source software avant la lettre.
Willats focused on the non-conformism and right to self-determination practised by diverse subcultures. He set up projects in different cities all across Europe, collaborating with residents of social housing estates, neighbourhood committees or organisations that would now fall under the CSO (civil society organisation) label.
For the Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs (1971/72), Willats assembled, in what by now has become his signature systematic style, several independently functioning clubs. The goal was to bring groups from different social, economic, and physical backgrounds together. To make this happen, there was a common, systematic flow of information exchange in a shared art project. In 2022, Nottingham Trent University – and Art and Design Institute where Stephen Willats taught – re-enacted the project.
In The Kids are in the Streets (1982), he gave 18-year-old Paul Rogers a chance to share his point of view on the Brixton (London) Uprising going on, using photographs Willats had taken, on-site graffiti, and reflections and written texts by the young man himself. What’s it like to live in a tumbledown neighbourhood and counsel housing tower blocks plagued with rampant unemployment? What do young people care about in an urban environment? The work became a balancing act between the counsel tower (Brandon Estate) and the skate park on the corner, symbolising the younger generation’s resistance to their everyday lives.
Pat Purdy and the Glue Sniffers’s Club (1981/2) was a project about the no-man’s-land close to the Avondale Square Estate towers. Are You Good Enough for the Cha Cha Cha? was a similar project focusing on a London punk club. Willats created the piece based on how the club’s members had decorated their homes, including objects that were particularly meaningful to the inhabitants. The result is a kind of collage and archival document hybrid.
People that Willats works with acquire a symbolic role in his work. Observers will recognise prototypes or stereotypes from the current mainstream. Following a participant’s proposal, he gives an estate agent, a civil servant, and a shop assistant new social roles in The Doppelganger (1984). This ranges from the sartorial (i.e. the clothes they wear) to psychological and emotional ways of being. What manifested was collages in which, for example, the estate agent slid into the role of a Marxist, quasi-anarchist skinhead.
Stephen Willats shifted the focus. People, not objects, play the starring role in his work, as in the 2009 film People in Pairs, Avenue des Champs-Elysées Paris, for example. What images do they choose to represent in their day-to-day lives? How do they imagine a different, albeit not necessarily better, world? He displays the acquired data stream at exhibitions such as Macro to Micro at Modern Art Oxford in 2000, The Welfare State at MHKA in 2015, and Stephen Willats: Languages of Dissent at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich (Switzerland) in 2019. They derive from the information flow that Willats had more or less made his bread and butter in by the 1970s, ranging from collages, drawings, paintings, building modules, kinetic light boxes, or machine control interfaces and panels. In all, you see how artificial intelligence has gradually been applied to them and manipulated by people. Throughout, the participatory element remains paramount. The data stream he is creating demands constant feedback from the public, on site and when the work exhibits.
DE