Stephen Willats

Stephen Willats: a Man from the Twenty-First Century

Creating a parallel world

Stephen Willats’ studio in London is located within walking distance of the

Lisson Gallery where, when I visited him for the first time at the end of last

year, he had been invited to participate in a group show conceived by the artist

Cory Arcangel. This confirms the interest that an artist like Stephen Willats

(London, 1943) is able to arouse among younger generations of artists.

The attention for Willats has increased in particular in a period when the word

Modernism – with all its implications for art, architecture and philosophy – seems to

have appeared in every single art review and press release for at least the last five

years. As evidence of this trend it suffices to look at the exhibitions Willats has

participated in recently, such as ‘Die Moderne als Ruine’ in Vienna and

‘Modernologies’ in Barcelona. I personally became interested having seen the work

‘Wie ich meine Fluchtwege organisiere, 1979–1980’ in Vienna and I realized that,

besides the critical discourse towards modernist ideals, he was a forerunner in

researching and tackling the concept of ‘planning’ in architecture and design,

particularly in their relationship to the individual and communities who have to live

‘within the plan’.

When walking into his studio you have to stoop to pass beneath the low door and, it

may be by chance, but this physical action, which makes tangible the moment of

crossing the threshold, seems to refer to one of the main issues of Willats’ research:

the relationship and communication between the outside world and ‘personal space’.

A relationship that, in his understanding, goes far beyond the public-private

dichotomy, and which produced a multifaceted discourse, juxtaposing what he called

the planned ‘new reality’ and the people’s self-organization. The border between art

and society is the other threshold, maybe an even more important one, that he has

been stressing and blurring from the beginning of his career.

New Era

From the late ‘50s onward Stephen Willats witnessed the emergence of a built

environment in London that was mirroring the economic and social growth of the

period and was therefore strongly connoted by a general optimism towards the

possibility of foreseeing and planning every realm of society. Nowadays it is a well

documented fact that not all these promises have been kept, or that someone didn’t

want to keep them, i.e. that the planned infrastructures and services needed to

produce a livable social environment have slowly been withdrawn, producing

isolated and depressed milieus; an urban policy that caused the stigmatization of

certain peripheral areas that, in some cases, turned in real ghettos (for instance the

Avondale Estate and the Skeffington Court at Hayes in the early ‘80s, both in West

London). (1) But at the time it was easy to get enthusiastic about the scale and

vertical projections of tower blocks that embodied the idea of a better future and a

‘new reality’ – something that Willats himself celebrated in his early drawings.

This celebration of a new era went along with Stephen Willats’ intention of

challenging the role of the artist in society, and in acting outside of the designated art

institutions so as to engage directly with the audience. His participation in an

interdisciplinary think-thank with mathematicians, art theorists and philosophers

increasingly drove him to see all art as being dependent on society and in a mutual

relationship with it. A growing interest in the language of cybernetics – well

documented in all the diagrams and sketches representing conceptual models of

communication and exchange networks – defined his artistic practice and his

conception of the artwork as “a dynamic structure of events in time, dependent on

exchanges between people, reflecting their inherent relativity in perception, being

tied to a context that was already meaningful to those people.” The artwork was in

this sense conceived “as operating within the domain of the ‘audience’, using their

language and priorities, etc.” (2) Therefore it becomes a “time-based evolving

communication strategy” (3) that changes from time to time and from situation to

situation according to the specificity of the environment where it is produced and to

the participants’ behaviours and responses. This kind of artistic practice, open

towards the active participation of the audience, demonstrates Willats’ intentions:

opposing the figure of the artist as the sole author and putting himself in a position of

dependency upon the audience.

Outside/Inside

This theoretical approach to art was first implemented with the sort of sociological

methodology of projects such as ‘Man from the Twenty First Century’ (Nottingham,

1969-1971), when Willats, with a group of students, staged a ‘man from the future’

dressed in a silver suit and with a Volkswagen camouflaged as spaceship.

Questionnaires consisting of a symbolic language were distributed door to door to a

working class community and to a middle-class one in order to determine lifestyle

patterns, but also to facilitate communication and reciprocal understanding between

the two. It is here that Willats starts to focus on the relationship between the outside,

institutionalized and ruled world, and the inside, personal and creative environment.

The latter was a standardized architectural units with its designed norms and slowly

Willats understood the objects central role within this realm. They offered, in fact, the

possibility of self-organize one’s own space through small creative acts that tend to

subvert the specification given for that space or that object. Traces of this research

are still very visible in his studio nowadays where he gathers clocks, vases, lamps,

etc. from that period; objects, as he said, that ‘emanate optimism’.

All these issues and ‘polemics’ became clearer when he started engaging with tower

blocks as the monumental symbol of the ‘new reality’; an issue that at that point

needed to be discussed, especially with the people who were living in it. This

challenge also brought him to explore situations in Paris (‘Les Problèmes de la

Nouvelle Réalité’, 1977) and Berlin (‘The Märkisches Viertel’, 1980). From ‘Vertical

Living’ (1977/78) onwards, what becomes relevant is the tension between the

determinism of the concrete built environment and how the inhabitants adapt: “They

found themselves in a psychological situation where they were distanced from the

world outside and from the other people inside.”(4) In Willats’ interpretation, the

unconscious reaction to this context is channeled via the objects and the view through

the ‘picture window’ that turn into means to produce a ‘psychological link’ (5) with

the world outside. This is an idea that later develops in the concept of ‘counter-

consciousness’; namely, the struggle of people to express their own individual

identity in a sterile and non-responsive environment. The potential creativity

contained in these situations or, to paraphrase Michel de Certeau, the inventiveness of

the tactics against the imposed norms, become one of the central issues in Willats’

research.

The ability to escape the rigidity of real estate finds its main expression in works such

as ‘Pat Purdy and the Glue Sniffers’ Camp’ (1981-82). The threshold and boundary

this time takes the shape of a hole in a fence separating the tower blocks in Hayes,

West London, from ‘The Lurky Place’, a wasteland where youths walk in to generate

new forms of sociality that often imply the misuse of everyday objects like glue cans

to get high. It is in fact in this ‘terrain vague’, with no planned destination, that the

people are able to “create a parallel world”, (6) often with violent outcomes towards

things and private property; an entropic means of escape that is still stigmatized as

pure vandalism even today, but that in many cases it is only an automatic form of

resistance that Willats names “creative behaviour”. (7)

Emanuele GUIDI

Is the editor of the book ‘Urban makers: parallel narratives on grassroots practices

and tensions’, Berlin, 2008.

(1) Willats, Stephen. Beyond the Plan, Wiley-Academy, Great Britain, 2001, p.38

(2) Willats, Stephen. Art and Social Function, 1976 Reprinted Ellipsis, London,

1999, p.8


(4) Willats, Stephen interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Abitare Magazine Website,

04.09.2009


(6) ibid, p.43

(7) ibid, p.43

Documents

Stephen Willats