reviews sTEPHEN WILLATs
stephen
willats:
person to
person, people
to people
MILToN KEyNEs GALLEry
26 M Ay – 8 JuLy
You might assume that a large institutional show by a reputable
artist who has been around for some time would adopt the function
of a retrospective. Person to Person, People to People, however,
comprises a new large-scale project by Stephen Willats and some
other work from the last couple of years, with only a few pieces
hailing from the 1980s, like inconspicuous points of anchorage.
Milton Keynes Gallery are interesting in this respect, regularly
taking a punt on new undertakings. In Willats’s case, though, this
only serves to reaffirm his aesthetic predictability.
For the central new piece, which gives the show its title, Willats
has worked with a group of residents of the Netherfield Estate, one
of the first social housing projects in Milton Keynes, providing 11
residents with a Super-8 camera and the brief of documenting their
surroundings, focusing on quotidian objects that might be signs
of, or transformers that lead to, a ‘parallel world’. Although social
inclusivity is a familiar format now, it is widely discussed in terms
of its failure to fulfil its own remit, often closing down the freedom
of participants through the facilitating artist’s act of authorship. In
this case it seems somewhat patronising to deem it necessary to
posit the idea of a parallel world in order to elicit an imaginative
response; and then again, if the resultant films – which feature litter,
fencing, building-material textures and instances at which nature
gets a foothold – do speak of fantasy or transformation, it is all but
drowned by Willats’s programme of social critique and insistence on
dry informatic modes of presentation. His wall panels, comprising
portraits of the residents, quotes about life on the estate and grids of stills from the films, are as
Person to Person, People to
People, 2006–7 (detail).
rigid as the town planning he is ruminating on, and visiting such a structural approach upon the Courtesy the artist and
residents in the name of enabling creative freedom seems as troublesome as the social control
Victoria Miro Gallery, London
he is critiquing.
Other projects represented here cluster around similar themes: the Barbican comes under
scrutiny when three people are instructed to conduct an enquiry into the social and material
environment according to the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Marshall McLuhan and Jean-
Paul Sartre. The films are shown on monitors on the floor beside wall-based grids of images
and texts, while in a projection booth three films of the participants reading from texts by the
three theorists play simultaneously, creating an incoherent babble that would alienate the most
genial gallery-goer. Although Willats aspires to transparency in the work, without recourse to
giddy aestheticisation, he is undermined somewhat by the romanticising Super-8 footage and
colour-tinted photography. And yet despite this unlooked-for aesthetic background noise, a
stark rigidity prevails, mitigating the reciprocity between artist and subject that is so desirable
when constructing an atmosphere of enablement, mutuality and critique. Sally O’Reilly
Artreview 124
NEW Sept_REVIEWS.indd 10 7/8/07 15:46:09
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