Mark Godfrey: Where does the title of your series For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle (2002-ongoing) come from, and why did you choose it?¹

Christopher Williams: Dix-huit leçons sur la société industrielle is a book by Raymond Aron published in 1963. It is a classic of sociology and economics about the Cold War period. It concerns Soviet Russia, the United States and China to some degree, and its about oil and potatoes and corn. Its a very basic description of the economic structure of the Cold War. I picked up the book because I saw the cover represented in Jean-Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know about Her (1966). Id been told the film was somewhat based on the book, so I went out and bought it and decided that Id use it as a starting place for my new project. The word leçons (lectures) was attractive to me because Ive heard people call my work didactic and I wanted to tackle that criticism head-on. By placing it in my title I raise the question: What lesson am I putting forward? What have I taught you? What am I being didactic about? Of course there is no lesson in any conventional sense. At one point I was thinking about calling the work Industrial Poems after Marcel Broodthaers's work of the same name, which would have been more in keeping with the way that I think about the work, but I thought Dix-Huit Leçons... would raise more questions about my intentions. Aron's title also included the reference to industrial society, which fit within the Cold War programme that I wanted to explore.

MG: Do you see the series as looking back on industrial society from the position of a post-industrial society?

CW: Yes, but with the understanding that even though in reality we may have moved beyond certain formations and types of production, those elements still form the way that we think and still are embedded very much within our living culture. Even though the series is talking about something from the past, I think its an active cultural framework.

MG: What made you want to make a series about the Cold War? What are the origins of your interest in this period of history?

CW: Before I began this series I started thinking about a Cold War project, but it was just a vague idea. For years Ive had an interest in the restructuring of cultural life in the post-War period and, in particular, the Americanisation of European popular culture. Cinema, which has always been important to me, is one site of this restructuring, and you can think about both the production and distribution of films in the 1950s. New cinemas were built at that time, and sometimes were contracted to devote 75% of their programming to American films. Even European avant-garde films, such as RoGoPaG, was witness to this situation.² The Gregoretti is almost Situationist in its propositions, including Topo Gigio the mouse, but the Rossellini is very Pop: its about a flight attendant, cameras and film.

Connected to this has been my interest in the European reception of Pop art. Theres the Capitalist Realists such as Lueg, Richter and Polke, but less obviously I'm thinking of Broodthaers. He really started to make work after reviewing George Segal and Claes Oldenburg, and he had a very distinct relation to Pop art. In fact his fictional museums and decors would be unthinkable without Oldenburg's Store (1961); Oldenburg rarely surfaces in histories of institutional critique, but The Store is a significant missing component of that history. My decision to make work about the idea of the Cold War has developed hand-in-hand with my conscious desire to try to be more involved with this idea of European Pop.

MG: Have more recent political events prompted you to revisit this period?

CW: Yes. Before the 2000 elections I noticed that people began to speak less openly about their political opinions unless they knew who they were speaking to. The further we got into the Bush administration, and certainly after 9/11, this whole fear of dissonant speech was developing at a rapid pace. It reminded me of my childhood, of the KGB, the CIA and television as I experienced it as a child. (My father worked on Get Smart and Mission: Impossible.³) The Bush administration felt remarkably familiar to me, and that strengthened my resolve to work with Cold War representations. So the subject of the Cold War comes out of my desire to engage with an idea of European reception of Pop art, out of my personal history, and then out of the Bush administrations push to silence any kind of critical speech and the fear of your neighbour and your telephone. Making work about the Cold War was an indirect way to talk about the present.

MG: Well return to that, but to address the series more specifically, once you decided to initiate a series about the Cold War, how did you been? What kind of photographs did you make?

CW: I had to start somewhere and so I used the image of the great Cold War couple to generate or produce the rest of the work. I wanted to create images that stood for Russia and the United States and that reflected on Cold War photographic culture. The images would serve as a kind of generative motor for the rest of the project. I decided to start with a picture of a camera. The question was whether I should photograph the camera that was actually making my photographs in a gesture of extreme self-reflexivity, or whether it should be at a remove from that idea. I determined on the latter. The camera that I chose is a well-known object the Kiev 88. It was produced at a factory called the Arsenal in the Ukraine and I viewed it initially as a kind of Eastern European cargo-cult object. Its a knock-off of a Hasselblad and it has a very interesting history, which to me is materially bound up in both the picture and the object itself. The Arsenal was originally an ammunitions factory, but during the Revolution there was a very significant strike in 1918 and the production of weapons stopped. A decade after Dovzhenko made a film about it inside the factory.⁴ At the end of World War II the Russians appropriated camera-building technology from different German camera companies, and set up a camera-making factory at the Arsenal which produced the Kiev 88. So within this one object, the Kiev 88, you have political history with a capital p: the Russian Revolution; a well-known film representing that Revolution and reflecting upon its position in history; the appropriation and displacement of the means to produce photographic apparatus; and the idea that its a collectible and a consumer product. As a fake Hasselblad, the Kiev 88 also is a replication of an original whose status is contested: some people say that it originally was a German product that the Swedes somehow got hold of during the war, some that it was a Swedish design. You could say that built into this photograph there is, as in many others in the series, the idea of social change. This is not indicated in any overt or obvious way, but the idea of quietly making pictures that do include those histories of change is important to me, especially in the US at a time when social change or voicing dissent seems like a hopeless and nostalgic idea.

MG: You mentioned that you started the series by creating a Cold War couple. What is the American photograph that is the equivalent for the image of the Kiev 88?

CW: It's the corn. Corn figures very prominently in Aron's Dix-Huit Leçons and so I started thinking about making a still life with corn. In her book Much Depends on Dinner (1989), Margaret Visser dissects a typical American dinner of chicken, rice, salad with olive oil and lemon, boiled corn and so on, and makes the claim in the chapter on corn that unless you're standing in a river, catching a salmon with your own hand, almost everything you come into contact with in your daily life has had some relationship to corn as a product. The lubricant used to grind the camera lenses in the photographic industry has a corn by-product in it; the material used to polish the steel has a corn by-product in it; the filmstrip itself has a corn by-product in it, and many of the chemicals associated with the production of a fine-art print also have corn in them.

MG: Perhaps the artificial corn in the photograph was made using a corn by-product as well?

CW: Yes. Its not real corn in the image, but artificial corn made for window displays or photographic shoots. The company that produced it estimated that 75% of the material used to make the artificial corn is in fact made with a corn by-product. One could say that the photographic industry has as much to do with corn as it does with, for example, light.

MG: Is one of the reasons that you consider this photograph as the American part
of the Cold War couple the fact that the image refers to the conventions of advertising and consumption both because the corn is itself a plastic marketing product, and because
of the Kodak three-point reflection guide?

CW: Colour photography in part was developed to serve the needs of advertising, and in my research some of the most stunning examples were images of food and of abundance: picnics, cocktail parties, etc. The Kodak three-point reflection guide that is represented in the corn picture refers back to older colour processes. It was included in most studio commercial work, and was intended to be used within the printing process when books or advertisements were made. Normally they were cropped out, but in a lot of my research into early commercial photography I found reflecting guides or colour bars or materials that were there for their later use within another form. That refers to the idea that the gallery is just one site among many potential sites where these images could be seen. Within the art context, we focus on the print within the museum or gallery as the primary site of encounter, but especially now advertising, magazines, catalogues, websites or postcards also take on an important function. The Kodak three-point reflection guide was copyrighted in 1968, which was a way for me to include the idea of a moment of social change within this particular photograph. The guide is both a referent to the photographic industry and to the kind of determinants within the photographic programme that Vilém Flusser describes in Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983).

MG: Can you discuss how the series came to incorporate photographs of buildings in Lodz, of products, of women in showers, etc.?

CW: I tend to develop a series by thinking about the constellation of elements that would normally be in one single photograph and then separating them out. I started For Example: Die Welt ist schön (1993-2001) with an image of a travel poster for Africa that showed an African woman with a basket on her head standing in front of a concrete modernist building. Very self-consciously, I just separated the elements: the basket went one direction, the woman went another, and the buildings went another. For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons... is an attempt to make a representation of the world. To do this, I needed to have human beings, the objects that human beings mediate the natural world with, I needed to have dwellings, landscapes and all of those things. These are the basic genres of photography too: portraiture, still life, landscape, cityscape, the bedrock of fine-art photography. Walter Benjamin's short history of photography breaks down photography into these basic elements.⁵ One photograph shows a Polish building a dwelling where you could find some of the objects that I have photographed, and where the people who eventually will appear in the series could be. But in terms of the Cold War subject matter, this photograph is also a way of addressing Soviet expansion. I could have picked more dramatic buildings in Poland with big Soviet numbers and letters on the side of them, but this building was very photographable. I found it interesting in its lack of specificity: it was a generic example of Soviet architecture, and it could have been in East Berlin also.

MG: Can you say something about how the series came to include photographs of women emerging from showers and others with curlers in their hair? How do these relate to the idea and history of the Cold War?

CW: Like the other images, the photographs of the models develop from specific research. The choice of the model was based on Jacques Tati's casting description for the female lead in Playtime (1967). Tati describes the physical characteristics of his desired actress, but also indicates that she should carry herself in a way that suggests a proper upbringing. She should look refined and educated.⁶ My model doesn't fit Tati's physical specifications but she does have this demeanor and sense of refinement. The other impetus for these photographs has been my interest in Charles Wilp, a famous German designer and photographer who worked for Afri-Cola in the 1960s and early 70s and designed adverts for feminine products. One campaign involved placing a model behind a plastic screen on which there was moisture and humidity. These images suggest that Wilp was looking at Richard Hamilton's early works. In constructing my image, I separated the elements of Wilp's advertisement, placing the door on the left and the model on the right. The glass in this shower door is called Chrome Raindrop, which is both a representation of water beading down a glass plane and a surface onto which real water accumulates.

So, as you can see, I set up photographic situations that, for all intents and purpose, could be those used in another kind of image-making activity. I try to stay as close as possible to those models of production as I can, but I also try to find the right amount of distance for there to be difference. Every shoot involves a struggle to find that point where there is distance from the model I am approaching, and yet enough proximity so that the photograph could be mistaken for the model itself.

MG: What is at stake for you in the inclusion within the photographs of various elements relating to the photographic industry? Beyond the historical references of the photographs, how does the presence of these elements articulate your ideas about photography in general?

CW: As you say, theres an accumulation in the work that relates to the photographic industry. This constitutes a kind of self-reflexivity that I believe extends, but does not negate, the modernist idea of material specificity. We usually think of modernist self-reflexivity as examining the physical properties of the medium, and in my series. I'm also interested in acknowledging other registers of photographic determination: the camera, the rest of the technical apparatus, but also the people and professions involved in photographic production. As well as the production of the photographic print, the work acknowledges whats involved in its distribution and so includes images of gallery display walls, for instance. In total this concern with photographic production and distribution, as well as its materiality, amounts to a second-order of self-reflexivity, or proposes an expanded frame for thinking about photographic materiality. It is important, I think, to reflect on photography in this way, because as a result the emphasis shifts away from two concepts that are paramount in the critical discourse around photography: the idea of the photographer-author; and the importance of the decisive moment. The work acknowledges that there are crucial elements at play in the production of meaning in photography before and after the artist arrives onto the scene to take the photograph. My thinking about photography is in part indebted to Flusser, who saw photography as a kind of institution with rings of determination, serving programmes of institutions beyond it and functioning itself to programme and perpetuate the production of photographs.

MG: Id like to address the experience of seeing one single image. When standing in front of one of your photographs, I often feel a kind of bafflement. I am faced with the bare, blunt appearance of the photographed object. Though I know that a lot of research has gone into each photograph, initially I have limited access to the back-story. What do you think is compelling about that moment of facing the photographs and not knowing their specific referents?

CW: I think this actually reflects or could represent a viewers relationship to the world outside of the pictures. Every object around us is at once very present and identifiable, but also the representative of multiple historical trajectories, economies and desires which you barely have to scratch the surface to start to get into. The coffee you're drinking is obviously a product that has a rich history here in Europe, but its also just a cup of coffee. And thats something inherent in all objects. Another way of approaching this question is as follows: traditionally photographic practice associated with leftist politics approached the muteness of the photograph as a problem. The problem was solved by using language or captioning as a corrective (this approach comes directly out of Brecht and Benjamin). Treating this muteness as a basic material element and not as a structural flaw, I have attempted to construct meaning through the use of negative form or absence, much like a dub producer.

MG: What about installation? You have exhibited the series in various venues, and each time you arrange the series in different clusters so that the viewer builds different connections between the images. Each installation also responds to and sometimes reconfigures the architecture of the institution. Can we speak about the link between the installations and the series subject? When I saw it installed in Porto, there wasn't a connection between the Cold War subject matter and the institution, but in Bologna there certainly was.

CW: In Bologna the relationship to architecture was very exaggerated.⁷ I wanted to analyse the history of the space in relationship to the student movement in the city in the 1970s. I had become aware of the political activity and the student activities in Bologna through punk music. The music functioned at the time as a kind of reportage about what was going on, specifically Scritti Politti's Skank Bloc Bologna (1978). The museum was designed and built during the communist period and over the years almost all of the original interior architecture was covered by sheet rock to make it a more traditional white cube. Simply through removal I revealed a lot of the original footprint and intentions of the architect, but also the original ideological intentions for that building. I did this at a moment when the museum was moving to a new building that represents a neo-conservative agenda, so my installation was a way of marking time, and it fit within my Cold War timeframe. But not all installations will investigate architecture and history in this way.

MG: Lets return to an idea you raised earlier. You mentioned that one of the reasons for exploring a Cold War subject is to build an implicit comparison with contemporary conditions, and that there clearly are some critical and political suggestions in that comparison. In contrast to some of the work thats being made now about the War on Terror and the 1960s protest movements, the politics of your series is extremely indirect. Do you think that critics have picked up the way in which these photographs are addressed to the present?

CW: I strongly believe that first and foremost I am always making art. Theres the old distinction of making political art or making art politically, and I invest in the latter. The indirectness is part of that. It could also be the result of my avoidance of instrumentality in the work. The series explores how material outside of our discourse works its way deeply into all representations. Im not interested in producing a clear signifier of my political position, but in exploring how these things are embedded in every aspect of our lives.

MG: How do you see the series continuing? At what point do you think this might come to an end?

CW: Well, somebody pointed out to me when I was working on For Example: Die Welt ist schön that in building a world model or cultural model there is no end in sight, and that I could continue that project for the rest of my productive life unless I ended it arbitrarily, which I did. Someone else pointed out to me (and it seemed so obvious that I was embarrassed) that this had something to do with Huebler's project to photograph everybody alive; that was also an impossible and an endless project. From the get-go Doug [Huebler] understood this it was part of the humour and beauty of the project, and without thinking about it consciously I inherited that understanding. Its very easy to see the new project as a continuation of the old project under another title with a shift in emphasis. I don't know when it will end or why, but I do know that I am nowhere near being done with it. I'm lucky enough to be able to follow my curiosity and base my work on it, above all else.

- Mark Godfrey & Christopher Williams