Christopher Williams interview: ‘What’s important is the viewer coming in contact with the picture’

Los Angeles artist Christopher Williams grew up on Hollywood movie sets and has applied the collaborative process of filmmaking to his art, using other photographers to create images recalling the ones found in catalogs and magazine ads. The subject of a traveling retrospective that’s just opened at MoMA, Williams met with Time Out New York at the museum to discuss the show and what he thinks is the most vital aspect of photography.

Where does the title “The Production Line of Happiness” come from?
It’s from a Godard video about a Swiss watchmaker who made Super-8 films of flowers, insects and birds, which gave him a sense of satisfaction missing from his usual job. I thought it was a good way to describe the making of work.

You studied at Cal Arts with people such as John Baldessari, Michael Asher and Douglas Huebler. Was there anything in particular that you took from them?
They all belonged to the first generation of conceptual artists, and what I realized is that while they infused their work with a high degree of seriousness, it existed alongside that same idea of pleasure. That’s true even of most rigorous figures among the group, like Dan Graham, who’s always said that his work is about comedy.

You’re also a contemporary of the Pictures Generation artists, yet your work departed significantly from theirs. Did any of them influence you?
Initially, I used re-photography, and was certainly encouraged by the example of Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince. But I’d say the two artists that were very important for me were Louise Lawler and Barbara Kruger. They were more involved in examining the context for making the art. And that idea, known generally as institutional critique, permitted me to put some distance between my work and that of the Pictures artists.

Have you applied some of that thinking to this show?
Yes. Another way of looking at what I do is that I get inside the conventions of displaying and distributing photography, and then amplify them. Naturally, that involves the way they’re exhibited. Only a certain amount of work can fit in a specific space, which generally involves building walls and so forth, and I’ve turned some of those elements into artifacts carrying them over from one venue to the next. So the show in New York is framed by the architecture from the first stop of the tour in Chicago and the next one in London. There’s also point here where I left part of the Gauguin exhibition previously mounted in the same galleries. So there are layers of two or three exhibitions made visible as a kind of palimpsest.

The catalog for the show is somewhat unconventional for a career survey. Are you also treating it as a work in the show?
The idea of a retrospective made me extremely uncomfortable. So one of the things that I wanted to do with the catalog was to bring in other voices. I’ve included lists, descriptions and manifestos by other artists—from Claes Oldenburg to Scritti Politti to Bernadette Corporation. Instead of a picture book describing what I’ve done, I’ve treated the catalog as a source book for the kind of discussions that interests me.

You started out as a filmmaker but moved into photography. Why the change?
Both my grandfather and father worked in motion pictures, and going into art was a way to escape all of that. But after spending time alone in a painting studio, I realized that I missed the kind of dialogue that takes place on a movie set. That became the model for my work.

Is that why you employ professional photographers?
Yes. I like functioning as a director. I’d started by doing enlargements from archival sources. And after a while, I thought that, instead of appropriating images, I’d appropriate the site of image production. So that’s also part of it.

What is the one thing that finally distinguishes your approach?
When people talk about photography, they always refer to the decisive moment—the point at which the image is captured. But I’ve attempted to shift the focus. For me, what’s important is the viewer coming in contact with the picture, not my taking it.