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, 19791980 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 peoples 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 didnt
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 ones 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 Problmes de la
Nouvelle Ralit, 1977) and Berlin (The Mrkisches 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 counterconsciousness; 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
(3) Willats, Stephen. Beyond the Plan, Wiley-Academy, Great Britain, 2001, p.10
(4) Willats, Stephen interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Abitare Magazine Website,
04.09.2009
(5) Willats, Stephen. Beyond the Plan, Wiley-Academy, Great Britain, 2001, p.22
(6) ibid, p.43
(7) ibid, p.43