Radio / Rauhfaser / Television offered a provisional summation of Christopher Williams’s ongoing research into contemporary mutations of social realism. The exhibition was centered in part on the politically engaged theater of the German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz. Williams recently recorded Kroetz’s 1972 radio play Inklusive using vintage audio equipment from both East and West Germany, and the play will be broadcast on Chicago’s Lumpen Radio (105.5 FM) at several points during the show’s run. The strong sense of class consciousness in Kroetz’s work is hinted at in Williams’s use of Rauhfaser, an archetypal brand of German wallpaper steeped in social semantics. A single photograph and two hand-painted glass signs hung in the gallery alongside video footage and historical documents displayed in six purpose-built vitrines. Its modest scale notwithstanding, the exhibition had an almost manifesto-like quality to it, outlining both Williams’s overarching intellectual passions – an interrogation of the way in which our visual culture is both staged and seen – and the timeless question of art’s relation to societal questions.

Christopher Williams
Blocking Template: Ikea Kitchen (Three-quarter) Studio Thomas Borho, Oberkasseler Str. 39, Düsseldorf, Germany, September 10, 2022, 2023
Archival pigment print on cotton rag paper
Print: 11 7/8 x 19 inches
30.2 x 48.3 cm
Framed: 26 x 33 5/8 x 1 1/4 inches
66 x 85.4 x 3.2 cm
Edition of 10, 4 AP
Signed verso
WILCH0620

© Christopher Williams. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.