Stephen Willats: Time Tumbler is reviewed by ArtReview

The British conceptual artist reaches out to the community to find a new visual language

At the heart of British conceptual artist Stephen Willats’s work is a preoccupation with the networks emerging as part of the integrated global economy of the late twentieth century. There is also a question of how far that term – network – can be reconciled with the other precursory term and alternative way of conceiving of social relations: community.

Visitors to this exhibition learn about a particular socially integrated approach that the artist developed and termed ‘Artwork as Social Model’. It involved gathering testimonies from local communities and presenting findings in a new visual language that combined photography, diagrammatic drawings and text. One example is The Compartmentalised Cliff (1977), in which Willats spoke directly to residents of a new tower block in the banlieues of Paris. Testimonies containing hopes, dreams and concerns are used to form an alternative cartography of experience that is superimposed onto photographs of the built environment, with an insistence on the equal significance of both. Mapping these feelings also allowed participants to arrive at possible solutions, which are recorded in the work.

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Image: Stephen Willats, Re-mixing the Fragments, 2020