{"title":"Stephen Willats","description":"\u003cp\u003eStephen Willats (born 1943) is a British artist whose practice since the early 1960s has centred on communication, participation and the social systems through which people construct meaning and identity. Working with residents of housing estates, urban communities and social institutions, Willats developed a practice that used diagrams, questionnaires, photographs and text to map the relationships between individuals and their environments. His work challenged the conventional boundaries between artist, artwork and audience, proposing instead a model of art as a form of social research and exchange. He founded the journal \u003cem\u003eControl\u003c\/em\u003e in 1965, which became an important vehicle for ideas about cybernetics, systems theory and participatory practice. Willats’s work has been consistently ahead of the institutional frameworks available to receive it, and his influence on socially engaged and participatory art practice has been substantial.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"andrew-wilson-conceptual-art-in-britain-1964-1979-tate-publishing-2016","title":"ANDREW WILSON, ED. — Conceptual Art in Britain 1964–1979, Tate Publishing, 2016","description":"\u003cp\u003eAndrew Wilson, ed., \u003cem\u003eConceptual Art in Britain 1964–1979\u003c\/em\u003e. Tate Publishing, London, 2016. Softcover; 160 pages, 19 × 25 cm; illustrated throughout in colour and black-and-white. Published to accompany the exhibition at Tate Britain, London.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAn exhibition catalogue that deserves to be considered as more than an exhibition catalogue.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublished for Tate Britain’s 2016 survey, \u003cem\u003eConceptual Art in Britain 1964–1979\u003c\/em\u003e reconstructs a period in which the definition of an artwork was being systematically dismantled. Sculpture became action; language became material; an instruction could replace an object; photography could function as evidence; and books, postcards, filing systems and documents could carry a work beyond the exhibition itself.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe book brings together an unusually concentrated group of artists who established and complicated that territory: Sue Arrowsmith, Keith Arnatt, Art \u0026amp; Language, Conrad Atkinson, Terry Atkinson, Victor Burgin, Michael Craig-Martin, Jan Dibbets, Braco Dimitrijević, Barry Flanagan, Hamish Fulton, Margaret Harrison, Ed Herring, Susan Hiller, John Hilliard, Mary Kelly, Joseph Kosuth, David Lamelas, Darcy Lange, John Latham, Bob Law, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Roelof Louw, Bruce McLean, John Stezaker, David Tremlett and Stephen Willats.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRead together, the list describes less a movement with a common appearance than a network of different answers to the same problem: if the artwork no longer has to look like an artwork, where does the work reside?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBruce McLean turns the sculptural plinth into something to climb across, occupy and misuse in \u003cem\u003ePose Work for Plinths\u003c\/em\u003e. David Lamelas reduces an event to the simple action of pouring milk into a glass. Bob Law proposes a drawing potentially extending to one million marks. Ed Herring places hundreds of postcards inside a filing cabinet. John Latham collapses book, ingestion, residue, archive and object into the same work. Elsewhere, photography, walking, language, advertising, administration, ownership, instruction and social systems become equally legitimate artistic material.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat makes the catalogue itself particularly interesting. Much of conceptual art was produced and circulated through precisely the formats traditionally considered secondary to art: photographs, typed instructions, publications, diagrams, postcards, photocopies and documentary records. This book therefore documents conceptual art using many of the same systems through which conceptual art originally existed. The document describes the work, but the history it describes had already made the document part of the work.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere is a second reversal. Practices that questioned permanence, authorship and the conventional art object eventually return through the museum: selected, photographed, captioned, sequenced, historicised and bound into 160 pages. What had been dispersed becomes a canon. What had been temporary becomes an archive. What questioned the art object becomes an object again.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIts relative ordinariness is part of its appeal. This remains an accessible Tate catalogue rather than a heavily fetishised piece of first-generation conceptual ephemera, yet contained within it is an unusually dense map of the conditions from which much contemporary practice still operates: instruction, appropriation, documentation, participation, distribution, language, administration, the body and the unstable boundary between artwork and information.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA history of dematerialisation, returned to circulation as a book.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCondition: Good to very good. Light rubbing, handling and edge wear to wrappers, with minor marks consistent with use. Interior clean from inspection.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSecurely packed; tracked UK and international shipping available.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Tate Publishing","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54229747368274,"sku":"WILSON-TATE-CAT-2016","price":45.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/Wilson_-Andrew.-Conceptual-Art-in-Britain_-1964-1979-front-cover.jpg?v=1786433842"}],"url":"https:\/\/thenewrare.com\/collections\/stephen-willats.oembed","provider":"The New Rare","version":"1.0","type":"link"}