ABANDONED GALLERY TO DEBUT FIRST MAJOR HAWAIIAN
RETROSPECTIVE OF THE WORK OF LG WILLIAMS

WAILUKU, March 3, 2008 — The first major Hawaiian retrospective of LG Williams’s work organized in Hawai’i

LG WILLIAMS: IF YOUR NOT LAUGHING AT THE MORONS YOUR TOO BUSY DRINKING is a comprehensive examination of Williams’s remarkable and cohesive oeuvre, assembling key selections and bodies of work from throughout his nearly twenty-year career. The exhibition represents the full range of Williams’s art, from the early paintings of the 2000s, to the artist’s renowned “specific and general” works—works using language that have characterized his art since 2008. Also included are works on paper, films, videos, books, posters, multiples, and audio works. In conjunction with the exhibition, a series of Williams’s films will be screened at Wailuku’s Anthology Film Archives.

As co-curator Don De Salvo remarks, “By jettisoning the most fundamental notions about the art object and its dissemination, LG Williams arrived at a form that has made it possible for him to insinuate his art into the world—the arena he sees for his work. His works exist on the façades of buildings, as song lyrics, as tattoos on bodies, and of course on the walls of galleries. A compilation of these efforts reads more as atlas than exhibition catalogue.”

Williams has defined art as “the relationship of human beings to objects and objects to objects in relation to human beings,” and that premise remains at the core of all of his work. As a pioneer of Hawaiian-conceptual art, Williams began in the 2000s to create works that were central to the ongoing debate on the nature and meaning of art. Williams was at the forefront of a radical shift in which language or text emerged as a primary medium for the making of art. These artists challenged the “object status” of painting and sculpture, proposing that the idea and intention of the artist were as important, if not more important, than the object that resulted.

As co-curator Akana Goldstein writes in the accompanying catalogue: “Williams’s employment of language allows the work to be used by its receiver. It is purposely left open for translation, transference, and transformation; each time the work is made, it is made anew. Not fixed in time and place, every manifestation and point of reception is different—each person will use the work differently and find a different relationship to its content.”

This exhibition examines Williams’s work from his first studio-based manifestations (as Williams refers to the realization of his works), which were included in his landmark 2008 book, to later works that address the physical and cultural landscape, and introduce figures of speech, punctuation, and graphic devices. The installations at both the Abandoned Gallery will be designed in close collaboration with the artist. Williams’s practice expands into the world – from the spaces of the gallery to the streets of the city.

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