LG Williams 'Stands Tall'
LG Williams Stands Tall turns the artist statement into an absurdly monumental public declaration of goals, principles, interests, and values. The installation's bureaucratic wall of self-description mocks the corporate demand that public figures clarify their brands while also indulging that demand with shameless excess. Williams appears as artist, athlete, professor, curator, coach, and public moral actor, an identity stack so inflated that it becomes its own critique of professional self-fashioning. The work is polemical because it refuses the romantic privacy of artistic intention; it puts the artist's supposed values on the wall as if they were both confession and advertising copy. In doing so, it exposes the contemporary artist's public image as an installation already waiting to be photographed.
- DATE:
- November 1, 2002
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Essay / Critique
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- LG Williams; Ricardo Boon
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- University of Hawaii; HI Gallery; Miracle Gallery; lgo of beverlyhills
- KEYWORDS:
- artist statement as installation; brand clarification satirized; self-description wall as critique; corporate demand mocked through excess; artistic values as advertising copy; public image already an installation; professional self-fashioning exposed