Anything But" At The Container
This 2011 press release announces Williams's Tokyo exhibition "Anything But" at The Container as a deadpan parody of abstract-painting rhetoric and conceptual overinterpretation. The tape drawings are described through an obsessive grammar of rectangles, ultramarine, economic theory, Dante, Virgil, Beatrice, and forgotten Artforum artists, reducing critical language to a comic mechanism that keeps generating more rectangles. The text mocks the inflationary habits of exhibition writing while still locating Williams within a real international network: Tokyo, Venice, Kyoto, Yerba Buena, di Rosa, Super Window Project, and War Room. Its humor lies in how completely it inhabits the voice of serious art prose while turning every claim into a geometric cul-de-sac. Beneath the absurdity is a precise jab at abstraction's dependency on language, pedigree, and interpretive excess.
- DATE:
- May 16, 2011
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Essay / Critique
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- LG Williams; David Hume; Adam Smith; John Stuart Mill; Karl Marx; Joseph Stalin; John Maynard Keynes; Dante Alighieri; Virgil; Beatrice; Kenneth Baker; Wally Hedrick
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- The Container; Tokyo; Artforum; Internet Pavilion of La Biennale di Venezia; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; di Rosa Art Preserve; Super Window Project; Lance Fung Gallery; Steven Wirtz Gallery; Gallery Subversive; Lucerne Kuntzpanaorama; San Francisco International Art Fair; Cengage Learning / Wadsworth
- KEYWORDS:
- rectangle grammar; abstract painting rhetoric mocked; Tokyo deadpan; economic theory as exhibition text; capitalism satirized through tape; conceptual over-interpretation performed