- Venue
- Raven Row
- Location
- London
The sixties was well known as a time of dramatic shifts and social changes in the UK. Catherine Mason’s excellent book – A Computer in the Art Room highlights a change in arts education during this time. Work inspired by cybernetic theory was of particular interest to Roy Ascott at the Ealing Ground Course which inspired a young Willats who went to university there with the aid of a scholarship (for his draughtsmanship). A seminar by Basil Bernstein as well as a cybernetics presentation by an influential actor turned artist Gordon Pask had an effect on the 20 staff and 20 student experimental course at Ealing and set them on the road to the thinking of theories of feedback loops concerning artist and audience. Would the audience in a way also be an active ‘creator’ of the work simply by contemplating the artwork and having a reaction? The 60s was also important for the fact that for the first time an exhibition on digital culture was debuted – Jasia Reichardt’s Cybernetic Serendipity (1968).
In an informal talk at the Raven Row space, the dapperly dressed Willats noted that he was interested in the role of the artist in breaking away from the straight jacket of the inherited world of art and that any strategy that the artist chose to realise intention was valid. This must have been quite daring at a time when realities we take for granted today such as sexual orientation could still controlled at that time. In 1962 he decided to look at advertising as he believed that this was a form of communication through time and the idea of movement through time can be seen to influence works on display here. Most importantly he was interested in the constant multi channelled flexibility to thinking which enabled him and his peers to be artist, scientist, scholar, designer, theorist, academic and everything in between.
The paper based works on the ground floor brings to mind works created by Paul Klee who was also interested in the idea of systems of forms and drawing as well as theories of organic forms and nature. The colours, lines and arrows in works such as Architectural Exercise in Colour and Form No.3 (1962) for example echo Klee works such as Oriental Bliss (1940) in colour and depictions of a grammar of forms. Another type of system explored how the social comes from the architectural, Organic Exercise No.6, Series 2 (1962) was a work described by Willats as a drawing he made of a tower block. The notions of the cellular and reconfigurable nature of the apartments interestingly also bears a resemblance to organic forms such as cell walls and vacuoles present in plant life. Ideas and thoughts such as this are littered throughout the works and the visitor is confronted with an idea of how Willatt’s broke down reality into component parts of reconfigurable systems and how the visitor might also be an active participant in this feedback loop. The feedback loop also playing an important role in the work upstairs in the form of questionnaires which directly engage the visitor’s feelings, interpretation and personal creative output.
From a visitors perspective, it was a real shame that some of the machines on show were not working but in some ways this only highlighted the very fragile and somewhat ephemeral nature to the works. In some ways it felt like some of the pieces were more earthy, innocent and fearless experiments with the everyday of elastic bands and dowls. The contemporary example would probably be the hacking together of projects using an arduino or lilypad. Visual Transmitter No.2 (1968) appeared to emit a type of intense radiating spectral energy through a system of turbines, it feels as if it was a prototype to solve the world’s energy crisis. There was a solid sculptural quality to the work which gave the work a futuristic yet utilitarian vibe. Other machines such as Variable Shift Machine No.1 (1963) and Shift Box No.2 (1964) used simple everyday materials to give the effect of chromatic or iterative colour shifts, gridded textures and pixellated display motions reminiscent of the computer revolution to come in the following decades. The movement of coloured lights in these machines were affected by simply moving lights behind a lenticular type of material giving the illusions of a different resolution.
Rather unusually, despite not being able to touch the machines in the larger main rooms on the ground floor, visitors are allowed to try on the space age helmets reminiscent of the costumes worn by Daft Punk. As well as providing a lot of amusing pretend robot fun, the helmets muffled out sounds and altered the surrounding view so that the Multiple Clothing dress (1965) and the transformable Corree Design furniture units (1965) took on a filtered perspective. Apparently these items did not sell well and the originals fell apart so it was charming to hear an honest admission of ‘failure’ and Willats need to shift from artist to designer and back again from a conceptual or ven financial viewpoint.
As a whole the show was an enjoyable encapsulated history of a period of Willats’s work. The show did contain other interesting material glossed over in this review, the presence of the documentary pieces of material such as the Control magazine (and elegant typeface) for one, as well as the amount of architectural models upstairs. Another things to note was the excellent free guide to the show produced by Raven Row featuring lots of background information and images.
In some cases the idea of the ‘conceptual designer’ can only be truly enjoyed by touching and discovering the concepts by oneself (as Willats encouraged) – although in this exhibition Raven Row has provided ample materials to augment the experience as well as discover for oneself.
