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Exhibition

EMMETT WILLIAMS
EMMETT WILLIAMS
Emmett Williams
Portrait of the artist, cracking up
FROM THE SERIES PUNCTOGRAMS, 1978/2003
COLLAGE
ahlers collection
© Emmett Williams
02. August 2008 - 28. September 2008

EMMETT WILLIAMS

A BERLIN AMERICAN

Emmett Williams was born in 1925 in Greenville, South Carolina and died in 2007 in Berlin. He was one of the most influential artists of the Fluxus movement, which also counted the likes of Joseph Beuys, George Brecht, John Cage and Nam June Paik among its members. The movement was founded in the 1960s by the Lithuanian-born New Yorker, George Maciunas. In line with its Latin name, Fluxus sought to make things flow, or – as beautifully expressed by Karl Marx – to present calcified patterns of behaviour with their very own melody and thus induce them to dance. Fluxus democratised art and brought it out of the ‘white cube’ and into social, political and economic space. Fluxus attempted to dissolve the boundaries between art and life, combining action and fiction, painting and music into one complete work of art.

Following the Fluxus mindset, Emmett Williams created multimedia works of art over the course of his life. In 1962, he took part in Maciunas’s Wiesbaden happening, which launched the Fluxus movement. He worked together with the Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri from 1957–59 in the Darmstädter Kreis für konkrete Poesie. He formed a variety of artistic friendships and partnerships. From 1966 to 1970, he was editor-in-chief of the legendary Something Else Press in New York. His poetry and anthologies are milestones of concrete poetry. His most important works include the erotic volume of poetry sweethearts (1966), for which Marcel Duchamp designed the cover, and the autobiographical work My Life in Flux – and Vice Versa, published in 1992.

Williams formed a particular connection to Berlin. He first got to know the city in 1980 as an artist-in-residence through the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, and subsequently decided to move there permanently. From 1981 to 1985, he was a visiting professor at the Berlin University of the Arts. In 1993, the city’s Haus am Lützowplatz featured his works alongside those of Dorothy Iannone and William N. Copley in a prestigious exhibition entitled Berlin Americans. In 1996, he was awarded the Hannah-Höch-Preis of the Berlinische Galerie for his artistic oeuvre. He lived in Berlin together with his wife, the British artist Ann Noël, until his death in 2007.

In Hanover, an exhibition by the Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation, A Berlin American, presents works by Emmett Williams from the foundation’s own collection,supplemented by a number of loans. Works from the collection include thePunctograms (1978/2003), revisions of unused illustrations from Williams’s book The Boy and the Bird, which he produced at Harvard in the 1970s. The artist uses small coding dots to change the face of each picture; in the titles, he coats his ironic self-analysis in dazzling wordplay. The Recycled Light Sculptures (1984/1985/2003) originally served as illustrations for Williams’s book German Poems. He made photocopies of slashed pieces of paper and used spray paint to transform them into works of art. In the graphic portfolio 21 Proposals for the Stained-Glass Windows of the Fluxus Cathedral, (1991) we encounter familiar faces: characters drawn from apopulation of colourful, playful, comic-like ‘people’. They offer an unparalleled reflection of the humorous, imaginative and original character of their creator.

The loans include works that provide a pleasing testimony to Williams’s friendship with Dieter Roth. The collaged colour copy A Chocolate Bar Dreaming of Being Dieter Roth, is an homage to his artist friend, who was unrivalled in his transformation of that ephemeral substance, chocolate, into a material for plastic design. The Foodfaces cycle (1989), in which he repeatedly creates portraits of his own likeness out of food items, is part of this line of thought.

When Emmett Williams adds ironic comments on the precarious living situation of the artist to his images, he proclaims truths that are just as relevant today. Yet he leaves no trace of self-pity or accusation. Instead, he revels in the attitude of homo ludens, man the player, and uses this both to rise to the challenge of his art and to tackle the constraints of everyday life.

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