I first came across Stephen Willat’s work in the Tate Britain which was showing his piece ‘Living with Practical Realities’ which captured the reality of an elderly lady living in high rise flats. I was taken with the way he presented the information, in a sort of photomontage meets service design customer journey map. I even wrote a little post about it, which turned out to be a bit of a deep dive into his cybernetic methods and research.
But I was very pleased and surprised to come across even more of his work at the Tate’s Leigh Bowery show and also their Electric Dreams show.
The Tates own notes describe how he came to make these pieces with the people who went to the club.
‘Willats later met the main protagonists of the Cha Cha Club, Scarlet and Michael, by chance in the studio of a friend he was also working with. They introduced him to the matt-black painted railway arches in Hungerford Lane below Charing Cross station where on one night per week they operated a club with a strict admission policy typified by Scarlet’s question ‘Are you good enough for the Cha Cha?’. Willats recalls this as a particularly exciting moment in the punk movement’s establishment of its own cultural boundaries. Several such clubs existed; the Cha Cha was among the most well known and its visitors included George O’Dowd (Boy George, the leader of the popular music group, Culture Club). The club was observed in operation over several months, virtually its whole life. Willats began fearfully, sitting in the corner and observing, continued by explaining and then photographing the participants and completed the work by collecting the debris from the floor and taking it back to his studio.
He had decided to work with the founders of the club and to treat them as creators of a particular situation rather than portray the club itself. He therefore adopted his usual procedure of tape-recordings and discussions followed by a collaborative arrangement of material on the panels. The purpose of this arrangement is to create a work of art and this determines the topology of the relationship; it allows the person working with the artist to volunteer aspects of their life that they consider relevant to the making of the work. The organisation of materials on the panel tends towards what Willats calls the ‘democratic surface’ where no particular view of reality is suggested by the predominance of one element. In addition the layering of types of material such as handwriting, objects and photographs tends to direct the work towards a more ‘natural reality’, that is towards a varied and confused position. The collaborators guided the creation of the work and had the right of veto but Willats remains the artist in the relationship. The subjects, for example, at Willat’s prompting, collected household rubbish and incorporated this where they thought it useful in their panels. The panels reflect both the home and club life of the subjects and the triptych arrangement suggests three different aspects of the club’s organisation.
The work’s presentation in the gallery reflects the moment of its creation, the ‘spontaneous tackiness’ of the remnants of punk culture. Thus the wall around the work is roughly painted yellow and matt black in two overlapping coats and the panels were made quickly and originally shown unframed. Willats has agreed to the design of the frames for museum display and storage.’
I think they are great, not sure how ‘arty’ they are, they are not very aesthetic, but I see them as a collaborative super sized persona experience maps. If you have the time to read the text and look at the detail, the documentary side is where they are strike a chord, the participant’s little confessional stories.
