Surface Value
The camera competes with the mirror.” –John Miller
I wrote this text over a decade ago when images were in the midst of breaking from a long history of craft, adopting new criteria in what they represent socially by those who create them.
Reading it now, I’m hit with how our current communal unconscious demands more, expects images to announce their inherent political condition and identity a priori. Image feeds and social reacitons that train your algos, a behavior previously seen as mere consumption, have evolved their own literacy politic. And yet even this phase of identity mongering is changing rapidly as a new era of images becomes produced at a massive scale by large language models, the sur-human production line.
Much of the world currently equates the freedom of speech as the right for their cathartic messages or images to exist on the databases of global digital conglomerates. This new sense of freedom has usurped an occupation of freedom, one that still remains limitless and off the surface of your screen.
As work that is slightly discomfortable in its love of being just photographs, even though its content navigates all that it means to be photographic, Christopher Williams’ retrospective at MOMA, “The Production Line of Happiness,” is a celebration and trial escape from the imminence of its surface. This performance of surface, which offsets the Fordist title of his first American retrospective, traces the effects of capital in the creation of images as well as capital’s long history in defining the photograph as object.
The question of what exactly a surface is perhaps is a primary condition on which Williams’ work performs. And it is a value that is presently weighed against the global sprawl of images from the every-maker, the new omnipresence: frenzy feeds loading just-now produced images with an entirely new and active surface, usually your phone’s. These contemporary surfaces act as a request first, an image second—an image to be socially approved with a tap or two, or as swiftly forgotten with a finger swipe. The cult performance of the shared image produces an efficiency of terror against a legibility that first emerged for those objects from the darkroom, dispersed and blended with the substructures of material distribution: newspapers, galleries and museums, magazine advertisements—the print.
The Production Line of Happiness is a glance backward to a time when one could maintain a clear vantage against things-as-images and things-as-objects, when there was power entwining the photographic stake and the history of art to isolate a political position within the work itself. It was a time that soon will be out of operation, and a time when, because of its inactive surface, a photograph’s content had to be separated, lifted, by the condensation of an unspoken collective acknowledgment.
Williams’ work may solidify the iconic gestures of advertising, the photographer’s love of the total otherness of his studio and his subject, or the methodical (and Structural) decomposition of “fine art” photography; and perhaps because of this, Williams’ work will be a talisman for the recent past, including that era’s belief in praxis and its own ideology of the possibility of a political position within art. In front of this work, we become an audience to the death of an old effect of capital and its exhausted art modes of calling to consciousness its fetishes. It is a death that Williams’ work allows with resilience to live for us in the present: the image very nearly escapes its objectness, and through capital and culture we resurrect it to mean once more, and once more again; like children, giddy with a picture book, self-reciting the riddle of capital.
This pantomime is no longer the case of the everyday image or everyday image maker, though. Due to the extensive shocks from updates to common visual literacy, and the global performance with it across all social networks, Williams’ work is probably in the best position to crystallize an experience of capital that we will never experience again.