“Risen from the stench of the manure pile - even though it seemed for a moment to have escaped it in a flight of angelic and lyrical purity - the flower seems to relapse abruptly into its original squalor: the most ideal is rapidly reduced to a wisp of aerial manure.”

—Georges Bataille (1)

Since the early-1980s Christopher Williams has pursued a meandering, canny logic to create works consisting of fragments appropriated from a variety of discourses and signifying systems. These he joins together, superimposes, and/or abuts within the institutional spaces of fine art.

Between 1984 and 1986 he presented one such work in five parts which explored the construction of photographic meaning and value, and the poverty of aesthetic systems of display which encourage contemplation, not understanding, of art. Typical of Williams’s faith in the potential significance of even the minutest detail, the title of this piece was an intrinsic part of the work, and changed to suit its varying location (thus: On Ghent, On Amsterdam, On New York, On Paris, etc.). Among the four remaining component parts, there was one photograph— taken from a commercial picture agency and framed for museological consumption—of the city where the work was installed, its banality ensured by its original purpose: local tourist promotion. In this way Williams twice designated location, employing the visual cliché as an alternative signifying system. Next to this picture he presented two similarly framed versions of a single archival black and white news photo—one large, one small (its frame the same size as that of the tourist shot) - in which a man lying on the ground is killed by another man with a bayonet, while an audience, including members of the press, looks on. Completing the work were labels of the kind one encounters in galleries and museums which document title, year, material, and size. The deferral of meaning produced by this installation made it necessary for the curious to go beyond the work “itself" to identify the character of these images and consider the effect of their juxtaposition and display.

Williams has permitted the disorder of  lived experience to contribute to his current project, Angola to Vietnam. When complete, it will feature an artist's book and a portfolio of 27 photographs of flowers that are on display at the Museum of Botany at Harvard University, as well as an equal number of printed display labels. In addition to identifying one flower per label, the artist has alphabetically arranged the labels by the  name of a country in which, whether naturally or because of a transplant, it currently grows. Williams selected these 27 nations from among 36 that were listed in a report to the Independent Commission on Humanitarian Issues which was published in 1986 with the sensationally informative title, Disappeared: Technique of Terror. Yet upon close scrutiny, the viewer will notice that fewer than 27 flowers are photographed. Three repetitions suggest the outlines of an exotic narrative: Angola and Togo share the same shot. Chile and Peru share the same flower, shot from different angles; the same holds for the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Meanwhile,  South Africa and Namibia depend upon the same negative which Williams crops differently.

Angola to Vietnam—the portfolio—is supplemented by a tear-sheet of a recent cover from Elle showing models wearing sailor caps emblazoned with the names of first- and second-world countries that (with the exception of Brazil) do not figure among those on the portfolio's labels. Completing the project is a 45-minute film which focuses on Howard Allgaier, an employee of longstanding at the museum. Printer of the museum's display labels, Williams recognized him, by chance, from photographs documenting the museum's history in a vitrine by the gift counter.

The flowers at Harvard (in perpetual bloom for the purposes of scientific documentation and educational display) were actually made by hand—in glass—by German master craftsmen, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, between 1887 and 1936. With its emphasis on artful glass specimens, the Museum of Botany is one manifestation of a widespread desire that emerged during the latter half of the 19th century to forge ideal unities: in this case, an institutional union of science and art. This yearning for resolution takes on particular meaning if considered within the historical context of the classificatory systems, territorial subdivisions and modes of specialization which proliferated before and during the age of monopoly capitalism. The purpose of these systems was to expand knowledge and power among the industrialized, colonial regimes of the West. Ever since the Enlightenment, innumerable systems existed for describing nature, for carving up the body and the body politic, for possessing the earth and dividing labor. Thus the Museum of Botany is itself mapped according to Carolus Linnaeus's 18th-century method of botanical classification. This system is then traversed by another one, adapted from 19th century museological discourse, which recorded the Blaschka models as they arrived from Germany. Both systems figure on the explanatory labels at the museum and in Angola to Vietnam.