Concerning Stephen Willats and the Social Function of Art: Experiments in Cybernetics and Society 9781350197626, 9781350197596, 9781350197602

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: New Functions for Art Practice in Society
A Cybernetics Primer
Cybernetics Goes Social
A Social Practice Primer
Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: The Omnidirectional Artist
Heuristic Tools on the Move
Homeostat Diagrams
Cooperative Decision-Making: Visual Meta Language Simulation
Pedagogical Processes
Man from the Twenty-First Century
Chapter 2: Modeling the Social
Cognition Control
Centre for Behavioural Art
Constructing Social Resources and Social Models
Art and Social Function
Chapter 3: Mutually Bound
Of Concept Frames
From a Coded World
A “New Reality”?
Willats in East London
Chapter 4: The Art of Sociotechnical Systems
Toward a “Depleted, Disillusioned New Reality”
“Art Creating Society”: Curating the Oxford Symposium and the Mosaic Series
Responsive-Ability in East London
Chapter 5: Creativity in Self-Organization
Participatory Reception
Defined Context, Social Practice, and the Multi-Homeostat Problem
Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Aesthetics
“Objects of Creative Release”
Back to the Wasteland
Chapter 6: Open-Ended Urban Systems
Middlesbrough and The Transformer
Marble Arch to Oxford Circus, London: Freezone
Simulation in Sheffield
South London: Changing Everything
A Pivot in Scale: Data Streams
Conclusion: On Giving Up and Compromise
Feedback and Multiple Futures
Open Systems and Participation
Thinking with Cybernetics
Compromise Not Compliance
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Concerning Stephen Willats and the Social Function of Art

Concerning Stephen Willats and the Social Function of Art Experiments in Cybernetics and Society SHARON IRISH

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Sharon Irish, 2020 Sharon Irish has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Some of the material in this book originally appeared in “The Performance of Information Flows in the Art of Stephen Willats” by Sharon Irish in Information & Culture: A Journal of History, Volume 47, Number 4, pp 457-486. Copyright © 2012 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xvi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Brentford Towers, South London, a site of several key works by Stephen Willats. © Sharon Irish, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Irish, Sharon, 1952- author. Title: Concerning Stephen Willats and the social function of art : experiments in cybernetics and society / Sharon Irish. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020036949 (print) | LCCN 2020036950 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350197626 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350197619 (epub) | ISBN 9781350197602 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Willats, Stephen, 1943–Criticism and interpretation. | Social practice (Art)–England–London. Classification: LCC N6797.W5 I75 2021 (print) | LCC N6797.W5 (ebook) | DDC 709.2–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036949 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036950 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-9762-6 ePDF: 978-1-3501-9760-2  eBook: 978-1-3501-9761-9 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations  vii Preface  x Acknowledgments  xvi

Introduction: New Functions for Art Practice in Society  1 A Cybernetics Primer 2 Cybernetics Goes Social 6 A Social Practice Primer 7 Chapter Overview 10

1 The Omnidirectional Artist  15 Heuristic Tools on the Move  17 Homeostat Diagrams  24 Cooperative Decision-Making: Visual Meta Language Simulation 27 Pedagogical Processes  28 Man from the Twenty-First Century  31

2 Modeling the Social  35 Cognition Control  36 Centre for Behavioural Art  38 Constructing Social Resources and Social Models  40 Art and Social Function  54

3 Mutually Bound  57 Of Concept Frames  59 From a Coded World  64 A “New Reality”?  68 Willats in East London  69

CONTENTS

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4 The Art of Sociotechnical Systems  79 Toward a “Depleted, Disillusioned New Reality”  80 “Art Creating Society”: Curating the Oxford Symposium and the Mosaic Series  98 Responsive-Ability in East London  102

5 Creativity in Self-Organization  111 Participatory Reception  113 Defined Context, Social Practice, and the Multi-Homeostat Problem  118 Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Aesthetics  124 “Objects of Creative Release”  134 Back to the Wasteland  137

6 Open-Ended Urban Systems  143 Middlesbrough and The Transformer  145 Marble Arch to Oxford Circus, London: Freezone 148 Simulation in Sheffield  153 South London: Changing Everything 156 A Pivot in Scale: Data Streams  158

Conclusion 

167

On Giving Up and Compromise  167 Feedback and Multiple Futures  168 Open Systems and Participation  170 Thinking with Cybernetics  173 Compromise Not Compliance  176 Notes  181 BIbiliography  252 Index  269

ILLUSTRATIONS Since Stephen Willats did not give permission to illustrate his work in this book, I have put information about the forty works I discuss in gray boxes that indicate where images have been published and where they may be seen online, if those options are available. The following list itemizes the work by Willats considered in the text, as well as the photographs that illustrate the various locations where he worked. In photographing the sites where Willats worked, I did not aim to replicate Willats’s angles or framing. 0.1 0.2 1.1

Stephen Willats, Art Society Feedback, c. 1959  3 Stephen Willats, Homeostat Drawing No. 1, 1969  4 Campden Hill Towers, Notting Hill Gate, London, Chapman Taylor Partners, architects, 1961  19 1.2 Stephen Willats, Organic Exercise No. 6, Series 2, 1962  20 1.3 Stephen Willats, Change Exercise No. 13, 1965  21 1.4 Stephen Willats, Control Magazine cover, issue 3 (1967)  24 1.5 Stephen Willats, Visual Meta Language Simulation, 1971–2  27 1.6 Stephen Willats, Man from the Twenty-First Century, shape, face, object, and clothes charts, 1971  31 2.1 Stephen Willats, West London Social Resource Project, 1972–3  42 2.2 Photos showing the four areas of the West London Social Resource Project  43 2.3 Stephen Willats, Edinburgh Social Model Construction Project, 1973  46 2.4 Stephen Willats, Edinburgh Social Model Construction Project, 1973  47 2.5 Stephen Willats, Meta Filter, 1973–5  52 3.1 State Graph, diagram adapted from Gordon Pask, An Approach to Cybernetics (1961)  60 3.2 Stephen Willats, Homeostat Drawing No. 2, 1969  61 3.3 Stephen Willats, Life Net Encoder, 1974  62 3.4 Stephen Willats, Concept Frames, 1976  63 3.5 Stephen Willats, Concept Frames through Time, 1976  63 3.6 Street in Perivale, London, UK  65 3.7 Stephen Willats, From a Coded World, 1977  66 3.8 Stephen Willats, Sorting Out Other People’s Lives, 1978  71 3.9 Bothnia and Tunis House, Ocean Estate, London, UK  73 3.10 Stephen Willats, Inside an Ocean, 1979  75

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4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 4.14 4.15 4.16 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11 5.12 5.13 5.14 5.15 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

ILLUSTRATIONS

Stephen Willats, Control Magazine issue 10 (1977)  81 View of Kennet House, Church Street Estate, London, UK  82 Stephen Willats, The Ideological Tower, 1977  84 Skeffington Court, 1974, Hayes, London, UK  86 Skeffington Court tower behind low-rise estate buildings, 1974  87 Stephen Willats, Vertical Living, 1978  88 Brentford Towers, Green Dragon Lane Estate, London, UK, Max Lock and Partners, architects, 1967–71  93 View of Harvey House, one of Brentford Towers, Green Dragon Lane Estate, London, UK  94 Stephen Willats, Brentford Towers, 1985  95 Stephen Willats, Brentford Towers, 1985  96 Stephen Willats, Control Magazine, 1990  100 Stephen Willats, Multi-Storey Mosaic, 1990  101 Martha Rosler, Brunch à la Loft, from the series The Rewards of Money c. 1987–8  103 Stephen Willats, Personal Islands, 1993  106 Kelson House on the Samuda Estate and Top Mast Point on the Barkentine Estate, London, UK  107 A view similar to that which Willats included in the booklet accompanying Personal Islands  109 Stephen Willats, Working within a Defined Context, 1978  116 Stephen Willats, Living with Practical Realities, 1978  121 Skeffington Court tower, 1974, Hayes, London, UK  121 Stephen Willats, The Lurky Place (Lisson Gallery, 1978)  123 Stephen Willats, Pat Purdy and the Glue-Sniffers’ Camp, 1981  125 A view of Avondale Estate, Hayes, UK  126 Stephen Willats, The Kids Are in the Streets, 1982  127 Three of Brandon Estate’s six eighteen-story tower blocks, London, UK  128 Stephen Willats (Leigh Bowery) What Is He Trying to Get At? Where Does He Want to Go? 1984  129 Stephen Willats, Intervention and Audience  130 Farrell House, London, UK  131 Stephen Willats, Preparatory worksheet for (Leigh Bowery) What Is He Trying to Get At? Where Does He Want to Go? 1984  134 Stephen Willats, Brentford Towers, 1985  136 View of Fenton House on Heston Farm Estate, near London, UK, from adjacent parkland  138 Stephen Willats, Private Journeys, 1994  139 Stephen Willats, The Transformer, 1997  146 View of Oxford Circus, the endpoint of Stephen Willats’s Freezone, 1997, London, UK  149 Installation of Freezone at daad galerie, Berlin, December 2014  150 Stephen Willats, Freezone, 1997  150

ILLUSTRATIONS

6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 6.10

Stephen Willats, Creativeforce, 1998  153 Stephen Willats, Changing Everything, 1998  157 Stephen Willats, Macro to Micro, 1998–2000  159 Stephen Willats, Oxford Community Data Stream, 2013  161 Stephen Willats, Data Stream Portrait of London, 2012  164 Stephen Willats, People in Pairs, 2012  165

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PREFACE The Center for Artistic Activism released a report in 2018 about the challenges of a “hybrid practice combining the emotional affect of the arts with the instrumental effect of activism.”1 I’m an art historian and also the child of social activists; for decades, I have focused on the challenging intersection of art and activism, compelled to identify approaches that effectively combine aesthetics and social impact. The projects of Stephen Willats thus caught my wholehearted attention when I first learned about them in 2003. What he called his “project works” were (usually) sited outside of galleries and museums in housing estates and economically marginalized communities, often cocreated with residents in the host communities, and were powerful interventions in urban spaces and social structures. My interest in his art in its specific architectural and urban settings developed into broader inquiries about municipal housing policies and city design, as well as work by other artists. I wanted to understand Stephen’s process in implementing his projects, but I also had to understand their political and artistic contexts. Time, place, and systems inflect the concepts, perceptions, forms, and activities of art. Stephen himself was concerned with regulatory systems, self-organized responses to those systems, and the roles of the artist in instigating changes to dominant systems. In exploring aspects of control—cultural, institutional, governmental, and physical—Stephen has used many media across various locations, with different audiences over his long career. My consideration of his art, however, is incomplete because of my primary interest in artistic activism. My politics and values spurred my research about his work over the years while at the same time they created a wedge between us because Stephen objected to how I presented his work. His commitment to controlling the narrative about his work and my own commitment to a narrative that was independent of his control mean that this book does not include any images of Stephen’s work. Stephen and I have engaged in a push-pull that has been instructive over the years, which I loosely recreate below. ME: I want to write about Willats’s art in historical context, while acknowledging that my understanding is partial and in process. WILLATS (to Michael Stanley in 2007, thinking back on the 1960s and early 1970s): “You begin to think that there’s no reason for a work

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of art to owe anything to what has gone before. It is more relevant to start looking around to see other disciplines in society that are about developing new concepts and modus operandi in communication. . . . You create a new territory, a new ‘cognitive’ territory for people.”2 ME: But even those other disciplines exist in time; historiography matters because “new” is relative. The territory needs context. WILLATS (telling me about a radio broadcast of Stephen Hawking’s Reith Lectures): “Time is meaningless. There is no past.” The late Hawking noted: “If the predictability of the universe breaks down with black holes, it could break down in other situations. Even worse, if determinism breaks down, we can’t be sure of our past history either. The history books and our memories could just be illusions.”3 ME: Cosmology is concerned with origins and change, too, though on a scale that I have trouble imagining. I’m more than willing to consider that history books are illusions, but, still, real people exist(ed) in real places, and often suffer(ed) and die(d) in those places, in part due to historical constructions that demonize, oppress, and exploit individuals and groups. Their lives were and are not illusions. This hypothetical conversation indicates some of the tension that Stephen and I have experienced as I tried to write this book. We are only nine years apart in age; his life started during the Second World War in London and mine a bit later in the United States, during the Cold War, in Seattle, Washington. I insist on acknowledging our situatedness in the past and the present—both physical and social—because I believe it is integral to our work, his art-making and my writing. Stephen and I resolved some of our differences, compromised on others, and remained at an impasse regarding image rights. In this preface, I briefly outline the history of our interactions, touch on the negotiations between us about reproducing images of his art, and offer a guide to visualizing his work in the absence of illustrations. Stephen and his wife Stephanie have been alert gatekeepers of his information and images. In the years between 2003 and 2016, they allowed me into their homes and studio, fed me, sat for interviews, shared documents and art in their possession, and walked and drove around with me. I felt that they were genuinely supportive of my publication effort, and I did my best to compensate them for their time and attention. I remain grateful for the years of my engagement with Stephen and Stephanie Willats. I deeply appreciate Stephen’s project works and the ideas that drive them.

The Paradox of Control4 While I would prefer to have an illustrated book, since Stephen has denied me permission, I now have more control over my own text. This is a

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paradox: by giving up on the illustrations, I gain more say in my writing. Writing history is always in revision and under debate; what follows is my version of this book’s trajectory. On November 21, 2012, in response to my publication in Information & Culture5 on some of Stephen’s work, he sent a laudatory fax to me, which in part read: The more people that read your text, the more people there are who love it, at least over here in the UK. . . . Think about a book. There could be someone over here interested.6 A book on Willats’s art aligned with my interests, and so I continued my research and grant-writing. I sent out book proposals in 2015 and received a book contract early in 2016. By March 2016, I returned to London to finalize my manuscript, having written and received grants to pay Stephen modest fees for rights and reproductions. I never pretended that my funds would fairly compensate him, but for a time he seemed willing to accept what I had to offer. I resisted Stephen’s oversight of my writing, but I did relent that spring and provided a draft for him to read since he refused to provide images unless he read what I wrote. Stephen did not like the version that he read and denied permission to use his images for illustrating the book; his gallery, Victoria Miro, communicated this decision to me in August of 2016. Stephen’s gallery then became my liaison with Stephen. While I have not spoken directly to Stephen since May of 2016, the staff at Victoria Miro Gallery were patient and professional as Stephen and I struggled to come to agreement. Regarding that 2016 draft, Stephen’s comments on it emphasized that his artistic practice was not social science or urban planning; the comparisons I made between his work and that of sociologists and planners seemed to irritate him. He also did not appreciate that my text associated his work with networked games or art curation. I welcomed his factual corrections and took his objections seriously, changing emphases to try and better represent his intentions. In the initial draft that he read, I tended to instrumentalize his projects. For example, when I wrote that Willats “create[d] new ways to engage with regulations or ad hoc schemes in order to amplify the needs and desires of ordinary individuals living within controlled settings” in that early draft, he wrote in the margin, “not the aim at all.” While challenging housing policies may have been a consequence of Stephen’s work with tenants, I acknowledge that this was not his motivation. In February 2017 my editor suggested that we proceed with the external reviews of my manuscript and see how the image permissions might sort out in the process. By December of 2017 I had the reviews in hand and began another revision. At the suggestion of the external readers, I included more discussion of British artists to provide context for Stephen’s work, along with further focus on early cybernetics in Britain. These comparisons

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illuminated some of the cultural and technological changes that occurred during the course of Stephen’s career. The editor approved my revised draft for copyediting in April 2018 and suggested that we send the manuscript to Stephen one last time after copyediting. She sent it to him via his gallery in June 2018, asking for a reply about the image permissions by August 2018. Victoria Miro Gallery forwarded Stephen’s reply in August of 2018, with his conditions, which included permission for “most” of the illustrations, but only as a printed version, no e-book. My contract specified an e-book; e-publications are a key part of many publishers’ business models, including Bloomsbury’s. My editor explained that fact to Stephen to see if there would be any room to negotiate. By July 2019, his gallery told us that Stephen was “still not confident with approving the text” and thus would not proceed with image permissions. While the second reading by Stephen was more favorable, he felt that my book didn’t recognize sufficiently the wide range of his practice; he indicated that my focus on cybernetics was limiting. He believed I had missed the mark in mentioning certain artists and not others, as well as misrepresenting what was and was not “punk.”7 While my emphases may not be to Stephen’s liking, I have been reassured that my analyses have validity by the 2019 publication of the catalogue, Languages of Dissent, in which curator Heike Munder noted that “[t]he thematic foci of Willats’ art—architecture, suburban housing developments, subcultures, (cybernetic) systems of communication—are directly linked to this interest in counterconsciousness and flow from his genuine curiosity about the ways in which society and its frameworks of power operate.”8 I know that I am not alone in the art reproduction quandary: other writers and editors have encountered similar difficulties. For example, on the third try, art historian Steven Nelson published his essay on artist Deana Lawson’s work in Hyperallergic, but without the accompanying images because she would not allow them to be reproduced with his article. In recounting his hurdles, Nelson rhetorically asked: “Do artists understand the clear benefits of myriad views of their work?” He cited another relevant instance: A wonderful case in point is Michael Lobel’s essay on Richard Prince’s early work. Not acquiescing to Prince’s disavowal of his early production, the art historian wrote the piece he wanted to write, and the Neuberger Museum, which published the catalog, supported Lobel’s endeavor. The final essay appears with holes where the artist’s images would have been. We should do things like this more often.9 Following up on Nelson’s account in Hyperallergic, artist and writer Dushko Petrovich held conversations related to [t]he problems that Nelson names explicitly—image rights acquisition, gallery or estate interference, editors withdrawing at the last

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minute. . . . [T]he impact of these factors on art history and criticism is at once significant and difficult to measure or reproduce because it consists of things that don’t get published [emphasis in original]. Appearing in Art Journal Open, Petrovich’s article presented interviews with those involved in the Nelson/Lawson “situation” (as he called it) who agreed to talk with him; the artist Lawson and one publication did not respond to his request. Petrovich quoted an editor: “[H]ow many academics do I know who have had to show artists their texts before they even agree to provide an image? That’s a problem, in my opinion, if we are going to really foster conversation around art.” In his interview with Petrovich, Steven Nelson affirmed: [T]he artist should not have the final say on the writer’s creative work—I feel that way about editors and presses as well. There has to be a moment at which we start letting go. . . . One of the big ramifications is that writers become timid when writing about an artist that they think is going to be difficult. Or they decide not to do the work at all. So, in essence, it has a chilling effect on the field.10 I profoundly regret that Stephen Willats has refused permission to reproduce his artwork in these pages. I believe my text still is useful and that my reference photographs provide some helpful context. My photographs of buildings mean that the book’s visual takeaways are largely architectural, without the balance of Stephen’s art works. The framing and angles that I used in documenting the sites are unlike the careful composition and lighting of Stephen’s photographs. As book publishing undergoes seismic shifts on digital platforms and upheavals in marketing practices, this volume represents a hybrid form, with a fair amount of Stephen’s work visible online. In the gray boxes where his images would have appeared, I have indicated a couple of places where reproductions have been published and a link or two to view the work online. Since link rot is a real possibility, though, you the reader can use the internet to customize and complement this text, even watching videos that capture some of Stephen’s works far better than still images. Unfortunately, some of the works I discuss are not available online or in print. For example, I would have liked to reproduce some of the preparatory drawings that have never been published, but I have described them verbally. There are extensive resources on “fair use” of reproductions, and I did consider arguing that approach for each of the eighty-five images by Stephen that I had hoped to use. Since Stephen has explicitly denied me permission, however, I do not want to be challenged in court, incurring even more expenses in the process.11 Stephen’s control over his work and his legacy means that he determines who can and cannot legally publish reproductions

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of his art. This is as it should be: artists must benefit from their ideas and imagery, which often have been created at great personal cost. Stephen has used an idea from chaos theory, a “strange attractor,” to describe the partial view that we each have of processes occurring around us.12 We rarely observe an event at its origin or at its completion. All that we have control over (and even that may be an illusion) is the quality of temporary interaction. This book, then, is an ephemeral offering within an elusive whole. I invite you to engage with it in the changing context of art scholarship. It is informed by my relatively brief encounter with Stephen and Stephanie Willats, which has left me puzzled and seeking further understanding.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This publication is about interrelated systems and ways in which artists can and do help us understand them. You might say the conceptual spine of this book is supported by the interactions of artists and systems, in which a self-selected, place-specific audience shapes art within structures instigated by an artist, in this case Stephen Willats. I owe both Stephen and Stephanie Willats thanks for the quantities of time they offered; their patience with me; the delicious home-cooked meals, many phone calls, faxes, emails, film screenings and introductions; and their willingness to let me intrude multiple times into their private spaces. The process has humbled me. Who I am and where I went changed quite a bit in the years during which I worked on this book. Since I began my research in 2003, it is with trepidation that I recreate my paths in order to thank so many who helped me. Landing in London knowing no one during that first research trip has turned into a fantastic group of friends interconnected across the UK and my home in central Illinois. With all my heart, I am so grateful! Initial research funding from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (2011) enabled me to conduct archival research in Edinburgh. The Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Bristol (UK) hosted me in March and April of 2014 as a Benjamin Meaker visiting professor for the Colston Research Fellowship, and thus I had substantial research time in London before and after my fellowship in Bristol. My participation in the University of Bristol’s grant-funded “Productive Margins: Regulating for Engagement,” with the support of Angela Piccini and Morag McDermont of the university, and Penny Evans and Carolyn Hassan of the Knowle West Media Centre, was transformative for me.1 I would not have met Angela, Penny, Carolyn, Keri Facer or Wan Yee, and other fantastic people in Knowle West (south Bristol) and in Bristol without Suzanne Lacy. Suzanne continues to be a compass for my work. Financial support from the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant Program (2015) and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (2015) made travel and long stays in England possible. A publication grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (2018) partially supported this book. To the staff and reviewers for those programs, your hard work is much appreciated. My initial London foray in April 2003 was limited to a small hotel on Sussex Gardens, near Paddington Station, and Stephen Willats’s studio.

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For most of my subsequent trips, the Penn Club on Russell Square was my home, near the British Museum, the British Library, Friends House, and the tube. Having been born and raised a Quaker, the Penn Club was a welcome and familiar haven for me. Given how often I got ill while in London, I am grateful for the staff’s patience with my incessant coughing, feverish searches for tea and soup, and requests for extra pillows. Many other gracious people have hosted me: Marilyn Booth, who left the University of Illinois for the University of Edinburgh, and cooked, walked, and talked writing with me throughout my lengthy stay in Edinburgh, and then again served as my tour guide in Oxford; Kenny Cupers, who left the University of Illinois for Berlin and was a fantastic host during my time in December 2014 in that city; Onni Gust, who left a postdoctoral position at the University of Illinois for the University of Nottingham and opened their home to me as I explored Nottingham; Caroline Haythornthwaite in London, while she was on sabbatical from the University of Illinois; and Andy Pickering and Jane Flaxington, who left Illinois for Exeter, were delightful company when I visited them. Lest you think everyone has left the University of Illinois (and sometimes it does seem like a transit hub), there are still amazing colleagues and friends in Urbana-Champaign who have listened to, cajoled, advised, and prodded me along the way. I learned about Willats’s work in 2000 from Anna Callahan, a former graduate student in art at Illinois. Ryan Griffis encouraged me to apply for the Art Writers grant from Creative Capital, with Sarah Ross backing him up; I never, ever, would have considered doing that, and then I got the funding! Ryan Griffis along with Kevin Hamilton, Nicholas Brown, and Sarah Kanouse were leaders in the Critical Spatial Practices Reading Group (2006–8) in which I participated, partially supported by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. That stimulating and exciting series of discussions and events built on previous campus-wide work, including “Walking as Knowing as Making,” organized by Nicholas Brown and Kevin Hamilton in 2005.2 These artists have enriched my scholarship immeasurably—it was through them that I met Hamish Fulton, Andrea Phillips, and Jane Rendell, for example—and they continue to expand my thinking. At the end of that decade, due to these collaborations, I connected with Aaron Levy of the Slought Foundation, who is a phenomenal inspiration in using culture for social change. Veronica Paredes, formerly of Media and Cinema Studies and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Amy Powell at the Krannert Art Museum, and Melanie Emerson, formerly of the Ricker Art and Architecture Library, while newer connections, quickly earned my gratitude for showing interest in this project. Other colleagues at Illinois (or once at Illinois) who have been part of generative conversations about cybernetics, libraries, social practice, and science and technology studies have my thanks, alphabetically: Kathryn Anthony; Alistair Black; Jennifer Burns; Anita Chan; Lisa Fay; Les Gasser; Maria Gillombardo; Jeff Glassman; Dianne Harris; Jamie Hutchinson; Emily Knox; Lilah Leopold;

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Jerome McDonough; Cynthia Oliver; Judith Pintar; Stacey Robinson; Kristin Romberg; ElizaBeth Simpson, who introduced me to Lee Worden, among other actions; Amita Sinha; Dan Tracy and the University Library staff who make incredible resources so readily available; Michael Twidale; the University of Illinois Archives, which holds the Heinz von Foerster Papers; Kristina Williams; and Hallie Workman. A number of these scholars have participated along with me in interrelated research clusters: Learning to See Systems and Recovering Prairie Futures (the latter led by Anita Chan and Mike Twidale, and then Chan and Emily Knox).3 The Special Interest Group: Computers, Information and Society (SIGCIS), affiliated with the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), has been a forum for me since 2010 when I presented work about Willats. In 2011, the fourth international conference on the histories of media art, science and technology, ReWire, in Liverpool, and a panel at the College Art Association in 2017, provided other opportunities for me to share my research. Many thanks to the organizers of those convenings. Omar Kholeif, now director of Collections and senior curator at the Sharjah Art Foundation in the United Arab Emirates, was a key leader of the ReWire conference through the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT); I have been so pleased to follow his stellar career, with dialogue along the way. Due to the ReWire conference, Bill Aspray contacted me and subsequently published my article in 2012 on Willats’s work in Edinburgh in Information & Culture, which he edited at the time. Joseph Heathcott, whom I first met virtually through the urban history listserv, H-Urban, has been an important interlocutor over the years. Thanks to him, I was able to publish an essay, “Critical Spatial Practices in US Cities since 1960,” in his edited volume, which explores some US examples of issues I tackle in this book.4 Online networks in addition to H-Urban and SIGCIS have been crucial emotional and intellectual support structures for me, especially the FemTechNet collective. This amazing and distributed group of scholars has sustained me since 2013. Serving as a co-facilitator of FemTechNet in 2014– 15 with Elizabeth Losh and Lisa Nakamura was deeply important for me. Unwilling to overlook someone from FemTechNet, I won’t list all the people who have grieved and laughed with me, challenging me on numerous levels. As the manifesto notes, “we are cyberfeminist praxis.”5 In the UK, Emily Pethick, former director of the Showroom in London, has been a stalwart in all things Willats; I can’t thank her enough. Andy Pickering, from Urbana, Illinois, to Exeter and in-between, has fortified and inspired me with his advice, his letters of support, and his own writing and research. In addition to those I have already mentioned, the archivists, librarians, curators, and scholars working on and with this urban and cultural material have been generous and responsive. Thanks to cultural historian Stephen Bann; historian John Boughton, who writes the Municipal Dreams blog; Hannah Brignell, curator of the Ruskin Collection and Visual Art at the Graves Gallery, Sheffield; Andrea Cameron, Hounslow Central Library

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(retired); Ben Campkin, director of the Urban Laboratory at University College, London; Tamsin Clark of Tender Books; Tim Craven, Southampton City Art Gallery; Simon Cutts, Coracle Press; artist Peter Dunn; Francesca Franco, author of a book about Ernest Edmonds, among other scholarship; Chris Gitsan, Middlesbrough Central Library; Adrian Glew, head of the Tate Archive; Gustavo Grandal Montero, librarian at the Chelsea College of Art; Ann Greene, Hounslow Central Library; London-based independent curator Hannah Redler Hawes; art historian Jane Kelly; Nicholas Lambert, chairman of the Computer Arts Society and head of research at Ravensbourne, London; artist Lorraine Leeson; George Mallen, co-founder of System Simulation; James Marshall, Chiswick Central Library; Anna McNally, assistant archivist, University of Westminster, London; staff at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art—Chloe Lawrence, Janet Hinchliffe McCutcheon, Claire Pounder, and Helen Welford; Jill Morgan, dean of the School of Design, Culture & the Arts, Teesside University; staff at the Museum of London Docklands; Matt O’Dell, archivist and registrar at Lisson Gallery, London; Elaine Penn, university archivist and records manager, University of Westminster; Frances Rankine, Prints and Drawings Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Jane Rendell, director of architectural research at the Bartlett School of Architecture; David Roberts, architectural history and theory tutor and Research Ethics fellow at the Bartlett School of Architecture; Colin Sackett, Uniformbooks; Alex Sainsbury, director of Raven Row gallery; staff at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Library, Dean Gallery, Edinburgh— Keith Hartley, Kirstie Meehan, Ann Simpson, and Kerry Watson; Catherine Spencer, lecturer in art history at the University of St Andrews; Mike Theis, Max Lock Centre director; Victoria Miro Gallery past and present staff— Clare Morris, Matt Price, Kathy Stephenson, Rachel Taylor, Catherine Turner, Hannah van den Wijngaard, and Isabelle Young; Jonathan Weston, Modern Art Oxford; Andrew Wilson, senior curator of modern and contemporary British art and archives at Tate Britain; and Nayia Yiakoumaki, Whitechapel Art Gallery archive. Outside the UK other scholars and artists have been supportive: Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani at the New School in New York City; Ariane Beyn, Artistsin-Berlin program, daad galerie; Los Angeles-based journalist Krissy Clark; María Fernández at Cornell University; Kenny Cupers at the University of Basel; Julieta González, chief curator at Museo Jumex in Mexico City (formerly of Museo Tamayo); Sebastian Haumann (another H-Urban connection) at Technische Universität Darmstadt and Maren Harnack at Frankfurt University who, with others, co-organized an excellent conference in 2012 in Darmstadt on community spaces, and a subsequent publication;6 independent curator Tumelo Mosaka; artist Martha Rosler; Museo Tamayo staff (I spoke there in February 2015)—Amanda Echeverria, Juan Gaitán, Tonatiuh López, Ixel Rion; Axel Wieder, former director of Index, the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation; and Los Angeles-based artist Rosten Woo.

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Remarkable people at the School of Information Sciences (iSchool) and the Center for Digital Inclusion at the University of Illinois supported my research by giving me a job in 2007, when I was about to give up on academia altogether. For their confidence in me, I thank Amani Ayad, Chip Bruce, Stephen Downie, Jon Gant, Caroline Haythornthwaite, Rae-Anne Montague, Ann Peterson-Kemp, Allen Renear, Linda Smith, John Unsworth, and Martin Wolske. Partnerships forged at the iSchool—with Sally K. Carter, Debarah McFarland, and Will Patterson—have expanded beyond that space to imagine and enact alternative futures. These visionaries demonstrate on a daily basis what leadership means: they each repeatedly show up, do the work, inspire others, and stay focused on the youth and families whom they serve. My book group—Frances Harris, Jo Kibbee, Bea Nettles, Dana Rabin, Sally Shepherd, Carol Spindel, and Karen Winter-Nelson, along with the cherished memories of Nancy Abelmann and Jane Hedges (oh, how they are missed!)—was always available and interested in the latest writing wrinkle, as was Copenhaver “Cope” Cumpston. Carol, Cope and I, longtime walking partners, discussed layouts, outlines, and responses for miles over the years. Dana and I also have covered ground on foot discussing British history, indexes, and revisions. Carol and Cope consulted with me over Skype when I hit various impasses in London and have been invaluable sounding boards face-to-face. Karen had excellent suggestions about the challenges of publishing an art book without authorized images, and her clear thinking helped me rewrite the preface. Speaking of books, the editors at I.B. Tauris were wonderful: first Baillie Card, and then Lisa Goodrum. Heartfelt thanks to them for their interest and support. That Lisa and I connected in New York City in February 2017 at her initiative pulled me out of a deeply unhappy mental trough. I am grateful to the excellent feedback from the two anonymous external reviewers of a version of this manuscript. Thanks as well to copyeditor Kate Reeves for her efficient and capable help. After I.B. Tauris was acquired by Bloomsbury Publishing, editors Margaret Michniewicz, Frances Arnold, and James Thompson inherited my book, gamely tackled my situation, capably following up on my many queries. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I worked with Alexander Highfield, April Peake, Anita Iannacchione, Barbara Cohen Bastos and Mohammed Raffi. I’m grateful to them for their efforts under pandemic conditions. David Luljak produced the index in record time, with little notice. During this book’s lengthy research and writing process, my father, Don Irish, lived with dementia and died on April 14, 2017. Despite his cognitive difficulties, he rarely failed to ask about my work on “that artist” and my progress. As a sociology professor from 1947 until 1985, and a lifelong community organizer, Dad was a large presence in my life, enacting social science daily and passionately. I hope he understood that his commitments thoroughly shaped me and often guided my choices. My sisters, Terry and Gail Irish, and my brother-in-law, Steven Budas, were devoted caretakers of

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my father, often at great personal cost. I am so grateful to them, not only for their tremendous love and sacrifice but also for enabling me to help out from a distance and during my whirlwind visits. My amazing immediate family—Reed Larson, Miriam Larson, Renner, Audrey, James, and Arthur Barsella—enfold me with tangible and intangible expressions of love and concern. I am so grateful for their care and consideration.

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Introduction New Functions for Art Practice in Society1

This book is an in-depth examination of the project works of London-based artist Stephen Willats (b. 1943).2 His goal was to connect art more directly to people, unmediated by institutions and other alienating structures. His work shaped certain kinds of audience engagement using cybernetic concepts as well as learning theories and open-ended systems. The imprecise term that Willats (and others) used to describe his projects—“social practice”— gestured toward the interactive, durational, and multimedia approaches he developed to challenge the barriers among the art world, other disciplines, and daily life. Willats’s practice spurred interchanges between art and science, providing new interpretations to the science of cybernetics; these interpretations not only informed cybernetics, but cybernetics also informed Willats’s experiments in the social functions of art. A key cybernetic idea and image in Willats’s work has been homeostasis. Homeostasis is a stable state that usually is achieved through some regulatory mechanism, such as a thermostat to keep a house at a consistent temperature. Homeostasis is also a physiological concept, as historian Ronald Kline noted: “the ability of a body’s feedback-control systems to maintain constant its blood pressure, temperature, and other vital signs.”3 The stability of embodied functions is a sign of good health; Willats viewed this equilibrium as a desirable social state as well. Throughout his career, he has experimented with aesthetic means to foster this dynamic stasis. The situations in which Willats practiced for over six decades changed, of course. Thus this book also considers some shifts in cybernetic concepts and art systems during that time. To put the point of the book as directly as possible (and to risk oversimplification), Willats contributed cybernetics concepts to social practice and social practice ideas to cybernetics. Neither of these terms wholly describes Willats’s art, but they are the focus here because they have been central to his art. Neither of these labels is straightforward, so

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explanations for each term follow, tailored to the particularities of Willats’s work. While I myself write about a single artist, Stephen Willats, my purview also includes broader relationships—between art and cybernetics, artist and audiences, among systems—while trying to manage the complexity of these interactions. A cybernetic concept that scholar Andrew Pickering has analyzed as “the multi-homeostat problem” is fundamental to my own discussion of Willats’s practice. Pickering described the multi-homeostat problem in social terms as “an indefinite number of people densely interacting with one another, creating endless possibilities, pushing them around, reacting to others, but never finding a stable configuration.”4 Pickering further articulated the challenge: “The only route to stabilization is to cut down the variety—to reduce the number of configurations an assemblage can take on, by reducing the number of participants and the multiplicity of their connections”5 By necessity, then, this book is limited, aiming to ask questions of Willats’s work that will contribute to ongoing discussions about the functions of art in society. The work is both open-ended and endless, bolstering Willats’s philosophical commitment to multiplicity and uncertainty.6

A Cybernetics Primer Cybernetics has been an important reference for Willats for nearly his entire career. While cybernetics has many definitions, a synthesis of some of these definitions might read: a cluster of concepts that focuses on how information is communicated over time and across space between and among individuals, groups, and systems (including machines). Prior to his hearing the term in 1962 in a lecture by Gordon Pask, Willats was already thinking cybernetically in the late 1950s, in terms of information feedback within environments and roles of observers in those environments. In a 1959 ink sketch (Figure 0.1), Willats diagrammed the environment that provided stimuli for artists, who produced outputs, which in turn affected the environment. This commitment to an iterative cycle that informed subsequent work, and the recognition that artists operated within an environment both that affected them and was affected by them have been consistently important in Willats’s practice. By the 1960s, Willats was working with and reading books by British cyberneticists, including Gordon Pask.7 Subsequent decades found him continuing his investigations into cybernetic ideas—stability, change, selforganization, control, regulation, and complex systems. In 2018, he created a video, “Endless,” which featured ideas of cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster. From 1958 to 2018, then, cybernetics has offered Willats vocabulary, concepts, and frameworks. This brief overview considers what cybernetics means in relation to his art, which is to say, not what cybernetics is in its many variations, but what key aspects are relevant to a discussion of Willats.

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Stephen Willats, Art Society Feedback, c. 1959. Collection of the artist. Ink on paper, 10.5 × 14.8 cm This version was published in Art Society Feedback, 137; a similar drawing from 1963 was published in Control. Stephen Willats Work 1962-69, 71.

FIGURE 0.1  Stephen Willats, Art Society Feedback, c. 1959. Ink on paper, 10.5 × 14.8 cm collection of the artist.

The ideas of cybernetics were articulated in the modern era in 1948 by Norbert Wiener, among others, for describing human control of and communication with machines; Wiener and his colleagues drew on a long history of interactions among humans and machines.8 These cybernetic concepts and methods initially were linked to military goals.9 Wiener’s formulations then were picked up by social scientists, artists, engineers, and business managers to provide new terms for practice and theory, recognizing their potential to integrate multiple systems.10 Definitions of cybernetics shifted (and continue to shift) among information and communication theories, computer science, and engineering. As with any term that defies easy definition, the ambiguities of cybernetics lent themselves to wide and sometimes unclear usage. Related ideas also were reinterpreted over time; in some circles, cybernetics and systems theory were used interchangeably. Concepts like homeostasis, control, and negative feedback were broadened by artists and social scientists far beyond military and technical contexts and applied to interpersonal situations, complex social systems, and aesthetics and ethics. Thus first-order cybernetics, that which is most closely associated with Wiener, mathematics, and control of engineered systems, branched into second-order cybernetics, the idea that we observe systems from within the systems in which we ourselves live. Second-order cybernetics particularly flourished in Britain, among psychiatrists, anthropologists, and artists who sought better ways to observe complex social structures and, in the case of artists, represent those structures artistically. In 1969, the British psychologist Michael Apter, writing in Leonardo, suggested that “a rapprochement between science and art would be beneficial to both and that cybernetics represents an ideal vehicle for such a rapprochement.”11 Many others supported such a rapprochement, adapting cybernetics to further the process. For our purposes, British artist Roy Ascott, scientists Gordon Pask, W. Ross Ashby, and Frank George, along with US-based Heinz von Foerster, are the central thinkers and writers for

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Willats’s uses of cybernetics. Willats worked directly with Ascott and Pask and knew of research by Ashby, George, and von Foerster through their many publications, conference presentations, and, in the case of von Foerster, his students. Willats and Ascott were not the only artists intrigued by cybernetics at this time. Stroud Cornock (b. 1942) recalled his 1965 encounter with Ascott and cybernetics as “both mystifying and beguiling.”12 Cybernetic experiments with human-machine interactions, behavioral controls, and uncertainty sought interconnections among multiple systems: biological, mechanical, electrical, and hybrid. For Willats, cybernetic concepts like homeostasis, control, and feedback proved generative for his art. In an interview with curator Emily Pethick, Willats recalled: In the mid 1960s I encountered the work of Ross Ashby, who developed the homeostat. His representation was a model with four nodes, totally interconnected by input-output relationships. The important thing for me was that it showed a possible form of relationships and information within society.13 W. Ross Ashby (1903–72), British psychiatrist and cybernetician, started to design and build a homeostat in 1946, with a working version completed in 1948.14 Ashby and an assistant, Denis Bannister, built it out of surplus bomb control units and magnetic potentiometers. Time Magazine claimed that Ashby called his one-off homeostat “the closest thing to a synthetic brain so far designed by man.”15 Ashby’s 1949 essay “The Electronic Brain” in Radio-Electronics stressed that feedback and flexibility were two essential aspects of this dynamic machine.16 Willats’s graphic representations of homeostasis were fundamental to his work from the late 1960s on, as discussed in Chapter 1 (Figure 0.2). His abstract representations of the homeostat depicted a flattened hierarchy that

Stephen Willats, Homeostat Drawing No. 1, 1969. Pencil and gouache on paper, 55.8 × 71.1 cm. Private collection. There are multiple versions of this image. The version I discuss was published in Art Society Feedback, p. 23; and Control. Stephen Willats. Work 1962-69 (Raven Row), 92; and online http://stephenwillats.com/work/homeostatdrawing/ (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 0.2  Stephen Willats, Homeostat Drawing No. 1, 1969. Pencil and gouache on paper, 55.8 × 71.1 cm. Private collection.

INTRODUCTION

5

continuously adjusted to changing circumstances in the environment.17 This approach readily linked to his biologically inspired ideas about mutualism within systems, symbiotic relationships that are positive (and are further explored in Chapter 3). Social exchanges involving mutuality, feedback, and self-organization were the basis for his large-scale project works. An understanding that inputs and outputs stabilize a system based on feedback informed Willats’s diagrams, which he created to represent different states in a system. These abstractions resembled those used by information theorists, semioticians, and physicists, but were developed and applied by Willats to track behavior, attitudes, and social processes. For example, in his 1961 book on cybernetics, Pask illustrated phase space and state graphs; his diagrams look similar to “concept frames” that Willats later developed. Greimas semiotic squares—a rectangle crossed by diagonals— also resemble concept frames; Greimas squares visualize relationships among contradictory, contrary, and implied elements. These diagrams point to the connections Willats saw between aesthetics and information.18 Willats’s practice does not map neatly onto cybernetic theories: his art was the driver, not the cybernetics. In 2018, Willats reflected: I did feel that there was a sort of fetishization of cybernetics from a new generation, a sort of nostalgia for something that is gone. You see, it was just a modeling tool. It was a good modeling tool, but it wasn’t a perfect modeling tool, because it was a transduction—you had to go down to go up. Cybernetics let you take a complex structure and make a simple representation.19 From “simple representation,” Willats then developed multilayered, multimedia art. While Willats suggested that cybernetics “is gone,” in fact scholars and activists, artists and scientists continue to study past applications, adapt and develop some cybernetic ideas for social change, and further artistic experiments. N. Katherine Hayles, in her 1999 book How We Became Posthuman, viewed many challenges posed to embodiment by cybernetics as instructive for how we might intervene in techno-cultural change to reclaim our bodies and our pasts and redefine our present and future.20 Andrew Pickering, in The Cybernetic Brain, as well as in numerous articles, argued that cyberneticians understood “the brain, mind, and self as performative,” always in process, and subverting divisions between mind and matter: “Cybernetics stages for us a vision not of a world characterized by graspable causes, but rather of one in which reality is always ‘in the making,’ to borrow a phrase from William James.”21 Ronald Kline’s The Cybernetics Moment pushed against the flattening of cybernetics into “an impoverished information discourse,” suggesting that we recover some of the past controversies and examine alternatives that may hold promise.22 Rather than dismissing cybernetics as “gone,” these scholars suggest that its histories offer possibilities for shaping the future. Artists and critics also

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continue to consider “waves of cybernetic discourse within conceptual, video and new media art,” as Etan Ilfeld did in his 2012 essay; in 2008, Catherine Mason provided important histories as well, in her book, Computer in the Art Room.23 Willats’s cybernetic art routed new dimensions back into cybernetics, which provided tools and models for his practice.

Cybernetics Goes Social In 1966, the Post Office Tower (now BT Tower) opened in central London as a hub for communications.24 Conceived in the mid-1950s, designed by the Ministry of Works in 1961, and completed in 1964, the abstract 77foot cylinder gave physical form to the importance of communications technology in the UK. Its radio mast supported a national microwave network for civilian and military uses. Its prominence literally broadcast information via television and telephone, making these media key aspects of mid-twentieth-century culture in the UK. Artists, Willats included, began to explore the aesthetic possibilities of connections among people and evolving media, creating contexts for interactions with electronic components, tape recorders, film cameras, and other equipment, for example. These tangible materials often were juxtaposed with discussions about abstraction and uncertainty. Cyberneticists like Ashby and Pask were convinced that many vibrant systems had much in common and each discipline could inform the other, with cybernetics providing a common vocabulary. Scholar Geoffrey Bowker wrote in 1993 that cyberneticians in the postwar period (in which Willats came of age) “argued . . . that with this new language [of cybernetics] they were breaking down the false dichotomies between mind and matter, human and non-human—dichotomies that the new information-based language would show never to have been true.”25 Cybernetics countered the “detached mind” from a “material body,” providing a model for embodied interactions with others over isolated, mechanistic procedures.26 For Willats, open-ended questions, frequent face-to-face encounters, and collaboratively produced visual art enlivened his cybernetic framework. While ample contradictory directions existed within cybernetics, Willats extended cybernetic theory to living bodies by melding embodied performance and adaptive systems in many art projects throughout his career. He rejected the military and technological fixes favored by many in the 1950s while still seeing value in the ideas of feedback, flexibility, and reconfiguration for social interactions. To Pethick in 2011 he said: I have always been interested in cooperation, a comparative critique between competition and cooperation in decision making. The languages available to me in the world of historical art were inadequate to describe

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the new reality, the new world I was encountering (late ’50s and early ’60s) that seemed to be emerging. So I became interested in languages from outside art. The emerging sciences of cybernetics and information theory were especially exciting, as were the nascent philosophies of semiotics.27 For Willats, cybernetic concepts offered a rich trove of ideas about random variables, strange attractors, systems, control, homeostasis, and feedback that spurred open-ended interactions with people and embraced uncertainty. Willats contributed to cybernetic thinking by making art that, while radically open in content, provided forms that “cut down” on the overwhelming, paralyzing variety of the multi-homeostat problem. Out of the intense wartime focus on communications and the postwar fascination with information processing in machines and humans, Willats distilled cybernetically informed art processes that still have currency.28 Working alongside and outside the technical context of much of cybernetic exploration, Willats introduced ways in which cybernetics could provide new forms to performance and visual art, and, in doing so, he altered existing art structures.

A Social Practice Primer As cybernetics has been adapted across many disciplines, concepts like feedback and homeostasis have informed new media, performance, and social practice art. Willats often described his work from the 1970s onward as “social practice,” a term that has been increasingly used in art criticism since the 1990s. Moreover, in Willats’s project works, performance was often integral to his social practice. Patrick Lichty reminded us that “live performance may have a set script, but there is a qualitative uncertainty to the interplay between the participants. This uncertainty imbues the event with a slight sense of chaos, creating an ‘unfixed’ quality to the performance.”29 This unfixed quality is the art of Willats’s cybernetic social practice: complex, indirect, adaptive, random, uncertain, and prioritizing negative feedback for stability, but remaining aware of positive, destabilizing elements. In 1850, French realist painter Gustave Courbet (1819–77) exhibited his pictures in the provinces, outside Paris and outside gallery settings. According to T. J. Clark, he displayed his large canvases Burial at Ornans and The Stonebreakers first in the seminary chapel at Ornans, then in the market hall in Besançon. He exhibited them again in a former cafe in Dijon two months later.30 By installing his work in rural spaces of daily life, Courbet pointed to an alienation of art from most people’s lives that had been increasing in proportion to the strength of galleries, academies, and officially sanctioned state patronage, centered in Paris. Courbet’s well-known actions anticipated pressing questions a century later when artists, including Willats, challenged

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the separation of art from life and worked to remedy these fissures with what they termed “social practice.” Richard Cork, writing in 1980, argued that artists had a responsibility to interact with the social world. “The great need now,” he wrote, “is to aim for a myriad [of] particularized points of intervention, rather than a grand overall strategy.”31 Willats experimented with multiple points of intervention throughout his career, including open-ended questions, interviews, workshops, displays in public libraries and shop windows, ballot boxes, and posters. Grant Kester has been a key contributor to the theorization of social practice as a legitimate and significant contribution to visual art. Kester signaled Willats’s importance early on (to a US audience, anyway) while editor of Afterimage (1990–5) in a prescient 1992 essay.32 Another interlocutor, Claire Bishop, argued that balancing the “social” and the “art” in social art practice involves not only substantive consideration of the societal context but also the artistic result.33 Shannon Jackson reflected on the “resolutely imprecise” phrase, social practice: As a term that combines aesthetics and politics, as a term for art events that are inter-relational, embodied, and durational, the notion of “social practice” might well be a synonym for the goals and methods that many hope to find in the discipline of experimental theatre and performance studies. Social practice celebrates a degree of cross-disciplinarity in artmaking, paralleling the kind of cross-media collaboration across image, sound, movement, space, and text that we find in performance. It also gestures to the realm of the socio-political, recalling the activist and community building ethic of socially engaged performance research.34 While Kester, Bishop, and Jackson are three of many critics since the 1990s to analyze social practice, way before the art world debates of that decade, Willats wrote and published Art and Social Function (1976), followed by Intervention and Audience (1986). In the latter book, he wrote: “The place of intervention itself is perceived as one of the mediums of the work”; and “what we identify as an artwork changes from being a contained object to a structured programme of events over a specific duration.”35 These two quotes underscore the situatedness of Willats’s work—the place of intervention as a medium—as well as the durational aspect in which structured interactions take place. The artist instigated a program in which participants organized their own responses to social and aesthetic systems. This mutual back-andforth within the confines of particular spaces, timeframes, and ideologies is what I investigate here. Willats itemized his approach in the early 1970s. To both cybernetics and social practice, Willats contributed an artistic examination of selforganization. He focused on human “percept” rather than “concept.”36 In other words, the cybernetic focus on learning through feedback, and

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adaptation within and among systems, gave a framework within which Willats could visualize how people’s perceptions shifted. Thinking back on the 1960s and early 1970s, Willats recalled (as I quoted him in the Preface): “You create a new territory, a new ‘cognitive’ territory for people. . . . The other [aspect] was really developing logistical frameworks which would enable this new kind of practice to take place.” This ever-adjusting balance was fundamental to Willats’s artistic models of “a culture of self-responsibility, self-organisation, rather than the transmission or a hierarchical type of culture.”37 The “logistical frameworks” that Willats designed often were inspired by control mechanisms such as the homeostat. In his 2012 book, Artwork as Social Model, Willats published “Propositions for Relevant Social Practice: From Discussions at the Centre for Behavioural Art, London,” which dated from 1972 to 1973: 1. A work of art could itself constitute a societal state, a model of 2.

3.

4. 5.

human relationships. A work of art could consist of a process in time, a learning system through which the concepts of the social view forwarded in the work are accessed and internalized. A work of art acknowledges the relativism inherent in perception and the transience of experience, there being no right or wrong[,] it taking the form of an open-ended process. A work of art operates as its own institution and as such is independent of specific art institutions. A work of art could engage anyone, being available to whoever wished to enter into its domain through embodying in its presentation the means for people to acquire the necessary language and procedures to receive and internalize its meaning.38

In 1996, in an article on his 1994 project, “Private Journeys,” Willats included two more statements that fit with those above: “The work operates directly in the infrastructure of people’s social and physical reality. The work has a definite beginning and end, its presentation and existence being of finite duration.”39 These propositions, articulated over a twenty-five-year period, provide a good basis to consider Willats’s social practice art and its development over decades: the artwork provided a context for human interaction; the artwork was a learning system in which concepts were learned over time; the artwork was open-ended and a range of perceptions and experiences were valued; the artwork existed independently of art institutions; the artwork was accessible to anyone who wished to engage with it; the artwork was integrated with people’s social and physical surroundings; and the artwork had a beginning and end. This book explores “the infrastructure of people’s social and physical reality,” in relation to Willats’s prolific science-inflected art production.

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Willats’s art, in particular, created states in which people could examine their human relationships, over time, and learn new behaviors that could alter their relationships, to each other and larger social structures. Such works of art did, indeed, operate as independent art institutions, outside the gallery and museum worlds. They “could engage anyone” and did in fact involve a wide variety of participants. That Willats’s work is socially engaged does not diminish the aesthetic power of it. I think one of the reasons that Willats’s project works hold artistic meaning is because of his “steering authorship”—a phrase that Claire Bishop used regarding another UK artist, a contemporary of Willats, David Medalla (b. 1942), but that term applies to Willats and his cybernetically inflected work as well. If Willats’s work were confined to the studio, or not involved with people as material, there would be no need to use the term “steering” to define authorship. But, in fact, steering captures the social and artistic aspects of Willats’s projects very well. Another phrase that Bishop applied to an artist, this time to Jeremy Deller (b. 1966), is “directorial instigator,” which comes close to Willats’s own descriptor, “artist as instigator.”40 In 2007 Tom Morton articulated the challenges of writing about Stephen Willats: Should the writer cast his participatory projects as a kind of shadow social history of post-1960s’ Britain (and, given his ongoing relationship with the country, of Germany too)? Should they focus on his interest in the urban and view him through the lens of town planning or psychogeography, or should they, picking up on the colour-washed photographs, directional lines and Letraset text that characterizes much of Willats’ work, explore the tensions and commonalities this suggests between the structuring of social relationships, information and form?41 I strive to be in dialogue with Willats’s projects, which means that I interact with them through my own historical, embodied self. I bring certain ideas— inputs if you will—and the connections I see may contribute to other outputs. I the author and Willats the artist are indeed parts of the systems we work within; we cannot ever know the systems fully from our situated positions. His art underscored dialogical, durational, and conceptual aspects: “The artwork becomes a social realm, a dynamic ‘symbolic world’ where the transformations in society made by the artist can be enacted and directly experienced, and the ramifications for change explored.”42 For Willats, material machines and artistic frameworks offered possibilities for social relationships.

Chapter Overview Stephen Willats has used film, collage, drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, and situations to explore human interactions as well as interconnections in urban spaces and with machines. The shifting lines

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between artist and audience dovetail with Willats’s interest in social, artistic, physical, and conceptual systems. New artist-audience configurations meant that art could exist independently of its creator(s) and did not require prior knowledge in order to make meaning. Second-order cybernetics and information theory, conceptual art, and punk aesthetics all shaped Willats’s art, which the following chapters discuss more or less chronologically. Chapter 1, “The Omnidirectional Artist,” focuses on the 1960s up to about 1970, heaving with social change and artistic experimentation. While working at two avant-garde galleries, Willats attended classes at several art schools in the London area and in 1965 started publishing and editing Control Magazine. He also created interactive installations that explored visual perception and cognitive tendencies. Willats’s use of diagrams— descriptive, prescriptive, predictive—distilled his ideas about perception and behavior, proposing possible futures. Willats’s interest in collaboration and shared authorship informed his teaching at Nottingham School of Art (1968–72), among other institutions. In Nottingham, Man from the Twenty-First Century (1971) was an early example in Willats’s practice of using social science and advertising approaches to create art in community settings. Willats’s art, in turn, provided cybernetics with new methods and media to communicate ideas. Chapter 2, “Modeling the Social,” provides contexts for Willats’s forms and projects in his expanded field of practice, outside art world institutions. During the years considered in this chapter (1972–5), Willats founded the Centre for Behavioural Art (1972–3), developed his social resource projects (1972 on), and completed and exhibited Meta Filter (1973–5), among other key works. In the social resource projects discussed here, Willats designed frameworks that enabled community members to organize interactions that would help them learn from each other and, in doing so, recalibrate and/or stabilize their situations. Across all these endeavors he asked fundamental questions about whom art should address, where, and how, and how these functions fit into society as a whole. Willats documented much of this art in 1976 in his book, Art and Social Function.43 Cybernetics, with its focus on feedback and self-organization, offered a means to diagram and imagine various aspects of art production, transmission, reception, and response. Chapter 3, “Mutually Bound,” examines what “mutually bound” means in the context of a range of Willats’s projects in the late 1970s: first, in some small-scale work and, then, in larger, urban-scaled work. Willats used diagrams to represent dominant ideologies in relation to what he called “counter-consciousness.” Modeling community networks with participants in From a Coded World (1977), for instance, offered imagined realities that challenged art and municipal institutions; using Willats’s structures, people organized themselves in new configurations. In some projects, Willats’s social art projects “bound” making and reception together within a community

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outside the art world; in other cases, Willats linked his social practice to a gallery; in yet another approach, his gallery installation invited museumgoers to respond to images of social situations. Chapter 4, “The Art of Sociotechnical Systems,” considers a selection of Willats’s projects created in tower blocks between 1978 and 1993. High-rise flats, what Willats called “icons of certainty,” rose quickly and ubiquitously in postwar Britain.44 Collaborations among Willats and residents in these ensembles revealed how they perceived their high-rise living situations and then imaginatively altered their confined spaces. Through integrating the tower block into the process of his art-making, Willats created an actual and imagined cybernetic structure that provided feedback about the building and its surroundings at the same time as the building’s inhabitants proposed new ways of living. Willats’s involvement was one means to “recalibrate” the system. Willats organized artists at the “Art Creating Society” symposium in 1990 in Oxford, followed by more projects in tower blocks in the 1990s. Chapter 5, “Creativity in Self-Organization,” considers the various ways groups and individuals in housing estates creatively organized themselves within Willats’s practice. I use the phrase “participatory reception” to describe this intertwining of art production and interaction. Seven of Willats’s works frame the discussion: Working within a Defined Context (1978); Living with Practical Realities (1978); Pat Purdy and the Glue Sniffers’ Camp (1981); The Kids Are in the Streets (1982); the portrait of Leigh Bowery, What Is He Trying to Get At? Where Does He Want to Go? (1984); Brentford Towers (1985); and Private Journeys (1994). Willats’s projects provided frameworks for tenants, for instance, to reflect on and visualize their current situations, and interact with the artist as well as their neighbors to create new artistic and social connections within bounded space. In a cybernetic schema, this process of adjustment to inputs is homeostasis-in-action, an ongoing exploration of objects, their settings and their users, how things are done, and how things might be done otherwise. Self-organization occurred independently of institutional structures, so that it also challenged the art world status quo. Chapter 6, “Open-Ended Urban Systems,” gives an account of Willats’s work on a city-wide scale. In Middlesbrough in 1997, Willats created walks and displays with residents in a city that had struggled financially for decades. In London, Willats produced a simulated walk called Freezone (1997) that promoted exchanges among the participants so that they could reach an agreement. Another simulation in Sheffield, Creativeforce (1998), was designed at the same time that Willats made Changing Everything in south London. The later photographic “data streams” that Willats created with teams revealed the multichannel lives of Londoners and other urban dwellers. Willats facilitated multidimensional thinking that aimed to expand people’s options in small, repeated increments, but his work did not offer a single-minded solution. Interested in new aesthetic possibilities available outside prescribed patterns of behavior, he stressed the adaptive and the

INTRODUCTION

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transformative in his dynamic projects. For Willats, it was not the artist’s remit to decide what these solutions looked like, but he viewed “free zones” of unscripted urban spaces as providing choices. Artist and theorist Jack Burnham in 1969 aptly described the role that artists such as Willats have taken up: “Artists are ‘deviation amplifying’ systems, or individuals who, because of psychological makeup, are compelled to reveal psychic truths at the expense of the existing societal homeostasis.”45 Willats recognized that the ever-shifting “societal homeostasis” demanded inputs from art both to transform the status quo and to spur new creations. “Deviation amplifying systems,” interveners, instigators, catalysts—there is an abundance of labels for artists who practice in the spaces among us. Félix Guattari’s words from Chaosmosis frame the importance of these artists: Our survival on this planet is threatened not only by environmental damage but by a degeneration in the fabric of social solidarity and in the modes of psychical life, which must literally be reinvented. The refoundation of politics will have to pass through the aesthetic and analytical dimensions implied in the three ecologies—the environment, the socius, and the psyche. We cannot conceive of solutions to the poisoning of the atmosphere and to global warming . . . , or to the problem of population control, without a mutation of mentality, without promoting a new art of living in society.46

14

C CHAPTER 1

The Omnidirectional Artist

Stephen Willats dates his artistic career from 1958, at the age of fifteen. From an early age he drew, constructed, wired, painted, molded, and bent material into visual work. Many artistic questions with which he initially grappled—the role of the artist in society, the relationship between art and audience—remained central to his work in the decades that followed. Of course, he and the times changed, so his responses to these questions altered as well. This chapter considers some early influences, tracing connections through Willats’s career up to about 1970. During this period he started publication of Control Magazine (1965–); gave visual form to theoretical concepts drawn from cybernetic and learning theories; exhibited his early electronic works at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art (1968); distributed his large-scale print, the Art + Cognition wall manifesto (1968); and taught at Ipswich Civic College and Nottingham School of Art. The materials and techniques that Willats used—screen prints, photocopied images, collages, electronic circuitry, lights, film, sound recordings—provided new media to cybernetics to explore concepts of feedback, self-organization, and regulation, for example. These media were created in relation to the audience; interactions with others crucially constituted the meaning of the works. Willats grew up in Ealing, just west of London. This suburb was connected to other parts of the metropolis by public transport, but itself had music clubs and art schools known for their experimentation. Using London and its environs to organize his own education, Willats went to clubs, worked at avant-garde art galleries, frequented anarchist cafes, took studio art classes, discussed philosophy with other young people, and adapted surplus electronics to activate his sculptures.1 The Ealing Club opened in 1959 and became well known for jazz and blues; there, in 1959, Willats displayed some portraits of Club visitors that he had drawn.

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Drian Gallery, founded by Halina Nalecz (1917–2008), had hired Willats as a gallery assistant in 1958, where he worked until 1961. In 1960, Willats also worked at Graphic Arts Studio in London, and there he learned about graphic design and silkscreen printing.2 Then, from 1961 to 1962, Willats worked on Saturdays at New Vision Centre Gallery (NVCG), which had been launched in 1956 by South African artist Denis Bowen (1921–2006). In the late 1950s and 1960s, both Drian and NVCG were showing abstract artists from across the globe who challenged the prevailing interest in romanticism and figurative art. In 1959, for instance, Argentine nonobjective artist Gyula Kosice (1924–2016) and kinetic artist Yaacov Agam (b. 1928) both exhibited at Drian, and in January 1961, a group retrospective of twentythree British constructivists was held there; in August 1961, Stuart Brisley (b. 1933) exhibited at NVCG.3 Of Denis Bowen and the other NVCG codirectors, Marlowe Russell wrote: It is difficult to appreciate how alienating non-figurative art was deemed to be in Britain during the postwar decades. . . . Although their role is often overlooked, Denis and his colleagues at the [gallery] made essential contributions to shaping postwar modern British art and enabling the emergence of significant trends.4 Time at these galleries enabled Willats to find mentors, read and think while awaiting visitors, and meet experimental artists, including William Green (1934–2001), who was exploring a range of aesthetic ideas and media. Willats’s interests aligned with those of the older Denis Bowen. Margaret Garlake quoted Bowen regarding the artist’s role: “The artist is no longer an outside observer of events but an active participant in the creation of them.”5 A small 1959 ink drawing in Willats’s notebook delineated his early and similar interest in the ways in which an artist actively created events: the artist exists within the environment. In turn, the environment provides stimuli for the artist. The artist then produces an output that affects the environment. The artist’s output is altered in some form and feeds back into the environment again, as well as going in a new direction. In this early drawing, the inputs and outputs were neatly and abstractly depicted as quadrilaterals; as Willats’s career matured, he realized that information flows were not linear, but omnidirectional. During quiet periods at the galleries, Willats read philosophy (MerleauPonty, for example) and learning theory. His father, Eric A. Willats, was a librarian in Islington and borrowed books for his son.6 Bowen encouraged Willats to attend Ealing College of Art, which drew a vibrant group of artists and musicians at that time, including Peter Townshend (of The Who), Ronnie Wood (eventually of The Faces and the Rolling Stones) and Freddie Mercury (of Queen), to name a few. Willats first took evening classes at Ealing with William Green (who had had an exhibit at NVCG in 1958), as well as with painter Ruskin Spear (1911–90) at Hammersmith School of Art.7 In 1962,

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Willats also took an evening class in printmaking at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in south London, with Michael Rothenstein (1908–93). He then entered the experimental Groundcourse at Ealing in 1962 for one year, on a scholarship. Art exhibits that influenced Willats that year (1962) included one of Nicolas Schöffer’s work and a display of concrete poetry at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). Ross Ashby (in 1960), Richard Hamilton, and Basil Bernstein (in 1962) gave talks at the ICA as well.8 Willats has often noted his intellectual debt to Basil Bernstein’s ideas of restricted and elaborated codes; for Willats, Bernstein’s theories provided an entry into sociolinguistics.9 In 2017, Willats recalled this time period: “The world we were living in was actually a random variable that we were creating sense from, rather than it giving us a sense [emphasis in original].” Aligned with this sense-making was an awareness of responsibility on the artist’s part to form an intent, and articulate ramifications of that intent, including how it would be received.10

Heuristic Tools on the Move In the early 1960s, Willats had a studio in Chelsea, where he produced sculptures that instantiated the learning and probability theories he had been reading about. Some of these sculptures were designed to engage the viewer in the artwork by inviting them to rearrange the pieces. “The artist,” Willats wrote in 1967, “might find his role as the programmer of areas of randomness triggering creative behaviour, the audience becoming all important and not just an afterthought.”11 Through triggering creativity, the viewer became a participant and their awareness of the work shifted accordingly. Observers of Willats’s works, such as Variable Shift Machine (1963), Shift Boxes Nos 1 and 2 (1964), the Visual Automatics series (1964– 5), and the quite lavish Visual Transmitters (1966, 1968), could explore their visual perception and cognitive tendencies. These sculptures of flashing lights, rotors, and colorful undulations caused “a perceptual reaction.”12 The “shift boxes” engaged viewers’ perceptions and behaviors, using darkness to focus attention and drawing on our inclination to create patterns, even when the signals were randomly generated. At Ealing, Willats worked most closely with tutors Noel Forster, Anthony Benjamin, and William Green.13 Only toward the end of the course did Willats develop a connection to the head of the Groundcourse, Roy Ascott (b. 1934). Ascott and Willats at this point were both interested in diagramming social structures, interactive performances, and feedback informed by multiple disciplines, infusing cybernetics with their social interests. Willats credited Ascott with his adaptation of the diagram as a means of visual communication.14

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Ascott, head of Foundation Studies at Ealing, created the Groundcourse for learning “from the ground up.” He described the two-year course as dynamic and integrative of art, science, and technology, with many visitors to the program from a wide range of disciplines. Both artists and scientists were brought in to share their viewpoints, including scientists Frank George, W. Ross Ashby, and Gordon Pask in 1963, and artist Gustav Metzger in 1962.15 The pedagogy was “based on cybernetic thinking with the emphasis on behaviour—not the object but the process, not art as a thing but art as a system which involved people [emphasis in original].”16 Ascott in 1964 stated that the viewer “becomes a decision-maker in the symbolic world that confronts him,” stressing the importance of interventions by a spectator for extending the meaning of an artwork.17 Willats explored similar ideas in his Manual Variable constructions. Pask, together with Robin McKinnonWood (1931–95), founded System Research Ltd in Richmond (a borough of London), where Willats worked part-time in 1962–3 as a machine operator and as a subject in various experiments. While experimenting with plaster shapes and blinking light boxes in the form of heuristic tools, Willats was also drawing. Emerging into adulthood in the late 1950s in London—at the same time as the city was engaged in massive rebuilding—meant that Willats had opportunities to artistically examine the tall blocks of flats (“tower blocks”) that municipalities were erecting in the postwar years. Chapman Taylor Partners’ eighteen-story Campden Hill Towers (1961) at Notting Hill Gate was erected near where Willats worked and attracted a number of graphic designers to move in18 (see Figure 1.1). This concrete frame structure, with shops on a recessed ground floor and flats above, was in an area being extensively redeveloped.19 The formal repetition of framing, the voids and solids of windows, walls and floors, and the large scale of the tower blocks rising across the city provided Willats with literal imagery that shaped the abstract concepts he was exploring formally and intellectually. Willats continued these studies of buildings for decades.20 Organic Exercise No. 6, Series 2 of 1962 is a large ink drawing on paper (Figure 1.2). The strong black lines read as building stories and bays, with thin black lines legible as fenestration. Other patterns in broad and light strokes may represent vents, louvers, mechanical structures, or balconies. The drawing is an interpretation of a high-rise structure rather than an effort to recreate an actual facade in two dimensions. The improvisational quality of the drawing is evident in the varied lines and spaces between them that set up rhythms with playful angles and atectonic forms. No one would mistake this drawing “exercise” as a portrait of Campden Hill Towers, and that was not the intention. The building’s six bays rising through eighteen stories provided lines and masses, shadows and highlights, voids and solids, which Willats used to explore with ink and paper the shapes proliferating across London. In July 1963, Willats moved to a studio in London Mews, in which he has worked ever since. In 1964, he was invited to exhibit his work at the Chester

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FIGURE 1.1  Campden Hill Towers, Notting Hill Gate, London, Chapman Taylor Partners, architects, 1961. Photo by Sharon Irish, 2016. Beatty Research Institute, a center for cancer research on Fulham Road, near Willats’s former Chelsea studio; there was a gallery inside the hospital. This first one-man show of Willats included paintings of architectural structures from 1962, his “democratic surface” drawings and a 1962 sculpture, Organic Exercise No. 1, Series 2 (forty-eight plaster blocks, wood, paint, pencil). He

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Stephen Willats, Organic Exercise No. 6, Series 2, 1962. Ink on paper, 78.7 × 53.3 cm. Private collection. Reproduced in Art Society Feedback, 255; Control. Stephen Willats Work 1962-69, 6. A related series held by the Tate Britain in London can be seen here: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/willats -organic-exercise-no-3-series-no-2-towerblock-drawing-t04106 (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 1.2  Stephen Willats, Organic Exercise No. 6, Series 2, 1962. Ink on paper, 78.7 × 53.3 cm. Private collection. wrote a statement for the catalog about these drawings, noting that they were “a form of data from which I lay the foundations for working.”21 Willats called himself a “conceptual designer” in the mid-1960s (1965–6) because his commitment to self-organization blurred distinctions between artist and audience. If the artist produced a studio work for response from a viewing audience, that would have created a distance between creator and audience that Willats was actively questioning. This experiment in labels bore witness to Willats’s uncertainty about what “artist” meant in the mid1960s. To embody this exploration of roles, Willats wore a white coat for an extended period, performing in the uniform of a conceptual designer. He also designed clothing out of synthetic fabrics in black and white and primary colors, with changeable texts, inviting people to wear dresses or jackets, for example, that they could customize with words to represent their own emotional states or ideas (Multiple Clothing, 1965ff).22 While other artists like Lygia Clark (1920–88) and Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) created wearable, interactive art in the 1960s, Willats was interested in his clothing being displayed in commercial settings, rather than in galleries or as part of art performances.23 He also created self-organizing furniture with movable segments so that users could rearrange it to suit their needs or preferences (Corree Design, 1965). That stores did not take up his clothing designs after an initial trial does not undermine his intent to move away from traditional art settings and sales. He was interested in changing the contexts for art. While Willats has often been labeled a conceptual artist, “contextual artist” is also accurate given his determination to expand the settings for art. In 1965, through graphic designer Dean Bradley, Willats was able to have a desk at Design Communications (in London).24 There he absorbed “theoretical models in advertising” and learned more about graphic design practices and publications. In addition, he studied subliminal communication in advertising using information from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising in London.25 These investigations informed his uses of social

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science methods in later projects, as well as supported the insertions of his clothing and furniture designs into commercial spaces. To Christabel Stewart, he commented: [About 1965] I began to think that art really would be social phenomena [sic], and that it would exist within the fabric of the world we lived in. So there was a sort of hiatus of thought about traditional practices and . . . an opening up of a completely new vision of how I might operate in a cultural way.26 As part of his thinking through how to operate in a cultural way, Willats continued to draw. Willats’s 1965 Change Exercise No. 13 is a compelling abstract gouache drawing that visualized cybernetic ideas about stability (Figure 1.3). The left side had ample space between the penciled edge and the beginning of the five columns of six rows of rectangles in black, white, blue, red, and green. The bottom of the grid had a narrower margin marked by a straight pencil line, with sufficient space for Willats’s signature. The top and right sides of the grids, however, were truncated as if they were sliding into an invisible field outside the frame. Movement was implied, too, by red triangles that seemed to shift positions as they led the eye to the right side of the composition, and blue triangles that became solid blue figures along the top. This drawing was one of a number of two- and three-dimensional works from the mid-1960s that visually explored multiple directions in systems, where a variable would change from version to version, in relation to inputs, and encourage a multiplicity of perceptions.27 By the mid-1960s, Willats had connected with a group of men about his age in Cambridge who shared interests in philosophy, mathematics, and the arts. These men, Stephen Bann, Philip Steadman, and Mike Weaver, coedited a magazine called Form between 1966 and 1969. The ten issues of Form focused on concrete poetry and kinetic art; Steadman, who trained

Stephen Willats, Change Exercise No. 13, 1965, 50.8 × 52.1 cm. Pencil and gouache on paper. Victoria Miro Gallery. This drawing can be viewed here: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/stephenwillats-change-exercise-no-13 (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 1.3  Stephen Willats, Change Exercise No. 13, 1965, 50.8 × 52.1 cm. Pencil and gouache on paper. Victoria Miro Gallery.

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in architecture, designed the publication in a square format with Helvetica font, and Bann translated the many avant-garde texts that they published.28 In 2015, poet, critic, and historian Stephen Bann (b. 1942), who has been a sympathetic critic of Willats since the 1960s, recalled that he and Willats likely met through Frank Popper, who was working on a book on kinetic art and included Willats in his book.29 These interdisciplinary, collaborative, and open-ended efforts—in philosophy, graphic design, clothing, furniture— were representative of the mixed milieus that Willats sought. As Emily Pethick documented from Willats’s diaries in 1965, many visitors arrived at his London Mews studio, to discuss pedagogy, the roles of art and artists, fundamental ideas, and curating.30 Among Bann’s first publications was Four Essays on Kinetic Art (1966), which was cowritten with Reg Gadney (b. 1941), Frank Popper (b. 1918), and Philip Steadman (b. 1942).31 Willats was frequently grouped with kinetic artists early on, given his three-dimensional, motorized works from the 1960s. The Four Essays volume included a number of artists important to Willats’s own investigations: Yaacov Agam, Frank Malina, and Gustav Metzger, to name three. Bann was already working with Popper; Popper’s interest in Roy Ascott provided a likely further connection to Willats since Willats and Ascott were briefly colleagues. Popper discussed Willats in his Origins and Development of Kinetic Art (which Bann translated from the French in 1968). In that volume, Popper wrote: Steve Willats . . . regards the use of artificial light primarily as a means of isolating sets of stimuli. “Darkness does this most conveniently,” he writes, “and enables me to keep my stimuli constant.” Willats is particularly concerned with the relationship between artist and his environment, and with the connections between artists and the “control mechanisms” of society. He sees the art object as a means of communicating a particular set of ideas: the observer is placed in a situation where he can identify with an omni-directional object and so temporarily achieves this state himself. When the observer thus becomes an integral part of the object, the artist is able to isolate certain stimuli and so provide a controlled reference frame in constant movement, which the observer is obliged to follow.32 In an unpublished paper that Willats wrote in 1966, “Mechanistic Crisis: An Examination into Tolerance Levels in Society and Its Application to the Transmission of Information,” he discussed a crisis in what he termed “unidirectional thinking”: What if I operate outside the prescribed pattern of behaviour? [T]hen I call this omnidirectional. Omnidirectional thought can take the assumption and use it, for it is non-mechanistic. It is unpredictable. . . . I become four dimensional as it were to the unidirectional progression. . . . When this

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kind of behaviour comes into contact with unidirectional behaviour it is subversive as it involves revolution and would mean total reorganization.33 This unpredictability was both a puzzle and an inspiration in Willats’s practice. Having discussed random variable theory among the group in Cambridge, and then explored the ideas further with William Green at Ealing, Willats became intrigued with the predictability of people’s behaviors in museums and galleries. He created a number of works, including the Manual Variable constructions, which countered the passivity of viewers by inviting them to move parts of his sculptures into new configurations.34

Control Magazine35 Willats has been (and continues to be) a prolific writer, publishing his ideas in varying formats, from manifestos to books.36 His ten artist’s books often were thoughtful combinations of text and image, evoking sounds and textures in relation to the photographs.37 For nearly every one of his social projects and exhibits, he published an essay or guidebook to extend the work in time and place. Often these publications included short essays by critics or other artists in addition to an interview between Willats and a curator. These productions overlapped somewhat with the gallery and museum catalogs for his many solo exhibitions, which frequently included a compilation of Willats’s writings, interviews, and related projects. From early in his career, Willats also published in high-profile art publications such as Studio International and Flash Art, as well as in smaller journals related to photography or art education; he published in the multidisciplinary Leonardo and New Scientist and the multimedia Audio Arts. As publisher and editor of Control Magazine since 1965, he created and nurtured an expanding network of artists who wrote about their practices in relation to society and included his own articles. Finally, in addition to artist’s books, project-related booklets, exhibition catalogs, articles in Control and professional journals, Willats published ambitious collections of his projects and interviews with his documentation and research. The endnotes in these books are a good indication of what he was reading and with whom he was discussing the theories and applications expressed in his work.38 Repeatedly he has noted that theory must precede and inform practice.39 Willats started Control Magazine to consider new functions for art practice in society.40 He has self-published Control continuously since; its contents and appearance were and are rigorously curated by him.41 He ultimately selected the title to address coexisting concepts that were in tension: hierarchical “last century thinking” and cybernetic self-organizing.42 In Control, Willats invited a wide array of artists who were exploring combinations of psychology, sociology, advertising, cybernetics, planning, and visual arts. He participated in forging “lateral connections . . . between

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Stephen Willats, Control Magazine issue 3 cover, 1967; published in a run of 650 copies. Tate Library, London, UK. Reproduced in Control. Stephen Willats Work 1962-69, 32. All Control covers are visible here: https://www.controlmagazine.org/issues (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 1.4  Stephen Willats, Control Magazine cover, issue 3 (1967). Tate Library, London.

previously separated disciplines and exclusive hierarchies of information,” an approach that he credited to Edward de Bono (b. 1933), who coined the term “lateral thinking” and authored a 1967 book of the same name.43 The first issue of Control was published with no address, date, or editor; it was a “free-floating” entity.44 Once he had faced some legal issues in relation to its anonymity, Willats published his editorship and address, but philosophically he intended Control to remain unattached to him personally. The production values of Control were more like books, as Willats used glossy paper and his own, screen-printed cover designs (following issue 1, designed by Dean Bradley). Its seriality was not so much an indication of its ephemerality as of an ongoing examination of the changing art world, including its distribution networks. Issue 3 of Control (Figure 1.4) was based around the idea of making a magazine interactive.45 Contributors—including Archigram, Joe Tilson, Peter Stroud, and John Latham—were asked to present work that involved the reader in an active way, such as questionnaires and other formats that requested a response. Work included by Noel Forster and John Sharkey had movable parts. Antony Hudek’s excellent essay on Control noted that the magazine “sought to move beyond any strictly defined category of artmaking,” serving as a mobile node that was omnidirectional.46

Homeostat Diagrams In 1969, Willats created a drawing of what he called a homeostat, which visually represented this idea of omnidirectionality in a flattened hierarchy. The image and idea of a homeostat were aspirational: Willats’s art aspired to social stability and equality. The image has remained fundamental to him through the decades; he often installed the image as a wall drawing in exhibition spaces. Willats’s 1969 pencil and gouache drawing is a

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small, two-dimensional rectangle with squares delicately delineated in light graphite over a gray wash. Arrows point to and from all four sides of all of the visible squares.47 The edges of the paper cut off some of the squares, implying that we are looking at an indefinite field of interconnected squares. The freehand rendering results in slight variations of line length and spacing between squares. Stare at the drawing long enough and the eyes animate the drawing; the squares seem to lift off the page, recalling some of the kinetic artists with whom Willats was associated.48 This perceptual animation relates to the inputs and outputs of the electromechanical homeostat, where current would adjust and stabilize after an initial excessive input. Willats acknowledged that W. Ross Ashby was a source for his thinking about homeostasis, but of course Drawing No. 1 looks nothing like the clunky equipment that Ashby built (although there is a resemblance to a diagram that Ashby published in 1954, illustrating the brain as a homeostat).49 Willats’s drawing depicts an in-process stable state, becoming a “polemical diagram,” as Andrew Wilson noted.50 Its twodimensional form aligned with the meaning of a flat social structure. The homeostat drawing also expressed the many inputs and outputs of Willats’s art in the 1960s—sculpture, electronic works that flashed lights, alterable clothing, modular furniture, paintings, printed magazines, typed manifestos, interview-based collaborative projects and readings—all underpinned by the social phenomena that animated his practice. Willats was prolific in the 1960s, as evident in the 2014 Raven Row exhibit, Control, Stephen Willats, Work 1962–68.51 Visual Homeostat (1968–9) and Visual Homeostatic Information Mesh (1969–71) used “an ultra-sonic field and photo-electric cells between” two units. As viewers approached Visual Homeostat, they interrupted a light beam, which in turn started a program that sped up the light displays. By collaborating with other viewers, observers could manipulate the sculpture and shape their experiences.52 Willats exhibited these works in group shows that were labeled “light art” or “kinetic art.”53 Curator Andrew Wilson noted that in the Barbican exhibit, The Sixties, Willats’s work was placed in several different categories, demonstrating his deep engagement with a range of disciplines and approaches but also indicating a lack of understanding about his aims. He maintained his work had nothing to do with kinetic art, but rather was “pragmatic, functional,” in the sense that he made heuristic creations that fostered learning.54 The first complete presentation of the works from this period—including Shift Boxes, Visual Automatics, and Visual Transmitters—was held in 1968 at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford. Willats had contacted the then-director, Trevor Green, with a proposal for an exhibition; the Oxford exhibitions director, Barry Lane, then visited Willats in his London studio and the exhibition proceeded. The floor plan was based on a maze in order to structure the viewing experience of the different works.55 When Raven Row Gallery installed these works again in the 2014 Control exhibit, they

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partially recreated the maze, so that each work was isolated in darkness from the others, increasing the impact of the viewing.56 The large interactive sculptures that followed were expensive to create and difficult to design; Willats had the theoretical ideas but needed help with the engineering because the hardware didn’t exist at the time.57 He met Chris Grimshaw in 1968 when his one-man show was being installed at Oxford. Grimshaw volunteered to help develop the designs, though Willats still had to build them. He recalled: “These were quite large-scale projects, and the only reason they could happen was that I had a studio at Powis Terrace. The space was over 1000 square feet so I could start to develop these major environmental installations.”58 Willats’s studio was near Powis Square in a former auto garage that was soaked with oil. Because Willats was collaborating with engineers and scientists, like Grimshaw, Peter Whittle, and George Mallen, and, by 1971, Derek Aulton, along with artists like Jack Shotbolt and Felicity Oliver, he was able to use recently developed technologies to try out his ideas.59 The electronic simulations were significant to the ways that he created his social model resource projects at about the same time (which are discussed in Chapter 2) because of participant collaborations and the role of feedback in shaping the work. Forms of electrical diagrams and concepts of sociotechnical systems that related to Willats’s electronic works continuously appeared in his drawings too, as David Mellor noted in The Sixties Art Scene in London: Willats’ diagrams of social systems in change, transcoded into the pulses and steps of brightly polychrome basic forms . . . extended his developments at the same time as his foundation and editing of Control magazine, which first firmly established conceptualist art practices within the London avant-garde.60 Stroud Cornock, a sculptor with Air Force experience in signals intelligence, taught with Ascott and Willats at Ipswich Civic College, from 1965 to 1967.61 Like Willats, with whom he shared a fascination with cybernetics, he diagrammed electrical systems in order to explore behavioral practices.62 His unrealized proposal for Gemini (1968) was a collaboration with engineer Nick Nealon. It was to feature two mechanical structures with temperature and light sensors as well as infrared beams to detect pedestrian movements through a building’s 100-foot-long concourse. In 2010, Cornock recalled that the competition judges in 1968 considered his sculptural idea without the technical design—“engineering drawings, circuit designs, safety provisions”—and that bifurcation doomed his proposal; the technical system that animated the sculpture was ahead of its time. Cornock stated that “the advent of information processing introduced the possibility of an artwork that can function as an open system: a system that initiates interactions with its environment.”63 Cornock’s unrealized Gemini was designed to respond to its surroundings, including the pedestrians moving along the open-air

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space. Willats also continued to create sculptures that responded to people in spaces, but increasingly his work directly engaged visitors by inviting them to play a game.

Cooperative Decision-Making: Visual Meta Language Simulation After his 1968 exhibition in Oxford, Willats began work on Visual Meta Language Simulation (1971–2)64 (Figure 1.5). It was a “complex electronic game for two players” that Willats constructed in consultation with the Motorola Semiconductor Company and electrical engineer Derek Aulton.65 The simulation was installed and played in the dark, with colored lights selected by the observers/players standing at two “decision boxes.” While this installation has long been dismantled (since its 1972 display at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford in Cognition Control and Gallery House/Centre for Behavioural Art), the environment that Willats created instantiated key themes for his career: cooperation, learning, and social relationships to art.66 Viewers stood at two “Decision Boxes” facing a “Problem Display,” which was a flat surface onto which colored patterns in abstract shapes were projected. Between the boxes and the display was an “Environment” consisting of sixteen light boxes, which were initially evenly divided between players. A partial pattern was projected on the Problem Display; each player would then select the best match from those visible on their Decision Box. If the first player successfully matched the patterns,

Stephen Willats, Visual Meta Language Simulation, 1971–2. Wood, Perspex, electronic components, about 244 × 610 × 366 cm. No longer extant. Installation view published in New Scientist v. 56, no. 817, p. 234; the caption has a typographical error (not “stimulation”); a diagram of the work was published in Art and Social Function, 240; a view of a screen from this work was published in Art Society Feedback, 40, and color views, 143. An overview of the work as published in Control v.6 is on this website: https://www.controlmagazine.org/vitrine/201 0/a-short-survey-of-control-magazine-19652017 (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 1.5  Stephen Willats, Visual Meta Language Simulation, 1971–2. Wood, Perspex, electronic components, about 244 × 610 × 366 cm. No longer extant.

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one of their opponent’s boxes in the Environment would be illuminated in the competing player’s color. If a player was really good at matching, their “decision possibilities” slowed down, while the pace of choices for the other player sped up, thus giving the player who was “behind” more chances. Furthermore, if the “better” player accumulated all sixteen illuminated boxes in the Environment, the color would flash so quickly that it wouldn’t register. So, “winning” wasn’t rewarded at all.67 Willats’s Visual Meta Language Simulation was published in New Scientist in 1972. That publication noted that the game worked optimally when the players cooperated: The machine therefore has two functions. First it tests each player’s power of visual imagination. There is no logical system linking the cues and the shapes: one either tries at random or has to guess. . . . The machine is also homeostatic in operation, for the odds on successive wins by one player continually decline. In a subtle fashion the game tests the willingness of the players to cooperate, for if one wants to continue playing, it is necessary to let the other win from time to time.68 To play this simulation, the users had to learn the “rules” of the work and be responsive to each other’s inputs.69 The rules, informed by game theory, meant that when the game cycle is repeated multiple times, cooperation is a reliable strategy.70 This approach of “presenting” a system to a participant and having them adapt to it and other players created a framework that could operate outside art contexts. Willats was a young man (thirty in 1973) building simulations, trying out “mental models and heuristics,” and experimenting along a continuum between the technical and the social.71 This work was an amalgam of cybernetic ideas with behaviorist theories. He viewed his constructions as tools for participants to learn about their perceptions and behaviors, using rules, language, and codes that they already knew in everyday life.

Pedagogical Processes Pedagogy drove much of Willats’s practice in these years, or, put another way, there was really no distinction between his art-making and his teaching. After the Groundcourse in Ealing was closed, Willats taught with Ascott (at Ascott’s invitation) at Ipswich Civic College School of Art from January 1965 to June 1966.72 In Willats’s Ipswich classes, everything was done as a group.73 In an undated statement he wrote after leaving Ipswich, Willats noted that he was “principally concerned with breaking down a student’s linear behaviour . . . making them aware of their relation to conditions” through various spatial exercises (such as overcrowding and isolation) that could also be expressed visually.74

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His contingent jobs at various art schools furthered Willats’s investigation of the role of art institutions in society at large. He commented to Emily Pethick in 2002: “I could see that things could be different, and one of the ways in which I thought art had to develop was in its relationship with society and its meaning in society.”75 The schools where he taught—Derby (1965, with designer Ralph Selby), Ipswich (where many of his students lived on council estates), Nottingham (1968–72), Hornsey (1969–70)—and the staff who hired him, often appreciated his novel points of view and approaches.76 There was passionate and frequent discussion during this time about the nature of art education, as evident by the 1968 takeover/ occupation of Hornsey by its students and numerous letters to the editor of Studio International about this “revolution.”77 Another example, Albert Hunt’s experiments at the Regional College of Art in Bradford in 1967, aimed to foster “cheerful and militant learning.”78 This shifting educational ground enabled Willats to create his own structures that had somewhat more leeway for open questioning of social and cultural institutions. In the mid-1960s in London, Willats met Don Mason, a kinetic artist, who alerted him to a job at Nottingham School of Art (then part of Trent Polytechnic, now Nottingham Trent University), and he was hired to run the printmaking department and teach there in 1968, at the age of twentyfive.79 Willats began commuting from London to Nottingham, a couple of hours north. At Nottingham, he continued the collaborative work with students that he had used at Ipswich and elsewhere, which went against the then-individualistic focus of art schools. The institution of the art school became the medium for a significant early work by Willats, the Art + Cognition manifesto (1968). This manifesto was printed to resemble sheets of paper in a 60 by 40 inch rectangular grid, what Willats described as “a public book, a book on a wall.”80 Mailed in tubes to about fifty art schools that offered degrees, Willats hoped that by displaying it, schools would “creat[e] a kind of climate or territory, intellectual territory, for actual actions to take place.” He noted: “Traditionally there was always an office as you walked into the college, where you had notices and things like that. And the idea was that [the manifesto] was a sort of work, but it was also to do with dissemination of information.”81 Divided into three sections—Art and Cognition, Life Support Systems, and Control— the print spelled out definitions and categories of restricted codes and elaborate codes, learning and perceiving, with statements in typescript such as: Unless the artist programmes his codes to either be elaborate or restricts his audience to people holding the same codes, or provides a means for a casual audience to attain the necessary codes (perhaps by having codes that are self-referential to the context—thus requiring learning by all) before or during this period of reception, then impossible insight is being asked of the receiver [from the lower right bottom of the grid].

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To avoid the necessity for “impossible insight,” Willats designed frameworks that used information with which the audience was already familiar or could readily learn. This manifesto was one variation on ideas he would explore with his students in the 1971 project, Man from the Twenty-First Century. In a letter in 1972, Willats elaborated on his process of working with students: he used speculative models, then reconnaissance and research involving “different kinds of data retrieval techniques”— questionnaires, in-depth interviews, photo and video documentation.82 Willats has kept questionnaires and course reading lists from this era that reveal the range of his inquiries.83 About five alphabetized pages of citations on cybernetics, psychology, semiotics, and learning science cover compliance, group performance, perception, personality, syntax, and visual forms, with publication dates ranging from the 1920s to the 1960s. Willats referred to many of these authors—Stafford Beer, Basil Bernstein, Donald Broadbent, Jerome Bruner, Noam Chomsky, James H. Davis, Frank George, Charles and Sara Kiesler, Dale Lake, Warren McCulloch, Donald McKay, Gordon Pask, and publications out of the National Physical Laboratory, among others—again and again in his own numerous publications. Of Nottingham, Willats recalled: I set up a very, very radical course, where it was based on the idea of mutuality. . . . The idea of individual authorship immediately was jettisoned and we developed the idea of a community, a consensus-type of relationship between the students and myself. He imagined starting “from zero,” inviting a group of about eight outsiders to offer varied strategies from advertising, cybernetics, learning theory, architecture, and painting to him and his students. Together they looked for “a way forward for a work of art.” He continued his reflection on his process at Nottingham: And from those discussions, various things came out: the idea of the importance of context, language, audience composition, things like that, which would become crucial elements in moving your practice beyond predictable situations, such as the art gallery. . . . So therefore reconnaissance became a very valid activity, prior to a work of art being composed.84 Willats left his tenured position at Nottingham in 1972 in what, for him, was a very painful rupture with the university administration. To Emily Pethick, he said his departure was due to “taking students from different parts of the university away from what [others thought] they should be doing.”85

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Man from the Twenty-First Century Created with his students in Nottingham, Man from the Twenty-First Century (1971) has little documentation, but Willats wrote about it most extensively in 1973 in The Artist as an Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour, and again in Beyond the Plan: The Transformation of Personal Space in Housing.86 With students, Willats canvassed two geographically and socially distinct areas of Nottingham, Bramcote Hills and Hyson Green. The project devised surveys that used photo-montaged charts—visual glossaries of signs and symbols, familiar objects, faces and hairstyles, and clothing—to obtain information from different social groups about their “leisure and shopping habits” and their “coding structures,” class-related “design preferences and aspirations”87 (Figure 1.6). These glossary-charts were derived from the local area. While Man from the Twenty-First Century was specific to its location, the communication strategies used by Willats and the students were informed by advertising and were generalizable to other environments. Nottingham in the 1970s was undergoing considerable change; Bramcote Hills was a suburb of Nottingham, just being built near a golf course, while Hyson Green was a densely populated area near the city center, with a mix of council and private terraced housing for working-class people.88 Willats mentioned that Hyson Green had “cobbled streets, long-established factories such as a brewery, and small backyard firms such as a tire repair service, garages, second-hand clothes shops, etc.” He described Bramcote Hills as comprising of “semi-detached and detached houses with openlayout front gardens and large picture windows; there is also a specially built shopping centre.”89 These distinctions among social classes were important to Man from the Twenty-First Century even as the project sought to identify some commonalties that would enable interactions among the groups.90

Stephen Willats, Man from the Twenty-First Century, shape, face, object, and clothes charts, 1971. Magazine cutouts and Letraset text on paper, each chart 63.5 × 40.6 cm. Private collection. These charts are illustrated in Art, Society, Feedback, 291–3.

FIGURE 1.6 Stephen Willats, Man from the Twenty-First Century, shape, face, object, and clothes charts, 1971. Magazine cutouts and Letraset text on paper, each chart 63.5 × 40.6 cm. Private collection.

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The project’s aim was to connect both neighborhoods via a common “meta language.” To do this, the project team identified items that already existed in both areas, asking residents what meanings and perceptions were associated with them.91 Colored, collaged charts made up of faces, objects, clothing, and shapes were used as prompts and helped discover these meanings and attitudes. Willats and his students went door-to-door between March and May 1971; initially, they found that very few people were willing to talk to art students, what Willats called “doorstep inhibition.”92 Thus they were inspired by the idea of an “ad campaign” that would use humor and performance to enlist residents in their project.93 A “Man from the Twenty-First Century” would dress in a silver space suit—complete with helmet—and appear in the participant areas in a silver time machine. The Man would “bound up to the door and knock on it,” and introduce himself as someone who “has come down to earth in 1971” to learn about their life. This “stunt” emerged in an era fascinated with the future and possibilities of space travel, as well as televised series like Star Trek (first shown by the BBC in the UK in 1969).94 Sociologist John McHale’s The Future of the Future was published in 1969;95 “Space Oddity” by David Bowie was a top hit out from Mercury Records in 1969; and Apollo 11’s lunar module had landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, an event that had been broadcast worldwide. To promote the project, posters were put up in each area, combined with advertisements in the local newspaper and mentions on the radio.96 Six canvassers performed in the “twenty-first-century man” role. This approach resulted in 95 percent response rate. Rather than inserting a fixed idea of the twenty-first century into 1971, Willats and his collaborators playfully experimented with alternative options. His futuristic man was full of questions rather than answers. Willats’s Nottingham project was entitled Man from the Twenty-First Century in order to elicit reflection from Nottingham communities about their environments and prompt speculation about the future. Questions were a means of connecting with an audience. Willats reported that “[a] large proportion of interviewees extended their answers to make elaborate maps, drawings, and writings, and this response subsequently paved the way for the use of open question techniques.”97 Lack of funding meant that the project was never completed—the two communities never came together to share a “meta language,” but the charts provide considerable information about (or about Willats’s perception of) white working- and middle-class preferences in hair, clothes, signage, and everyday objects in 1971. More importantly, by conducting interviews with individuals, the project emphasized the particularities within “audiences” and challenged the duality of artist and audience as two monolithic entities. The shape chart, with its twenty-four small squares of arrows, Xs, dots, dashes, zigzags, and circles included imagery that Willats would use in drawings and collages in subsequent decades.98 Another chart with thirtyone illustrated objects—including a paintbrush, telephone receiver, pipe,

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candle, lipstick—may have served as coded symbols or just represented ordinary activities. In his later project works, Willats used objects as conversation starters and as nodes of commonality as well as symbols of consumer culture. “The fabric of the reality we construct around ourselves in our personal and social space,” Willats noted, “is built up from objects that have a variety of functions for our own psychology and act as a means of externalising ourselves within the interpersonal networks in which we live.”99 His awareness of the roles of objects in daily life shaped many works that followed. Another aspect of Man from the Twenty-First Century that indicated Willats’s long-standing interest in the built environment was the artist’s recognition that people transformed their living quarters to reflect their values, social status, and hopes for the future. He wrote: At the time of the project, the houses of Bramcote Hills had just been completed, but already residents were customising them, layering the outside with individual elements such as Greek pillars, trelliswork or positioning status symbols such as a speed boat or a caravan in the driveway. At Hyson Green the front living-room window also played an important role, but here objects, often potted plants, seemed to have the role of keeping you out, of stopping you from looking in.100 Willats’s early art practice had many inputs, to which he responded using a variety of media, forms, content, timeframes, and interactions. In the 1960s, his focus was largely phenomenological; for example, his electronic constructions created defined situations with which the audience engaged. By 1970, Willats was emphasizing collaboration, which emerged out of his study of cognitive science. The forms he employed shifted from referring to a self-contained environment such as Visual Meta Language Simulation to interactive designs that were shaped by unpredictable and embodied elements within an abstract framework, such as group efforts in Ipswich and Nottingham. The Man from the Twenty-First Century sought to limit inputs through the use of charts and conversation in an effort to create a metalanguage that could be shared across groups. The structures from this unfinished project were important in creating Willats’s social resource projects in the 1970s, instantiating an iterative process in which lessons learned in one project fed into and transformed later projects. Cybernetic concepts of feedback, self-organization, uncertainty, and adaptation remained crucial as Willats developed social contexts that queried people’s perceptions and assumptions, prompting learning. In turn, people’s participation—their drawing, writing, movement, and oral exchanges— gave new form and content to cybernetics. By making art in relationship, with people and constructions, Willats linked material forms to imagination and transformation.

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C CHAPTER 2

Modeling the Social

Cybernetics provided a collection of terms and tools for Stephen Willats to apply in his social practice. While he had already experimented with interactive projects outside gallery settings, evident in his teaching at Ipswich and Nottingham, by 1972 he had refined a model for this approach, which he called “social resource projects” or “social model construction projects.” This work expanded his art into urban neighborhoods, away from the earlier electronic Environments and illuminated Decision Boxes. During the years considered in this chapter (1972–5), Willats founded the Centre for Behavioural Art (1972–3), developed his social resource projects (1972 on), and completed and exhibited Meta Filter (1973–5), among other key works. Across all these endeavors he asked fundamental questions about whom art should address, where, and how, and how these functions fit into society as a whole. Willats documented much of this art in 1976 in his book Art and Social Function.1 A “social resource” for Willats was tied to a particular social setting in which its members fulfilled certain of their needs. He stated that the “objective of these social interactions can vary though generally it is associated with maintaining the internal structure of a community in a harmonious state.”2 In the social resource projects discussed here, Willats’s aim was to provide a context that enabled community members to organize interactions that would help them learn from each other and, in doing so, recalibrate and/or stabilize their situations. Willats designed the framework for these changes of social states, offered concepts, images, conversations, and documents to the participants on a recurring basis and worked with them to complete a project for mutual sharing. Willats’s project works helped to shape a “set of strategies” that has been labeled “social conceptualism.”3 In contrast to the seemingly unitary modernism of the 1950s and early 1960s, Willats’s art was open, fluid, durational, process-oriented, interdisciplinary, and multimodal.

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Further, his art incorporated participant behaviors and attitudes as well as networks of art distribution, which also expanded the definitions of art and audience. Cybernetics, with its focus on feedback and self-organization, provided a means to diagram and imagine these various aspects of production, transmission, reception, and response.

Cognition Control Building on the work Willats had done with students in Nottingham and at other institutions, the collaborative, multi-sited exhibit, Cognition Control, occurred in Nottingham in January and February 1972 and, in a somewhat different configuration, in Oxford in October and November 1972.4 Issue 6 of Control Magazine documented the varied projects that Willats curated in both locations, in addition to creating his own work. Willats reported: The idea [behind Cognition Control] was to simultaneously present in the fabric of the community projects by groups of artists that intervened in people’s daily routines and life. The upshot of this was to have an effect on life in the city, so that people could actually contemplate the idea of a different cultural state, that things could be different than how they were.5 Ernest Edmonds (b. 1942), who had contributed to Control Magazine in 1971, was one of the artists whom Willats invited to participate in Cognition Control in Nottingham. Like Willats, Edmonds was interested in codes used in communication. For his contribution to the exhibit, Edmonds created a version of an experiment, Communications Game 2, which involved three participants. Edmonds had been working on this interactive project since 1971; an earlier version of it involved stations that were networked into groups of three using hardwired logic circuits that Edmonds designed and built. The initial artwork was created by interactions among two to fifteen distributed players who responded to light stimuli controlled by other players using switches. Edmonds’s interest was in the ways in which players tried to make sense of their environment using limited options at the terminals, which provided only partial, inconsistent information. This fascination with restricted codes, seemingly random light signals, and cognition paralleled Willats’s, whom Edmonds had met in March 1971 at Leicester Polytechnic at the Invention of Problems II symposium, organized by artist Stroud Cornock.6 For his own contribution to the Nottingham version of the Cognition Control exhibit, Willats created The Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs.  “I personally don’t have anything to do with tennis—never have,

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never will do,” he reflected. “But I could see that the tennis environment was interesting, because it was enclosed. It obviously had functions over and above physical exercise. . . . [T]ennis was stratified in terms of social hierarchies.”7 He chose tennis because he knew virtually nothing about it, and he wanted to be able to have sufficient distance from his focus to analyze social structures within groups.8 The “enclosed” tennis clubs gave boundaries to the “social resource” that club members used to meet their needs, whether it was for exercise, status, romance, or skill development. Although the tennis club project was never completed, many of the strategies Willats developed for it—a site-specific manual with open-ended questions, collaged posters, information feedback mechanisms for further project development—were repurposed by Willats for other social resource models.9 When Cognition Control was recreated with a new group of artistparticipants at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art in the autumn of 1972, Willats developed an entirely different project there, the Oxford Insight Development Project. Peter Ibsen, the Oxford museum director for a short time, supported Willats’s implementation of the work with “the same parameters, the same core structure . . . , but by moving it [from Nottingham] you would load it with different references.”10 In other words, the location of the social resource model—Oxford, in this case—determined what the focus of the model would be. Willats identified four areas of the city that were geographically separate but (at that time) not dissimilar— Cowley, Marston, Jericho, and Summertown—and developed collages of the everyday local environment. Participants then responded to these visual cues as a way to identify commonalities across their neighborhoods using a manual, which was handed out door-to-door and in public spaces. People reflected on their daily routines and imagined “re-modelling” their social resources; their contributions were displayed at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art. A ballot box was available at the exhibit so that viewers could vote on their preferred “re-modelling.”11 The structure of Willats’s Oxford project—linking distinct areas in and around a city, imagery collaged from the local environment, a manual, door-to-door contacts, and a feedback system in the form of a ballot box—recalled Man from the Twenty-First Century and the Tennis Club project. Other artists whom Willats invited to join Cognition Control in Oxford were George Mallen and Don Mason.12 Mason displayed collaged and enlarged photographs on billboards around Oxford depicting US troops at Kent State University in Ohio, a site of killing and injury of student anti-war protesters, and London dockworkers lobbying Jack Jones of the Transport and General Workers Union.13 Mason paired his billboard display with a slide show in the art gallery of advertisements interspersed with images of strikers and workers. Mallen, who met Willats through Gordon Pask at System Research, likely in the early 1960s (neither of them remembers exactly), exhibited Ecogame

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in 1972 in Oxford. An initial Ecogame was created by Mallen with John Lansdown and Alan Sutcliffe for the “Computer 70” exhibition at Olympia London.14 Conceived as an artwork, it was a decision-making system based on economic choices. This “model of a socio-economic system where the players represented different sectors of the economy . . . and the resource represented capital” had the goal of increasing the overall resources while preserving an equitable distribution of income among the players. The impacts of different decisions on the environment were then displayed in slides on video monitors. Groups of four people played three separate versions of the game running simultaneously in a darkened room.15 Willats’s curation of these varied interactive projects in Nottingham and Oxford spearheaded the integration of electronic arts with social practice. Willats had fruitful discussions and shared endeavors with Mallen, Cornock, and Edmonds for decades. Artists in Cognition Control provided tools—billboards, games, posters, and manuals—to engage people who may not have been interested in gallery exhibitions. The works depended on people interacting with projects and with each other, whether as passersby of provocative billboards, players of networked electronic games, or participants in a “social resource model.” This “mutualism”—a term Willats started using in 1959 to describe reciprocal and beneficial processes among artists, audiences, and environments—was a hallmark of Willats’s expanded art practice.16 Art historian Rosalyn Deutsche noted in 1985 about the early 1970s: A more decisive shift in contemporary art occurred when artists broadened the concept of site to embrace not only the aesthetic context of a work’s exhibition but the site’s symbolic, social and political meanings as well as the historical circumstances within which art work, spectator, and place are situated.17 Deutsche’s comment aligned with Willats’s own broadening of the “concept of site” in his social resource projects, as well as with the work of Hans Haacke (b. 1936) about which she was writing.

Centre for Behavioural Art Closely linked to Cognition Control, the Centre for Behavioural Art was founded by Willats in 1972 in London as an interdisciplinary think tank. He directed it for the fourteen months of its existence. The idea grew out of the collaborations in Nottingham and Oxford and involved many of the same people.18 The Goethe Institute in London had temporarily provided gallerist Sigi Krauss and artist Rosetta Brooks with several floors for an alternative art space, which they called Gallery House. They, in turn, provided the entire

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fourth floor for the Centre’s use: “We . . . didn’t pay rent or anything like that—and we just had two big rooms . . . where we could present seminars, exhibitions, meet in an informal way to set up projects.”19 Realizing that the art world did not offer the structures or tools that he needed, Willats created the Centre as a means to generate discussions and share theoretical perspectives.20 Willats’s contemporaries often studied at the Royal College of Art, the Slade School of Fine Art, or Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design, for instance, and he never did. After his brief stint at Ealing, he created structures for his own education, organized by and for the people involved. Significant influences on Willats at that time, whose names appear in correspondence and programming at the Centre, included the futurism of psychologist Christopher Riche Evans, who was head of the Man–Computer Interaction section at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL); the technical expertise of Peter Whittle, an electrical engineer who also worked at the NPL; systems scientist George Mallen; and the cybernetics of Pask and Ashby (both of whom he first encountered at Ealing). Material generated in discussions at the Centre was often featured in Control Magazine. In the spring of 1973, Willats published a small notice in Leonardo: The main aim of The Centre for Behavioural Art, London, is the furtherance of the growing interest amongst artists in establishing relationships between art and cybernetics and the behavioural or social sciences. Lectures and seminars are held regularly at the Centre by both artists and scientists. There is an exhibition space to display or document projects developed by members. Papers are published and distributed to the whole membership free of charge. The annual subscription is 1 pound and cheques should be made payable to S. Willats.21 The Centre was “a point of reference, or communication between artists and scientists,” full of opportunities for lateral thinking during its seminars and workshops.22 An effort slightly earlier than Willats’s Centre had been launched by the artist Marcello Salvadori (1928–2002), whom Willats knew slightly. Erica Marx, a wealthy patron of poetry and experimental art, supported Salvadori in founding a Centre for Advanced Study of Science in Art (CASSA) in 1964 that had several names in its short life (Centre for Creative Studies, Centre for Art in Science). Paul Keeler and artist David Medalla (b. 1942) hosted the first iteration of CASSA, which then became Signals Gallery until it closed in 1966.23 The Centre for Behavioural Art that Willats shaped in 1972–3 did not become an independent gallery like Signals, but instead sometimes served as a gallery within Gallery House and had a print version in Control. While Willats’s pursuit of “multi-linear communication” among artists and scientists did not diminish, when Gallery House was forced to close in 1973, the Centre lost its space and no new, affordable spot was located.

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One significant milestone for Willats at the Centre was the exhibit, The Artist as an Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour, in 1973. Included in that exhibit was documentation of the West London Social Resource Project (see section in this chapter), as well as Visual Meta Language Simulation (see Chapter 1), and explanatory information posted on the walls in the Gallery House space. “For me,” Willats recalled, “this was really the first major presentation of my work apart from the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art [Oxford] in 1968.”24

Constructing Social Resources and Social Models Social resource or social model construction projects formed a significant aspect of Willats’s art practice; they were ambitious in scale and duration. Willats adapted the “social model” idea from Gordon Pask, his one-time employer, as Pask described it in a 1965 article.25 From the time he taught at Ipswich and worked collaboratively with his students in 1965 to projects in Nottingham and Oxford in the early 1970s, Willats assembled strategies and approaches that gave form to his social models. He planned additional social resource projects for Westminster, Newcastle, London (including Hounslow), and Edinburgh in the 1970s to explore art’s social functions.26 For Willats, the Social Model Construction Project was “an investigation into the operation of a social framework for art practice, and its relation to social function.” While he the artist created a framework, Willats believed that his open-ended approach would not skew people’s perceptions of the issues of concern.27 He viewed the artist “as an instigator of changes in social cognition and behaviour,” the name of his 1973 publication (reissued in 2010 by Occasional Papers), but the changes in understanding came about due to participants’ self-organized responses to their environments. In the catalog, Means of Escape, Willats described his method for social project work: he began with a “purely” theoretical model; decided on the type of physical location he wanted; did reconnaissance to select the actual locations; established contact with individuals there; and then altered his conceptual model as the work progressed.28 As he interacted with local people, he inevitably increased his contacts, which in turn further altered the project. Willats viewed a group of people as similar to a homeostat in that he thought communities tended toward stability. He wrote: “the most important factor underlying a group maintaining its identity is the internal drive towards social stability, which results in pressure from the group on the individual to conform by fulfilling expected roles and normative behaviours.”29 Willats then aimed to counteract this social pressure to conform by creating a context for interaction that would promote new understandings. Integral to his model was a means to shift participants from

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a descriptive mode to a predictive mode and then a prescriptive mode.30 In other words, once participants had observed and described their current environments, how might they envision and predict alternatives? What would they prescribe for their future? How would they choose to perform differently in relationships and in their environments? Willats stated that a related result of this step-by-step process was that these interactions gave people the opportunity to self-organize and exchange information about themselves within their communities.31 Willats used diagrams to depict complex relationships from the beginning of his art practice. He visualized these social states by distilling connections in space and over time using arrows and squares; grids; flow charts; and linked geometrical shapes darkened with hatching or shading. The diagrams were a means to an end but integral to his process. Roy Ascott, in a 1963 Molton Gallery exhibit catalog, published a schematic diagram (designed by his colleague Noel Forster) in which he noted his “intention to use any assembly of diagrammatic and iconographic forms within a given construct as seems necessary.” His diagram connected “society as an organism,” “adaptive control,” and “clarity and control,” to “a contingent environment.” A further series of manifesto-like statements linked concepts across the page. Ascott and Willats, among others, explored ways in which text and charts could be used artistically, to “embrace the process of arriving at new kinds of rules or logical models,” as Ascott wrote.32 Willats published about diagrams in 2007: To describe dynamic interrelationships between active entities in a network, a language is required to illustrate the exchange and flows of information, and this is the language of the “diagram.” In my work the diagram has evolved to illustrate dynamic relationships and to stimulate imaginative involvement in the possibilities attached to essential principles driving those states.33 He noted that “a model is used as a symbolic set of relationships that pares down the infinite variety of the world into a simplified form, exposing its essence.” Rather than presenting the model as reductive and static, however, Willats argued that it was an “evolving structure [that] presented the audience with a process in which they could gradually develop their own cognitive relationships with the presented possible states.”34 Key to Willats’s modeling was that the audience had to be included. By reducing variety to a limited set of variables, the model was seen as an articulate, coherent extraction. Willats believed this method provided the potential to imagine the whole.35 In all of Willats’s social model projects his aim was to establish a structure that enabled participants from different groups to develop models of their environments that would actually meet their needs. Willats interacted with his audience from the start so that he could learn as much as possible

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about their codes, assumptions, behaviors, and perceptions; he identified shared references and common terms so that he could effectively convey his meaning in the environment in which he worked. Since he was working in somewhat uncharted territory, his efforts involved a lot of trial and error, as he noted in Art and Social Function.36

West London Social Resource Project The West London Social Resource Project, developed and implemented from March to November 1972, explored ideas about symbolically and actually coded landscapes, proposing how class structures might be transformed by interactions across space and over time37 (Figure 2.1). The areas that Willats selected in west London were identified as upper-middle, middle, lower-middle, and working class38 (Figure 2.2). The brick terrace housing along the tree-lined boulevard in working-class Greenford is adjacent to a community center; the lower-middle-class Hanwell area has large fourstory flats of brick on side streets that back onto a parade of shops and numerous churches; car parks in front of modest brick and glass structures are visible from the busier roads, which also lead to older terraced housing.

Stephen Willats, West London Social Resource Project, 1972–3 Stephen Willats Archive, Chelsea College of Art and Design Library, London, UK. I discuss these visual parts of the project: · Selection of collaged posters from each of the four project areas; · Response sheets; · Public register board no. 2 with ballot box at Osterley (UK) Library; and · Diagram showing steps in development of the project over nine months. Ink, Letraset text on paper, 21 × 29.7 cm. Aspects of the West London Social Resource Project have been published in a number of places, including Stephen Willats, Art and Social Function, passim; Art, Society, Feedback, 101, 359; Between Buildings and People, 10; Beyond the Plan, 10–15; Languages of Dissent, 92–95. Chelsea College of Art and Design Library, London, holds the archives from this project and a number of images are online (accessed December 1, 2019): http://www.chelseaspace.org/archive/willats-images.html http://www.chelseaspace.org/archive/willats-images2.html http://www.chelseaspace.org/archive/willats-images3.html This link shows a display board with ballot box, a diagram of project phases, and the exhibit at Gallery House http://stephenwillats.com/work/west-london-social-resourceproject/ (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 2.1  Stephen Willats, West London Social Resource Project, 1972–3. Stephen Willats Archive, Chelsea College of Art and Design Library, London, UK.

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FIGURE 2.2  Photos showing the four areas of the West London Social Resource Project. L to R, top to bottom: Greenford, Osterley, Harrow, and Hanwell. Photos by Sharon Irish, 2014.

Upper-middle-class Harrow is dotted with small green spaces with trees that separate traditional-looking single-family houses, sometimes buffered by tall hedges. Just behind the tube station at Osterley, marked by a tower, is a quintessential row of middle-class, semidetached homes with pitched roofs, chimney pots, and bay windows.39 Willats’s project initially included 109 people, which diminished in stages, from about 90 people, quite evenly distributed among areas, down to 45 people, over a nine-month time period.40 Willats stated that the “four participant groups were . . . geographically, economically, and socially separate from each other and saw themselves as such.”41 In a 1972 diagram, Willats demarcated various steps at the start of the project: reconnaissance and initial participant interviews, followed by “reinforcement” and “identification with project.” The people who helped Willats implement the social resource project in west London were called project operators. Many of them were associated with the Centre for Behavioural Art (artists Rosetta Brooks and Felicity Oliver, learning scientist Gerald Brieske and his partner, Nancy Brieske, for example).42 They made initial contact with potential participants via door-to-door introductions; if,

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after a return visit a week later, people agreed to participate, they received a leaflet and a poster for their window. Project operators, included in the collective authorship of the project, then distributed The West London Manual, which asked participants to reflect on their current conditions, using questions and visual cue sheets (a descriptive model). Cue sheets presented partial images (such as a gable or grille) that were then matched to collages of photographs taken in the area; the participants were asked to write about their associations with these images. While the Manual contained questionnaires, Willats’s aim was not to elicit social science data but rather to assist participants in “gaining information/insight about themselves.”43 Subsequently, he used repeated public presentations and follow-up contacts to share these self-generated insights. His strategies mimicked those used in advertising, but rather than habituate people to information from an external source as might happen with billboards or advertisements, his approach instead “turned right around and used [advertising methods] to free the psychologies of people and to enable them to be receptive to new perceptions and ideas.”44 In terms of advertising strategy, then, the project operators “sold” the project doorto-door, returned with the Manual, and arranged for follow-ups on a regular basis. There was no right or wrong; the project “was an open system with no pre-set conclusions to peoples’ perceptions.”45 West London’s social and political geography shaped the materials used in the West London Social Resource Project. The collaged posters that Willats created for each of the areas of west London depicted facades, signage, and other distinctive aspects of the environment. The posters and other ephemera were very carefully and precisely made. Their collaged form—the fact that they didn’t allow for a single overall view—was consistent with Willats’s interest in fragments and partial views. Further, as theorist Jonathan Hill has noted about montage, “the sense of something missing . . . ensure[s] that the viewer or occupant has a constructive role in the formulation of the work.”46 Willats invited participants in the West London Social Resource Project to fill in what they felt was missing, as well as reflect on their own perspectives and those of others. The context—each of the areas of west London involved in the project—was integral to the creation and meaning of the project. Willats noted: “The West London Social Resource Project was a sort of simulation, where people would experience aspects of another model of society through their engagement with an encoded world in the form of the work itself.”47 Using the Manual, participants were asked to describe or draw the “social function” of a feature of their environment: a front gate of a residence; what was seen out of the front window; or a typical person in the neighborhood. This daily practice accumulated descriptions about the area. After ten days, these Day Sheets (filled out daily for a week) and Information Sheets were collected for display; Willats used carbon paper to make two copies of the

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question sheets so that one copy of the collected sheets could be displayed on Public Register Boards in the public libraries in each of the four areas, and the other copy remained with the participant. The sheets also informed the next step, which was to think about how residents would like to change their environments, what changes they would prescribe. The next step, then, invited participants to fantasize alternatives to their current conditions using The West London Re-Modelling Book. Sample prompts were “Describe/draw/make a plan of a garden or open space that could be used by all the people in your neighbourhood showing how it would function”; “What do you see as the ideal social structure for your neighbourhood, and its relationship to other communities in West London?”48 Of the ninety people who took the Re-Modelling Book, forty-five turned in their completed booklets, making suggestions such as separating pedestrian and vehicular traffic, clustering the community center with the library and church, providing meals to the elderly, and increasing open space. During this stage, participants were encouraged to visit other project areas and interact with the people and prescriptive suggestions on display, but Willats and his team also rotated the boards from library to library to facilitate information exchanges.49 Participants proposed social models that would address not only their situations but also those from other project areas. In west London, Willats was able to provide repeated interactions with project operators and neighbors to guide groups into new cognitive territories, from description to prediction to recommended changes (prescriptions). Ballot boxes next to the Public Register Boards allowed people to vote on the posted Re-Modelling sheets, indicating their preferred solutions; about 60 percent of the participants voted. To feed back into these neighborhood systems, Willats produced a booklet to share some of the most favored changes, Final Project Models. The social models were “part of a moving structure of events in time that will evolve, as an active part of [the audience’s] internalisation, an audience’s memory of the structure.”50 Interactions within and about the social model were crucial for the evolution that Willats aimed to foster. While the suburban residents of west London were one key group that Willats addressed, he also was equally committed to influencing artists, to change the nature of art practice. To that end, in January 1973 he displayed portions of the west London project on the ground floor of Gallery House, the location of the Centre for Behavioural Art, a space that was a crucible for interdisciplinary dialogues. He called the west London project “a signpost of social change” that intentionally was set in the world of the residents; the participants became a temporary art institution, shaping that “moving structure of events.” The documentation of this temporary art institution installed at the Gallery House (another temporary institution, as it happened) expanded the project into a different area of London. At Gallery House, viewers could watch the project evolve, although Willats

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hoped that viewers would also visit the community locations and observe how repeated interactions created frameworks for participants to learn about and solve problems.51

Social Modeling in Edinburgh The most fully realized of Willats’s social models was the Edinburgh Social Model Construction Project (ESMCP) in 1973 in Edinburgh (Figure 2.3). Willats was invited to Edinburgh to create an artwork as part of the Leith Festival, one of the festivals held that August to coincide with the larger Edinburgh Fringe Festival.52 That same year, the Computer Arts Society held a large exhibition, Interact: Man, Society, Machine, as part of the Fringe Festival, and, in the end, Willats’s project bridged the two.53 Partnering with art students and others in Edinburgh for about six months, Willats identified four distinct areas of the city—distinct in terms of social class, architecture, social amenities, and integration with other areas—to create the social model (Figure 2.4). As he had done in west London, Willats worked with others in Edinburgh for several months to collect images and situations that would be locally relevant, such as photographs of family groups, golf outings,

Stephen Willats, Edinburgh Social Model Construction Project, 1973. Materials are held in the Collection of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. I discuss the following visual aspects of the Edinburgh Project: · Central core diagram, showing problem categories and sub categories and how the information from the responses is handled, by computer or people. Ink, Letraset text on paper, 24 × 30 cm. · Problem sheets on public register board in Silverknowes. · Cover of Project Operators Manual. The Edinburgh Project has been published extensively, including in Art and Social Function, 174–7, 182–208; Art Society Feedback, 321–3; and Languages of Dissent, 89.

FIGURE 2.3  Stephen Willats, Edinburgh Social Model Construction Project, 1973, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Dean Gallery, Edinburgh.

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FIGURE 2.4  Stephen Willats, Edinburgh Social Model Construction Project, 1973. Views representative of project areas in Edinburgh. Left to right, top to bottom: Leith, Gorgie (Willats called it Slateford), Morningside, and Silverknowes. Photos by Sharon Irish, 2011. houses and shops, and signage. The neighborhoods that were involved in the ESMCP were Leith on the waterfront; Morningside; Gorgie, which Willats mistakenly called Slateford, not far from the center of the city; and the midtwentieth-century planned suburb of Silverknowes to the west. On an undated large sheet of preparatory diagrams, Willats wrote in ink that [the] project attempts to show how people, social groups, relate to each other, and how social conventions determine that relationship, which are not generally articulated consciously by members of a social group. The project would then show how people could relate to each other, or it could set up a framework whereby people could postulate their own relationships to each other. As a community model building project, it would establish a framework that enabled a community to construct a representation of themselves, which over a period of time would modify according to membership, and environmental changes. The process by which a community constructs a representation of themselves, could also show at various stages the relationship that [a] group has to another one, and enable members from both groups to restructure relationships.54

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Willats’s open model created a context for people to describe their surroundings and then, with these descriptions informing the next round, the participants prescribed changes that they would like to see in the future. By alerting neighbors to their community’s perceptions and actions, Willats believed his art could help transform areas for the better. In Edinburgh, as in west London, Willats and his team of project operators gathered information from neighborhood residents about their social and physical environments. But in Edinburgh, Willats implemented machine processing: the data were delivered to what he called the “central core,” about eight volunteers who analyzed the responses in conjunction with machines. The central core volunteers processed the problem sheets and a mainframe computer further analyzed the input. People of the central core distilled the responses into key words and then numerical codes; the responses were punched into cards and passed along to the programmer with an algorithm from Willats. The programmer, Stuart Pound, then ran the punch cards through the algorithm on the mainframe. The computer was located just outside Edinburgh at Dalkeith House, which had been leased by International Computers, Ltd (ICL), a pioneering hardware, software, and computer services company, for its research and development offices. Guided by this computer analysis, Willats and the core team selected the next day’s set of questions, usually from a file of prewritten problems. There was a feedback loop among Willats, the machines, the operators, and the participants. For Willats, the “output” of his projects was open-ended and multiple, but the concept of the algorithm influenced his initial approach to many projects. An algorithm is basically a set of instructions, a sequence of steps carried out in a particular order, with certain constraints and/or with some specific options in order to obtain an output.55 Willats used algorithmic methods to represent the ways in which we categorize people and places, and how changing perceptions affect cognition and action in relation to our social and physical environments. Willats’s notebooks in the Tate Library and Archive are full of commentary about problem-solving methodologies. He wrote: The Symbol Structures provide a means of encoding the ambiguities [and] provide [an] externalizing agent, i.e., they provide a means by which an operator can remove the ambiguity inherent in the problem with regard to his cognition of it by putting it in an encoded form.56 In other words, Willats used mathematical methods to address the “multihomeostat problem” in his art—encoding social behaviors to reduce ambiguity and perhaps clarify decisions. The aesthetic forms that emerged from his information-sharing and -sorting strategies provided a new language and new contexts for art and audiences. In addition to the four areas of Edinburgh, Willats added a fifth group, the Casual Audience Participant Group, which was composed of Festival-

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goers. A portable terminal linked via an acoustic coupler was installed on a main thoroughfare in Edinburgh and allowed Festival attendees to provide their own responses to problem situations. Their inputs were processed separately from the four residential areas selected.57 For five days in August 1973, ESMCP volunteers visited residents of the four areas around Edinburgh and gave them sets of paper problem sheets upon which open-ended tasks were posed as questions, usually with a photograph or collage acting as a prompt. These sheets provided the data that were processed by the central core and computer. The sheets were distributed to about thirty-two people per area who had agreed to fill in their responses on a daily basis for the duration of the project. (The newto-the-UK company Rank Xerox allowed its machines to be used gratis to copy the sheets, while the participants used carbon paper to produce copies for themselves.)58 Face-to-face, daily interaction was crucial to the ultimate success of the information-gathering, as Willats had learned in west London. People wanted to engage with other people, not a clipboard with a form or a computer terminal. One ESMCP problem sheet related to mealtimes and behavior conventions within a family, for example. People were asked to describe how meals typically occurred in their households and how they could change mealtimes to meet their needs. These responses were gathered and used by the “central core” team to develop subsequent prompts. Every evening, the team grouped responses and summarized them. For instance, they identified the following tendencies, among others. In Leith: mealtimes performed a formal social communicative role with a set seating arrangement. The jobs in the area were seen as predominantly trades and services. Staggered starting times for jobs led to little interaction between family members in the morning, but led to cooperation in a tight schedule. In Morningside, by contrast, “there seems to be no set pattern for mealtimes. . . . Family activity determined by family size. A strong feeling of property shown by the returns.”59 These short summaries were included on problem sheets handed out the following day to give participants a sense of the larger picture. Subsequent problem categories concerned “more formal and public behaviour conventions,” such as activities and relationships within or outside the neighborhood. “How would you describe the customs/conventions of a club or equivalent type of social amenity in your neighbourhood to a stranger in your area?” was another example of a problem presented to the participants.60 The flexibility of the open-ended problems was integral to Willats’s aesthetics, which prioritized audience input. No names were attached to the problem sheets; all responses were anonymous.61 To offer an example from Gorgie (Slateford), one participant wrote on their problem sheet:

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I would gather together the best architects, landscape gardeners, sociologists, and have them redesign the entire area. As a neighbourhood consists of people, I think they would have to consult the wishes of the people in which case we might end up with cinemas, libraries, etc. actually in the neighborhood.62 The problem sheets and periodic encapsulations of responses, called “consensus tendencies,” were displayed on monitor boards in publicly accessible spaces, such as a shop, a community center, and a golf club. Many participants drew plans and maps and sketched other ideas that challenged the coders, and these pages were also put on public display. Participants and their neighbors could compare responses from their own area as well as those from other areas across the city. In 1973 Willats had ideas that could be implemented with computer equipment and available methods, but only barely and only slowly. Willats’s cybernetic way of thinking and diagrammatic representations of relationships among people and places preceded the technology that he needed to readily execute his art of open systems.63 His unpublished notebooks are full of Boolean logic operations and heuristic frames to discover the “essence” of the interactive process.64 The Boolean (true/false) logic systems and sequential frames in his diagrams were prescient for the sorting and managing of information later on. He had to either purchase and build the circuitry himself or negotiate with an institution or corporation (like ICL) for access to its computing power. In the case of ESMCP, he also partnered with a computer programmer, Stuart Pound. The aim of ESMCP was to externalize the idea that anyone could influence decision-making and to “increase the participant’s awareness of his own coding behaviour.” The ESMCP used self-organized solutions to problems as the basis for subsequent problems, thereby creating “a learning process [that] will evolve in a self-determined hierarchy of information, the contents of which gradually become more meaningful and relevant to participants as it progresses.”65 Willats’s interest in this “learning process” on the part of participants was evident in Visual Meta Language Simulation as well, which he had built in the previous two years. Homeostasis provided an image and conceptual structure within which Willats’s Edinburgh project unfolded. Even the cover of the project operators’ manual was drawn to resemble a homeostat, with rectangles that identified each area connected by arrows to a square representing the central core. Willats hoped that the four project areas in Edinburgh would achieve a “common information level.”66 The information flowed in this project via interactions among the participants, the central core analyses, the computer processing, and Willats. The project operators regulated the inputs and outputs within a Willats-designed system. While uncertainty was inevitable given the complexity of the project, Willats contended that the underlying rules of a homeostat only became evident “in the real world . . .

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through the establishment of formal relationships between people. . . . Thus the fundamental unit of social organization is the group, and as such, it is an important area of attention for the artist.”67 He avoided arranging a final event at the end of the five-day project in Edinburgh to stress the “stable” nature of the environment.68 Rather than any measurable social outcomes in particular communities, Willats’s goal was to show that “the artist can develop art methodologies that enable him to function meaningfully outside existing art institutions, and determine himself what social, physical context he works within, and the criteria with which it is seen by its audience.” Ultimately, he wished to be in control of artistic concerns, but those concerns had to be understandable to a broad audience. That audience also participated in forming the evaluation criteria for the work, what I call “participatory reception.”69 The learning process occurred over time and was visible in the participants’ responses; as they “extended their references to include other groups of people’s social behaviour, etc. . . . they became less concerned with existing states, but postulated hypothetical ones.”70 The exchanges of information among those in the project broadened people’s awareness of each other and their own roles in the “social model.” One example from a respondent in Leith addressed the value of multigenerational living: “[We need] small houses for the older people but built in amongst the other houses so that there is someone to keep an eye on the older people.”71 Willats’s cybernetic approach constituted and represented open-ended, multidimensional, somewhat fluid roles in his artwork. For Willats, these experiments centered on mutualism, as he called it, not only representing cooperation but also enacting symbiotic, beneficial relationships in art projects.72 The participants in Willats’s social model not only created knowledge about themselves and their communities as they provided solutions to the problems, studied the monitor boards, responded to new problems, and talked to others about the project, but also they were part of a process that is ultimately unknowable because it is so complex. Along with Willats, we cannot understand the world in all of its complexity, but his models and structures help us imagine alternatives nonetheless.

Meta Filter Willats explored two basic modes of audience interaction: in the first, he identified one or more audiences in advance, as he did in Edinburgh, and then developed strategies drawn from their own settings, language, and behavior to make the art accessible and responsive to the audience members. Second, expanding on ideas explored in Visual Meta Language Simulation, Willats constructed Meta Filter (1973–5) that could be mobile and set up in different contexts for diverse groups of people to visit (Figure 2.5). As Willats himself has noted, this second direction was “independent . . . and

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people acquire[d] the language of the work as part of their engagement with it.”73 To Margret MacKay, Librarian at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Willats wrote in 1984: At the same time as I developed the Edinburgh work I made a simulation of it as an interactive electronic console that inacted [sic] what the Social Model Construction Project did outside with four communities, inside an art institution. This work was called Meta Filter.74 In 1975, following a lengthy illness and months of collaborative work with an electrical engineer, Derek Aulton, and close contact with George Mallen’s System Simulation, Willats completed and exhibited Meta Filter, an interactive system for two participants.75 Initially, Meta Filter was exhibited at The Gallery, a tiny alternative art space above a taxicab office near Paddington Station.76 The installation consisted of two image screens on opposite sides of a wooden console and a processor connected to a slide projector inside the console. Derek Aulton devised the slide sorting system, which Willats then built with reprogrammable chips and recycled photocells. In order to operate Meta Filter when it was on display, people made appointments and were paired for one of the two sessions available each day. Just as the face-to-face contacts were crucial for the ESMCP, this interpersonal aspect was also central to Meta Filter. When the participants arrived for their appointment, they were offered tea and biscuits and engaged in a discussion about the project with the administrator (usually Nicholas Wegner). Once seated at the console, each operator (as the participants were called) faced a slanted surface with an electronic keypad and spaces for the display of numerical choices, a paper problem book, a pencil, a thesaurus of terms mounted near the screen, and a slot for completed problem books. The two operators were not visible to each other but worked to come to an agreement

Stephen Willats, Meta Filter, 1973–5. Wood, electronics, and mixed media. Muséed’art contemporain de Lyon Meta Filter has been published in numerous places, among them: Art and Social Function, 218–24; Art Society Feedback, 304–7; Languages of Dissent, 96–7. Images online are here: http://stephenwillats.com/work/metafilter/ (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 2.5  Stephen Willats, Meta Filter, 1973–5. Wood, electronics, and mixed media. Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon.

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in answering questions in the problem book about images projected onto their individual screens. Meta Filter was another instantiation of mutualism in which the operators needed to cooperate to come to an agreement; the artwork would not “work” without this dynamic interdependence.77 The participants simultaneously viewed an image on their screens, either of single individuals or in groups. They then selected a numbered word or word phrase from the posted “person perception” thesaurus to describe the interactions of the people in each image. There were about 1,000 words available to use to interpret the emotions or actions that an operator might perceive in a photograph. These lists had been developed by two groups of people representing two philosophical approaches—behavioral and humanistic. Each group had provided terms to describe how the people in the images might perceive each other, and these terms then were used by the operators. For example, one image showed two women, one standing behind another seated at a typewriter. Each operator would then choose a word from the thesaurus to describe how the seated woman might perceive her relationship to the standing woman. As each operator made a selection, they entered the number for their choices on the keypad and wrote down their answers in the problem book. Each operator’s counterpart could see on their display the number that the other had chosen. Operators “were taken through different social situations that increased in complexity, building a model of society—their society.”78 Willats asked participants to select terms based not only on urban environments and gendered groups but also on facial expression, body language, posture, personal space, clothing, and objects in the photographs, all of which communicated affect, attitude, status, and identity in social relationships. Mid-century examinations of communication often were abstract and disembodied; by the end of the twentieth century, N. Katherine Hayles argued for recognizing bodies in communication: “[E]mbodiment makes clear that thought is a much broader cognitive function depending for its specificities on the embodied form enacting it.”79 Willats depicted bodies performing together and asked operators to consider those interactions. Participants were in a relationship with Meta Filter and with each other, with a goal of coming to an agreement about what they thought was going on in the images displayed. That was the point of the piece: “The purpose of the work is the processes the two participants go through to understand each other’s perceptions and to work together to find a state of agreement.”80 Meta Filter was “both sculpture and event, both process and documentation,” as curator Anders Kreuger described it.81 The twelve sequences of images displayed (made up of seventy-five slides) were determined by the operators’ choices; as people interacted with Meta Filter, the sets of images changed depending on the selections made by the participants. If they could not agree on one set, Meta Filter presented another set from the same social category. It usually took two hours for  pairs of operators to work through the problem book. In addition

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to the ephemeral interactions with Meta Filter, copies of the completed problem sheets were posted on nearby walls, evidence of participants’ process of decision-making. Critic Richard Cork recommended visiting Meta Filter with a total stranger, “preferably someone with a different social background who could vigorously contest all your responses and oblige you to take into account a way of thinking you might never have encountered before.”82 Willats recognized that each participant brought along their own social history; he labeled people’s self-presentations “Life Codes.”83 Meta Filter was a material ensemble that aimed to develop the immaterial— bringing people together around their perceptions of relationships using controlled sequences of images. The work moved from place to place—above the taxi stand, in a storefront, to a museum—inviting operators to perform “coming to agreement.” The installation also prompted group performances because observers would watch the operators at work, interacting with them and each other as they gathered around the console. While Willats’s striking aesthetic forms visualized his efforts, the participants in his project works also were able to customize their use of and responses to codes in his art based on what they found meaningful.84

Art and Social Function Willats was interested in information networks as well as networks of relationships, connected to real people in real locations. He recognized that communication occurred nonverbally as well as verbally. People’s embodied participation—their voices, their conversations, their bodies in spaces, their drawings and handwritten texts—gave new form and content to cybernetic structures. Willats’s distinctive combinations of face-to-face exchanges and computer programs, language codes and electronic interfaces, and humanmachine connections all interacted in ways that demonstrate how Willats’s social practice informed cybernetics and how cybernetic concepts shaped his social practice. His art adapted to location, participation, and situation. He noted that art differed from scientific practice because it was “directed at creating the conditions for the recipient to effect changes in his or her own cognition and behaviour.”85 In other words, works like the ESMCP and Meta Filter provided structures that helped the participants self-organize new models of living together and generate new visions for society’s future. In doing so, Willats bound art to society and society to art, even as those boundaries shifted. The shifts were manifested in strikes, elections, daily routines, communications technologies, planning, international conflicts, social identities, arts organizations, and many forms of cultural production. Curator Andrew Wilson itemized some of these struggles and actions post-1968, which, in the 1970s, “produced the highest level of strikes

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since the nineteen-twenties.”86 Conrad Atkinson (b. 1940), in his gridded four-panel “Garbage Strike: Hackney” (1970), montaged text with his colored photographs of mounting piles of rubbish in one of London’s inner boroughs during one of the strikes by sanitation workers.87 Edward Heath’s Conservative Party won in the UK in 1970, replacing Labour’s Harold Wilson, and social unrest continued “with the coincidence of the oil crisis and the 1973 to 1974 miners’ strike that led to the three-day week, the failure of the Conservatives at the polls, and the return of Wilson in 1974.”88 More and more artists challenged systems of education, presentation, and circulation as well as questions of content and form, founding the League of Socialist Artists in 1971 and the Artist’s Union in 1972. The Women’s Workshop was organized within the Artist’s Union to highlight sexism in the arts and to work across other sectors.89 While Willats was well aware of these new organizations, he did not join them; he focused on experiments within his own practice, in discussion with scientists and a wide variety of urban dwellers. Willats’s contemporary, critic Richard Cork, wrote in 1980 that art had a “rightful berth in the social world.”90 But how that “berth” should be occupied and by whom remained open questions.

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Mutually Bound

In the mid- to late 1970s, Willats continued to explore social and artistic constraints within his own practice, in the art world and beyond, in urban communities. As with his exhibition of the West London Social Resource Project at Gallery House in 1972, and his involvement with the Fringe and Leith Festivals in Edinburgh in 1973, he tried various ways to open art institutions to a wider public. He believed museums and galleries could be far more porous than they were. He reflected in 2015: It could be a cybernetic model, that we could view the art world, the art institutions, as an interactive interface, with the community around it in which the polemics and issues, conflicts, whatever, would be represented within it in a way that it could transform your perceptions of those things.1 Fostering an interactive interface, however, meant that Willats needed a permeable framework in which people would want to meet and exchange perspectives. Willats built a “social berth” for his art, and he inserted his social projects into the art world through a variety of strategies, as seen in Cognition Control (1972) and Meta Filter at The Gallery in 1975. Like other experimental artists in the 1970s, though, he was working against accepted practice. It was only in 1973 that the Arts Council hired a full-time officer to support photography, for example; previously, artists had been refused funding because photography and video were not viewed as art.2 Jo Spence (1934–92) similarly challenged accepted hierarchies with the Photography Workshop Ltd, which she ran from 1974 until her death in 1992, together with Terry Dennett (1938–2018). The Photography Workshop had a “clear aesthetic strategy, a political aesthetic that . . . can be described as a form of ‘proletarian amateurism,’” according to Siona Wilson. Wilson called Spence’s

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aesthetic “political” because of the stigma attached to nonprofessionals as well as to photography. Emerging out of the Photography Workshop, the Hackney Flashers collective created an exhibit in 1975 called Women and Work, which displayed “panels of documentary photographs of women in the workplace, unemployment lines, and working in the home with brief handwritten descriptive captions . . . by amateur, untrained photographers.”3 The Hackney Flashers collective, and Jo Spence, challenged power structures and built their own structures for art in ways similar to Willats. Focusing artistic attention on factory workers also countered 1970s art world trends; in 1979 Willats did a project with garment workers, The Place of Work.4 A feminist framing of industrial labor was also against the grain. In 1973, artists Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt, and Mary Kelly began research on female workers at a factory in the London borough of Southwark. By 1975, after collecting accounts from over 150 women, conducting observations and sifting through archives, Harrison, Hunt, and Kelly installed Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry 1973–1975 in the South London Art Gallery (a different project than that by the Hackney Flashers), which included film, audio, photographs, and works on paper.5 Mary Kelly subsequently published in Control Magazine at least twice, in 1977and 1979, on her own conceptual artwork and feminism. Art, politics, and activism intertwined in this decade, with media, forms, content, and context manifested in nontraditional ways. Willats persisted in developing more interactive strategies as the 1970s went on, to connect what was happening outside a gallery to installations inside the art space. In Artwork as Social Model Willats wrote: “The acts of making and reception become mutually bound.”6 In some instances, Willats’s social art projects “bound” making and reception together within a community separate from the art world; in other cases, Willats linked his social practice to a gallery; in yet another approach, his gallery installation invited museum-goers to respond to images of social situations. This chapter examines what “mutually bound” means in the context of a range of Willats’s projects: first, in some small-scale work and, then, in larger urbanscaled work. Willats’s Person A of 1974 had six “triptychs” that formed of one large panel with two below (a total of eighteen panels).7 Bringing techniques of engagement into the gallery, which he had also used in the “field” in Nottingham, west London, and Edinburgh, Willats had a response sheet for the viewer of Person A to fill out using a thesaurus that Willats had composed. The viewer would choose a short phrase from a thesaurus to describe the behavior pictured in the top panel. If the viewer thought Person A should alter their behavior, they would be directed to the bottom row and offered a set of terms describing possible future actions. Once the viewer selected one of those alternatives, they would move on to the next set of panels and engage similarly with what Willats called “other states in the system.”8 For Willats, the thesaurus was a way to invite reactions using readymade terms to

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describe perceptions, “which range from the physical appearance of Person A, to mental states, social states, etc..” To Emily Pethick in 2015, he noted that the “symbolic world” that he “encoded” in wall-based installations in the gallery was drawn from everyday lives outside the gallery. These works featured “sequencing through time, based on learning theory, or computer programming: A series of states, which gradually develop an idea through time for the viewer.”9 Person A was included in a 1974 exhibit at Gallery December in Münster, which prompted Willats’s inaugural trip to Europe.10 A related work created that same year, Perceptions of a Married Couple, had six panels with photos, Letraset, gouache, ink, and IBM text on card and was made (for the first time in Willats’s work) in the couple’s “symbolic world,” their house and environment.11 While the couple posed for his photographs, Willats himself provided the text cues in the panels. His aim was to provide visual and verbal tools to shift the viewers’ attention from individuals operating alone to enacting cooperative behavior. Both Person A and Perceptions of a Married Couple developed the narrative possibilities of his wall works and allowed the people with whom he worked and the viewers of that work to tell stories about their actual and/or imagined lives, set in their everyday contexts. Critic Stephen Bann wrote in the booklet Conceptual Living: Willats does not claim to have invented a new code for urban living in his encounter with the private and public lives of his subjects. But what he can claim, quite legitimately, is to have supplied them with a new form of narrative articulation, which borrows resourcefully from the repertoire of the social scientist but depends nonetheless on a radical possibility which exists in the image as such.12 This narrativization that Bann pointed out is due to the familiarity of the daily scenes, the sequencing of those images, and Willats’s cryptic use of words that may allow the viewer the “radical possibility” of inventing their own story. Willats assumed a receptivity to his visual offerings: The internal structure of each panel in the work is intentionally disparate and ambiguous, so that the audience can interact with the cues that are presented. . . . In this sense the work is designed to be used as a tool, linked by inference to the viewer’s own personal experience.13

Of Concept Frames Willats adapted diagrams from various disciplines to suit his art. Depending on what he was trying to distill, he utilized circuit schematics, models of information transfer, and state change graphs, respectively drawing on

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electronics, information theory, and physics.14 Willats’s colleague Roy Ascott also diagrammed his ideas, as discussed in Chapter 2. In 1961, Willats’s mentor Gordon Pask published a rather short book, An Approach to Cybernetics, to explore what scientist Warren McCulloch described in the preface as “that miscegenation of Art and Science which begets inanimate objects that behave like living systems.”15 Pask introduced cybernetics as an interdisciplinary exploration of “how systems regulate themselves, evolve and learn” and “how they organise themselves.”16 Pask was keenly interested in how states within a system change. In his book, he illustrated a “state graph,” which was a two-dimensional visual summary of a sequence of eight possible states (Figure 3.1). Eight points were connected by vertical and horizontal arrows, which showed possible transitions. Three squares were formed through the linking of these points; diagonal arrows crossed through the shapes as well. Pask’s state graph provided the model for Willats’s concept frames. In 2000, Willats described the “idea of a concept frame [as] a purely artificial device to break down this multi-channelled picture of reality.”17 This device was a means to control information and action in a dynamic social system and also to demonstrate interdependence and mutuality.18 His concept frame provided a case study in the ways in which he toggled between theory and practice, abstraction and lived experiences, social structures and aesthetic forms. The visual aspects of his concept frame included a square, cross axes, and a plane, combined with text.19 The words that were juxtaposed in the diagrams were “set up in the work in opposition to each other,” serving as cues for a viewer to construct a model for themselves.20 These multidirectional connections were conceptual, visual, social, political, and technological, or some combination of these.

FIGURE 3.1  State Graph. Diagram adapted from Gordon Pask, An Approach to Cybernetics (London: Hutchinson, 1961), p. 54. Created by Sarah Christensen.

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As Willats moved beyond his studio and gallery spaces into urban neighborhoods, he sought ways to model ever-more-complex interactions and meanings, while focusing on a few variables. Distilling the city and its inhabitants was crucial to avoid the “multi-homeostat” problem that could preclude a stable arrangement. Willats’s London, a generative, confusing, and sometimes violent mix, posed a challenge to clarity and conciseness at every juncture. This city on a tidal river was a heaving assemblage of people, loud noises, foxes, rubbish, jazz ensembles, rain, bus fumes, crumbling buildings, Ghanaian accents, tube stations, crows, publications, art events, construction zones, canals, spoken Hindi, and so on. Cybernetic concept frames, together with theories from experimental psychology, helped “break down this multi-channelled picture of reality.”21 There is a visually rich path taken by Willats to explore the multihomeostat dilemma from his homeostat drawings of the late 1960s and early 1970s to his diagrams of concept frames and, finally, his integration of those schematic drawings into his multi-paneled, collaborative works. Willats’s many diagrams schematized differences to better understand messy vitality. In “Homeostat Drawing No. 2” (1969), Willats used gouache to blacken two sets of four squares at the center of the composition (Figure 3.2). By linking the black squares with reciprocating arrows between and among them, he eliminated five intervening squares in each set, visually focusing attention on these two sets of squares against a field of light, penciled-in squares. In April 1974, Willats created Life Net Encoder, a large drawing in black ink and gouache on heavy paper (Figure 3.3). Life Net Encoder provided visual forms that Willats used extensively throughout his career: grids, squares, diamonds and crosses, and diagonal lines intersecting these shapes, with codes and explanatory text. The Encoder showed changes in states over time or, in other words, how groups of people might learn from each other, adjust their behaviors, and, ideally, come to an agreement. State Six, the black diamond shape within a grid, represented a “common life code”

Stephen Willats, Homeostat Drawing No. 2, 1969. Pencil and gouache on paper, 55.9 × 71.1 cm. Private collection. Published in Art Society Feedback, 149.

FIGURE 3.2  Stephen Willats, Homeostat Drawing No. 2, 1969. Pencil and gouache on paper, 55.9 × 71.1 cm. Private collection.

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Stephen Willats, Life Net Encoder, 1974. Ink, Letraset text, and gouache on paper, 59.6 × 83.8 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, Prints and Drawings Collection, London, UK. Published in Art Society Feedback, 102, 150; Online: http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O146501/ life-net-encoder-design-willats-stephen/ (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 3.3  Stephen Willats, Life Net Encoder, 1974. Ink, Letraset text, and gouache on paper, 59.6 × 83.8 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, Prints and Drawings Collection, London, UK. in abstract form. Willats explained in carefully placed Letraset text across the bottom that each State Change represents a stage in the formation of a homeostatic net evolved from four groups of people’s different life codes. Mediation between the life codes that distinguish the four groups at each State Change, enables a common life code to be constructed between them.22 In the abstract forms of Life Net Encoder, Willats continued to explore his interest in metalanguages evident in Man from the Twenty-First Century, social model and social resource projects, and Meta Filter. The lines that intersected the squares marked descriptive and prescriptive trajectories that Willats continued to apply to his analyses of people’s interactions in subsequent years. A sheet in the Modern Art Oxford archive labeled Concept Frames, probably from 1976, pared down the Life Net Encoder into a perspective that diagrammed not only how four notions (which he called “axioms”)— identity, code, values, and behavior—were “internally linked” but also how they existed in sequence.23 By dividing the rectangular prism into cubical sections, Willats gave depth to the areas representing the intersecting axioms and showed how each of those areas remained constant in relation to each other through time and states (Figure 3.4). Another diagram, Concept Frames through Time, took an approach that read simultaneously as planar and three-dimensional (Figure 3.5). The lines of the gridded squares were more heavily weighted than the connecting “temporal” lines, however, so the plane was emphasized, focusing attention on the central “x” of each grid, marking a “problem situation.” Both of these concept frames delineated changes in states, changes that occurred as people responded to problem situations. Using concept frames, Willats analyzed social systems that included “axioms” of identity, code, values, and behavior, for example. These concepts

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Stephen Willats, Concept Frames, 1976. Typescript and ink on A4 paper, 29.7 × 21 cm. One version is held in the archive of the Modern Art Oxford museum, UK. Published in Art Society Feedback, 353.

FIGURE 3.4  Stephen Willats, Concept Frames, 1976. Typescript and ink on A4 paper, 29.7 × 21 cm. Museum of Art Oxford Archives, Oxford, UK.

Stephen Willats, Concept Frames through Time, 1976. Typescript, Letraset text, ink on paper, 29.7 × 21 cm. One version is held in the archive of the Modern Art Oxford museum, UK. Published in Art Society Feedback, 520.

FIGURE 3.5  Stephen Willats, Concept Frames through Time, 1976. Typescript, Letraset text, ink on paper, 29.7 × 21 cm Museum of Art Oxford Archives, Oxford, UK.

were not necessarily in opposition to each other but might contribute to instability or complexity. In a sense, Willats used binary structures against themselves; by creating visual imagery in which opposites or complications coexisted, he stressed the intertwining of conditions, the complexity of realities.24 The axioms were assigned letters or numbers and placed at the corners of a square, both in diagrams and in multi-panel wall works. There are many ways to parse these terms, but one is the way in which A and D (identity and behavior) were performed externally by an individual, whereas B and C (code and values) were often internalized. A multi-panel use of concept frames, Sorting Out Other People’s Lives, is considered later in this chapter. As is already evident, Willats mined many disciplines for ways to describe and analyze social situations with artistic means, including games, thesauruses, and concept frames. Bann (quoted earlier) called Willats’s method “narrative articulation, which borrows resourcefully from the

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repertoire of the social scientist.” Tactics and strategies that Willats used in his social practice included problem displays, public registers, open-ended questions, response sheets, ballot boxes, audio-recorded and transcribed interviews, workshops, seminars, zine-making, mapping, stickers, and shop window displays. Tools and technologies to implement these, beyond the usual (for artists) film and still cameras, collage, pen and ink, paint and plastic, and self-published documentation, included clipboards, carbon paper, outdoor displays, Letraset, computer punch cards, reconnaissance of urban areas by car and foot, and photocopying. These tools supported the socio-aesthetic process and emerged quite organically from the needs of each project, though Willats did theorize about his use of Xerox machines.25

From a Coded World To archivist Margret MacKay, Willats wrote in 1984: The West London Social Resource Project [1972/73] is the work from which the Edinburgh Social Model Construction Project derived its methods, and From a Coded World the next work I made after Edinburgh derived its form from what we learnt.26 From a Coded World was an eight-week project from February 26 to April 16, 1977, that Willats organized in the London suburb of Perivale, having developed the work in May 1976.27 Unlike the West London Social Resource Project and the Edinburgh project, From a Coded World was focused in one fairly compact area, rather than distributed across distinct communities.28 Willats chose the area because it was “socially consistent”; he was able to use the community center as the project’s base, which was just across the road from the public library, where the public register was set up. In Perivale, then, he enacted his abstract Life Net Encoder (Figure 3.6). Of its conceptualization, Willats told Emily Pethick that he aimed “to take quite a large territory and to really take this community through . . . different processes, from a critical transformation from the world as it is towards the world as it could be.”29 The design of From a Coded World was itself a model of mutuality inserted into daily life, intended to “construct the cooperative consciousness that it is founded on”30 (Figure 3.7). Having seeded interest using posters throughout Perivale, Willats organized a large team of about fifty people, assigned them to seven neighborhood teams, and had them go door-to-door to get people involved. One participant noted: “[A]t the time I was getting in a bit of a rut at work and I wanted to see how I viewed other people and how other people might view me and the situation.”31 As an orientation for potential participants, Willats publicized and then held a seminar before the start of the project. He exclaimed: “The place was packed!”32 Those who were interested (Willats

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FIGURE 3.6  Street in Perivale, showing front gardens and shopping parade. These are the sorts of spaces that Willats used for From a Coded World, 1977. Photo by Sharon Irish, 2014. called them the “primary audience”) were given task-oriented problem sheets to respond to scenarios posted on outdoor displays, which depicted domestic, neighborhood, or work routines; all responses were anonymous and forty-eight residents remained with the project. These display boards (about 4 by 3 feet in size) were placed in twelve highly visible sites in the area—in front gardens, near a church, on the sides of walls—so that residents did not have to go far to see a board and fill out their sheets. Participants had a week to complete their responses (in duplicate, using carbon paper), which were then collected and posted in the library. The project operators consistently worked in the same neighborhoods collecting the problem sheets so that they were able to establish relationships with the residents. Each respondent’s sheets were kept together over the course of the project so that viewers could observe their development when visiting the public register in the library. Willats commented, “I have always been interested in the use of libraries. They were very responsive to the idea of us using their library for this particular purpose.”33 The project went through four states over four weeks to direct people’s attention to the plurality of people’s perceptions about relationships: after the first round of responses the display boards were changed and participants received new problem sheets, aimed at “remodel[ling] their perceptions  of

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Stephen Willats, From a Coded World, 1977. The visuals from this project that I discuss include • Publicity materials from the Victoria and Albert Museum, National Art Library, London, UK; • Problem display illustrated in Art for Whom? • Diagram showing Structure of State Changes with the two types of audiences described and the public register receiving input, Victoria and Albert Museum, National Art Library, London, UK. View of the project installation online: http://stephenwillats.com/work/codedworld-perivale/ (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 3.7  Stephen Willats, From a Coded World, 1977. Ephemera held at Victoria and Albert Museum, National Art Library, London, UK.

interpersonal norms and stereotypes.”34 His goal was to create a more “mutually founded” reality that countered the tendencies to separate art and society. “[T]he artwork is itself an actualisation of the prescriptive model of social relationships, that functions as a dynamic structure through time. Both content and structure are bound together as a prescriptive model, forwarding a socialist participatory ideology.”35 From a Coded World prompted prescriptions by participants that considered how interactions shift over time, not unlike a homeostat readjusting to new inputs to achieve temporary stability. I stressed the phrase “bound together” in the previous quotation to underscore Willats’s commitment to the mutualism of his art practice. The first of the problem displays serves as an example: a diagrammatic composition of photographs arranged in three rows featured a chart at the bottom illustrating one of the four kinds of social structure. This first display depicted “authoritative structures.” Willats used communication theories to express how a society based on unidirectional, authoritative networks objectified people and compartmentalized realities, undermining mutuality and cooperation across groups. On the display board, sixteen small images across the top were linked by lines to the next row of four larger photographs. The top row provided a sort of visual glossary labeled with abstract terms, such as property, emulation, standards, and conformity.

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The second row of larger photographs showed a couple—a man and a woman—engaged in cooking, shopping, doing laundry, and gardening, what Willats called “the Personal Coded World.” Each of these pictures had a caption that asked the viewer to respond to questions related to ownership, consumerism, compliance, and social pressures in relation to the people in the photographs. The third row had two photographs: one showing three men in a job interview and another with two women teaching and learning, the “Public Coded World.”36 The prompts below these images asked about the power relationships among the people. This first board, then, aimed to spark discussion about status, regulation, order, persuasion, and similar concepts that defined a “deterministic kind of network.”37 While the situations illustrated would have been familiar to Perivale residents, Willats used eight human models to act out the scenarios so that people were freed to respond in an uninhibited way, given that they did not know the individuals in the images.38 The fourth and final display board highlighted collaborative schemes, in a similar layout. Implied within this board was a questioning of stereotypical gender roles, as the board asked for responses regarding how a man and woman might share equally in decisions and responsibilities, for example.39 The homeostatic diagram at the bottom of the “cooperative structures” panel was an abstract representation of coming to agreement: four equidistant black squares connected by bidirectional arrows, in addition to arrows that diagonally crossed the interior of the square. (The diagram was a variation on Homeostat Drawing No. 2 from 1969.) As with his other social model construction projects, iterative presentations within a fairly short timeframe were intended to alert community participants to various social states: authoritative, consultative, associative, and cooperative. An outdoor display board in quasi-public places was new in Willats’s work, although it followed from his interest in public signage and advertising methods.40 Placed on sites negotiated with community members, the boards brought neighbors and strangers alike to view the displays; only one board (by the newsagent) disappeared and there was no graffiti.41 Willats essentially created an outdoor exhibit: “There were people walking around these streets, looking at these display boards, instead of going to an art gallery.”42 Willats labeled this latter group the secondary audience. From a Coded World was “on a bigger scale, and it had a bigger response from the art world altogether” than the Edinburgh project a couple of years earlier.43 Critic Richard Cork wrote: “Some found the phrasing hard to understand; and it is true that Willats, in his desire to formulate a coded world which would be as widely applicable as possible, sometimes failed to use the most accessible language.” Still, “the project elicited an astonishing variety and intensity of reactions from most of the people who took part.”44 The work developed ideas of symbolically and actually coded relationships, proposing how social configurations might be transformed. The final set of participant response sheets was kept up for a further two weeks in the

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library. Residents were encouraged to visit the library via posters that featured models posing in familiar settings, such as a launderette and a shop, images that had been used on the display boards. In all the social model projects, Willats created a necessary and impressive array of posters, postcards, fliers, booklets, diagrams, and problem sheets. This ephemera represented the marketing of his ideas—in sequence and spatially— to a public not usually interested in the art world. The materials were printed as well as photocopied for wide distribution. In addition to communication functions, they conveyed his aesthetic mode of communication, with a spectrum of greys combined with sans-serif text. Occasionally, Willats used a single bold color. When I visited the Chelsea College of Art and Design (which houses the West London Social Resource Project archive) and met with Special Collections Librarian Gustavo Grandal Montero, he emphasized this point by pulling out piece after piece from the Willats collection: spread out across a large wooden table, the materials were understated, minimalist, and consistent.45 This fascination with everyday paper production was also evident in Willats’s own early collecting of zines, for example. Artist A. A. Bronson noted the flood of zines in 1976 and credited Willats with his own awareness: “Stephen Willats was an artist who began to collect this material in the mid70s and he drew it to my attention at the time. His contribution was crucial in assembling the Punk issue of FILE Megazine in 1977.”46

A “New Reality”? Willats viewed the modernist idiom in architecture as an indicator of “the new reality,” an expression he used to describe impersonal bureaucracy and top-down planning of cities.47 His social practice took place within suburban and city spaces that were planned, built, and altered by professionals as well as inhabitants of the built environment. While Willats recognized the importance of expertise, he valued the insights of those who had to live within the systems that “experts” created. He noted in 1982: “Integral to the concept of the ‘new reality’ is that it is new, planned, a better way of living for large numbers of people.”48 The people who navigated that “new reality,” in Willats’s view, should have a say about whether the newness was in fact better. Willats offered tools to prompt reflection on people’s physical surroundings and imagine alternatives. Gordon Pask had contemplated the built environment as well. In a 1969 essay on “The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics,” he wrote about “mutualism,” arguing for a systems approach to architecture in relation to people: [B]uildings cannot be viewed simply in isolation. It [architecture] is only meaningful as a human environment. It perpetually interacts with

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its inhabitants, on the one hand serving them and on the other hand controlling their behaviour. In other words, structures make sense as parts of larger systems that include human components and the architect is primarily concerned with these larger systems; they (not just the bricks and mortar part) are what architects design. I shall dub this notion architectural “mutualism” meaning mutualism between structures and men or societies.49 Feedback from prospective residents was rarely part of housing production. Further, giving priority to professionals undercut the mutualism that Willats valued among artists and audiences. If designers moved away from the everyday and the familiar, the users, particularly if they were not included in the process, were sometimes put off by the changes. Willats engaged with the residents of housing estates to identify the ways in which the environment came to be so alienating and repetitive and then attempted to “remodel” the environment. He recognized that these self-organized ways of expression were often dismissed as “amateurish, for this status is given a derogatory image.”50 To counter this prevalent preference for the professional, Willats developed techniques to elicit responses from occupants. The face-to-face dialogue was certainly important, as was what photographer Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani referred to as “photo-elicitation methods,” after Douglas Harper. She noted in her own collaborative work: As people took second looks at the neighbourhood though photographs made from a different point of view, they were able to make analysis, give clarification, and begin to explain how the pieces fitted together. Being able to illuminate the feel of place, people’s emotional connections and their sense of the past often opened up a space for negotiations of social issues to be given voice.51 Remodeling behaviors and attitudes often accompanied rethinking spaces, a dynamic process that strengthened mutualism. People were considered experts in their own experiences, which could be shared and altered by them.

Willats in East London Willats worked with residents in neighborhoods of Nottingham, west London, and Edinburgh in the 1970s. In about 1977, he began exploring east London.52 Over the next two years, Willats worked with the Whitechapel Art Gallery in east London on a series of projects done collaboratively with people who lived or worked nearby in order to “reposition . . . the role of the

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Gallery in the community around it.”53 In addition to working with residents on the Ocean Estate, “famous as one of the poorest in Europe,” Willats also partnered with leather workers and dockworkers (Working within a Defined Context, 1978, see Chapter 4), both situated in east London.54 The Whitechapel exhibited these works in 1979 under the title, Concerning Our Present Way of Living. In 2016, Willats reflected on these projects set in east London: “I wanted to externalise the museum into the community, and internalise the community into the museum. The work resembled an interactive interface between the internal realm of the gallery and the neighbourhood around it.”55 This London-based effort had an important precedent in Willats’s 1977–8 project in Oxford called Contained Living: Learning to Live within a Confined Space that also integrated the museum into the community and vice versa. Contained Living had two parts: one part was at Friars Wharf Estate, a short walk from Oxford’s Museum of Modern Art, and the other part was at the museum. To view the piece in its entirety, one had to visit both locations. Willats used similar structures in later work in Leeds, Berlin, and Middlesbrough.56 As Pask noted, buildings must be considered in a broader context, including their own design and social histories. Thus a bit of background is in order about the Ocean Estate, a planned municipal housing project. Report after report about the Ocean Estate in Stepney (now part of the Borough of Tower Hamlets) stated that multiple “regeneration” efforts were only minimally successful. These reports acknowledged that including residents in these efforts was crucial, but the lack of trust among all the parties often defeated this goal, along with the tangle of government and charity groups.57 A 1979 newspaper article, “Ocean Waves Its Distress Signal,” highlighted problems on the Ocean Estate, noting high turnover among the 7,000 people in 1,800 homes, with the most-troubled blocks being those built in the 1950s, Bothnia, Tunis, Malacca, and Bengal.58 The government gradually reduced housing subsidies for the Greater London Council, which in turn eliminated many on-site porters and neglected maintenance; residents complained of broken lifts, leaky walls, and mold. Standardized procedures that were designed to handle large numbers of tenants meant that individuals often were poorly served.59 By 1979 there were press reports of antisocial and criminal behavior being rampant on the estate.60 A number of these “problem estates” were being demolished by the 1990s.61 In 1996, Willats wrote of the estate: The Ocean Estate resembles a huge transit camp, with many different ethnic groups, ranging from Greeks to Bengalis. . . . Most of the residents I met were simply waiting to transfer elsewhere, usually a new town such as Harlow or Basildon. There was very little of the community spirit traditionally associated with East London.62

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Sorting Out Other People’s Lives As with many of his projects, at the Ocean Estate Willats worked at the same site on multiple projects, producing an interactive work that involved a number of residents, Inside an Ocean (1979), as well as a series of four panels with Mrs. Kit Stone in her flat, Sorting Out Other People’s Lives (1978)63 (Figure 3.8). Mrs. Stone and her husband, John, lived with their six children and one grandson in Weddell House in a cramped, ground floor flat with four bedrooms. In 1978, the Stones’ flat was damp and poorly maintained. Mrs. Stone was head of the Ocean Estate Tenants Association: “I’m just one of those people who likes to fight people and argue with people. If I think I’m right I don’t shut up.”64 Willats interviewed her and Mr. Stone about living as a family in the flat, as well as about her voluntary roles in various groups besides the tenants’ association: the claimants’ union, a furniture workshop, and the Citizens’ Advice Bureau. Of Mrs. Stone, Willats wrote: “Residents in a situation of extreme deficiency and isolation produce their own spokesperson who acts as a catalyst for that community.” He thought of a housing estate as a self-organizing system, and people like Mrs. Stone then helped to maintain “internal coherency” within the system.65 Together Willats and the Stones discussed home, education, economic and social realities.66 Willats noted that the model used here “wasn’t coauthorship because I was actually making the work of art but it was an act of mutuality.”67 The family had lived there for six years; since John was in ill-health, he was at home with the children and answered the phone. Mrs. Stone remarked: “I would like to see more facilities for the kids on the estate. Quiet facilities.”68 The couple described Bengal House as the oldest structure, with the other three big towers (Malacca, Tunis, and Bothnia) as going up shortly thereafter. The estate also included Bengalis, West Indians,

Stephen Willats, Sorting Out Other People’s Lives, 1978, four panels. Photographs, photographic dye, ink, Letraset text, gouache on card, each panel 103 × 76 cm. Victoria Miro Gallery. Published in Art Society Feedback, 164–67; Welfare State, 49–53 (colour) View online (accessed December 1, 2019): http://stephenwillats.com/work/sorting-out-other-peoples-lives/ https://www.muhka.be/programme/detail/22-the-welfare-state/ item/13014-sorting-out-other-people-s-lives

FIGURE 3.8  Stephen Willats, Sorting Out Other People’s Lives, 1978, four panels. Photographs, photographic dye, ink, Letraset text, gouache on card, each panel 103 × 76 cm. Victoria Miro Gallery.

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Nigerians, Pakistanis, and Turkish Cypriots, with whom Mrs. Stone worked in her voluntary capacities. The panels for Sorting Out Other People’s Lives were created between August and November 1978. Black text and diagrams of lines and rectangles were superimposed on dyed photographic prints using primarily a magenta and yellow palette, with fairly low saturation and of varying value (brightness). The top half of each panel showed a domestic feature— vented window, television, food preparation, upholstered chair—while the lower half showed Mrs. Stone involved in community organizing tasks. Willats arrayed small black-and-white rectangular photographs as concept frames in the bottom corner of each of the four panels; they were linked via black diagonal lines to images featured within the colored squares, creating a rhythm that crisscrossed all four panels and stressed the enmeshment of lives, flats, estates, boroughs, cities, and societies. As with all of the panels, Panel 2 of Sorting Out Other People’s Lives had two registers. The bottom register showed Mrs. Stone at a typewriter “doing a job the state should do,” such as “helping them [tenants] make their claims.” The magenta dye of this lower register was comparatively intense, pulling the eye toward the center of the four-panel composition. The text, “Educate the people better to their rights,” was written in Letraset across Mrs. Stone’s shoulder, extending toward the typewriter. A more brightly hued square framed her face in profile. The top register had an image of a television with the text, “Little things that people very conveniently forget to tell you,” across the top of this pale yellow photograph. In very small text around the concept frame in both registers were axioms: purpose, feeling, response, belief (lower frame); code, reason, behavior, intention (upper frame). In 1988, Willats described this layer of meaning that surreptitiously spread across the anonymous concrete [of the tower block.] The results are sign systems that denote human presence and reflect the relativity in the economic, social and psychological relationship people have with the private, capsulised environment of their flat and the planned public spaces outside.69 We live among interconnected systems, and Willats’s panels help us to grasp this complexity. Willats depicted the ways in which lives were embedded in housing and urban systems by layering the diagrams with the photographs of Mrs. Stone inside her flat, scenes of the estate at different scales—from close-up views of doors and windows to wider shots of facades and signage. The quotations and keywords were symbolic of conversations, patterns, habits, and motivations that, while neatly placed, complicate, and interrupt our viewing with our own responses to the words. The overlaid text was at once on the surface, representative of everyday sounds, and mediated via transcription and psychology to serve as “subtitles” for the scene.

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Inside an Ocean The postcard that Willats used to announce his large-scale project in 1979 at the Ocean Estate in east London, Inside an Ocean, featured a photograph of the eight-story Malacca House (and Bothnia House receding to the right) taken from a high vantage point and cropped to emphasize the height of the complex (Figure 3.9). The photo showed two of the four main sections of this long concrete structure, in the context of nearby development. The black-and-white image underscored its quasi-industrial appearance with no ornamentation. Abstract geometries, formed by projecting stair and lift towers, prominent balconies on the top floors, windows flush with the facade, and angular canopies over the main entrances, provided an exemplar of “post-war concrete modernism,” icons that Willats pondered with the residents of the estate. These blocks, now demolished, were designed by Pierre Moiret, of Pearlman Moiret Associates, in 1950 and completed between 1951 and 1953.70 Willats used the striking forms of the modernist buildings on the posters and brochures advertising the Ocean project as a counterpoint to the

FIGURE 3.9  Ocean Estate, Bothnia, and Tunis House. Street view from the 1950s. London, UK. COLLAGE: the London Picture Archive, ref. 266081, catalog no. SC_ PHL_02_0838_X69_158. Image courtesy of the London Metropolitan Archives, City of London. This image is very similar to that used by Stephen Willats for some of his promotional material about Inside an Ocean, 1979.

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experiences of those inhabiting the damp, drafty buildings. Willats worked with the residents to take a system-wide look at the housing situations of many. He also did audio recordings with a number of tenants. Mr. and Mrs. D, for example, appreciated the veranda and the size of their maisonette; recalling when they had first moved in twenty years previously, “they [the flats] were a showplace” and had had a porter initially. The couple noted that they were in ill-health and cold, the lift was broken, vandalism was up, shopping facilities were nonexistent, and maintenance was not good; they could see right through gaps in the concrete wall. Mrs. D reported: “We are like prisoners because we can’t get out,” and “they [the authorities] talk to you as you’re a bit of dirt.”71 Inside an Ocean had three parts, with the work-in-progress being displayed on a Register Board at the community center (Dame Colet House). In all, Willats spent about fifteen months on the work, partly supported by a grant from the Tower Hamlets Arts Committee. Once the project began, there was a two-week-long effort to have residents describe their current situations on problem sheets (Figure 3.10). Using these descriptions, Willats created five posters (“problem display boards”) showing things “as they are.” Then followed a second two-week period for people to prescribe how things could be different, using Willats’s posters as prompts to fill in response sheets and to indicate how they might initiate those changes. Willats then created another set of posters, and further response sheets were collected and posted. The third part was the presentation of everything for another two weeks. Willats provided five topics to consider: home, communal, economic, social, and cultural aspects. “The principal agent for generating interaction between the audience and the work,” according to Willats, “is through the presentation of ‘problem situations’ that reflect some conflict between object and person.” Willats posed questions and used photographs and texts to draw in participants.72 This method of engaging with the audience and reflecting with them on their everyday environment corresponded with “photo-elicitation” practices discussed previously.73 For the first part, “Describing things as they are,” one of the posters related to “Our communal reality.” A pair of black-and-white photographs mounted one on top of the other showed a broken bench out-of-doors against a brick wall, with graffiti, and, below that, a casually dressed older White man and woman in conversation seated on an upholstered settee. Above the bench image was the commentary: “Not a lot of changes except that it’s got more noisier and a bit more uncaring.” Below the photo of the people was the question: “In what way does the estate environment influence their community feeling[?]” By selecting these two images, Willats centered antisocial behavior like graffiti and vandalism, as well as the presence of the elderly on housing estates. The situation linked the physical environment to the residents and asked for input from viewers about this juxtaposition.74 Willats, instead of limiting his inquiry to a single issue, asked participants

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Stephen Willats, Inside an Ocean, 1979. Visuals discussed include • Postcard announcing project (with photograph similar to that in Figure 3.9); • Flier for the first part of project; • Flier for the second part of project; and • Problem display panel from series of 12. Photographs, ink, Letraset text on card, each panel, 132 × 100 cm. Ephemera held by Victoria and Albert Museum, National Art Library, London, UK. Panels are published in Art Society Feedback, 168–170. The 2014 reinstallation of this work is visible online: https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/steph en-willats-concerning-our-present-way-of-living/ (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 3.10  Stephen Willats, Inside an Ocean, 1979. Ephemera held by Victoria and Albert Museum, National Art Library, London, UK.

to consider a variety of settings—private interiors, balconies, and lobbies— with a variety of people interacting. He considered people and housing as being “mutually bound” in ways that sought solutions to social ills from those most affected, while also recognizing that larger systems restricted choices for most of them. Other Inside an Ocean display boards showed a bedroom interior paired with a woman and child, posing the question about home, “How do you think this family’s living conditions effect [sic] their life together?” Another board showed double glass doors opening into a lobby together with a man outside on a balcony, asking about the social reality, “In what ways could people overcome the physical pressures of this estate to socially relate to others living around them?” The people pictured were representative of residents on the estate: white, black, and South Asian. Response sheets with question prompts provided large blank areas in which to share ideas and, by implication, affirmed that resources to address some problems existed among the people who lived on the estate. Willats asserted: [T]he Ocean Estate is seen as a symbolic manifestation of our society, its physical structure being a product of a culturally dominant institutional consciousness. Such a physical world mediates the social consciousness of the people who live within its confines.75

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The estate buildings were designed and constructed by a municipal housing system that regulated tenants; the tenants were both affected by these environments and effected changes within them. Willats and the tenants intervened in the “culturally dominant institutional consciousness.” In a local newspaper article covering the exhibit of Response Sheets at Dame Colet House, a reviewer noted, “And there are plenty of scribbled ‘pearls of wisdom’”; she also reported on Willats’s reaction: “I believe I’ve created a lot of interest on the estate.”76 The community-generated ideas were available for any visitor to study. “Everyone could see the diversity of opinion, the relativity of their own opinions, their perceptions and those of the world around them,” Willats said. “It showed that your perception is relative to everybody else’s.”77 Willats’s approach is affirmed in recent work on participatory art practices. Martino Stierli and Mechtild Widrich in their 2016 edited volume, Participation in Art and Architecture, note that the simplistic attention given to just one source of agency is “best overcome by a pluralist focus on sites of interaction and participation.”78 Mutualism fostered discussion and exchanges that multiplied possibilities.

Art for Whom? Willats continually displayed imagery from urban surroundings—building facades, laundries, public benches, city lights, libraries, fenestration—to prompt residents to share their attitudes toward their environment, and how they imagined it differently. His projects countered prevailing expertise that reduced people to numbers and then used those numbers in ways that supported the status quo. In opposition to that bureaucracy, Willats cooperated with residents of housing estates and suburbs to visualize specific places, problems, and responses in grassroots ways. In 1978, curator Richard Cork invited Willats and other artists and artist groups to exhibit at the Serpentine Gallery. Art for Whom?, the title of the exhibition, posed more than a rhetorical question. Cork maintained that it was the central and most urgent challenge confronting artists in our time. . . . Art cannot properly be said to exist if it does not make itself available, in the fullest sense of that word, to the society which produced it in the first place.79 The contributors in addition to Willats included Conrad Atkinson, Peter Dunn, and Loraine Leeson, the Laycock School Experiment, and Public Art at Royal Oak. The group wrote an eponymous collective statement published in the small catalog. The final point of their ten-point statement reiterated the mutuality to which Willats was committed: “WE declare that art needs people as much as people need art: the two should be inextricably

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linked with each other, and never divorced so damagingly again.”80 The process-based, site-specific works in this exhibit needed contextualization in the gallery. Willats exhibited materials related to From a Coded World and both he and Cork wrote about that project in the catalog; Cork had been one of the project operators. Loraine Leeson and Peter Dunn exhibited work from their campaign to save the Bethnal Green Hospital and theorized about that project, and Cork wrote about their local history installation in the South Ruislip Library that contrasted Ruislip with the new town, Peterlee.81 Leeson and Dunn published further reflections in Control Magazine in 1977 and 1979. Willats’s social art instigated analyses about the present and future urban living and how residents organized within these conditions. Willats crisscrossed the city of London (and other locations) for four decades, often returning to the same housing estates and suburbs, to highlight varied responses to modernist residential structures and outlying areas. Using “extra-gallery tactics” and tapping into the “vital feedback” from participants, Willats’s practice was bound to “the human, social and political issues which affect everyone’s existence,” which in turn shaped his work.82

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The Art of Sociotechnical Systems

The history of social housing in the UK is intertwined with government regulation, real estate development, economics, class structures, and immigration, among other factors.1 While the literature on low- and highrise government housing estates is vast and varied, this chapter focuses on high-rise buildings and Stephen Willats’s projects in them. Willats made his art in the gaps between idealized dwellings and actual lived realities of estate housing. Control of the behavior of inhabitants of social housing—via physical planning, regulations, media imagery, and/or informal pressures— fascinated Willats. By creating projects within the very spaces of midtwentieth-century modernist housing, Willats’s art not only increased the visibility of these urban developments and those living in and around them but also intervened in these deterministic systems using new aesthetic forms. Andrew Higgott underscored the ways in which images of built modernism saturated the city: The history of modernism has been shaped by the development of the visual media in parallel with the practice of modern architecture: the new architecture, new media and new photography worked together to mutual advantage. Had they not done so, the forms of modernism rather than any deeper level of its meaning of realisation, might not have become so pervasive.2 But pervasive these forms were and high-rise flats became a key image for urban Britain in the mid-century. This visual imagery influenced planning, advertising, and interiors as well. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911– 80) characterized this process:

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As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art. . . . It shapes our entire outlook and all our ways of feeling. Like any other environment, its operation is imperceptible. . . . The artist provides us with antienvironments that enable us to see the environment.3 The high-rises where Willats sited some of his projects varied in materials, fenestration, height, interior plans, and context, to name some important design factors. Just as Willats’s projects demonstrated the variety of people residing in tower blocks, so too a sampling of estate designs reveals that modernism was not a singular aesthetic even as modern architecture altered the fabric of so many British cities.4 Even so, urban dwellers became inured to what seemed commonplace; historian Simon Pepper noted that nearly 20 percent of the housing built by the Greater London Council in the late 1960s and early 1970s was in “very high blocks of 20 storeys or more.”5 Willats’s work helped people to consider what had become overly familiar and thus not really seen. His art provided structures “that enable us to see the environment” (as McLuhan noted) so that urban dwellers might look beyond the “forms of modernism” and see the many people who occupied those flats, and the ways in which they adapted those deterministic structures to their needs.

Toward a “Depleted, Disillusioned New Reality” Architects and planners who addressed the postwar housing shortages often made laudable efforts, spurred by their (usually) middle-class ideals of decent living conditions. Material shortages, among other challenges, frequently made it impossible to meet admirable goals.6 Bureaucratic and ideological processes further undermined the ideals.7 Because the tower block itself was integral to Willats’s work, this chapter provides background on some of the modernist structures of the 1960s and 1970s. Stefan Muthesius and Miles Glendinning, in their comprehensive study on the tower block, explained that the point block was introduced to Britain in 1951 and “heralded the beginning of the new housing architecture” pioneered by the London County Council (LCC). “By 1965,” they reported, the LCC had “built over a hundred of these slender multi-story point blocks.” In terms of visual impact on London, it is worth noting that the first high-rise flats over fifteen stories (the eighteen-story Brandon Estate towers, where Willats did a project in 1982) were only authorized in 1957. The quantity of new residential buildings at these heights, then, built between 1951 and 1965, significantly altered the appearance of the city. E. E. (Ted) Hollamby, Brandon Estate’s designer, lauded in 1960 the “visual image” one has of “the conurbation . . . a cluster of tall towers soaring.” The Royal Institute

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of British Architects (RIBA) sponsored two major symposia in 1955 and 1957 on “High Flats,” to ascertain popular attitudes toward tower blocks, a type that continued to be built at increasing heights, often with decreasing design quality, for the next two decades.8 The tower block began to appear in Willats’s photographic collages, as well as in Control Magazine, in 19779 (Figure 4.1). (The Compartmentalised Cliff of 1977 was likely Willats’s first collage with a tower image, created in suburban Paris.)10 On the front cover of issue 10 of Control Magazine was a photograph of Kennet House, a sixteen-story tower block surrounded by the primarily low-rise buildings of the Church Street Estate in west London (Figure 4.2). The light-colored spandrels and grouped windows of Kennet House emphasized its horizontality, while the recessed central bays on both sides of the building drew the eye up to the rooftop mechanical structure. It stood angled on a corner site in a densely populated part of the city near Paddington Station, more or less in Willats’s back garden. The cover image of Control illustrated the tower block from a high vantage point and revealed what was not there: no projecting balconies, no fancy fenestration. The building was not remarkably tall or massive; it was, in fact, unremarkable, and that was likely the reason Willats selected the image. It was (by 1977, anyway) everyday, common. A few trees and a green space to the left of the tower shown on the Control Magazine cover visually linked to the foliage of Regent’s Park that extended across the background of the photograph. Just above this line of trees, the words, “Extending the social function of art. The foundations of a practice for today.” provided the title for the issue, as well as a synopsis for Willats’s tireless explorations of relationships between society and art. As Willats had expressed in his “Mechanistic Crisis” paper in 1966 (written for the Destruction in Art Symposium of that year and discussed in Chapter 1), bureaucratic government control and restricted living spaces could be seen as creating a “crisis” that triggered a homeostatic response.

Stephen Willats, Control Magazine issue 10 (1977), cover showing Kennet House and surrounding Church Street Estate. All Control covers are visible here: https://www.controlmagazine.org /issues (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 4.1  Stephen Willats, Control Magazine issue 10 (1977), cover showing Kennet House and surrounding Church Street Estate. Tate Library, London, UK.

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FIGURE 4.2  View of Kennet House, Church Street Estate, London, UK, Photo by Sharon Irish, 2016.

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In other words, as people moved into the rigidly planned state-run housing estates, their spatial limitations not only heightened awareness of identities, social codes, behaviors, and values but also introduced the possibility of change in response. Willats had been working with residents in their built environments since the mid-1960s, starting with his classes at Ipswich Civic College. In the UK, as housing legislation reduced service staff and, eventually, promoted the purchase of property, the quality and quantity of spaces for low-income inhabitants diminished.11 The flats that had served to shelter so many in need in the previous decade were poorly maintained and lacking in amenities. In 1984, Willats wrote: “The symbol of the optimistic, futuristic New Reality of the 1960’s had, by 1975, become the sign post for a repressed, depleted, disillusioned New Reality that pointed towards the 1980’s.”12

The Ideological Tower For Willats, the blurring of distinctions between artist and public often began with diagramming general concepts and then using these drawings as references as he worked “outside the ‘high culture network,’” as artists Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson called it when they first wrote for Control Magazine in 1977.13 These diagrams were for Willats’s use and, as I understand it, were not intended to communicate his thinking to residents in housing estates, for example. He was a versatile artist in that sense: in his studio, he developed visualizations of abstract ideas that provided him with general models for fieldwork; in the art world, these drawings represented his practice as a conceptual artist and theorist; in his social practice, the diagrams provided structure as he engaged with messy realities or, as he put it, “as a heuristic for getting through the experience.”14 Such is the case with The Ideological Tower of August 1977 (Figure 4.3). In this diagrammatic drawing, Willats used what can be read as the structural framework of a modernist skyscraper to depict ways in which societal problems intersect with identity, social codes, values, and behavior. The “building” was composed of “nine stories,” drawn in black ink, with each “floor” from foundation to the top crisscrossed by lighter lines forming an “X,” a concept frame. Distilling social behaviors into a concept frame was merely one step for Willats toward understanding social ecologies—but the process clarified how Willats conceived of his work in tower blocks. The text on the drawing read: “Each floor in the tower represents one concept frame.” A (Identity) and B (Code) form two vertical axes of the tower; they rise with horizontal “braces” linking them. Similarly, C (Values) and D (Behavior) form the other two “columns” of the tower, linked diagonally in the horizontal plane. The vertical axis is labeled “models of relationships” on a continuum from “general structures” at the bottom of the axis to “particular structures” at

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Stephen Willats, The Ideological Tower, 1977. Ink on paper with Letraset text, 101.8 × 75.7 cm. Private Collection. Published in Between Buildings and People, 13; Languages of Dissent, 109. A related work, The Twin Towers, can be seen here online: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/willatsthe-twin-towers-t13340 (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 4.3  Stephen Willats, The Ideological Tower, 1977. Ink on paper with Letraset text, 101.8 × 75.7 cm. Private Collection.

the top. In “plan”—a two-dimensional view of one “floor”—Willats noted on the diagram that “[e]ach concept frame views a social problem via four axioms.” The axioms—identity, code, values, behavior—were “constants, . . . established so that biases of information” can be assembled around them. The entire conceptual tower provided a schematic way to see relationships in human communications. In 2007, Willats defined concept frames as “nodes of information (but nodes that still in some specified way belong together, for example with different but dependent functions) . . . assembled in a holding frame, the frame being a subset of a set of frames that gives a ‘whole.’”15 As with The Ideological Tower itself, these concept frames—communication structures— are interconnected and defined by specific axioms, creating a speculative unit that may alter over time and through space in what Willats called “sequential concept frames,” which were discussed in Chapter 3. Willats’s concept frames were arranged in sequences that were either represented spatially in drawings or actually set up within a tower block. Willats believed such sequences were crucial to personal and/or societal transformation. “Radical changes in perceptual approach affecting attitudes and beliefs rarely occur in response to one encounter,” he wrote in 2000. Any change in attitudes required repeated encounters with new information. He wrote: In presenting “complex” information that requires basic shifts in attitude to absorb, information that varies considerably from existing beliefs, the ordering of that information in time enables bit by bit transformation and internalisation to take place.16 The tower block provided a clear format for Willats’s sequential concept frames, as affective and pragmatic responses to living in modern structures were displayed in sequence over time, on various floors.

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In his 2007 essay on speculative modeling, Willats noted that when the “abstracted approach” was applied in architectural design, it moved into dangerous social and political territory. Certainly one outcome that became all too obvious was exhibited by the abstractions created by “planners” in the late sixties when shaping major living and working environments for other people, where the actual complexity of people’s lives was all too often reduced to a numerical formulation to fit within a socially paternalistic imposed plan.17 This then was the conundrum: when planning and design ideologies produced rigid systems, how did people actually adapt those spaces to their complex needs? How did formulaic spaces affect the people who lived within them? How might art help people avoid getting stuck in place and attitude? For over fifteen years, Willats explored tower blocks in and around London, as well as in other British, French, and German cities. I will discuss the following projects: Vertical Living (1978), Brentford Towers (1985), Multi-Storey Mosaic (1990), and Personal Islands (1993).18 Willats has spoken about the way that physical environments influence those who live in them.19 By bringing this “physicality” into the foreground—integrating the iconic tower block into the process of his art-making—Willats created artistic structures that provided feedback about a building and its surroundings at the same time as the building’s inhabitants proposed new ways of living there. Because each of the sites in London was different, and Willats’s practice was evolving over time, these project works display an adaptability within a cybernetic framework.

Vertical Living Sited along the Grand Union Canal, the red-brick housing estate Skeffington Court is near the railway station and a shopping (high) street, in the village of Hayes in the Borough of Hillingdon in west London. Willats had been exploring this area since 1972, when construction was underway on a number of estates in this outer suburb.20 In 1974, Prime Minister Harold Wilson opened Skeffington Court, “in a spirit of confidence about this form of housing”21 (Figure 4.4). Skeffington Court had been open for just three years when Willats started work on two projects at the estate in 1977, Vertical Living and Living with Practical Realities (on the latter, see Chapter 5); the mother of a friend of his lived there.22 Vertical Living marked the first time that Willats had worked in a single building both to create and to display his art. The fourteen stories of the Skeffington tower are defined by horizontal bands between each floor. The plan is essentially that of a point block (the utilities and lifts are in the central core), but it is complicated by a lower block connected to the main tower. From the

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FIGURE 4.4  Skeffington Court, 1974, Hayes, London, UK. Location of Stephen Willats’s Vertical Living (1978) and Living with Practical Realities (1978). Photo by Sharon Irish, 2014. Pump Lane entrance to the estate, the buildings increase in height, from four stories to ten stories to the adjacent fourteen-story tower (Figure 4.5). The geometries are hard to decipher since they are layered and close together on the narrow site between busy roads, light industrial buildings, and the canal. One visitor to the Vertical Living project, art critic Richard Cork, remarked: I was struck particularly by the fact that one did seem to be literally entering a kind of no man’s land, in that it didn’t seem to be anywhere in particular. Street followed street in more or less uniform succession, and you did feel as if you were marooned in the middle of a district which didn’t seem to have any kind of local identity. . . . I got this extraordinary sense of isolation, the feeling that the people who lived there must of necessity, whether they liked it or not, be very sealed off from any other kind of context apart from the one they inhabited.23 Willats was dismayed by the gap between planning ideals and built actualities.24 He noted that the planners and architects had envisaged an environment which required a specified level of maintenance, . . . the full time resident caretaker being an essential part of their plan. As financial cut backs took hold and the

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FIGURE 4.5  Skeffington Court tower behind low-rise estate buildings, 1974, Hayes, London, UK. View from Pump Lane. Photo by Sharon Irish, 2014.

caretaker became part time, so what was a brand new building began to throw up increasing clouds of doubt for the residents.25 Then (as now) entry to the tower block required a key or code. In the course of photographing the buildings, Willats met some of the residents

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and explained his interests to them, eventually finding seven residents who were willing to work with him on the first part of Vertical Living. They jointly created display boards for the tower block. To create these boards, Willats recorded interviews with these volunteers and then distilled issues from those recordings to pose problems for the rest of the residents to contemplate in the second part. Willats also made photographic portraits of the seven tenants, as well as of their living spaces. The interior photographs exhibited the “diversity of expressions . . . by residents inside their individual living space.”26 Each participant approved the final display boards that showed themselves, their objects, and the issue to which their neighbors would respond. As Willats noted in his documentation of this project, Within what at first sight might seem like a jumble of objects there was another category that could be from the past, present, future[,] which psychologically extended the space inhabited by the person and connected them to the world outside. . . . [T]hese interventions by the resident had the effect of changing the fixed rigidity of the space for them, of combating the pressure to conform exerted by the space on their psychology.27 The display boards had two photographs of an individual inside their flat, with a description of a problem under one photograph, and a question about how to alter their situation under the second photograph (Figure 4.6). In the first problem display, “Looking at the effect on me of life in a confined space,” a middle-aged woman was shown sitting in her living room with this text underneath the photo: “How can I reduce the amount of external noise that is disturbing my thoughts in here[?]” To the right of this image, a second photograph showed the same woman seated on a couch, reading a newspaper open beside her. The text under this photo asked the viewer to suggest (prescribe) some solutions to a problem: “What do you think people like me can do to stop the feeling of isolation from others around

Stephen Willats, Vertical Living, 1978, First Problem Display, from a series of twelve. Photographs and Letraset text. Published in Art Society Feedback, 49 (installation view), 87; Between Buildings and People, 14; Beyond the Plan, 20; two other panels appear on p. 21. Viewable online: http://stephenwillats.com/work/verticalliving/ (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 4.6  Stephen Willats, Vertical Living, 1978, First Problem Display, from a series of twelve. Photographs and Letraset text.

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them while being on their own[?]” Below those two photographs, in a grid arrangement, were two collaged concept frames with objects matched with words and axioms (Identity, Motivation, Code, Behavior) at the corners. In the lower-left frame, “single” appears with a television set; “quiet” appears with a distant view of some industrial buildings; “restlessness” appears with a car; and “privacy” appears with a view of pillows on a double bed. In the bottom right, the grid paired a lidded dish with “independent”; a room interior with “access”; two cloth dolls seated in a chair with “create”; and an ensemble of suitcases and a table with knickknacks together with the word “experiment.” The words described a human action, emotion, condition, or preference that contrasted with objects that might support a change in a person’s state, but in and of themselves were mere things. The words also prompted the viewer to make their own associations with the images and the words. The other six problem displays had the same format of two images of an individual or couple in their flat above two concept frames. The second display, “Observing how I am dependent on other people,” described an elderly woman’s dilemma, “How can I feel safe going to visit other people in this tower after 4 in the afternoon[?],” and asked viewers, “What do you think I should do to involve others within this tower in my daily life[?]”28 Of this artwork, Willats wrote that it took the form of a social process. While various objects such as the Problem Displays were associated with the formal structure of the work, they were also agents for the generation of interpersonal relationships . . . enabling a chain of social interactions to be developed that were not originally existent within the tower.29 After the displays were ready, part two of the project began. One week prior to the expansion of this project, the artist put up fifty posters in nearby shops and the library. “Project operators” (who were friends and acquaintances of Willats) then went door-to-door in the Skeffington tower block seeking people to participate, using the face-to-face approach also used in previous Willats projects. They found thirty-seven volunteers, from a total of seventy-five flats. Participants were given a project file in which to keep their response sheets, and an explanatory poster, designed by Willats. For two weeks (July 16 to August 6, 1978), Willats displayed the problem boards in the lift lobbies of Skeffington Court’s fourteen-story tower block. The “point block” tower eased the display of Vertical Living because the lifts at the building’s core brought people together there. Initially, one problem display was set up on the first floor, and all residents were invited to view it. Those who agreed to join the project formally were asked to fill in their response sheets in duplicate (using carbon paper). After two days, the project operators visited the residents to collect one copy of their response sheet to post on the public register, which was set

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up opposite the problem display. Suggestions by participating residents addressed the problems posed on the boards. While the register was being filled with the first round of responses, the second problem display went on view on the third floor, also by the lifts. Prior to examining the second problem display, however, residents were asked to read the response sheets to the first problem display, to see what everyone had suggested, and to inform the next round. The project lost some participants at this point, but twenty-eight people stuck with it through all seven problem displays, which were exhibited on every other level up to the fourteenth floor.30 Each problem display had its own register placed opposite. For some of the participants, the visits from the project operators were welcome interactions; the face-to-face contact in this and other projects by Willats was a significant factor in participation. After all the problem displays had been installed and the response sheets posted, the entire set of boards remained in place for another week. Then Willats held a series of meetings with residents and the project operators in the foyer to discuss the project prior to removing the installation. In 1979, in issue 11 of Control Magazine, Willats published “The Counter-Consciousness in Vertical Living,” which tied his work to some of his other projects in Germany and France related to counter-consciousness, along with the diagrammatic drawing from 1977, The Twin Towers (which was similar to The Ideological Tower of the same year).31 Willats defined counter-consciousness in 1982: “‘Counter consciousness’ is self-organising, relationships between people are self-determined and formed from what they can mutually establish are their priorities and needs.”32 In the case of Vertical Living, he observed that even small spatial alterations made by residents had great significance for them, it was something special which they would point out. . . . [T]hese interventions by the resident had the effect of changing the fixed rigidity of the space for them, of combating the pressure to conform exerted by the space on their psychology.33 By including these interventions in his artwork, Willats affirmed feedback into the tower block system by the residents. Throughout his practice, Willats has been drawn to aspects of cybernetic thinking and the vocabularies that emerged from mid-century theorists and social scientists: self-organization, inputs, outputs, feedback, homeostatic regulation. In the 2008 film A State of Agreement, Willats reflected that in the design of high-rise environments “there was no real feedback—if we use this cybernetic word—from the occupants, the people who are going to inhabit these buildings.”34 Vertical Living provided a literal and figurative structure in which to organize residents’ ideas about the place where they lived. The project had a beginning and end date, but the interactions that Willats instigated with his art were open-ended.

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Inputs came from the problem displays that Willats cocreated with participants; the residents’ responses to those problems were outputs, informing the next round. As one moved through space—arriving at the estate in Hayes and traveling vertically through the tower block as the displays appeared on different levels—one responded sequentially over time to the displays. Gordon Pask noted in 1969 (in gendered terms): “[M]an ‘talks with’ his surroundings. These consist in other men, information systems such as libraries, computers or works of art and also, of course, the structures around him.”35 Performance studies scholar Jon McKenzie underscored the “systems” aspect of these interactions: “[S]ociological researchers of technology have . . . turned to this concept of sociotechnical systems precisely because it focuses on the interface of social and technological performances.”36 Vertical Living serves as an example of this sociotechnical junction: the residents provided information about their experiences of living in the controlled environment of a tower block; this social information shaped subsequent responses, as well as the perceptions of the tower. The feedback loop continued within the building, as problem displays were exhibited and tenants “performed” their responses within the project. Willats’s art took place at this “interface” that McKenzie named. Skeffington Court became a site for cybernetic expression. Willats wrote, “In the ‘new reality’ this control is continually impressed on the consciousness of people through encoding the physical environment into a highly complex structure of inter-related symbols that exhibit their separation from nature.”37 In Willats’s view, physical environments like Skeffington Court alienated people from each other, and from their surroundings. Vertical Living both pondered the status quo and displayed ways that residents countered social isolation within designed systems. Catherine Mason, an important writer about art and cybernetics, noted that “[t]he idea of control and communication is at the root of cybernetics— information conveyed by signals is decoded to become feedback used for control. Self-regulation by feedback is found in all cybernetic processes, whether natural, mechanical or social.”38 Rather than adopting cybernetics as a static framework within which to work, Willats insisted on the embodied particularity of feedback loops; he acknowledged that the process of observing systems included the observers themselves. Vertical Living, a “complex structure of inter-related symbols,” demonstrated how the built environment shaped and was shaped by the interactivity of second-order cybernetics that Willats applied in this project.39 Curator Brigitte Franzen in her essay on the importance of the tower block in Stephen Willats’s work claimed that “tower block architecture is not the actual subject of the image.”40 Franzen noted that Willats “induced” active agency among residents: he “bundles information, makes it readable and feeds it back into the residential systems.”41 Willats’s projects also are material and symbolic assemblages of humans, buildings, streets, transport

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systems, infrastructures that both include and go beyond the tower block. The material fact of the tower block and its surroundings (Franzen’s “residential system”)—whether car parks, empty lots, roads, canals, walkways—and the people who move through them, shaped Willats’s work as well as shaping the lives of people who lived there.42

Brentford Towers In 1967, the firm of Max Lock and Partners designed council housing in the form of six twenty-three-story towers on a site close to London’s Kew Bridge. These buildings opened in 1971 as Brentford Towers, part of the Green Dragon Lane Estate43 (Figure 4.7). Built on former industrial properties, Brentford Towers were among many postwar projects where the decline of manufacturing or shifts in technology—in this case, gas and waterworks and rail lines—changed the physical appearance of the city. At nearly the same time as the construction of the tower blocks, the elevated section of the M4 motorway was built in 1964 in Brentford despite intense local opposition. (One still can see Brentford Towers from the M4.)44 These tall structures act as markers for shifts in municipal authority, planning, housing regulation and construction in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Turning into Green Dragon Lane from High Street (Kew Bridge Road) in the London borough of Hounslow, a visitor passes what is now the Steam Museum and then, beyond a high brick wall enclosing the museum site, the landscape opens up to reveal an expanse of green lawn defined by the six towers, the inspiration and instantiation of Stephen Willats’s project, Brentford Towers, of 1985. Willats and William Furlong recorded a conversation as they drove to these towers south and west of London; Furlong was the editor of Audio Arts. They spotted other towers on the skyline, and Willats remarked that he was familiar with and had worked in many of these locations since he began drawing the buildings in the early 1960s.45 Brentford Towers was a mature Willats project, with many logistical, aesthetic, and intellectual issues well resolved and well documented. A Lisson Gallery postcard called Willats’s Brentford Towers a “time-structured installation evolving over 28 days inside Harvey House” (October 6 to November 2, 1985).46 The audio recording that Furlong and Willats made in the autumn of 1985, about halfway through the installation, introduced the listener to the spaces and residents in Harvey House, one of the six Brentford Towers, which Willats chose for this collaborative project (Figure 4.8). Willats noted that the estate “expresses the idea of the New Reality . . . the totality of it—walkways, flowerbeds, mutualistic philosophical thinking of the 60s,” and that the estate continued “working in a way, [it was] not totally vandalized.”47

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FIGURE 4.7 Brentford Towers, Max Lock, and Partners (architects), 1967–71, Green Dragon Lane Estate, London, UK. Photo by Sharon Irish, 2014. Harvey House is set back slightly from the road behind a low berm. Furlong and Willats used the entry phone to connect with Sharon Wood, one of the project participants. They then entered the building and took the lift to the tenth floor. Mrs. Wood greeted them while her baby cried and another child was audible on the recording. She reflected that the project

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FIGURE 4.8  View of Harvey House, one of Brentford Towers, Green Dragon Lane Estate, London, UK. Photo by Sharon Irish, 2014. “hopefully . . . will help to get to know more people. When you get in the lift, it’s something to have a conversation about really.”48 Funded by Artangel Trust and Elephant Trust, Willats’s site-specific work at Brentford began with approaches to the building’s caretaker, the chief housing officer, and the tenants’ association to enquire about residents who might want to collaborate with him on an art project. Willats then met John Foster,

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who helped throughout the project. Mr. Foster was on the housing tenants’ association committee.49 In the Audio Arts recording, Mr. Foster noted that it was “my duty to try and help him.” Willats’s work with tower block residents grew rather organically as one person introduced him to another, and so on, although he aimed to get a representative sample of people, such as those with children, single men and women, and couples, and people who lived on different floors, with flats oriented in various directions. The artist gave himself three weeks to establish relationships with those with whom he would cocreate work. Once fifteen people had agreed to participate, Willats began by visiting each of them in their flats, talking about particular objects that held special meaning for them, and taking photographs of these objects. Willats also discussed with each individual their relationship to life outside the flat: the view from their living room window, their neighbors, or the larger urban context of the estate. After transcribing the interviews, developing the film, and sharing the results with each of the participating residents, Willats worked with them to distill what would go on individual public display boards (which were made in their flats) to be exhibited on the landings with tenant approval. “I would provide the framework for the work, and residents would load that framework with their own conceptualization of the relationship between objects on either side of their living room windows.”50 The layout of each board was the same: a photo of the resident, a photo of Harvey House, a quotation in their handwriting, and photos of a view from their window (or an aspect of their flat) and an object in their flat (Figure 4.9). An angled view of the north facade of the building, cut out and placed on the left of each display board, emphasized the height and exterior forms of the structure: the strong horizontals of the balconies and clustered windows intersected with the corrugated concrete panels that comprised one bay all the way up, without visual interruption. The images were mounted on a whiteboard (words were written directly on the board). The other photographs had a dark border that emphasized the varied shapes of each

Stephen Willats, Brentford Towers, 1985 • Display Board with Sharon Wood • Display board with Mr. Mitchell Display boards are held at Chiswick Central Library Local Collection, London, UK. Display board with Sharon Wood published in Between Buildings and People, 123; Mr. Mitchell display board not published. Related images in Art Society Feedback, 450–1, and online: http://stephenwillats.com/work/brentford-towers/ (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 4.9  Stephen Willats, Brentford Towers, 1985, Preparatory drawings and display boards, Chiswick Central Library Local Collection, London, UK.

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Stephen Willats, Brentford Towers, 1985. Installation view of display board. Published Art Society Feedback, 450; Between Buildings and People, 123 Online: http://stephenwillats.com/work/brentfordtowers/ (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 4.10  Stephen Willats, Brentford Towers, 1985. Installation view of display board.

of them. A black arrow pointed to the floor where each individual lived, and black lines connected the images. Because the boards were made by Willats with different individuals, the content of each board varied. One portion of a large preparatory worksheet indicated that Willats initially planned to have response sheets posted along with the display boards, but that aspect fell away as the project developed. Willats noted that many of the residents talked about the M4 motorway, but he didn’t want every board to feature that controversial road; thus in dialogue with each resident, he worked to select an aspect of tower life that did not duplicate others. Both Vertical Living at Skeffington Court and Brentford Towers were integrated with the actual tower: at Brentford, “the work climbed the inside of the block, floor by floor, to gradually build its own conceptual tower. . . . The actual physicality of the tower was an integral part of the work and had to be experienced first-hand.”51 The display boards of Brentford Towers were installed floor by floor over twenty-two days and then left in place for another nine days (Figure 4.10). To view the work, a visitor would ascend to the top of Harvey House and walk down, stopping off at various landings to view different displays.52 Willats’s ethics guided this and other participatory efforts. Everyone was a volunteer; participants chose what to display; and no board was displayed on a landing without everyone on that floor agreeing to the exhibit (thus some of the floors did not have displays). Willats’s motivation was to “change residents’ behaviour, so that they would go to floors they would not normally see and, in doing so, meet other residents.”53 He has repeatedly stressed that giving priority to the “audience” is a means for the artist “to break through his present social containment.” A prerequisite for an artwork that manifests a counter consciousness is that the separation which existed between the artist and the audience is closed, that they become mutually engaged, to the point where the audience become the rationale in both the making and reception of the work.54

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Chapter 5 will focus on some of the individuals with whom Willats collaborated, especially as they were affected by the sociotechnical structures within which we all live. Here, I want to point out how some of the Brentford Towers displays featured urban systems, “wide and vertiginous prospects of motorway flyovers, factories and other houses far below [that] contrasted with the domestic intimacy of the interior photographs,” as described by Cork.55 Harvey House had flats with large living room windows and some flats had balconies. For example, Mr. Mitchell, who lived on the twentieth floor, chose the exterior view of the motorway and an interior view of his television set (including an image of the city being broadcast) to accompany his selected quotation: “Some nights you hear a load of motorbikes ripping up the old M4, sounding their horns, automatically it’s interesting, and you look. Same with police cars, or fire engines. It’s all activity isn’t it?”56 Mrs. Wood wrote: Sometimes I imagine I’m going along a country road, ’cos I would like to have a go on a bike on the real road, but usually I might put on a pop record, and it helps me keep pedaling. I just get on my bike and I keep looking at the clock to see how far I’ve got to go. I suppose I just sit and think about what I’ve got to do when I get off it, like start the dinner or some other boring household chore.57 In addition to this quotation and a photograph of the meter on her stationary bike for her display board, she selected a view down onto the river and Kew Bridge. The motorway, the river, Kew Bridge, car parks and traffic, airplanes, pedestrians, trees, birds, playgrounds, as well as balconies and other buildings below Harvey House or further away, were depicted as interconnected with residents’ lives in specific and embodied ways. As Willats wrote, “There was to be a complete binding between the reality embodied in the work, the context in which it was presented, and the primary audience of the work.”58 While Brentford Towers stood as monuments, “vertical icons” as Willats labeled them, they also represented another aspect of modern urban life that Willats often investigated: organizational and governmental decisionmaking that affected both the human and nonhuman worlds.59 These decisions went beyond the architectural and planning actions at Green Dragon Lane Estate to include the complex, intertwined events that spurred redevelopment at a junction of the Rivers Brent and Thames in Brentford. That the river Thames, the trees, the atmosphere, and the wind were present in the display boards of Brentford Towers was significant because the work acknowledged the residents’ interactions with all these environmental aspects, stressing context in addition to content. Second-order cybernetics highlights networks in which human individuals perform along with water and birds.60 (On second-order cybernetics, see the Introduction.) Hounslow Borough Council in the 1960s was politically progressive, primarily thanks to the industrial area of Feltham. Muthesius and

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Glendinning described the post-amalgamation Council (in 1965) as majority Labour compared to the Conservative-controlled pre-amalgamation Council of Brentford and Chiswick. Thus the leader of housing in Hounslow, Alfred King, was finally able to push his agenda for structures like those on the Green Dragon Lane Estate, after being in the opposition party for his entire political career to date.61 Certainly actions that were considered “progressive” in the 1960s, by the mid-1980s were viewed as “paternalistic” and “repressive” to Willats and many others.62 Institutions, wrote Willats, were [e]stablished by society to ensure that the physical environment and people’s social behaviour remain under its determining influence. . . . These institutions present themselves and are legitimised by the rest of society as vested with expert knowledge; this authority is reinforced by the distance created between themselves and the people their decisions will affect.63 Just as art had become alienated from everyday life, so too had governmental authorities. After completion of his projects, Willats remained in touch with people with whom he worked. He remarked that other organizations emerged related to his own involvements. According to Willats, a women’s organization resulted from tenants’ involvement with Brentford Towers; this group’s presence complemented his polemical representation of “an inseparable relationship between the physical reality [that] society constructs . . . and the self-organisational creativity of people.”64 Willats studied the ways in which these tall towers came to be, noting the construction firms involved, for example. In the case of Brentford Towers, the contractor was the Wates Construction Company. Wates was (and is) a large organization that led the field in system-built structures. This method required setting up a large expanse of land for the production of concrete components. “Mobile shelters, made from plywood, corrugated sheeting and corrugated acrylate on a steel framework, which run on rails and enable[d] comfortable factory conditions” on a twenty-four-hour cycle, provided the means to erect these ambitious high-rises.65 This cluster of concrete-steel-rails-labor-riverhousing authority-electrical power-waste is part of the mosaic of Willats’s art.66 While the shelters and tracks are long gone, the industrialization of housing construction had significant economic, visual, and social effects on London dwellers, including Skeffington Court and Brentford Towers.

“Art Creating Society”: Curating the Oxford Symposium and the Mosaic Series Willats’s extensive engagement with outlets for art—from traditional galleries, museums, and publications to do-it-yourself (DIY) magazines,

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exhibits in community centers and libraries, and “think tanks”—meant that he had long acted as a curator in public. He provided structures for a wide variety of people to make and discuss art. In June 1990, he organized an international symposium at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford (now Modern Art Oxford) to foster “a really fresh approach” to “art where it is people and their society that is [sic] the criteria.”67 Called “Art Creating Society,” the symposium featured a fascinating list of artists that Willats invited to speak and/or make commissioned work in and around Oxford. He wrote: The new climate of openness both ideological and geographical, together with the exciting possibilities of today’s communication media, should be taken as a catalyst for the artist to re-assert a social meaning in art practice. . . . [C]oncepts of social interaction can be expected to stimulate a more concerned art for the 90’s.68 The Berlin Wall “fell” in November 1989, the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, and much of Europe was imagining post-Cold War options, what Willats described as a “new climate of openness.” He had curated interventions before: in 1972 he had organized the multi-sited Cognition Control, which included the Museum of Modern Art Oxford (see Chapter 2). The 1990 event was much more ambitious though. Willats invited artists from the United States, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, France, Austria, Canada, Finland, Belgium, and Poland, in addition to those he invited from the UK. He unsuccessfully sought an artist from China.69 He reported that 500 to 600 people attended the events, which were all free. Issue 14 of Control Magazine, the cover of which he painted by hand, was dedicated to the topic; eighteen artists or artist groups had two-page spreads in the issue, considering “the potential of art intervening in the creation of society” (Figure 4.11). At the same time that Willats organized “Art Creating Society” he was also producing further work with estate residents. While mutualism for Willats never meant relinquishing aesthetic control completely, the methods he used in the 1980s and into the 1990s became increasingly open to inputs from more people. In Vertical Living, for example, the content of the display boards came from collaborations with estate residents, but the formal structure was Willats’s to a greater degree than the boards for Brentford Towers. Multi-Storey Mosaic of 1990 was created at Highfields Estate in Feltham, not far from Brentford.70 It was intimate in scale, a collaboration among the artist and eight residents of the estate.71 Willats then produced a series of “Mosaic” pieces: Tower Mosaic at Warwick and Brindley Estate in 1990–1; People Mosaic for Kettle’s Yard Gallery in Cambridge, 1991; Living Mosaic at Snowhill Estate, Bath, April 1991; and Museum Mosaic at the Tate Gallery in Liverpool, 1994.72 Willats began Multi-Storey Mosaic in June 1989; over the next year, he interviewed, photographed, and reflected with the residents about objects

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Stephen Willats, Control Magazine, hand-painted cover. Issue 14 included participants in the “Art Creating Society” symposium, held in Oxford in June 1990. All Control covers are visible here: https://www.controlmagazine.org/issues (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 4.11  Stephen Willats, Control Magazine, hand-painted cover, issue 14 (1990). Collection of the author.

in their flats and relationships among them and the world beyond their homes. Reflecting on his decades-long work on personal space, Willats wrote that residents “of small, confined and isolated personal living spaces . . . extend the psychological realm of that inner space into the fabric of the surrounding environment.” The “distant outside” was integral to links with interior spaces.73 Willats and the residents created freestanding display boards for installation on four landings at the top of Homecourt (floors twelve to fifteen) (Figure 4.12). The siting of Multi-Storey Mosaic high up in the tower of Homecourt was intended to involve people in a journey within the structure of the building, and this direct experience was seen as an essential part of viewing the work.74 The black-and-white grid, layered with typed quotations from the interviews and photographs of the interviewees and objects in their flats, served as a template for future work in the “Mosaic” series. The design of the series meshed with Willats’s conceptualization of tower blocks: “I see modernist housing developments as monumental symbols of planned, modern social thinking, which are filled with a casual mosaic of objects and signs that exist in random displacement with each other, and sometimes even in overt alienation.”75 Willats’s mosaic projects countered monumental housing with small-scale items and individual commentaries that sometimes subverted the deterministic surroundings. Formally, the two-dimensional grid of squares gave equal weight to these “objects and signs.” As Michael Archer pointed out in 1986, “Two dimensionality, together with the reciprocal nature of its myriad links, militates against the system constructing hierarchical relationships within itself. All nodes are equal.”76 The grid format appeared again in Willats’s more recent “data stream” compositions (see Chapter 6).

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Stephen Willats, Multi-Storey Mosaic, 1990, Highfields Estate, Feltham, UK. The visuals discussed include · One of the display boards in Homecourt; · Multi-Storey Mosaic booklet cover showing Highfields Estate, Feltham, 1990; and · Multi-Storey Mosaic booklet inside cover, 1990. Display boards held by Chiswick Central Library Local Collection, London, UK. Booklet is available in several locations, including the Tate Library, London, UK. Images of Multi-Storey Mosaic boards and a view of Homecourtwere published in Beyond the Plan, 49 (installation view); 50–1.

FIGURE 4.12  Stephen Willats, Multi-Storey Mosaic, 1990, Highfields Estate, Feltham, UK. Display boards held by Chiswick Central Library Local Collection, London, UK. The cover image that Willats used for the booklet documenting MultiStorey Mosaic was a masterful composition in gray of the estate buildings.77 This image of intersecting slabs and towers was also included in a collaged poster that Willats made. An eleven-bay high-rise provided a backdrop for the lighter forms of the now-demolished slab structures on Highfields Estate. While the estate has been extensively refurbished and looks nothing like it did on the cover, the story of these blocks constructed between 1966 and the early 1970s was consistent with the quotations excerpted on Multi-Storey Mosaic boards. For example, resident Helen Treadway commented: Everything in your flat is a statement about yourself, it has a personality. When you invite people around[,] you are proud that they come around to your house. This is you. Whereas when you walk along the corridors or look at the view down the bottom of the flats, . . . you’re embarrassed. Silvia Foskett mentioned that “the lift’s out half the time.” Willats reiterated this “new reality”: The regular, vertical or horizontal featureless surfaces of the buildings’ outface, the cell-like interiors, the prison-like corridors, are the result of this thinking; the communal seats of concrete, the linear walk ways and concrete flower pots, all remind the residents of institutional power.78 Local historians and librarians Andrea Cameron and James Marshall wrote of the Highfields Estate: Over 700 council flats together on one site produced a poor social mix. Before the flats were three years old the residents of the . . . 12-storey blocks had to be evacuated to enable the blocks to be surveyed in case they needed strengthening.79

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The structural evaluation occurred after the 1968 partial collapse of the system-built Ronan Point in east London, after a gas explosion. While there was no indication that the Wates method of system-building, used at Highfields as well as at Brentford Towers, was faulty, the Ronan Point disaster certainly fed opposition to high-rise, system-built residences. Homecourt (built in 1968), the largest structure on the Highfields Estate, was eventually demolished due to “concrete cancer.”80 Controversies about high-rises continue; in 2017, the Grenfell Tower fire on the Lancaster West Estate in London, a consequence not only of mismanagement but also of substandard cladding used in a 2016 refurbishment, caused many to worry about the safety of other blocks and to continue to organize for accountability from municipal councils and private management groups.81 Four tower blocks in Chalcots Estate in the London borough of Camden, for example, were evacuated just after the Grenfell fire.82 Rather than respectful, open relationships among tenants, politicians, developers, and management structures, people in charge frequently have been unresponsive to ongoing efforts by residents to promote well-being and safety. Disastrously, and too often, calls for accountability and suggestions for maintenance from tenants and grassroots activists like the Grenfell Action Group (formed in 2010) have been dismissed by those who oversee now-deregulated housing estates.83 There are many ways for sociotechnical systems to fail, particularly when, as Willats suggested, “models created in a divorced abstraction are applied to shaping the real world in which people live.”84 Artists like Willats have used their talents to highlight the lives and amplify the ideas of people who live within these systems and foster self-organization in the face of institutional power.

Responsive-Ability in East London In her 2002 book, In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art, scholar Meiling Cheng examined the means by which artists working with communities enacted their practices in relation to the participants in their projects. Cheng coined the term “responsive-ability” to describe the ways in which artists (Suzanne Lacy, in particular) engaged with and cultivated empathy among those with whom they worked.85 This section considers various responsive methods on the part of artists Martha Rosler, Loraine Leeson, and Peter Dunn, before turning to Willats’s social practice work in east London. As Suzanne Lacy herself wrote in 1995, “Of interest is not simply the makeup or identity of the audience but to what degree audience participation forms and informs the work—how it functions as integral to the work’s structure.”86 When in 1990 Stephen Willats invited artist-participants in the Oxford symposium to produce two-page spreads for issue 14 of Control Magazine,

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US-based Martha Rosler (b. 1943) contributed Brunch à la Loft from the series The Rewards of Money (Figure 4.13). Rosler was then in the midst of preparing a book (to be published in 1991) based on her three-part exhibition and collaborative activities about housing justice, If You Lived Here.87 In Control Magazine, she paired written commentary with her circa 1987 photomontage composed of an advertisement for the magazine,

FIGURE 4.13  Martha Rosler, Brunch à la Loft, from the series The Rewards of Money c. 1987–8. Photomontage © Martha Rosler. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. Image and accompanying text published in Control Magazine 14 (1990), 21.

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Money, as well as a photograph of a brick building in the background in the process of being demolished. The juxtaposition of the affluent loft residents chatting across their kitchen island and, beyond their large window, a cascading pile of bricks from the wreckage of the empty flats graphically depicted New York City’s gentrification. In the accompanying text, Rosler wrote: “In London ‘loft living’ and wholesale re-engineering of workingclass dockside communities into a sanitized professional-managerial ghetto is exemplified by Docklands and Canary Wharf, a mega-project backed by international capital.”88 In this piece, Rosler named the “re-engineering” that was occurring on what had been known as the Isle of Dogs and connected it to the profit motive. Once a thriving industrial, shipping, and storage area, the Isle of Dogs (the historic nickname for the land defined by the southward U-shaped bend in the river Thames) was heavily bombed during the Second World War, rebuilt, and then redeveloped.89 Most of the docks were closed in the early 1970s; nineteenth-century sugar and grain warehouses were shuttered, and employment shifted during nearly two decades of activity by the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC), after its creation in 1981.90 As planner Michael Edwards noted in a 2003 report, [T]he Docklands has been the focus of two massive construction booms, separated by a serious slump. This led to a total physical transformation of the area south of the Commercial Road [an east-west thoroughfare that defines the northern edge of the “isle”] The labour market changes associated with this transformation have engendered greater inequality of incomes than Britain has seen for many decades, making the UK the European country whose income distribution most resembles Brazil’s and making Tower Hamlets one of the sites of the starkest inequalities.91 Having worked extensively with poor and un-housed people in New York, Rosler identified similar patterns of injustice in east London and put these patterns of profit and policy in a larger context: “The city, any city, is a set of relationships as well as congeries of built structures; it is a geopolitical locale.”92 She recognized that artists often were important actors in displacing people from areas undergoing redevelopment and thus assumed responsibility to document and challenge these processes, in Control and her curatorial and multimedia work, arguing for “an interested art practice that does not simply merge itself into its object.”93 By installing a series of related exhibits in Manhattan in 1988–9, Rosler, in If You Lived Here, pulled art into the public via billboards, for example, and offered resources and discussions in galleries across interest groups. Her long-term, multi-sited approaches paralleled artists’ efforts underway in London in the 1980s. The Docklands Community Poster Project (1981–91), by a team of artists and residents coordinated by artists Loraine Leeson and Peter Dunn, was a response to the changes on the Isle of Dogs.94 Leeson, Dunn, and the rest of

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the Docklands Community Poster Project team collaborated with tenants and action groups over a ten-year period to develop a visual response to the massive London Docklands redevelopment. They created a series of large (12 × 18 feet) collaged photomurals. The artists took their own photos for the photomurals and drew on historical and archival materials as necessary. Some murals also included drawing by Dunn. Leeson and Dunn reported in 2015 that the project was organized as a community cooperative in which local groups comprised the majority to guarantee their groups’ control over the issues that were featured and the timing of the public release of campaign materials. The cooperative also agreed on the siting of the photomurals that displayed the information in accessible locations.95 The murals were displayed in two stages: the first sequence highlighted the redevelopment; the second, the historical background. The project also included pamphlets, photographs, exhibitions, festivals, the People’s Armada to Parliament, and a roadshow that shared information with other groups facing similar redevelopment.96 Unlike conventional hoardings or community murals . . . the posters were completed on a gradual basis so as to establish an active narrative interest in the work’s progress. As such the hoardings functioned as both an information board and as a symbolic site of resistance to the unbridled development, according to John Roberts in his 1990 book.97 The expanded work—the festivals and the People’s Armada—further blurred the boundaries of artist and audience given that a critical mass of participants was essential to cocreate these performative works. Rosler, along with Willats, Leeson, Dunn, and others, observed the “wholesale re-engineering of working-class dockside communities” by the LDDC. Architectural historian Diane Ghirardo stated: “Part of the strategy for developing Docklands involved downplaying the presence of what few residents and remaining industries there were, and rewriting the area’s history.”98 The Docklands Community Poster Project, Rosler’s Brunch à la Loft, as well as Willats’s 1993 project, Personal Islands, sought to resist that erasure of people and place by making art. Each of these artists drew on collaborative social practice methods in which relationships were fundamental to the process and people’s varied contributions were crucial to the outcomes. These artists aimed for mutual understanding among the participants of both the creative processes and final visual representations.99

Personal Islands Willats had worked in east London, with dockworkers, leather garment workers, and housing estate residents, in the 1970s (see Chapters 3 and 5);

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Stephen Willats, Personal Islands, 1993. Visuals discussed include · Display boardsinstalled in lobby of Kelson House, Samuda Estate, 1992; and · Booklet, front and back covers and centerfold. Documentation of the estate locations and participants was published in Between Buildings and People, 136, 139–41; two display boards were illustrated in black and white, 142–3. Installation view of display boards was published in Beyond the Plan, 76.

FIGURE 4.14  Stephen Willats, Personal Islands, 1993.

he returned to the area in 1993 to create Personal Islands (Figure 4.14). In contrast to Vertical Living, Brentford Towers, and most of the “Mosaic” series, each of which occurred within a single tower block, Personal Islands focused on two towers on two separate estates on the Isle of Dogs. With residents of Kelson House100 on the Samuda Estate on the eastern side of the Isle, and of Top Mast Point on the Barkentine Estate to the west, Willats made photographs and recordings about objects inside their flats (Figure 4.15). These inputs were used to create installations inside the entries of each building on the two estates: five display boards in Kelson House made with residents of Top Mast Point and five in Top Mast Point made with residents of Kelson House. Personal Islands required that viewers cross the Isle to visit both installations.101 The display boards had the same format: rectangular posters with brightly tinted photographic portraits of residents at the top and bottom. In the middle was a grid of four images showing objects from their flats. People and objects were set against a black ground; a typed quotation from an interview was affixed below the featured items. In two boards titled “Personal Journey” and “Personal Organisation,” the portraits of individual men at the top were tinted red and the people portrayed below were tinted pink and purple. The objects—statuette, hat, clock, tool, guitar, book, figurine, and feathers—were shaded in blues and oranges, and not in scale to each other. There were no names on the displays and one didn’t know to whom the objects belonged or whose quotation was excerpted; visitors only knew

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FIGURE 4.15  Kelson House on the Samuda Estate and Top Mast Point on the Barkentine Estate, London, UK. Both were sites on the Isle of Dogs and hosted Willats’s Personal Islands, 1992–3. Photos by Sharon Irish, 2014. that the boards had been exchanged between the two estates. The careful composition of centered, colorful photographs, with the lower portrait cropped flush with the bottom edge of the board and outlined with a thin line, created an abstracted genre picture: specific but unidentified people shared aspects of their everyday life while looking directly out at the viewer. The quotations mention global travel, household tasks, and scheduling time alone. As with many of Willats’s artworks, the viewer was invited to freely associate among the quotations, the objects, and the portraits in reflecting on the display boards that were visual prose poems. A booklet that Willats published served as a guide to this distributed project and also as a visual commentary that contrasted the public and private spaces among recent and older buildings.102 The center pages of the booklet featured paired images from the Isle of Dogs of signage and new construction together with men in suits, while the other pages highlighted interiors and vistas from flats high up in the towers, accompanied by photographs of the anonymous participants, with short quotations. The walk between the two estates went right through the newly constructed Docklands area, inevitably prompting comparisons among the structures. One of the residents that Willats interviewed described “that horrible building across the road there, Canary Wharf,” and then remarked that “they said they was gonna have plenty of jobs for the likes of the boys on the island, and they’re still out of work.”103

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The booklet, as well as the publicity for the project, envisioned a third building, the then newly built Exchange Tower, as part of Personal Islands. In July 1992, Willats followed up on a meeting he had had with a representative of Charter Group, the developer of Exchange Tower, an eighteen-story glass office structure (1987–9).104 Willats’s letter explained: The proposed display system for Exchange Tower would be free-standing, and in the form of a triangle so that each face could represent a montage from one of the three buildings. Of course the display system would have to be in keeping with the environment of Exchange Tower, and you would have to feel happy with what was shown on it. I should add that the work is a non-commercial venture, the idea being to show how the artist might operate in a positive way within the fabric of the community.105 Charter Group apparently never approved this display, as Personal Islands only took place in the tower blocks. In publicity about the exhibit and on the cover of the companion booklet, however, Willats represented Exchange Tower as an image framed by Kelson House and Top Mast Point. The centerfold of the booklet shows people in conversation in an environment characterized by the controversially tall One Canada Square rising above luxury flats on Mackenzie Walk and a gargantuan, curved pair of office buildings (now Thomson Reuters). Willats also included an image of a mirrored glass and steel ensemble adjacent to a hotel along Marsh Wall, in the same spread, along with signage for public transport and real estate106 (Figure 4.16). These two black-and-white combinations depict transport systems, financial institutions, and white-collar workers who moved through this landscape in a visual commentary about the changes at Docklands. Diane Ghirardo described a situation that continues to the present day: “Given enormous incentives to build and the boom economy of the times [1980s], developers stampeded Docklands.”107 Willats’s actions were one of many efforts to counter the stampede and demonstrated “how the artist might operate in a positive way within the fabric of the community,” despite being shut out of Exchange Tower. Personal Islands and other projects analyzed in this chapter used art to provide feedback to many urban systems. Willats developed an array of artistic approaches that drew on other disciplines; significantly, though, he transformed those other disciplines— communication theories, social science methods, and cybernetics—into a distinctive aesthetic that reimagined institutions, hierarchies, and artistic genres. Willats’s concept frames, overlaid on representations of tower block facades, car parks, interiors, and skylines, focused our attention on people, objects, and settings that we might never notice in our daily routines. His art required viewers to move vertically or horizontally through urban spaces to see his juxtapositions of grids and tinted photographs, handwritten vignettes and vistas, arrows and portraits. Willats’s efforts to identify and nurture counter-consciousness shaped his projects, at the same time the prevailing

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FIGURE 4.16  A view similar to that which Willats included in the booklet accompanying Personal Islands. This view is along Marsh Wall on the Isle of Dogs, London, UK. Photo by Sharon Irish, 2016. physical, political, and economic structures of London (and elsewhere) constrained his production. The symbol of the tower block provided a necessary and rigid contrast to his generative conversations with inhabitants about their lives in high-rise structures; these interactions then informed the visual and performative creative process. Perceptions of space, identity, and affect that emerged out of discussions in physical and social environments had visual counterparts in Willats’s art. These “counterparts,” however, were not equivalent to the social interactions, but rather put these concepts in flight, so to speak, in a place between the creator and the viewer, for reflection and further discussion. The display boards served as open-ended questions, as prompts for observing our observations. This process was second-order cybernetics as art; the process invited mutual consideration of complexity, for which Willats’s homeostat image was a cipher.

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Creativity in Self-Organization

Despite the glitzy offices and luxury flats going up in the 1980s on the Isle of Dogs in London, life in that decade was really hard for a lot of people all over the UK. Jobs in industry disappeared as unions lost power and manufacturing moved elsewhere. From 1979 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher served three consecutive terms as Britain’s prime minister, countering peace and social welfare efforts with a hardline conservatism. Transportation strikes, the 1984 miners’ strike, pressure for respect and justice from gay, feminist, black, and/or Asian people, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and the ongoing resistance to English rule in Northern Ireland created opportunities for alternate cultural developments at the same time that people despaired of ever achieving their goals. During the 1980s, the housing environment shifted from the immediate postwar approach of massive building for war veterans and their families toward providing only the bare minimum shelter for those most in need.1 From 1965 to its dissolution in 1986, the Greater London Council (GLC) had aimed to rationalize planning and wrestle with challenges in the city: transport, housing, rapid population growth, and pollution. With mixed results, the GLC started large motorway and residential projects but faced bureaucratic snarls and tenant resistance. A scheme introduced in 1967, when Conservatives took control of the GLC, allowed tenants to buy their flats at a discount. After the Housing Act of 1980 was passed under Thatcher, this arrangement became the “right-to-buy” and tenants who could afford it bought their residences at a discount in large numbers.2 Thus the 1980s witnessed a dismantling of municipal housing and other features of the welfare state, including an end to further building of council housing and a sharp decline in maintenance for remaining housing stock. Graham Stewart in Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s noted, “with the end of the council house building programme the housing budget fell by . . . 67 per

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cent over the decade.”3 While funding cuts in housing, transportation, and education were not exclusively Thatcher’s doing, her Conservative Party privatized services and actively undermined workers’ rights so that the welfare of the most vulnerable people deteriorated significantly during her tenure.4 Chapter 4 discussed Stephen Willats’s work between 1977 and 1993 in terms of large physical systems, like municipal housing. This chapter will consider the various ways groups and individuals within those systems creatively organized themselves within Willats’s practice. Seven of Willats’s works will frame the discussion: Working within a Defined Context (1978); Living with Practical Realities (1978); Pat Purdy and the Glue Sniffers’ Camp (1981); The Kids Are in the Streets (1982); the portrait of Leigh Bowery, What Is He Trying to Get At? Where Does He Want to Go? (1984); Brentford Towers (1985); and Private Journeys (1994). Six of these projects were sited within and around municipal housing estates. While the conditions of social housing were deteriorating, the people who lived in government-built and -managed spaces were well informed about their needs because they occupied the housing and watched urban changes taking place all around them. In his social practice, Willats often chose tower blocks as his project sites and tower-block residents as his collaborators. There, he encountered residents who had been in England for generations as well as new immigrants from former British colonies. Their immediate circumstances had important historical contexts, which many of their families had also experienced, across generations. In other cases, the residents were newly arrived from across the city or the globe. Selforganization among tenants in response to these changes took place within a decades-long, politically charged grappling with challenges in urban labor, transport, and housing. While the physical settings were predefined, the social relationships within them were not necessarily so; people’s stereotypes, racism, and other examples of xenophobia were certainly evident in these confined spaces, but so were tolerance, acceptance, and resilience. The latter qualities opened up creative options.5 With Willats as their interlocutor (in this case), interactions, ideas, and aspirations of tenants and workers were made visible. Cybernetics provided a set of ideas for his art. Willats explored people’s self-organization, focusing on the ways in which they were navigating, altering, and resisting the various systems that were in place around them. In discovering or maintaining ways to regulate their lives, people investigated options with others, responded to external inputs, adapted to change, and organized themselves into different patterns as conditions required. By doing so, Willats believed new understandings about each others’ perceptions would and did emerge. Self-organization countered dominant norms, Willats asserted.6 Further, self-organization occurred independently of institutional structures, so that it also challenged the art world status quo.7 Willats’s projects provided frameworks for tenants, for instance, to reflect on and visualize their current situations, and interact

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with the artist as well as their neighbors to create new artistic and social connections within bounded space. In a cybernetic schema, this process of adjustment to inputs is homeostasis and is ongoing. In 1973, Willats wrote: “A feature of a self-organising system is its structural uncertainty when situated in an evolving Environment, for it is continually adapting to attain equilibrium between its internal state and that of the Environment.”8 Willats’s homeostatic approach included a wide variety of expression by a wide variety of people, in an open-ended process that did not necessarily resemble the initial expressions from participants. The temporal and spatial limitations that Willats placed on the process, though, provided some closure, coalescing into a temporary stasis. The self-organization that occurred within Willats’s projects helped shape his career-long exploration of “the complex dynamics that connect ‘what we make’ and ‘what (we think) we are,’” as described by scholars Bruce Clarke and Mark Hansen.9 These connections were the subject of Willats’s many art productions, which explored behavior and perception, and how each of these attributes also was affected by external situations.10 His artistic examination of these philosophical ideas is a key contribution by Willats to social practice art as well as to cybernetics.

Participatory Reception In 1986, in his artist’s book, Intervention and Audience, Willats wrote: What the generation that grew up in the early 1970’s on the New Reality housing schemes have managed to achieve is of immense importance to everyone, especially the artist, for they have established their own cultural forms of expression as an overt statement of a counter consciousness based on self-organisation and community. Here the relationship between the creators of cultural activity and the audience was totally interwoven, simply there was no separation, the audience were participants. This interrelationship between creators, while marginal and without the resources of the dominant culture, nevertheless succeeded in developing a parallel world, and even intervening in the dominant culture’s process of generating new perceptions of itself.11 Willats stressed that the audience and creators of cultural activity were “totally interwoven.” The young people who were the creators overtly countered the dominant culture; as a creator himself, Willats joined them, giving visual form to “a parallel world.” Self-organization within his art projects certainly challenged any neat distinction among participants because they were forming relationships and making aesthetic choices in

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dialogue. The extent to which participants in Willats’s projects determined the finished artwork varied, but the process of building trust, holding conversations, documenting objects, and enlarging networks was crucial to the meaning and execution of Willats’s work. The concept of “audience” can be parsed in many ways. Artist and theorist Suzanne Lacy diagrammed the audience as “a series of concentric circles with permeable membranes that allow continual movement back and forth.” “Origination and responsibility” was at the center of her circle, with rings moving out: “collaboration and codevelopment; volunteers and performers; immediate audience; media audience; audience of myth and memory.”12 In my 2010 book on Lacy, I wanted to understand the various threads in these relationships and I introduced the idea of “participatory reception,” in which the audience shared not only in the creation of a collaborative project but also in the reception of the piece.13 “Participatory reception” seems even more relevant to Willats’s work. Compared to “audience,” “participatory reception” better describes cycles of communication because it holds the creation and the reception—a feedback loop, if you will—within the same phrase. The mundane, the routine, the repetitive, the coming-and-going, all shaped Willats’s art. He valued the amateur and the ordinary, knowing that multiple viewpoints of even the most unassuming object, person, or assemblage heightened aesthetic interest because our individual outlook is altered by another’s vision. Even a “simple” exchange is full of complexity: nonverbal body language, embodied senses, weather, memories. As Stephen Johnstone explained, “commitment to the everyday can also indicate the desire to give voice to those silenced by the dominant discourses and ideologies—a commitment coupled with the responsibility to engage with the everyday’s transformative potential.”14 “Those silenced by the dominant discourses and ideologies” have been key participants in Willats’s art, recalling the “responsive-ability” in art discussed in Chapter 4. In turn, their reception of Willats’s art fed back into future iterations of his projects. “Participatory reception” captures this multichannel process. Grant Kester, who has written insightfully about both Lacy and Willats, has called this responsive artistic phenomenon “dialogical art.” He wrote that we “need a way to understand how identity might change over time— not through some instantaneous thunderclap of insight but through a more subtle, and no doubt imperfect, process of collectively generated and cumulatively experienced transformation.”15 Willats believed that his works would motivate participants to imagine alternatives for themselves and that they would be positively affected by his projects. In the same issue of Control with the tower block pictured on the cover (1977), Willats published an essay by artists Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson, “Adjusting Culture to Practical Function: Reflections and Projections,” in which they argued that “cultural activity” could work to revitalize society: “[O]peration outside the ‘high culture network’ must be directed towards

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cultural issues which have a direct bearing on concrete social experience.” They recounted that the way we organise our lives in relation to others . . . create[s] the specific form of cultural bonds, which demarcate one cultural context from another. These may provide the means of stability as well as the pressures for change and regeneration necessary to the vitality of society. . . . A cultural practice moving towards a non-hegemonic mode therefore needs to develop the means through which the distinction between producer and consumer, “artist” and public, is broken down to create a reciprocal education process.16 Dunn and Leeson used phrases similar to those which Willats used to describe the interwoven cultural activity that aimed to create sufficient stability to allow parallel worlds to flourish. Willats, too, was committed to blurring binaries to increase mutualism. While the methods to break down distinctions varied considerably, within Willats’s practice and the work of other artists, Dunn, Leeson, and Willats all recognized that cultural activities occurred within sociopolitical systems. With awareness, appropriate strategies, and luck, these systems could be altered by coalitions among artists and audiences. They intended to intervene in the processes of the dominant world by reorganizing cultural forms, shaping a counter-consciousness informed by the activities of daily lives.

Working within a Defined Context London’s Isle of Dogs in the 1980s (introduced in Chapter 4 as the site of Personal Islands by Willats) was transformed by the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC, 1981–91) in which an Enterprise Zone was set up and architects and contractors implemented the master plan for the Docklands shaped by real estate development and economic restructuring.17 Newly designed or recently demolished structures and situations, which were often clustered with other technological changes, such as light rail (Docklands Light Railway, 1987), demanded significant adjustments on the part of those touched by these developments.18 Even before the LDDC ran into financial trouble in 1987, dockworkers were losing their jobs when the docks closed (West India and Millwall docks closed in 1980). The local boroughs and river-based businesses also suffered.19 The UK public, which paid the bill for much of the development on the Isle of Dogs, was certainly affected: they shared the costs without receiving (m)any benefits. These adjustments—if that is the right word for many people’s pain and financial hardship—prompted mutual support, gave significant lessons about clashes among sociotechnical systems, and altered configurations among communities in east London.

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In 1978, Willats began a collaboration—“an act of mutuality”—with men who worked at 19 Shed West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs. This project was one of three in which Willats joined with people who were in the vicinity of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in east London to make art; the Whitechapel also hosted a solo exhibit of Willats’s work in 1979 that included the multipaneled works created in these engagements.20 Willats, with entrée from the Port of London Authority (PLA), conducted interviews with dockworkers, climbed into crane cabs with them, observed and photographed their work spaces, and sometimes served as the butt of their jokes.21 The resulting four-panel work, Working within a Defined Context, used concept frames arrayed vertically on each subtly colored panel to mark changes over time and in location as men moved goods throughout the workday (Figure 5.1). The panels showed particular instances that offered situations for workers to express themselves independently of the predetermined, fixed schedule. Willats described it: “Within this contained environment the process of work is a linear time-dependent path that acts as the mechanism for an item’s transportation. Movement of items within the process is conditional on fulfilling authoritatively specified rules at points of transformation.”22 People not only intersected with items in regulated ways but also added or altered the routines, when possible, according to their own preferences. Willats’s interest here was in the quotidian arrival, unloading, processing,

Stephen Willats, Working within a Defined Context, 1978. Photographs, photographic dye, Letraset text, gouache, ink on card. Four panels, each 152 × 76 cm. Museum of London Collection. Published in Stephen WIllats: Concerning Our Present Way of Living (Whitechapel Gallery, 2014), n.p. Black and white versions of all four panels visible here: http://stephenwillats.com/work/worki ng-within-defined-context/ Colour version can be seen here: https://www.artfund.org/supportingmuseums/art-weve-helpedbuy/artwork/9838/working-within-adefined-context (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 5.1  Stephen Willats, Working within a Defined Context, 1978. Photographs, photographic dye, Letraset text, gouache, ink on card. Four panels, each 152 × 76 cm. Museum of London Collection, London, UK.

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and redistribution of goods at the port and how, at each stage, there were opportunities for individual (“person-based”) counter-consciousness. While the dockers were the subjects of Willats’s panels, Willats was also expressing himself, informed by the experiences of these workers and their settings. The “act of mutuality” went both ways. This complex piece has many visual layers, accompanied by text drawn from interviews with dockers and language from company manuals.23 The top register in all four of the panels shows “contained” locations where goods were handled or processed: pallets stacked with goods, filing cabinets, a loading crane, and a container ship and barge.24 Across the bottom register are images of men at work: securing tarps with rope, working at a desk, operating the crane in the cab, and inspecting paperwork dockside. The photographs in the top register are sepia-toned; those on the bottom are a smoky rose, varying slightly in value. The center register features particular objects that vary among individuals and settings, hinting at daily activities like shaving, eating, smoking, reading: a discarded razor blade packet, a jar of mayonnaise on a shelf, a cigarette package on the ground, a tabloid newspaper. The similarity in value across all the panels flattens the imagery, providing a backdrop to the strong rectangular shapes—in reds, greens, and browns—that outline certain features on each register. Within each panel on the top and the bottom are rectangular collages of four more images. These black-and-white collages are also outlined, marked with an “X,” with text defining the corners. The collages magnify the routines and rules of the docks by depicting posters for union meetings, social events, and regulations about time off, together with images of cartoons, graffiti, signage, a teapot, playing cards, and flowers. One photograph of a notice of a Transport and General Workers Union meeting in October 1978, for example, shows the bulletin board display that included a poster of a “stag night” with the backside of a naked woman in heels drawn next to the November 1978 date. Axioms that repeat at the four corners of each collage on the top register read clockwise from the upper left: role, intention, behavior, code. On the bottom register, the axioms, in the same sequence, are feeling, belief, purpose, response.25 These axioms generalize the performances of the workers, underscoring some complex social dimensions of the workplace. Of the particular situation on the Isle of Dogs, at West India Docks, Willats noted: “These dockers were dealing with more or less the last boat that came into the port.”26 The imagery that Willats used depicted newer methods of handling cargo (cranes, containers, and pallets) and of passing time (television) juxtaposed with older technologies of ropes and bicycles, and pastimes of cards and tea. The men are shown going about daily business in a subtly colored atmosphere that marked the coming obliteration of the docks, reinforced by text: “There’s no point in hanging around” (Panel 1) and “Whether there’s a possible job has a great deal of effect” (Panel 3). The

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West India Docks had opened for trade in 1802; the gloom of their demise is rendered palpably.27 Other excerpts from Willats’s interviews with the dockers highlight their community: “We will cash in and help one another” (Panel 2) and “Dockers realised long ago that education is a step forward” (Panel 4). For the 1979 exhibition of this work at Whitechapel Art Gallery, Willats wrote: “[T]he transported item is the cue for making links between an authoritative institutional world of objects and an interactive world of people.”28 Willats examined this “world of objects” together with people whose jobs included moving and tracking items in sequences that involved skills and risk. But containerization after World War II had altered how goods were handled and economic restructuring worldwide resulted in new institutions, with one effect being the dismissal of dockers and their whole way of life. Historians of London stated: The social implications of the [upriver docks’] closure . . . were catastrophic. In 1960, some 50,000 men and women were employed in the port; by the mid-1980s the total had fallen to under 3,000. More than 200,000 people who worked in industries and trades dependent upon the port for their livelihood also lost their jobs.29 The precarity of this labor was on display in Working within a Defined Context. The four panels in Willats’s work visually distilled global trade, local labor, river history, and systems of exchange into a multi-panel wall piece that drew on dockers’ knowledge but not on their actual artistic choices regarding technological change. Willats kept aesthetic control over his visual interventions in the Isle of Dogs. In these panels, the constituencies with whom Willats worked were the inspiration for and subjects of artistic creation rather than collaborators. Nevertheless, there were relationships between Willats and the dockers that emerged from his presence on the docks and conversations with the men. The workers performed their jobs and their identities within the defined schedules of the workplace, supporting each other and mutually creating a context for their daily lives. The artist performed his roles as well: exploring the physical structures of the West India Docks; talking with the workers and documenting their tasks; creating imagery in complex patterns; and linking the Docklands to the Whitechapel Gallery for the exhibition.

Defined Context, Social Practice, and the Multi-Homeostat Problem In the world of art criticism, “social practice” lumps together all sorts of approaches which consider human interactions in embodied, cross-

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disciplinary, multimedia, time-based, spatial contexts. This broad brush scumbles the detail from artist to artist, and work to work. Critic Grant Kester stressed the “complexity and diversity of socially engaged art practice” and objected to the rigid boundaries that various critics have set between aesthetic projects and activist works.30 Willats’s practice alone offers an array of approaches to working outside and among galleries and museums. Analyzing the details of many of his efforts must include the aesthetic value and artistic interest in the work. But just as “art” and “activism” often have been cleaved, so too have “art” and “science.” In Willats’s case, cybernetics, cognitive science, and learning theories helped his work cohere across various realms and enriched its aesthetic value. The homeostat is a concept and an image that distills Willats’s approach. Willats used his art practice to achieve some perspective on what scholar Andrew Pickering called the multi-homeostat problem (see Introduction). Pickering recognized the problem as one that prevented stability due to an indefinite amount of human activity (in his example) that overloaded the system, so to speak. Pickering argued that the only way to stabilize a situation would be to limit the “number of configurations an assemblage can take on.”31 While one work “stabilized” a fluid social configuration artistically, Willats’s whole approach —his work between a museum and communities—was also a way to address the multi-homeostat problem. He chose to address the art audience, which he did in the construction and display of the panels. He needed to carefully control his methods and media choices to avoid too many inputs. Willats used concept frames, photo-collage, color, and text to shape his research and composition. His solutions—faceto-face interactions with dockworkers and visual assemblages drawn from those interactions—were calculated to calibrate inputs, so to speak, in his engagement with communities and museums. Pickering’s definition of the multi-homeostat problem emerged from his sociological analyses, while Willats’s artistic decisions were formed by the specific physical setting in which they occurred. The particularity of each site also helped to stabilize the configuration. For his projects, Willats invested many months building relationships with dockworkers, estate residents, and other participants. As a “provocateur” (in Kester’s words),32 he entered mutually informative relationships to look closely at the world as it was in order to contemplate the world as it might be. This “in-between-ness” that characterizes social practice art is unstable and dynamic. Willats’s artwork had an “emergent quality” in that each complex creation had a “quality which belongs to a complex as a whole and not to its parts,” as English philosopher C. D. Broad defined “emergent.”33 This quality also related to Willats’s explorations of random variables, in which the artist instigated self-organization as participants (re)arranged parts of a sculpture, for instance, into different configurations. Similarly, in Willats’s large project works, participants contributed experiences, objects, stories, and ideas to an arrangement that was unpredictable, perhaps even

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disruptive, during its development. The resulting artwork marked a moment of quiescence before Willats began a new process for creating another controlled experimental work.

Living with Practical Realities In 1978, Willats created two works at Skeffington Court in Hayes, west of London: Vertical Living (discussed in Chapter 4) and Living with Practical Realities. Living with Practical Realities is a threepanel, black-and-white work featuring Skeffington Court resident, Mrs. Moran (Figure 5.2). Mrs. Moran had been one of the first people who moved to the high-rise in 1975 from inner London.34 Willats stressed that this work centered on the isolation of a person in modern society, isolated by old age, physical environment, gender, and poverty, and indeed that  is  what we see in each panel. Across the top of all three panels, we view photographs of Mrs. Moran inside her flat: sitting with her hands clasped in her lap, standing stooped in front of her television, and sitting again, pensively holding a cup of tea over a saucer. The panels feature text across the top that emerged from tape-recorded conversations that Willats had with her about her physical, economic, and social realities: “Living within the confines of my new home”; “Living with the present day limitations of a small income”; and “Living without the certainty that I will see someone tomorrow.” No other person appears in the imagery. Each panel features two concept frames, where the top describes her existing reality, and the bottom offers a “prescriptive” view with solutions to questions posed in each panel. For example, in Panel 1 on “physical reality,” underneath the photo of a seated Mrs Moran appears the text: “As I can’t get out much I have to organise my life in here” followed by the question, “How do you think I can adapt myself to these modern surroundings[?]” Willats considered open-ended questions as essential tools for initiating social interactions. Centered in each of the panels was a view of the Skeffington Court tower, crisscrossed with the first of the concept frames35 (Figure 5.3). In Panel 1, the diagonals link imagery and text for key terms—code, behavior, intention, and attitude—illustrating and documenting how exactly Mrs. Moran coped with her “modern surroundings.” The text for “my code” in all capital letters reads, “Keeping it all clean and tidy fills the day,” and is applied over an interior photograph of a pair of slippers and rug cleaner; “My behaviour” is linked to a photo of pots and pans on the top of the cooker and the text, “Providing just a little at a time for one.” “My intention” has a photo of a space heater under a table and the words, “Looking after basic essentials.” Finally, “My attitude” is illustrated with a radio topped by a clock and

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Stephen Willats, Living with Practical Realities, 1978, three panels. Photographs, Letraset text, and mixed media on board. 109. 9 × 76.8 cm. Tate Britain Collection. Published in Conceptual Art in Britain, 104. Viewable online: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/willatsliving-with-practical-realities-t03296 (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 5.2  Stephen Willats, Living with Practical Realities, 1978, three panels. Photographs, Letraset text, and mixed media on board. 109.9 × 76.8 cm. Tate Britain Collection, London, UK.

FIGURE 5.3  Skeffington Court tower, 1974, Hayes (near London), UK. Photo by Sharon Irish, 2014. other items, with the words “Who wants a companion that won’t listen.” A full-length frontal photograph of Mrs. Moran standing in a coat holding her purse at the covered entry to the tower block is at the center of the second concept frame. This concept frame offers some different possibilities: a rectangle to the left, “Another meaning,” encloses the text, “Becoming

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independent from their thought-out world”; “Another perspective” is paired with a photograph of the car park from above; “Another conclusion” is connected to the text, “Informing myself about the ways around their physical barriers”; and “Another understanding” offers a photograph of the walkway that links various low-rise parts of the estate with the tower block. (See also Figures 4.4 and 4.5 in Chapter 4.) Willats wrote that the questions posed in Living with Practical Realities transformed situations into problems that could be addressed using input from viewers’ experiences.36 Mrs. Moran joined with Willats in displaying actual objects in her flat that held symbolic and literal meanings for her (such as the radio and the clock) that might also have prompted associations among viewers. Willats recognized that the specificity of those references and the textual and visual context were crucial to orient the viewer: “And this is the dilemma for the artist, that unless his use of language is seen to contain relevant meanings for individual members of the ‘general public,’ nothing is going to happen at all.”37 To address this dilemma, Willats chose straightforward phrases from interviews and recognizable ordinary items that, paired with abstract words, together helped make meanings graspable. When Willats decided to use an image of the Skeffington estate in Living with Practical Realities, he chose a photograph that isolated the tower block through cropping as well as angle, as if to duplicate Mrs. Moran’s own isolation. Shooting from ground level, Willats’s photograph of the tower emphasized its height and the symmetry in its southern facade. In 1982, Willats also used a photograph of the Skeffington Court tower to illustrate part of his essay in The New Reality: The “new reality” is specifically a product of planning: planning how people should live in an urban society that is to be kept stable within the prefixed limits, norms and priorities of the higher authority that has been vested in institutions. There is right from the start, an obvious basic division between the minority who determine the topology of urban living and the majority who are forced to passively accept its given form in their daily lives.38 Willats’s “new reality” resulted from professionals who developed and then enlarged sociotechnical systems that transformed London (among other locations) and the lives of people there. Willats’s artistic structures, however, provided a means to counter the limits and priorities of that planning with self-organized responses. As mentioned in Chapter 4, architectural historians Stefan Muthesius and Miles Glendinning examined tower-block architecture in terms of social isolation and poverty, which Willats also explored in Living with Practical Realities. They noted that “linking attitudes and behaviour with form and space” was possibly a middle-class effort to pacify the lower classes.39 This

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assertion that connected the design of physical spaces with sociocultural expectations echoed Willats’s claims that middle-class “professionals” took over decisions about the daily lives of urban dwellers, “impress[ing] their social consciousness onto the actuality of other people’s physical and social reality.”40 Scholars David Cowan and Morag McDermont argued that social housing has always provided a site of moral regulation. . . . Early attempts at “regulation” were carried out from the perspective of those with detailed, scientific training—the medical officers, architects and surveyors whose gaze rested on the minute detail of scheme design.41 In Living with Practical Realities, Willats and Mrs. Moran focused on those minute details. Professionals designed the estate to minimize antisocial behavior in municipal housing—with walled common spaces, rough concrete surfaces, and controlled entries—and Willats joined residents in creating artistic commentary. Willats superimposed texts drawn from conversations with his collaborator over photographs of Skeffington Court; this served visually to reclaim physical spaces on the estate for its tenants, somewhat akin to graffiti on walls. In Panel 1, for instance, Mrs. Moran is quoted as “informing myself about the ways around their physical barriers” in an active reply to “their” professional solutions. In Panel 2, the enclosed text “Co-operating with others who have found their own alternative to the system” is linked to a photograph of an allotment garden. Those who created “their own alternative to the system” refused the passivity assumed by the decision-makers. In 1972, Willats had come across an industrial area with substantial open space in Hayes, not far from Skeffington Court and adjacent to nearby Avondale Estate. This “wasteland” was not controlled by planners or other specialists, and thus presented possibilities for representing selforganization as well as happenstance. In 1978, Willats created The Lurky

Stephen Willats, The Lurky Place (Lisson Gallery, 1978) / Interior spread. Tate Archives. Related work published in Art Society Feedback, 172–5; Between Buildings and People, 19. The Tate Archives, London, holds a copy of The Lurky Place. Online: http://stephenwillats.com/work/lurky-place/ (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 5.4  Stephen Willats, The Lurky Place (Lisson Gallery, 1978). Interior spread. Tate Archives, London, UK.

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Place, a twenty-four-page artist’s book set in that context42 (Figure 5.4). The book opened with explanatory text, a map, and twelve photographs documenting the area, including motor repair works, boat storage, a watchman’s hut, and surrounding housing. Eighteen panels, similarly composed, then followed the introductory section. A representative interior spread consisted of four photographs arranged in two registers, with close-up views of rubbish paired with distant views of housing estates, industrial sheds, and smokestacks. Black diagonal lines linked the paired images of remnants of human activity—bike wheel and bottle cap— to a rain-soaked dirt road; a tower block to a ripped income tax paper. Willats observed in the accompanying text: “Through the residual items, it is possible to structure connections between the consciousness vested in ‘The Lurky Place’ and the restrictive society in which they originated.” He continued to visit the area after his return from Berlin in 1980. As Stephen Bann noted, the idea of an isolated “island” like the wasteland had been crucial to Willats’s work in West Berlin in 1979–80, where that city was surrounded by East German territory.43

Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Aesthetics By 1980, Stephen Willats had been a practicing artist for over twenty years, getting by financially, but only just. In the 1980s it became even more challenging for him to survive as an artist as London’s cultural and political climate continued to shift further away from his concerns. He returned to London from Germany in late 1980, after nearly two years in Berlin; he found welcome and needed support in the north of England, in Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Newcastle, and Leeds.44 Still based in London, however, he also explored groups there that were developing a parallel world. . . . It is from marginalised areas of creativity such as punk that the artist can find powerful heuristics relevant to his own situation, and by taking them on board can gain a tactical confidence. . . . The punk movement when it first came to public notice, strongly expressed the idea of self-organisation (D.I.Y.—Do It Yourself— was an important slogan to punk) and contextual expression. . . . The fundamental message of punk that is so culturally important for the artist, is that everyone has the potential to express their own creativity, and that what is meaningful to people is relative to the context in which it is received and made.45 Between January and September 1981 in west London, Willats collaborated with a resident of Avondale Estate in Hayes, west of London, by the name of Pat Purdy. This collaboration resulted in Pat Purdy and the Glue Sniffers’

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Camp, a multi-panel project of four triptychs about two worlds, life on the housing estate and life in a self-organized camp that youth built in the adjacent wasteland, an area that was also the setting of The Lurky Place46 (Figures 5.5 and 5.6). Willats wrote: I revisited one camp that Pat had been particularly associated with, photographed it, and then removed at her suggestion all the discarded objects I could find. I decided to embody the collection of objects found in the camp directly in the work, and asked Pat to write her own quotation straight on to the photographic panels.47 Note the italicized phrase “at her suggestion” in the quotation. This statement affirmed the conception and execution of the “inter-relationship between creators” that Willats described in his 1986 book, Intervention and Audience. Here the artist tapped into and learned from the creativity of selforganized spaces and groups. This project occurred at the same time that Willats was working with Paul Rogers who lived on the Brandon Estate in south London (see discussion in this section). Stephen Bann wrote that Willats’s collection and application of found objects to his photographic panels began initially with the Pat Purdy work; he continued this practice with many other works in the 1980s.48 Certainly, the rusted red, black, and white can of Evo-stick adhesive in the center of one of the Pat Purdy compositions gave material evidence of the source of inhaled vapors for the youth.49 The division between the two larger panels in the triptych reinforced the distinction between the controlled, surveilled spaces of the estate on one side and a zone of communal release in the wasteland on the other. Willats stressed that the youth with whom he collaborated were remote from “a life with possessions . . . and the practice

Stephen Willats, Pat Purdy and the Glue-Sniffers’ Camp, 1981, twelve panels in a sequence of four triptychs. Photographs, photographic dye, Letraset text, gouache, felt tip pen, found objects on card eight panels, 76.5 × 102 cm; four panels, 51 × 66 cm. Collection of Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia. · detail of a panel in the center of the fourth triptych. Published in Art Society Feedback, 384–91; Between Buildings and People, 65. Online: http://stephenwillats.com/work/pat-purdy-and-gluesniffers-camp/ (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 5.5  Stephen Willats, Pat Purdy and the Glue Sniffers’ Camp, 1981, twelve panels in a sequence of four triptychs. Photographs, photographic dye, Letraset text, gouache, felt tip pen, found objects on card eight panels, 76.5 × 102 cm; four panels, 51 × 66 cm. Collection of Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia.

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FIGURE 5.6  A view of Avondale Estate, Hayes, UK. The wasteland that provided space for Pat Purdy and others is adjacent to the towers. Photo by Sharon Irish, 2016. of professionalism” so valued by the dominant culture.50 He wrote to Keith Hartley, a curator in Scotland, about the series: Here the waste land acts as an active agent, and is made so by people transporting various objects into it to facilitate various pursuits which will alleviate the condition of the “new reality” (the housing estate) in which they are forced to live.51 The tower block and wasteland were protagonists in the assemblage of Pat Purdy; similarly Living with Practical Realities was constructed using the physical aspects of Skeffington Court. The fence, the concrete and brick structures, the interior walls, the pavement all defined the limits of the “new reality” and, by contrast, the release provided by open spaces, paths, and personalization of individual flats. As seen in the Pat Purdy panels, Willats’s art practice included collage and do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches, also associated with punk aesthetics. In 2007, curator Mark Sladen enumerated aspects of punk: a “theatrical deployment of bodily transgression and its confrontational exploration of sexuality, deviance, violence and abjection. . . . Other punk characteristics . . . included its collage of media-derived ‘trash’ and its use of ‘do-it-yourself’

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techniques.”52 Self-organization aligned with DIY, as Christian Kravagna asserted in 2004.53 In 1981, at the same time he was working in Hayes in west London with Pat Purdy, Willats began work in south London (south of the Thames River) in the districts of Brixton and Kennington. Willats was also working in east London, as previously discussed. In other words, Willats the artist-urbanist readily moved across district and borough lines to further his practice by engaging with different people. In 1982, the Guayanese musician Eddy Grant’s song, “Electric Avenue,” gave testimony to the rage against racism and police brutality in south London, which erupted in 1981 in what were called the Brixton riots.54 In May 1982, Stephen Willats completed a twelve-panel work made jointly with an eighteen-year-old white youth, Paul Rogers, The Kids Are in the Streets55 (Figure 5.7). Together in July 1981, Willats and Rogers had begun considering Rogers’s photographs of the April 1981 riots, together with the housing estate near Brixton where Rogers lived, the Brandon Estate, and the Stockwell Skatepark (also called Brixton Bowls or Beach) where Rogers hung out56 (Figure 5.8). This multi-panel arrangement of angled triptychs, created over six months, combined Rogers’s photographs from the riots, found objects, Willats’s photographs, and handwritten text, with some questions spelled out in Letraset. In 1982 as well, Willats wrote The New Reality for the Orchard Gallery in Northern Ireland in which he framed themes that he continued to examine in subsequent decades. He wrote: “For decision-making responsibility has been put in the hands of the professional, the specialist, the planner, the architect, the social worker and associated experts who impress their social consciousness onto the actuality of other people’s physical and social reality.”57 In turn, Paul Rogers said in an interview with Willats: “[T]he

Stephen Willats, The Kids Are in the Streets, 1982, four triptychs: eight panels 100 × 75cm; four panels 56 × 56cm Photographs, photographic dyes, Letraset, ink, felt tip pen, Paul Rogers’s objects and items found on the Brandon Estate on hardboard and cardboard, Victoria Miro Gallery. Published in Beyond the Plan, 96–7, 103–5 (documentation); Changing Everything, 54–7. Online: http://stephenwillats.com/work/kids-are-streets/ (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 5.7  Stephen Willats, The Kids Are in the Streets, 1982, four triptychs: eight panels 100 × 75 cm; four panels 56 × 56 cm. Photographs, photographic dyes, Letraset, ink, felt tip pen, Paul Rogers’s objects and items found on the Brandon Estate on hardboard and cardboard, Victoria Miro Gallery.

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FIGURE 5.8  Three of Brandon Estate’s six eighteen-story tower blocks, designed by E. E. “Ted” Hollamby for the London County Council as part of a mixed development in 1957, London, UK. Photo by Sharon Irish, 2014. people that live on the estate [need] direct involvement instead of people that don’t even live there, instead of people that live in semi-detached suburban houses with front and back gardens making decisions for the people that live on those estates[.] [P]eople that live on the estate should be making decisions for themselves.”58 How appropriate, then, that Willats and Rogers focused on the fluid, embodied, self-organized movements of the skate park. Willats wrote that these spaces “are an escape from the pressures of living and working within the contained conditions of the ‘new reality’ and are also a manifestation of a counter consciousness of social contact and community involvement that implicitly responds to the complexity of the psychological make-up of individuals.”59 In his 2001 study of skateboarding, architecture, and the city, Iain Borden noted that young people used skateboarding to establish “their own parallel world, distinct from the one organized for them by their parents and by the state.”60 The text that Rogers wrote across the rose-tinted third triptych of The Kids Are in the Streets undulates along the curved surface of the image of the skate park, with housing in the background. The square panels have photographs from the Brixton riots linked with bold, black lines to the adjacent panels, along with imagery of graffiti reading “White Power”

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Stephen Willats, (Leigh Bowery) What Is He Trying to Get at? Where Does He Want to Go? 1984. Photographs, photographic dye, ink, acrylic paint, and objects mounted on board with tower of ten painted breeze blocks. Two panels: What Is He Trying to Get At?: 152 × 98 cm; Where Does He Want to Go?: 152 × 98 cm; tower: 200 × 44 cm National Portrait Gallery Collection, London. In print: Between Buildings and People, 78–9; Beyond the Plan, 108. Online: https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/ mw74731/Leigh-Bowery-What-is-he-trying-to-get-atWhere-does-he-want-to-go (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 5.9  Stephen Willats, (Leigh Bowery) What Is He Trying to Get At? Where Does He Want to Go? 1984. Photographs, photographic dye, ink, acrylic paint, and objects mounted on board with the tower of ten painted breeze blocks. National Portrait Gallery Collection, London, UK. Two panels: (What Is He Trying to Get At?): 152 × 98 cm; (Where Does He Want to Go?): 152 × 98 cm; tower: 200 × 44 cm.

combined with the Nationalist Front logo, and “Legalize Freedom.” Captured in this one triptych, then, are references to white supremacist subcultures, police lines in Brixton, and writings and photographs of a young white man trying to make sense of an oppressive and violent world, in tandem with an artist in his late thirties who also pondered, in Panel 3, how “to push ahead and create any objectives.” The Cha Cha Club, underneath Charing Cross Station in London, was another gathering spot for people on the margins of the mainstream, which Willats learned about in 1981. There, in 1982, Willats first met Leigh  Bowery (1961–94), along with a number of others with whom he  would work.61 Willats’s 1984 portrait of Bowery, What Is He Trying  to  Get At? Where Does He Want to Go?, was collaboratively generated by Bowery and Willats, over time, in different spaces (Figure 5.9). In 1986, Willats published an image of Bowery’s elaborate self-presentation on the cover of his artist’s book, Intervention and Audience (Figure 5.10). Willats recalled: When I first went to the Cha Cha Club I found the rough, tense atmosphere there very difficult to cope with. . . . The rough tension of the place was

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Stephen Willats, Intervention and Audience (Coracle Press, 1986) cover showing Leigh Bowery and the tower block where Bowery lived in east London. Online: https://www.cornerhousepublications.org/p ublications/intervention-and-audience/ (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 5.10  Stephen Willats, Intervention and Audience (Coracle Press, 1986) cover showing Leigh Bowery and the tower block where Bowery lived in east London. Collection of the author. very similar to the feeling of tension and aggressiveness I had begun to notice growing on the housing estates where I have been working, where people sensed things are now going wrong for them but had no means to do anything about the situation.62 Once he established some acquaintances at the club, Willats interviewed quite a few of these creative inhabitants of the night whom he met here; Tom Holert reported that Willats’s relationships with “figures from the night life of the years 1982 to 1984 . . . fed in to thirty day/night portrait diptychs.”63 In this chapter, the focus will be on the 1984 portrait he made with Bowery. Willats himself published significant documentation about this tripartite work, in addition to Tom Holert’s essay in Art Society Feedback.64 The work’s title was drawn from an interview that Willats did with the philosophical Bowery in April 1984, who had turned twenty-three the previous month.65 Willats’s monumental tripartite portrait of Leigh Bowery was an assemblage, as was the work Pat Purdy of 1978. This artistic method uses three-dimensional found objects, essentially turning collage into sculpture. The collaboration between Willats and the not-yet-well-known performer Bowery consisted of two panels on each side of a stack of ten breeze (concrete) blocks, which were painted alternately bright red and green.66 The two large painted panels burst with objects that parade up the surface together with tinted photographs and collaged imagery from popular movies and advertisements. The title of the “day” panel (“What is he trying to get at?”) was spelled out in silver Letraset applied over a gray ground with smudges of blue and pink acrylic paint. Bowery himself wrote on the right side of this panel, “Once I’m in, I’m really in. Everything’s shut outside. I can look down and say I’m quite safe in this position, as though I’m in a spaceship or something, just hovering above everything.” Bowery’s “space ship”— illustrated by him as a linear cartoon shape—was a flat on the eleventh floor of a tower block (Farrell House) in east London in the Borough of Tower

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Hamlets (Figure 5.11). Bowery had only lived there about a month when Willats first visited him in the spring of 1984.67 A pink-tinted portrait of Bowery applying makeup was centered at the top of the “day” panel. Below, Willats placed a large black-and-white pinktinted photo of the exterior of the building so that the facade rose to fill the

FIGURE 5.11  Farrell House, London, UK. Leigh Bowery lived in a flat on the eleventh floor. Photo by Sharon Irish, 2014.

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lower half of the panel. Farrell House was just off Commercial Road, not far from the Bangladeshi leather workers on Brick Lane and the dockworkers on the Isle of Dogs, with whom Willats had worked in the late 1970s.68 In the other panel, the night view of Farrell House featured some windows shining with a bright yellow light that spilled onto balconies, while the rest of the building had a mustard-gray hue. “For Bowery,” Alistair O’Neill claimed, “his East End days were the unremarkable and unseen flipside to the fantastic notoriety of his West End nights, and Willats’ artwork demonstrates this as a polarity.”69 Willats used objects provided by Bowery to represent themselves (rather than serve as symbols); the transformation occurred when Bowery used those materials on his body to flamboyant effect. An array of these objects on the “day” panel fans out from an arrow that pointed back up toward the Bowery photo. Blue-tinted rectangular photos of other objects —sewing machine, button-holer, buttons and hooks, telephone, iron, kettle, washing machine—were the tools of Bowery’s DIY fashion designs, along with the assemblage of actual objects: tubes of theater cosmetics, applicators, red and gold glitter, sewing machine oil, and a plastic Star Trek mug. In contrast to other assemblages, the items here were like a list rather than serving as forms that could be read as something else (such as Pablo Picasso’s 1942 Bull’s Head made from a bicycle seat and handlebars). The bright-red “Daz” soapbox seemed about to tumble off the bottom of the left-hand panel toward the stacked tower of red and green blocks, drawing the eye to the second panel. The blues and pinks of the “day” panel shifted to yellows and purples of the “night” panel, “Where does he want to go?” In this composition, Bowery wrote in gold capital letters on the left side: “I suppose it’s like sort of advocating tolerance, you know, don’t criticize or be hostile to anything that’s different or unusual or something that you’re not familiar with,” punctuated by the outline of a star and a crescent moon. A fully transformed Leigh Bowery in blue makeup looked out at us from a color photograph centered at the top of Panel 2. In the interview that Willats conducted, Bowery exclaimed: “I’m mad on different things about Indian cultures. I’m also over the top about different aspects of 1970s clothes, like platforms, and then I really like things from outer space.”70 The second panel celebrated all these items in tandem with orange-tinted photographs of other costume and entertainment paraphernalia splayed across the surface. A photo of a sketch of platform shoes and painted nails overlapped with an image of a toy holster and gun. More photos of makeup sticks, a hat, a wig, shoes, 78-rpm records stacked on edge and a television set rose in a pattern like the teeth of a zip, to the right of actual costume jewelry—a crescent-shaped pin, a yellow plastic ring, and a string of “pearls.” Just above these applied items, Leigh Bowery stared at us from the photo shot inside his flat, posed in one of his rooms that was covered with Star Trek wallpaper; he was ready

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to leave his “capsule” and head into his future, wearing the hat, the wig, and the costume jewelry. Willats encountered Bowery right on the cusp of his fame, in a city that in the 1980s proclaimed many independent fashion creators.71 Certain found objects on Panel 2 stressed Bowery’s fascination with things “Indian” (which, for him, included the entire subcontinent and beyond). Willats and Bowery added a small orange and yellow bottle of liquid incense on the upper right side; boxes to hold “Tibet Pumpkin” hair oil and incense intersected with the arrow that pointed at the text. Bowery’s blue face paint recalled the blue complexion of the Hindu god Vishnu. This assemblage depicted the fashion “look” that Bowery developed in the collection, “Paki from Outer Space,” promoted by Susanne Bartsch in New York.72 In 2012, Willats commented on his projects with club-goers and other youth: It was my work in the “wastelands” in the early 1970s that led directly to my becoming interested in the various manifestations of night culture that exploded in the early 1980s. For I saw this night culture as a container of many “social capsules” created purposefully by different groups in order to express themselves outside the norms of the dominant culture. . . . [I]t seemed that most of the people that went to the “private clubs” were unemployed and actually living in the “new reality” housing estates. The private clubs I saw as a positive stage on from life in the “new reality,” in that members had left behind for that night the depressing environments in which they lived.73 The questions Willats posed to Bowery probed the relationship between living “outside the norms of dominant culture” and the economic straits of many of these young people. For example, Willats enquired, “Does being poor at the moment make you even more creative and more ingenious?” Bowery replied, “I’ve never got enough money to do, you know, all the things I want to do, but that’s good in a way because I actually become more resourceful.”74 It is not hard to imagine that Willats himself, pressured by his own limited financial circumstances in the early 1980s, identified with Bowery’s financial challenges and creativity. On one of the large preparatory worksheets that Willats used to develop the Leigh Bowery portrait, he wrote: “Distance is used between [the] flat and the ground to express the difference between the creative self-expression inside the flat, with the repressive determinants outside” (Figure 5.12). The exterior of the tower block of Farrell House symbolized the predetermined spaces that Willats viewed as repressive. On another part of the large paper worksheet, he noted that the distance was both physical and psychological. While the worksheet revealed Willats’s experimentation with different colors

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Stephen Willats, Preparatory worksheet for (Leigh Bowery) What Is He Trying to Get At? Where Does He Want to Go? 1984. Pen, ink, and coloured wax crayon, 59.4 × 84.1 cm. Both worksheets are called Worksheet One. Given by Stephen Willats, 2004. Heinz Archive and Library, NPG D17002 and NPG D17003, National Portrait Gallery Reference Collection, London, UK Neither worksheet has been published.

FIGURE 5.12  Stephen Willats, Preparatory worksheet for (Leigh Bowery) What Is He Trying to Get At? Where Does He Want to Go? 1984. Pen, ink, and colored wax crayon, 59.4 × 84.1 cm. Both worksheets are called Worksheet One. Given by Stephen Willats, 2004. Heinz Archive and Library, NPG D17002 and NPG D17003, National Portrait Gallery Reference Collection, London, UK. and formal organization of the portrait, he already had conceived that “each panel [would be] split between the deterministic world surrounding the capsule, objects of creative release within and the manipulation of creativity made there.”75 Willats’s portrait of Bowery centered on “creativity in self-organisation” visualized using objects and people. While certainly more complex than the 1959 sketch by Willats, this worksheet sketch extended his analysis of feedback in systems. Willats’s focus on contrasts between inside and outside—how an individual organized personal space to, in a sense, “escape” the constraints of the outside world—also continued his explorations visible in Vertical Living and Living with Practical Realities of 1978, as well as Pat Purdy of 1981.

“Objects of Creative Release” In 2013, in a booklet called World without Objects, Willats recalled: [W]hen I was working in apartments in recently constructed housing blocks in West Berlin in the late 1970s, I noticed that residents positioned objects around the interior of their living space to provide a psychological framework for themselves and for anyone else who entered their space.76 This interest in the meanings of objects continued after Willats’s time in Berlin. As people changed the context of an object, that object also changed its meanings. Richard Francis in an essay on Willats noted: “[O]bjects change

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status and value as they are moved from one system to another; discarded things are the agents for personal revelation.”77 Willats’s repurposing of objects, thus altering their value, is on view in his Pat Purdy panels of 1981, set in the wasteland, Leigh Bowery’s objects in his “capsule” and many other assemblages. Scholar Sara Ahmed’s essay, “Happy Objects,” provides insights into the ways in which objects mediate between the audience (or participants) and the artist (though Ahmed doesn’t discuss Willats). In tandem with the diagram Willats made in conceptualizing the Bowery portrait, Ahmed’s analysis helps clarify how these objects did their work. Willats’s diagram for the Bowery portrait indicated that social isolation could be countered through community and self-expression, often using objects as tools for connection. This transformation involved inputs from the surrounding world and objects to self-organize a new consciousness. The confrontation between two states of consciousness created opportunities for change. Arrows pointed toward a meeting, an altering of states, to counter materialism. The key here is that objects were isolating because of the ways that pervasive advertising fostered disappointment and frustrated desire. Willats wrote: “The subsequent separation between the creators of the popular culture and its audience, its receivers, had a fundamental outcome: it made the audience feel inadequate.”78 This market-driven situation intensified the contrasts between conspicuous consumers and the many people at the margins who struggled to meet their living costs.79 Ahmed examines “how happiness functions as a promise that directs us toward certain objects, which then circulate as social goods.” This “positive affective value . . . sticks, [it] sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects.” She homes in on how feelings of happiness can be reinforced by or diverted from “an affective community,” which pinpoints how marketing often works. “We become alienated . . . when we do not experience pleasure from proximity to objects that are already attributed as being good.” Alienation is entangled with expectations and disappointment, as Ahmed notes. “Objects would not refer only to physical or material things, but also to anything that we might imagine might lead us to happiness, including objects in the sense of values, practice, and styles, as well as aspirations.”80 In Willats’s preparatory sketch for the Leigh Bowery portrait, he diagrammed the tension between alienation and pleasure, isolation and community, and how those states could foster expressions that would maintain those contradictions in homeostasis, however fleeting, and counter feelings of inadequacy. The objects that Willats and Leigh Bowery featured in their portrait “point[ed] toward happiness” because Willats’s co-investigation with Bowery focused on the tools or objects that Bowery collected and used to fashion himself.81 Miranda Joseph provided another angle from which to assess objects when she noted that any given object has multiple meanings, what she called a “multivalence of the commodity.” On the one hand, the

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objects used by communities with which Willats worked were enmeshed in capitalist systems by virtue of their production and exchange; on the other hand, these objects, often cheap or discarded, helped define these marginalized communities through use and display.82 The objects on view in Willats’s works were indeed multivalent and visually compelling. In Leigh Bowery’s portrait, the composition included objects that facilitated “creative release” and transformation. Willats took up what he termed “the powerful heuristics” of the punk movement, incorporating into his own practice the approach that “everyone has the potential to express their own creativity.”83 He explored methods of sharing artistic expression with his collaborators, as he did with Leigh Bowery. At Brentford Towers in 1985, Willats similarly joined with residents of one of the high-rises, Harvey House, to produce display boards that were central to the project, Brentford Towers (also discussed in Chapter 4). Objects served as tools or agents in this work as well. Ron, one of the participants in Brentford Towers, lived in Harvey House (Figure 5.13). The display board that he made with Willats featured an image of a decorative horse and a partial view of other tower blocks. He wrote: “I call it a night flat rather than a day one. I am alone but I don’t feel lonely. I think the objects ease my loneliness. Having had enough hassle during the day I look on it as a sanctuary from the world outside.”84 These objects that Ron valued revealed parts of his inner life. Willats remarked in 2013 that [t]here is a complex inter-relationship between objects as tools, and objects as icons, between function and style, that increasingly seems to govern our personal and social pre-occupations. The fabric of the reality we construct around ourselves in our personal and social space is built up from objects that have a variety of functions for our own psychology and act as a means of externalising ourselves.85

Stephen Willats, Brentford Towers, 1985, Chiswick Central Library Local Collection, London, UK. · Display board with Ron. Photographs, felt tip pen, mixed media on card. Interview with Ron published in Between Buildings and People, 117; Vision and Reality, 104–5 Related images online: http://stephenwillats.com/work/brentford-towers/ (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 5.13  Stephen Willats, Brentford Towers, 1985. Chiswick Central Library Local Collection, London, UK.

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Willats’s assertion about the effects of the “fabric of the reality” that we construct was visualized in the worksheets that preceded the implementation of Brentford Towers. On one of the worksheets, he drew two squares around the words, “Culture seen through objects” and “Culture seen through people.” Above the left-hand square, he wrote “Tower block as cultural symbol”; the text above the right-hand square read, “Tower block as social reality.” Below the two squares, arrows pointed to the words, “Environment within the tower block.” On another portion of the Brentford Towers worksheet appeared “Two comparative statements.” Within a tower-block shape on the left, the writing says: “Tower block as it exists as an object” and in a similar shape on the right: “Tower block as it could be as a social reality.”86 Brentford Towers, at various scales, considered objects as cultural expression and their roles in creating social identities. Willats remarked in 2013: “I saw that the actual building blocks in which those residents lived, while having the function of housing people, were themselves expressions as objects.”87 For Willats, tower blocks were both symbols of regulated living and actual objects that housed people. As objects, too, they held potential for alternate realities, created by those who occupied the spaces. These alternatives were uncertain, to be sure; inside flats, people selected objects, objects affected people, people and objects transformed within and between systems. These inputs and outputs formed an assemblage or set of assemblages that unsettled binaries: artist/audience, resident/tower block, interior/exterior. In the abstract, this unsettling offered opportunities for change, but of course power structures remained. Those engaged with a work of art, for example, continued to assess and alter a project during the time of its implementation; at times this process was translated into other arenas and assemblages. In 1988, the National Tower Block Directory included a two-page spread on Willats. The editors wrote: “Stephen’s art is our art. By tower block tenants, about tower block tenants, and for tower block tenants.”88

Back to the Wasteland For nearly three decades, Willats worked with residents of municipal housing. In May 1994 he returned to west London to install Private Journeys at Fenton House, a sixteen-story tower block on the Heston Farm Estate89 (Figure 5.14). The estate stands at the edge of a large park (the eighteenth-century Osterley Park and House), and Willats had been visiting this area since the late 1970s.90 Similar to how he had explored Pat Purdy’s environments with her in the 1980s, these Private Journeys were one-toone interactions with five people over about nine months, in which estate residents led Willats on walks from their living rooms into “private spots”

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FIGURE 5.14  View of Fenton House on Heston Farm Estate, near London, from adjacent parkland. Location of Stephen Willats’s Private Journeys (1994). Photo by Sharon Irish, 2015. in the adjacent park, in direct opposition to an “isolated individual’s remote communication with unseen others, made through the [computer] terminal,” as Willats put it in an article in Control. Willats’s interest centred on the self-organisation of people’s construction of reality and its inherent personal relativity. In this respect the work contrasted the world

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of determinism, the ordered constructs from institutional society, with the anarchistic psychological realm associated with the freedom found in the seeming chaos of wasteland areas in the urban environment.91 As they walked, Willats recorded the residents’ comments and photographed signs that they pointed out. Together they considered what associations they had to the objects. They then created display boards about these journeys that included their portrait, objects from their living room, objects and signs from the journey, and objects and signs from the park, together with transcribed text, in formats like those used in Brentford Towers.92 These boards were exhibited in the Fenton House community room. A public register was empty at the start (“from zero,” as Willats called it); viewers were invited to anonymously draw their responses to one of five questions related to the journeys that had taken place, represented on the display boards. There were five sets of response sheets (one for each “journey”); the responses to these different prompts were arranged in a mosaic pattern (Figure 5.15). Willats had been told by the housing authorities to avoid Heston Farm Estate “as they considered it to be a very alienated, hostile environment, which had not responded much to previous formal initiatives.” Willats took this message as an invitation to explore “the richness and immediacy of faceto-face interaction.”93 While Willats admitted that Heston Farm presented a dangerous, volatile situation at that time, he also reported that “the local authority were really quite amazed, they didn’t think anything like this could have happened, and the result was I think, that they felt confident about perhaps doing something else there.” That “something could happen that was positive, that was working, that [the residents] had done themselves, that was enormously important.”94 In turn, these connections remained important for Willats as well. He had carried out projects with similar formats repeatedly, including Multi-Storey Mosaic (1990) in Feltham and others listed in Chapter 4. Professor Stephen Bann mentioned to me that he considered Stephen Willats to be a genre artist in some ways.95 “Genre” is an art-historical

Stephen Willats, Private Journeys, 1994. Image of residents and operators from Heston Farm Estate working on Response sheets. Two public register boards with mosaic contributions are visible behind the participants. Documentary photos of Heston Farm Estate appear in Beyond the Plan, 72, 106. The cover of the booklet, Private Journeys, is visible online here: http://www.chelseaspace.org/archive/willats-images4.html (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 5.15  Stephen Willats, Private Journeys, 1994.

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category that describes realistic depictions of everyday scenes, usually in painting. Willats’s many works—from collages to artist books, in which ordinary objects are presented either in isolation or in context—affirm Bann’s statement. Images of the interior of Mrs. Moran’s flat, office scenes from London docks, display boards of Brentford Towers and Personal Islands, Pat Purdy’s spaces, both confined and unregulated, and the living rooms of Fenton House flats, all provide us with glimpses of objects that meant something to their owners or were transformed from rubbish into new purposes. The creativity among overlooked people came to the forefront in considering their objects, their architectural or urban settings, and the uses to which people put these items. What was hidden or isolated became a point of connection or source of imagined change. The “parallel worlds” that so intrigued Willats were shaped by individuals of different ages, class status, racialization, and gender identity. In producing visual art with people in these worlds, Willats was joined by male dockworkers, Mrs. Moran, Pat Purdy, Leigh Bowery, Ron from Harvey House, and Fenton House tenants, to name those considered here. There were many remarkable others with whom Willats cultivated mutualism, some of whom he featured in Vision and Reality, his compilation of transcribed tape-recorded interviews that he began in 1974 and published in 2016. Of these interviews, Willats commented: [A]s the 1970s progressed, with the media’s stigmatisation of social housing, and the withdrawal of essential services such as maintenance, the mood . . . turned more negative with a critical, sometimes even depressed, tone prevailing. This changed in the early 1980s when I made a series of recordings with a younger generation, the so called post punks, who were reacting against the political turn to the right, a new conservatism. They had moved into difficult-to-let housing on Council-owned estates, either squatting or more usually taking on the tenancy of an inner-city low rent flat. They created interiors consistent with and reinforcing the attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of their DIY community, largely based on a night culture of small self-organised clubs that they had created. Their improvised, purposefully tacky, visual language of alienation and the rejection of mainstream norms and values, gave a positive fresh thrust to my recordings.96 This improvisational energy fed creative performances in which behavior and perception shifted attitudes and challenged assumptions. Scarlett Cannon, another dweller of the “night culture” with whom Willats made the 1982 artist’s book, Cha Cha Cha, guarded entry to the underground Cha Cha Club.97 According to American Vogue editor Hamish Bowles, Scarlett “would hold up a hand mirror to someone she deemed inappropriately dressed for admission and say, ‘Would you let yourself into this club?’

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She was all-powerful.”98 This sort of “power” demonstrated the adaptive ways of young city dwellers who claimed spaces and subverted dominant norms; at the other end of the age spectrum, elderly people were not passive observers either. N. Katherine Hayles noted that cybernetics puts into play “shifting boundaries between observer and system.”99 Participant-observers in workspaces, tower blocks, clubs, and vacant lands, catalyzed by Willats (in these cases), fed their ideas, actions, and imagery back into systems that were depicted in tangible displays. These self-organized efforts were springboards to other ways of being.

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While pinpointing any one thing that explains Willats’s art is not only impossible but also not very interesting, it does seem valid and useful to focus on “systems” in Willats’s practice. As curator Johanna Burton asserted about artists in the 1960s and 1970s: they were taking up systems not “with any specificity, any faithfulness, but . . . on the contrary, they were taking systems up abstractly, as materials themselves to be transformed.” Burton went on to posit that art practices emerged out of “systemicity” in a “shared desire to mark, and sometimes make, processes and contexts rather than discrete objects per se [emphases in the original].” That Willats was making processes and contexts with an eye on transformation is clear; that the systems approach of cybernetics provided useful strategies and notions for context- and process-production is also evident. Burton noted that the “recourse to ‘systems’ enabled rather than denied access to the rhizomatic, perpetually variable and vehemently nonlinear, while making visible the myriad structures designed to contain and order.”1 This chapter, then, considers some of the structures that Willats designed to provide contexts for systemic change in the cities where he worked. Willats’s interest in adaptive systems, instantiated in work as manifold as Colour Variable No. 3 (1963), Meta Filter and From a Coded World in the 1970s, and Brentford Towers (1985), indicated his continuing effort to create work that was fundamentally about the systems themselves and himself and his collaborators within those systems. N. Katherine Hayles wrote: By and large, first-wave cybernetics followed traditional scientific protocols in considering observers to be outside the system they observe. Yet cybernetics also had implications that subverted this premise. The objectivist view sees information flowing from the system to the observers,

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but feedback can also loop through the observers, drawing them in to become part of the system being observed.2 Feedback was crucial to Willats’s art, and he made projects that drew participants into structures and invited inputs. He stressed the active role of each participant in sorting out their environments, writing from his own vantage point: It is my action in making connections between these multi-media, multichannel fragments, in bringing parts together into a coherent model from what would be otherwise a wholly overwhelming random experience, that enables me to create meaning within my own framework of references.3 He was an observer within the systems he observed. The use of multimedia in Willats’s projects was well suited to feedback loops. Actions were photographed or filmed, edited, and shared in a process he called “media-ised.”4 In the projects considered in this chapter, photodocumentation of movements through space, repeated film clips, images on networked computers, interactive interfaces, and combinations of these created coherency within open systems, at times conceptualized by Willats as “strange attractors.” Willats defined “strange attractor” as a phenomenon in which “‘things’ are pulled towards something but you can’t see and do not need to see the whole picture, but you can possess that part of the process which you witness.” This generalization about the (unknowable) whole from a part of the process underscores the way in which Willats approached systems abstractly, working with fleeting encounters to “engage in . . . the kinetic energy of the action.”5 In 2014, he wrote: A product of what in the 1960s Heinz von Foerster called The 2nd Order Cybernetics, The Strange Attractor expresses and gives a structure to the perception of fluidity and transience in our random encounter with elements of reality. For the Strange Attractor enables a model to be created from which we can maximise the relationship with fleeting encounters.6 A strange attractor is both a geometrical pattern characterizing a complex, chaotic system and a dynamic object that is dissipating into chaos. The inherent tension sustains a tenuous convergence akin to learning.7 Willats recalled that cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster “came over to England [in the 1960s] and he was connected to some of the people I knew then.”8 From the 1960s into the 2000s, second-order cybernetics offered Willats concepts with which to experiment. For over five decades, the city has been Willats’s arena to enact social models and decode experiences. Critic Hans Ulrich Obrist’s 2012 panel discussion in Basel on the “Artist as Urbanist” included Willats and highlighted his

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long-term practice in cities.9 This chapter details a number of his projects set within urban infrastructures: The Transformer (Middlesbrough, 1997), Freezone (London, 1997), Creativeforce (Sheffield, 1998), Changing Everything (London, 1998), and various “data stream” works (London and Oxford, 2012–13). Willats facilitated multidimensional thinking that aimed to expand people’s options in small, repeated increments, but his work did not offer a particular solution. Interested in new aesthetic possibilities available outside prescribed patterns of behavior, he emphasized the adaptive and transformative aspects of his projects. For Willats, it was not the artist’s remit to decide what these solutions looked like, but he viewed “free zones” of unscripted urban spaces as providing choices.10 Multiplicity and mutuality remained his central tenets.

Middlesbrough and The Transformer In 1866, George Eliot wrote in the novel Felix Holt, the Radical: “The breath of the manufacturing town, which made a cloudy day and a red gloom by night on the horizon, diffused itself over all the surrounding country, filing the air with eager unrest.”11 Eliot’s words certainly described the city of Middlesbrough when I visited in 2015, and likely described the Middlesbrough that Willats experienced when he arrived there in 1997. A long economic decline in the North-East followed the Second World War.12 The coal industry had contracted in the 1960s, though pollution from other industries lingered. The unrest in the city was palpable in the shuttered houses, graffiti, empty lots, and razor wire. A framework for future possibilities coexisted there, even so: the gridded street plan of Middlesbrough included parks, main thoroughfares, and a housing density that fostered neighborliness.13 In 1997, the national government implemented a dispersal scheme for migrant communities, relocating new arrivals to the North-East.14 Middlesbrough witnessed an uptick in new-immigrant families, although the city had been home to many Bangladeshi families, for example, for decades. The families had arrived in the 1970s to work in factories there, and Willats joined with a number of these long-established residents on The Transformer. Whoever participated with Willats, though, aimed to parse their city as a communication structure, moving through space, studying the perspectives of their neighbors.15 Commissioned by the Middlesbrough Art Gallery (now called the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art), Willats created The Transformer in 1997. Based on a walking tour of about one and a half miles through a central area of Middlesbrough that he cocreated with residents, The Transformer had four nodes in the town, including the art museum16 (Figure 6.1). The other nodes—a community center, library, and local shopping center—were

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Stephen Willats, The Transformer, 1997, Middlesbrough, UK. Images discussed include · Front and back cover of The Book of Questions; · Display boards 4A and 5A. 103.6 × 143.2 cm Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), UK; · Display boards 14C and 15C. 103.6 × 143.2 cm Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK. Some views of the work in situ were published in Changing Everything, 26, 34. Another display board is visible here: http://stephenwillats.com/work/transf ormer-middlesbrough/ (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 6.1  Stephen Willats, The Transformer, 1997. Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), Middlesbrough, UK.

linked by the walk that looped past a park, along main streets and alleys to the nodes.17 In developing the walk, Willats partnered with residents to photograph objects in the cityscape. In workshops, Willats and the participants combined their photographs and texts from their interviews on posters, which were displayed at the nodes. Willats and residents of Middlesbrough used visual culture to consider the urban environment, social interactions, and alternative futures. A number of Willats’s previous projects had involved participants moving through a neighborhood (Social Resource Model for Tennis Clubs, From a Coded World, and Personal Islands, for example), and Private Journeys (1994) had been structured around a walk for two people. The Transformer, though, formalized this approach by mapping out a route for wide participation.18 The walk was available to everyone who was mobile and could be joined at any point; the segments between nodes were short. Willats developed a modeling book called The Transformer: The Book of Questions as a means to get participants to reflect on their surroundings by responding to questions in the booklet. Willats stated: “The question is a fundamental vehicle for social exchange between two people.”19 The Transformer booklet had black-and-white photographs that were paired with quotations from the people with whom Willats worked to create

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the walk. For example, under two square photos showing pork sausages for sale in a shop and a sign reading “Cleveland Homeopathic Clinic” was the text: One time was full of small businesses and, as the years have gone by, we’ve seen shop by shop close down, it’s because the Retail Parks, they tend to take a lot of business out there, people tend to go there rather than stay within this community. The accompanying prompt was, “Find the two contexts from which the images below originate and transform what you discover in whatever way you can imagine, draw them, make a plan of the result.” Other questions included responding to boarded-up houses, street drains, door decorations, walls embedded with glass shards, rubbish, and signage. Another prompt (Question 16) asked the viewer to “Relate this sign [a white arrow with the number 9] to the building on which it is situated, draw, make a plan that expresses your associations.” Underneath the image of an arrow was the text: “It is the address exactly of the Mosque itself, so whenever I see number nine I connect and I see the Mosque address in number nine, so it reminds me of something important, like part of me.” Willats worked closely with the mosque and Muslim Cultural Centre, among other groups. People’s entries in their modeling books were also exhibited on a grid at the museum, similar to other public viewings of response sheets that Willats had organized over the years.20 When I walked the full circuit of The Transformer route in March 2015 in Middlesbrough, I photographed many of the same details as the participants did in 1997, appreciating the focus on small-scale objects at various heights. Then, at the museum, I was able to view some of the project posters.21 Each of these boards had two sets of collaged color photographs arranged in a tight grid, linked by a horizontal black line through the center, with Letraset spelling out the text. Formally, The Transformer boards had an overlay that stressed the spatial and temporal dimensions of them: the square images in a grid were connected by a second, skewed square created by bold black lines. The sets of two images per display board reinforced this gridiron effect, reading simultaneously as diagram, document, and collaged composition. The texts centered below each collage added layers of emotion, memory, and physical sensation to the imagery.22 Using The Book of Questions, participants were invited to use their reactions to the boards and remodel the environment through which they had just walked. For example, the composition marked 4A—which included photos of a street grate, a bricked-up door, a door knocker, and an incised green blazon—had this text: “LOGICALLY I KNEW YOU COULDN’T FALL THROUGH, THOUGH I USED TO BE FRIGHTENED, SOMETHING COULD REACH UP AND PULL YOU DOWN, A SORT OF FANTASY, A SORT OF IMAGINARY WORLD BUT IT’S GOT A CERTAIN REALITY.” Using The Book of

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Questions the viewer was asked to “make a drawing showing how the picture [a black-and-white photograph of a street grate] might transform the hidden world symbolized in the images shown on the display board.” Willats, together with Middlesbrough collaborators, created an openended project within a rapidly changing, financially troubled community. The Transformer engaged the imaginations, the multisensory bodies, and the memories of those who chose to join in. By doing so, by facilitating encounters among each other in urban systems, Willats hoped something transformative would occur.

Marble Arch to Oxford Circus, London: Freezone Cities offer some of the most complex data-generating structures. The stretch of London’s Oxford Street that Willats chose for another walk, from Marble Arch to Oxford Circus, is often packed with all sorts of people, shopping, waiting for buses, strolling (Figure 6.2). Big department stores like John Lewis and Selfridge’s draw crowds, while many small businesses in between promote their wares with hanging signs, pavement placards, and window displays.23 In 1997, the same year as the Middlesbrough project, Willats created Freezone, which simulated a walk along Oxford Street (Figure 6.3). Exhibited in a gallery space, Freezone integrated computer and cognitive sciences with environmental impacts (broadly construed) on urban dwellers, from signage to furniture, pavements to tower blocks, topics which Willats had considered for twenty-five years. In making Freezone, Willats collaborated with about a dozen colleagues to capture images, audio recordings, and texts as they walked along sections of the 0.7-mile route. Each person had a different device—Super 8 camera, tape recorder, video camera, pencil, and paper—to collect impressions; art historian Jane Kelly, for instance, was asked to focus on the ground. She noted that this collective approach gave the piece a strong sense of place, but “without the character of individual expression.”24 Willats then created concept frames using various media. He described the concept frame as being divided up into eight sections each of which is dedicated to one particular area of experiencing the language of the street. Thus one box in the frame is dedicated to the ground walked upon, another to institutional signs, another to ambient sounds, etc.25 In the center of the frame, a “symbolic group” consisted of a posed photograph of individuals about whom operators/participants were asked to speculate. These frames were displayed sequentially on computer terminals

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FIGURE 6.2  View of Oxford Circus, the endpoint of Stephen Willats’s Freezone, 1997, London, UK. Photo by Sharon Irish, 2014. networked together in an installation (Figure 6.4). Rob Hamadi was the programmer for Freezone; Cedric Leete built the display consoles to house the Intel computers and bulky CRT monitors.26 To activate Freezone in the gallery, two participants stood at adjacent light gray kiosks. They were to choose words to describe what each saw on the computer terminals. Agreement between them about word choice meant that the “walk” could proceed. The computer screens displayed slides with concept frames composed of grids of different images and texts. The depicted situations increased in complexity as the sequence progressed. Each kiosk also had a number keyboard and buttons to select or clear choices for each player/operator. Flanking the units were boards with lists of words. This thesaurus of 300 alphabetized “person perception” words provided terms to select in order to describe the states of the people shown in the frames.27 The terms chosen by each player were displayed to the left of the concept frame. Selecting a term that matched that of the other player enabled them to move ahead on the route. To track progress, a light box was mounted on a wall facing the players, lighting up as joint decisions were made. There were thirty-six spots along the route that were named as possible stopping points; these were mostly shops but included a bank, a charity, a school, transportation facilities, and some brand-name cubicles. Giving a nod

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FIGURE 6.3  Installation of Freezone at daad galerie, Berlin, December 2014. Private collection. Photo by Sharon Irish, 2014. Stephen Willats, Freezone, 1997, screenshot from mixed media installation. Private collection. Two screenshots and an installation view are published in Languages of Dissent, 102–3. Screenshots and a short video of Freezone are here: http://stephenwillats.com/work/freezon e-1997/ (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 6.4  Stephen Willats, Freezone, 1997, screenshot from mixed media installation. Private collection. toward the title of his work, Willats wrote: “The work provides a territory which is mutual, and free [though directed] for participants to explore the potential of the transformations and exchanges between them.”28 What Willats called a concept frame in Freezone was a means to abstract representations of an urban space visually and textually and come to terms

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with the multi-homeostat problem introduced in Chapter 3. He described these representations as nodes of information in a holding frame; a group of these frames comprised a whole.29 The gridded forms in Freezone also visualized the nature of networked, digital imagery. “Every digital image is a grid,” wrote Erika Balsom. “Beyond the grid of the image is the grid of the network, a virtual rather than geometric space—a space of relations, subjection and manoeuvre.”30 The sequence of images and texts in Freezone were linked together with the other terminal and activated by visitors who joined in the simulated walk by coming to agreement; this whole process referred to larger systems in the city within which people and things interact in multiple ways—physically, imaginatively, emotionally. The concept frame changed as the individuals cooperating on the “walk” moved along Oxford Street; alternatively, if they could not agree on the descriptions of relationships depicted, variations on questions about the concept frame were displayed until an agreement was reached (or until all six options had been tried). For example, the starting frame showed a young white woman emerging from the Edgware Road pedestrian subway. The question posed was: “How do you think the represented situation will influence the feelings Person A has about herself?” (Willats’s 1974 Person A installation also used a thesaurus and “choose your own option” in answer to questions presented.) In Freezone, the nodes of the grid surrounding the image of the single woman showed squares with a footprint, graffiti, tube signage, weather, and the words “general traffic noise.” As the “walk” proceeded, further questions related to two, three, and four people’s interactions, and they, in turn, were interacting with objects, from shoes to flowers to fruit displays. How was one person’s perception of a situation different from that of another? Did perceptions change as participants discussed the choices and “moved” together along the walk? “[A]s I walk down the street,” Willats noted, “the entire physical nature of the environment is revealed as an overt statement of the ideological parameters on which the dominant, institutional culture is founded.”31 The questions in Freezone were intended to spark discussion about sociocultural systems and how they shaped urban dwellers moving through quasi-public spaces at the end of the twentieth century. In a subsequent frame, five people are seen walking, surrounded by fragments that depict the area: color images of paving stone, tiles, street markings, rubbish from a bottle and words describing the weather, sounds (crashing, hissing), and bits of conversation. These environmental excerpts, selected by Willats, form onscreen collages that also relate to the gridded Transformer display boards from Middlesbrough. The question presented on the screen, to be answered from a list of posted terms, was: “How is the society surrounding person A affecting how they see their involvement with the group?” Person A, in this case, is a white woman, second from the left in the group. Subsequent questions were dependent on what terms were previously agreed upon. If

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none of the six options related to the displayed image produced agreement, the program moved to the next frame and new questions, and the “walk” continued by one marker, shown on the light box on the wall. Willats’s computer-supported work aimed to foster lateral thinking. In the composition of the Freezone concept frames, for example, the juxtaposition of a variety of inputs prompted the operators to freely associate. [F]ragmentation, [Willats wrote] is seen as generative to stimulating the operator to make complex connections which reflect . . . the relativity of their own perception. The Symbolic Group are [sic] placed in the centre of the screen so that the fragments of information contained in each concept frame provide an environment of references, stimulating lateral connections by participants when making their responses.32 I viewed a reinstallation of the work at the DAAD Gallery in Berlin in December 2014, together with artist Rosten Woo and journalist Krissy Clark.33 I was able to observe them at the kiosks, and better understand the social dimensions of the installation. Just as with Willats’s Meta Filter of 1973–5, interactions among operators were expected and encouraged. The size and screen resolution of the monitors often made it hard to understand what was going on in the photographs, but that was all the more reason to talk to the other player, about the street scenes, the possible emotions and body language on display, and the thesaurus. Rosten and Krissy discussed the scenarios and word choices prior to making their selections. Willats stressed: “[R]eaching Oxford Circus is not seen as a final target, as there is no right or wrong, or preferred view given to the operators.”34 Freezone created a reason to relate to another person, familiar or strange, and discuss perceptions of urban life, appreciating each others’ viewpoints. Willats wrote: “This particular location was selected as an idealised manifestation of contemporary cultural norms and values, and as containing a rich variety of the languages employed to externalize and project them.”35 Willats was interested in the ways people made sense of the massive information inputs swirling around them in the city. Willats had extensive and long-term connections with computer arts circles, so he could have created sophisticated simulations in 1997. By keeping the machinery basic and the visuals as unanimated slides, the participation in the simulated walk remained the focus. The monitors were hidden inside the consoles; the light box did the job of tracking progress but did not stand out in any particular way. In other words, his project was not about the machines; they were means to an end, which was mutuality and exchange. Freezone emphasized Willats’s commitment to building social infrastructures, rather than computer art in service to another goal. Freezone was decidedly place-based, situating itself and the operators

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in a specific location and time.36 Further, by keeping the project fairly low-tech, in that there was no learning curve for the operators, people could immediately engage with the installation.37 The “art” of Freezone existed in the communications among the users and the installation; the process could be repeated and/or done differently, with different people, at different times.

Simulation in Sheffield In a self-published booklet, Multichannel Vision (2000), Willats wrote: “While it might seem obvious to say that the physical form of our environment shapes our psychology and perception, I would say that the environment in turn has been moulded by the social and ideological consciousness dominating in culture.”38 Willats’s conceptually based and cybernetically informed work has long focused on this reciprocity between the physical forms of our environment and the dominant sociocultural tendencies shaping these forms. Creativeforce of 1998 is a case in point, not only linking physical and symbolic worlds but also continuing explorations of mediatized environments (before that label became frequently used in communication studies to describe the give-and-take among media, culture, and society).39 Creativeforce involved both face-to-face interactions and simulation in Sheffield, a city about 170 miles north of London. This project was commissioned by Photo 98 (a one-time entity created for the UK Year of Photography and the Electronic Image)40 (Figure 6.5). Developed between September 1997 and July 1998, Creativeforce was then installed for a year in three public locations around the city: Mappin Art Gallery, the library at the Manor housing estate, and the library in Hillsborough.41 Willats noted in 2000:

Stephen Willats, Creativeforce, 1998, Museums Sheffield, Sheffield, UK. Images discussed include · View of one of a sequence of slides (Section 1) displayed, from distributed mixed media installation. · View of another sequence of slides (Section 8-Future) displayed, from distributed mixed media installation. Images of this work were published in The Artwork as Interactive Simulation, 34–7.

FIGURE 6.5  Stephen Willats, Creativeforce, 1998. Museums Sheffield, Sheffield, UK.

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[S]imulation techniques are particularly important tools for the artist in forwarding radical perceptual models, such as of society, for they enable a “symbolic world” to be created where the model can be enacted and experienced according to the parameters that might be set. Creativeforce provided a contained framework that engaged participants in imagining alternative systems. To support that process, Willats argued that “the artwork must become liberated from just describing existing reality, so that it can become the agency for transforming the cognitive self and projecting that self into a world of complexity and exchange.”42 From three terminals, distributed among Mappin, Manor, and Hillsborough, people could share in a simulated journey in Creativeforce. To work, the simulation required at least one person in at least two of the locations. The participants in the simulation, for the time that they were networked, formed a mini-society, working to answer questions posed by the program. Of course, in addition to cocreating a symbolic world, the participants in Creativeforce were also operating in real life. Their participation, whether as face-to-face collaborators or users of the simulation, fed back into the project, shaping views of both Sheffield and the artwork, real and imagined. Prior to the construction of this networked installation, Willats collaborated with ten Sheffield residents along the recently constructed public transport Supertram route to generate imagery and texts used in the piece. Willats divided the route into ten segments, forming a metaphysical journey between the conscious world of reality and the unconscious world of the imagination, the language of signs, and people’s associations with them[,] forming a thesaurus of images and texts to be used by the operators as the means of exchange in the process toward finding agreement. Willats and the volunteers walked the tramline together; the resident would direct Willats to photograph “things that set their imagination beyond the actual object.” Then the participants themselves used Super 8 film cameras to create their own visual journey. Willats also tape-recorded interviews with each of them. He then edited these materials to compose the slides that were displayed on the terminals; rotating panels, set up next to the terminals, displayed the thesaurus.43 Phillip Black and David Ellis did the computer programming; Cedric Leete fabricated the consoles that held the equipment (as he had done for Freezone). The distributed participants had to agree upon terms in the thesaurus and, using them, respond to prompts to “move” together along the tram ride. The presented situations increased in complexity as the virtual trip progressed. In keeping with Willats’s commitment to “the physical form of our environment,” a sketch of Sheffield and the Supertram is in order before

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considering the particulars of Creativeforce. Due to its left-wing, Labour-led city council, Sheffield “was marginalised in the 1980s and 1990s because of its politics. It became a poor northern city.”44 Willats had had an exhibition in 1986 at Sheffield’s Mappin Art Gallery, Striking Back: Works Since 1972.45 By the time he returned in the following decade, the Supertram had been constructed, opening in 1994. He recognized that it was “a polemical symbol of the new Sheffield,” a tangible attempt to regenerate a city trying to recover from the closure of its manufacturing plants.46 The Supertram curves through the hilly city of Sheffield along several lines, passing many low-income areas along the way. It had had a bumpy financial history from the beginning, but after a large portion of the extensive low-rise Manor estate was demolished along with some tower blocks in the late 1990s, the potential ridership on the tram diminished.47 (The film, The Full Monty, set in Sheffield after the steel mills closed, was released in 1997 to relatively sympathetic reviews.48) Willats’s project was another way to spark new approaches across the south Yorkshire city, from the southeast Manor estate library to the centrally located art gallery, and northwest, to the Hillsborough library. Creativeforce participants were asked to consider situations in the present and in the future. One screenshot from Creativeforce had text and close-up photographs superimposed on a street scene of terraced houses, parked cars, and power lines: images of garage doors spray-painted with “Leave Clear, No Parking in Front” and the top of a stone post float in the lower left and right corners. Sans-serif text in an off-center white rectangle reads, “Each one doing something slightly different from the person next door.” This street scene (likely along Infirmary Road in Upperthorpe/Neverthorpe) was paired with a “Present” question, “From your associations with the view in front of you, select an item which would best describe your own identity within this context.” It matters that the players would have been relatively familiar with their city, enough to know that Upperthorpe and Neverthorpe are residential areas west of the center, with, for example, seven twelvestory tower blocks from 1967 refurbished in the mid-1990s. Two other towers—the thirteen-story slab blocks and Kelvin Flats—were demolished then, just before the launch of Willats’s Creativeforce. Another composite in a screenshot from Creativeforce showed a view of Fitzalan Square in the city center, with the stone facade of Canada House on the left, the Commercial Street bridge in the background, and blocky storefronts on the right. Partial pavement markings that read “ER” hover in the foreground. This image posed a question for the future: “From your associations with the view in front of you, select an item that expresses how you feel the social outlook of the individual in the community could be developed.” It is hard to know the extent of the impact of Creativeforce. Willats quoted two participants (Liz Hall from the Middlewood section and Alison Tidswell from the Netherthorpe section) at the end of his booklet on interactive simulation. Ms. Hall spoke of enjoying the process of gathering images for the project; Ms. Tidswell noted that she remembered the

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experience “vividly,” shifting from being “angry and dispirited” about her work situation to pleasure in “the shared experience of looking.”49 While this is hardly a scientific sample, these comments are consistent with my interactions with other participants in Willats’s projects: people became increasingly comfortable in conversations and welcomed the chance to get involved. Further, with projects like Creativeforce and Meta Filter (twenty years before), Willats was not the only catalyst for the project. At least some of the time at Willats’s project sites, there were “administrators” such as librarians and gallerists who gave orientations and tutorials to those who came by. Inviting participants to connect with others in a distributed system and choose responses to questions about how their community might change was a thoughtful method of creating shared symbolic worlds.

South London: Changing Everything Willats worked all across London; what geographer Doreen Massey wrote about “internal geographies of place” in 2007 was also true of the city in the previous decades: What is this “London” (or any other locality)?; who is this “we” that may be hailed in reference to place? . . . It has been shown how the very characterization of cities as “global” is a strategy whereby the part stands in for the whole, where the city is defined by its elite and the rest are consigned to invisibility. . . . [C]ities of the many are effectively claimed by the few.50 Willats’s work with individuals and groups of all sorts countered this claim to the city by “the few” and refused the “invisibility” of “the rest.” He had begun projects with residents in south London (south of the river Thames) in 1981, in the districts of Brixton and Kennington, which are not far from the housing estates in north Peckham (also in south London). Those estates in Peckham were the focus of his 1998 project, Changing Everything. In 1997, the director of the South London Gallery, David Thorp, commissioned Willats to create a project; the 1998 project, Changing Everything, and its accompanying exhibition, marked a return for Willats to a major public gallery in London. (There had been exhibits in London at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1986 and 1993, but primarily Willats had been active outside London, including Derry, Orchard Gallery, 1982; Greater Manchester, Rochdale Art Gallery, 1984; Sheffield, Mappin Art Gallery, 1986; Leeds, City Art Gallery, 1987; Newcastle, Laing Art Gallery, 1988; Tate Gallery, Liverpool, 1994; and Middlesbrough Art Gallery, 1997.) Jane Kelly, an art historian who lives near the South London Gallery, wrote that it was in

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an area of predominantly municipal housing, away from the centre of the city, inhabited by working class people who have lived here all their lives, by immigrants and their children who were born there, also by recent arrivals, including those fleeing persecution and economic deprivation in their own countries.51 The connections that Willats instigated among community members and the gallery recall those links he fostered with residents on the Ocean Estate (Inside an Ocean) and Whitechapel Gallery in 1979. While Willats recognized that too many stimuli scattered attention, his collaborative urban journeys offered a means to focus on what fragments captured the imagination and distinguished one participant from another. When Willats and his companions identified symbols that were already perceived as meaningful to them, this process opened up possibilities for further exploration. These perceptions provided starting points for the artist in making an intervention.52 For Changing Everything, Willats worked with people connected to organizations in the area: the Peckham Library, the Kicking and Punching Club, the Toddlers and Babies Club, the Baptist Church, the Women’s Centre, and the Vietnamese Centre53 (Figure 6.6). He organized sessions with residents to identify issues of particular concern, and, from those meetings, he found volunteers to document and reflect on walks through

Stephen Willats, Changing Everything, 1998 Images discussed include · Collaborating on photo mosaic for display at the South London Gallery; · Mosaics on display, South London Gallery; and · Map in the guidebook showing walking route. Photos of Willats meeting with residents published in Surfing with the Attractor, 8. Installation view at South London Gallery published in Surfing with the Attractor, 15. A selection of images from community meetings and the exhibition are visible here: http://stephenwillats.com/work/changingeverything/ (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 6.6  Stephen Willats, Changing Everything, 1998, South London Gallery, London, UK.

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areas near the gallery.54 About twenty participants joined him on individual walks around the South London Gallery, with still and film cameras and tape recorders. These walks focused on sensory inputs that enriched the environment by attending to varied stimuli.55 Each participant shared their individual response within the larger project by contributing their set of photographs and text descriptions to a large, collaboratively composed wall installation in the gallery. Arranged in grids, five images high by four images wide, each “mosaic” was flanked by a portrait of the individual who had walked the route with Willats. Each person had a measure of control in this model, rather than ceding it to the artist or urban infrastructures.56 Like The Transformer in Middlesbrough, the guidebook that accompanied Changing Everything allowed others to take the short journey through the neighborhoods that Willats had previously made with his collaborators. People were invited to develop their own sequences using response sheets “in reaction to one question as the basis for the next.” Response sheets included in the guidebook were collected and exhibited on freestanding gridded walls in the gallery. This arrangement promoted feedback among the gallery visitors, the contributors to the original themes, and the physical neighborhood. The techniques and methods that Willats employed in this south London project, such as mosaic grids and response sheets, were adapted from previous projects. Other approaches were relatively new and developed further in subsequent works: walking as research and critique; installation of video monitors in shop windows to display films from the walks; and what Willats called the “data stream,” a collaborative assemblage of urban phenomena.57 Freezone was being developed at the same time, and Willats credited a woman in north Peckham (near the South London Gallery) with giving him the idea of the “data stream,” where people were given tools to record different “layers” of an environment: objects, sounds, textures, weather.58 While Willats was interested in engaging people with his art, he was equally committed to transforming the art museum “into an agency for externalising, articulating and amplifying the creative self-expression of people who are no longer passive viewers, but participants in the process of constructing the work’s message.”59 Changing Everything moved beyond the gallery walls; Willats was a catalyst for self-expression in many nearby areas, which he fed back into the museum exhibit. Art historian Antony Hudek labeled Willats’s Centre for Behavioural Art (1972–3) as a “porous entity”; the artist remained committed to this porosity in other art institutions as well by insisting on exchanges among communities and galleries.60

A Pivot in Scale: Data Streams During the final stages of Freezone and Changing Everything, Willats was also working on Macro to Micro (1998–2000). In this work, Willats took

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on the role of producer in orchestrating a short, improvised performance by a group of actors in a semipublic space in order to explore the effects of minor, unpredictable disruptions on everyday routines. Willats recruited five actors familiar with poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht’s theories of critical detachment61 and showed the group the setting he had selected: a shopping parade (or strip mall, as we call them in the United States) in west London that was fronted by a broad walk, parallel to busy Uxbridge Road in Hayes.62 He asked the actors to develop a sequence of short events to take place on the pavement outside the shops, but not to tell him in advance what they were going to do. He then recruited fifteen other artists to document the event according to their individual inclinations, using pen and paper, rubbings, audio recorders, writing, and Super 8 film cameras. On a Saturday in early December 1998, the two groups converged to generate the material for what became a wall installation, Macro to Micro. The actors performed scenes that included a person pretending to faint on the pavement, an attempt to make a call in a public telephone box with no money, and an effort to hail a nonexistent taxi. A drawing by Eleanor Jansz for the project showed different portions of the environment that were captured.63 Subsequently, during eight two-hour workshops, images, and audio from the collected material were discussed and selected by about ten of the participants, resulting in a forty-seven-panel work with still, video, and audio components (Figure 6.7). Before the use of the term “tactical urbanism” by Rebar in 2005 to describe “temporary, cheap, and usually grassroots interventions,” Willats and the actors and artist-documentarians whom he recruited engaged in “minimal disruptions” of this suburban space to explore the varied perceptions of a dynamic setting.64 Willats also asked four people to write reflections for a gallery guide on how to approach the final work.65 Macro to Micro is intriguing as a multimedia collaborative performance staged in public that was then edited into an installation by multiple people;

Stephen Willats, Macro to Micro, 1998–2000. Super 8 mm film shown as video on two monitors, 4 channels of audio and 220 works on paper, ink on 47 panels, 226.5 × 680 cm. Tate Britain Collection. Published in Conscious-Unconscious, 29. Portions are visible online here: http://stephenwillats.com/work/macro-micro/ (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 6.7  Stephen Willats, Macro to Micro, 1998–2000. Super 8 mm film shown as video on two monitors, 4 channels of audio and 220 works on paper, ink on 47 panels, 226.5 × 680 cm. Tate Britain Collection, London, UK.

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it also links to the “data streams” that Willats produced in the next decade. For the Oxford Community Data Stream (2010–13), he adapted strategies from The Transformer and Changing Everything to an interactive project between two areas of Oxford. For the Data Stream Portrait of London (2012), Willats worked with a group of artists whom he invited, similar to Macro to Micro, but with an expanded “data set.” What Willats called “data streams” could be described as visual and conceptual representations of open-ended urban systems. These large-scale installations of text and images were both “micro” in focus and “macro” in uniting fragments temporarily as a whole. The city has long been Willats’s milieu and inspiration, affecting him as he in turn altered it, through observation, disruption, and mediatization. I have indicated how he moved among scales in works like The Transformer and Changing Everything, working with individuals to create posters and mosaics, and engaging a broad audience through inviting responses to walks in which problems were posed. With Freezone, Changing Everything, and Macro to Micro, he also isolated areas of focus, from the weather above to markings underfoot. A persistent inquiry into how we live together in information-saturated environments links all these works. In a section of his manual, Artwork as Social Model, titled “The World that Confronts Me Everyday,” he wrote that “embedded within the very physical fabric of my environment is a whole spectrum of signs, symbols that exist as objects, and which individually and collectively state to me the ideological outlook of the culture from which they derived.”66

Oxford Community Data Stream Willats has had a long and productive relationship with Modern Art Oxford (MAO, formerly known as the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford). He exhibited his kinetic Visual Automatics at Oxford in 1968; at that point, the museum had only been open for two years. MAO has been a fulcrum for Willats to leverage his community-based projects ever since 1972 when he organized Cognition Control (see Chapter 2). In 1978, he created Contained Living, a project similar to Inside an Ocean of 1979 in east London, in that the work was implemented with residents of the Friars Wharf Estate in Oxford and exhibited at nearby MAO.67 Willats is interested in both information networks and networks of meaning, each connected to real people in real locations. In 2010, he began work on the Oxford Community Data Stream, a commission by MAO in which he used collaborations between communities to transform images and, by implication, people’s perceptions of each other68 (Figure 6.8). For two years, Willats worked with sixteen residents in two outlying areas of Oxford, the village of Kennington, south of central Oxford, and the housing estate of Blackbird Leys, also south of Oxford and directly east

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Stephen Willats, Oxford Community Data Stream, 2013. 400 colour prints, 18 channels of video, variable size. · Installation view at Modern Art Oxford. · Video still Video stills published in Conscious Unconscious, 11–12; Oxford workshops illustrated in Conscious Unconscious, 16. Examples of the collaborative videos can be viewed here: http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2013/0 6/stephen-willats-at-modern-art-oxford/ Installation views online: http://stephenwillats.com/work/welfare-stateimages-exhibition-muhka-antwerp/ https://www.muhka.be/programme/detail/22the-welfare-state/item/13016-oxfordcommunity-data-stream Video of Willats discussing the Oxford Community Data Stream: https://vimeo.com/64952351 (All links accessed December 1, 2019.)

FIGURE 6.8  Stephen Willats, Oxford Community Data Stream, 2013. Four hundred color prints, eighteen channels of video, variable size, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, UK.

of Kennington.69 With residents, he created “data streams” using Super 8 cameras or 35 mm snap cameras in walks along identical routes. Some individuals took footage and photographs of nature; others focused on signs or industrial buildings. Eventually, the two communities came together in three workshops to digitally transform the images, creating a collection of entirely new images. As Willats noted, this activity “creat[ed] a stream of images that didn’t exist before. This was an important moment in the work, for the transformations made by bringing together elements from the two very different neighbourhoods was made by two people who had not met before.”70 Human connections were created together with the digital collages. The collaborative works were then exhibited at MAO, as well as in Kennington Village Hall and Blackbird Leys Advice Centre, in 2013.71 Willats’s assistant on this project, Melanie Pocock, did substantial advance work in consultation with Willats, contacting the parish council of Kennington, and the residents’ association of Blackbird Leys. Pocock was (and is) an energetic young woman who was an Inspire Curating Contemporary Art fellow at MAO, coordinating the data stream project over its two-year duration. Since this Oxford project was in the recent past,

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I was able to interview some of the participants. I have changed the names of the community members; I am grateful that they took the time to speak with me. Besides Willats and Pocock, I spoke to four people involved with the Oxford data stream, three from the Blackbird Leys area, and one from Kennington. Two of the women from Blackbird Leys with whom I spoke were active in their residents’ association, one man was involved in local governance, and one person, Ines Kretzschmar, was a charity staff member.72 The area of Blackbird Leys involved with the Oxford Community Data Stream, Falcon Close, has low-rise maisonettes between two open, green spaces, at a remove from the estate’s shops, advice center, and library. Marie A (not her real name) had lived in Blackbird Leys since 2009. She reported that Willats treated the participants “royally” and that she looks at photographs and area streets much differently than she did before. The workshops in which the Blackbird Leys and Kennington residents worked together were very informative to her, in terms of photographic composition and theme, she reported. She thought the Kennington residents were initially wary of the Blackbird Leys participants, in part because those from Blackbird Leys brought their children with them, but then they got on well and enjoyed the opening at MAO. One of the Blackbird Leys residents made a friend in the Kennington group.73 Another Blackbird Leys resident, Claire B, noted that the data stream activities were a welcome change of pace for women staying home with small children. She also noted that the project brought people out into the community who wouldn’t have come out for other sorts of things. While she has since moved away from Blackbird Leys, she remains in touch with her former neighbors. She didn’t recall anyone from Blackbird Leys visiting Kennington; the Kennington people came to the leisure center at Blackbird Leys for the workshop.74 The charity staff member, Ines Kretzschmar, who has worked at Blackbird Leys since 1994, was instrumental in suggesting an active residents’ group for Willats to contact. Ms. Kretzschmar felt that the data stream project did increase positive attitudes toward Blackbird Leys, which had acquired a “sink estate” reputation in the 1990s. Further, she lauded Willats for taking the time that the community needed in order to participate: she described Willats as “laid back” and able to engage with all sorts of people.75 Willats had to build trust among himself, Ms. Pocock, and the possible participants to interview individuals and cocreate the data stream. Ms. Kretzschmar felt that the relationships with the artist boosted the confidence of some of the participants, at the same time as they addressed issues that challenged their communities: rubbish, signage, potholes. The fourth individual with whom I spoke, Tom C from Kennington, praised Willats as a “lovely man” whom he met through the parish council. He noted that it was hard to get people to participate and that Kennington contributed “barely half-a-dozen” people to the project. He found it

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interesting to use a still camera and film to document community features but, for him, the project was one opportunity among many.76 The Oxford Community Data Stream consisted of 400 images fixed on a freestanding flat wall and eighteen channels of video. Willats saw himself as a “facilitator and motivator” providing structure for the variety of experiences and visual impressions. In a shot from one of the videos, a split image showed the two locations, overlaid with three boxes. The background videos were shot by people walking: the video moved with a pedestrian rhythm, while the boxes were fixed in place. The right-hand box was shot in Blackbird Leys; the left-hand in Kennington. A pair of strangers had worked to morph the two images into a third one, displayed in the middle box. The pictures within the boxes changed over the duration of the video. One particular still captured the low-rise, low-density aspects of both places and playfully decorated the roofline of a Kennington house with a colorful plastic bag full of boxes, joining a close-up view of a bag on the ground with an elevated scene of the roof, chimney, and electrical pole. People together transformed the reality they lived in, using their imaginations. A split screen video that conveyed movement along a road in two locations at once and a periodically changing sequence of boxes approximated the multichannel experiences of many of us walking through town. Movement by our bodies was implied as we viewed the digitized films from the vantage point of the creator behind the lens. Each participant focused on different aspects, from pavement cracks to a distant cloud formation, prioritizing what we saw and felt depending on the errand of the moment. Cybernetician Gordon Pask asserted that the structure of a city is not just the carapace of society. On the contrary its structure acts as a symbolic control programme on a par with the ritual constraints which are known to regulate [humans] and which render this behaviour homeostatic rather than divergent.77 However indirectly, this idea influenced the homeostatic forms of the data streams, a mural of distinct, square images connected by black lines, familiar from Willats’s early drawings. There is always more input than we can absorb at any given time and the data streams allowed the viewer to focus on just one aspect, while others remained within one’s peripheral vision, so to speak. Stephen Johnson recognized a similar Pask-like order in urban patterns: “The city is complex because it overwhelms, yes, but also because it has a coherent personality, a personality that self-organizes out of millions of individual decisions, a global order built out of local interactions.”78 Willats recounted in 2014 how the idea of a strange attractor inspired the data streams. These streams pulled together bits of reality into a temporary display that remained incomplete while reminding viewers of transience and

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dynamism. Willats viewed that dynamism as “a vehicle for generating new perceptions.” In issue 19 (2014) of Control, Willats wrote further: Similarly we do not need to know where what we have encountered came from, but while it passes through our domain, we can create, or make a presumption of ultimate destiny, its history. The longer the entity passes through our field of experience the higher our perceptual resolution can become, one perception leading to another[,] giving more complex relationships with a subsequent increase in the range of possibilities open to us.79 Willats conceived of exposure to these random elements over time as increasing “the range of possibilities open to us,” nodding to the ways in which emergence works when there is no fixed order or predictable sequence.80 These encounters may be catalysts for creation and imagination.

Data Stream Portrait of London Willats was commissioned to create the Data Stream Portrait of London by the South London Gallery in 201281 (Figure 6.9). Willats worked with a group of artists to document two very different streets in London—Rye Lane in Peckham and Regent Street—using rubbings, video, film, audio, and digital cameras. These fragments were then collaboratively edited down to about 1,300 squares and organized into a two-sided wall mosaic as part of the exhibition, Surfing with the Attractor, in June and July 2012. The final installation of the London data stream was nearly 50-feet long and over 10-feet high. Rye Lane fragments were presented on one side; Regent Street fragments on the other side, in parallel time lines. To Margot Heller of the South London Gallery, Willats said: “You’ve got the reality of the street as

Stephen Willats, Data Stream Portrait of London, 2012, 320 × 1,500 cm × 30 cm Wood, paint, PVA glue, Laserjet prints I discuss the view of the side of the wall about Rye Lane, Peckham, UK. Excerpts from Rye Lane and Regent’s Street are illustrated in Surfing with the Attractor, 44–47. Online: http://stephenwillats.com/work/data-stream-portrait-london/ A short video of the exhibition at the South London Gallery is here: http://stephenwillats.com/work/surfing-attractor/ (All links accessed December 1, 2019.)

FIGURE 6.9  Stephen Willats, Data Stream Portrait of London, 2012, 320 × 1,500cm × 30cm. Wood, paint, PVA glue, Laserjet prints, South London Gallery, London, UK.

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we encounter it, then that street is media-ised through a variety of means. . . . Then that re-media-isation is again re-media-ised by being encoded into a digital format” and exhibited in a gallery. Further, the installation “is an open mosaic, a democratic surface that points to another culture, a culture of self-organisation.”82 All the streams—from facial expressions to weather descriptions, from objects to sounds, from the evidence of the natural world to infrastructure—coexisted and prompted the viewer to make their own connections. Face-to-face in the gallery, viewers recalibrated as they engaged with the installation. Information as images and text was mounted on long walls, down low, in the middle and up high, to be organized for each individual, by each individual. Outside the gallery, one could wander down Rye Lane nearby or go north to Regent Street in London. As Stephen Johnson wrote, The face-to-face world is populated by countless impromptu polls that take the group’s collective pulse. Most of them happen so quickly that we don’t even know that we’re participating in them, and that transparency is one reason they’re as powerful as they are. In the face-to-face world, we are all social thermostats: reading the group temperature and adjusting our behaviour accordingly.83 These works remained grounded in reality, however; they were not just signs referring to signs. In Tiziana Terranova’s 2004 essay, “Communication beyond Meaning,” which examined the cultural politics of information, she called this anchorage the “resilience of meaning.”84 The London data stream installation also featured Willats’s black-andwhite films of urban pedestrians, People in Pairs; in these films, colored squares with directional arrows were inserted over faces of walkers to depict interpersonal communication between dyads85 (Figure 6.10). “Two people are the fundamental unit of society,” wrote Willats, “and two people walking together, going towards a strange destiny, towards something unknown to the external observer is an expression of the time base, the transience Stephen Willats, People in Pairs, 2012. Video The 2013 Antwerp version of People in Pairs can be viewed here: http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2014/01/stephen -willats-at-balice-hertling/ (accessed December 1, 2019) 2015 variations on these videos appear here: http://indexfoundation.se/exhibitions/stephen-willats (accessed December 1, 2019)

FIGURE 6.10  Stephen Willats, People in Pairs, 2012. Video. Collection of the artist.

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embedded in relationships.”86 In this series of Super 8 films transferred to DVD, communication symbols were reworked by Willats to signal the ways in which urban dwellers affect each other as they move through the city. Willats’s films cannot be featured in this “still” book, yet they are important aspects of his practice that animate his information exchanges by showing different moving bodies interacting. These films of pairs of people walking outside were displayed in shop windows near the gallery, so that the gallery “flow[ed] out into the world around it and . . . the world around it flow[ed] into the gallery too.”87 Willats explored the fluidity of the gallery as it extended “out into the world” and as the world entered the gallery not only at the South London Gallery but also (as discussed) at Oxford, the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and in Leeds. Transience and movement were central to the meaning of the data streams, in this case. Complexity theory, systems theory, and cybernetics provided Willats a trove of concepts throughout his career as he grappled with the informationintense environment of contemporary life.88 Willats and Pask considered both buildings and cities as dynamic entities, in place and in time. In 2013, Willats said in an interview with Ute Meta Bauer: “I’m now celebrating the idea that the world is complex. There are more possibilities in complexity: it’s richer and it’s made dynamic when we embrace a vision of the world as a complex set of random variables.”89 The ways in which Willats mediated complexity, with the ever-recurring arrows in his work pointing to our everfluid life situations, have produced a fascinatingly varied oeuvre. While his diagrams, drawings, and paintings were often abstract, they nearly always had a corollary on the street or in a lift lobby; in turn, lived experiences would shape subsequent compositions. Willats’s systems were open, which challenged him to define boundaries, structures, or nodes in order to establish stability, if only temporarily. Second-order cyberneticians like von Foerster aimed to generalize the feedback and control mechanisms from engineering and science to focus on the unpredictable, open relationships in society. Willats and his collaborators, with recording devices, still and video cameras, moved together up and down streets, creating multiple views of the city that became the means to represent the give-and-take between objects and people. Scholar of science studies Andrew Pickering has written about the ontology of cybernetics, which is key to Willats’s art: “[C]ybernetics stages for us a vision not of a world characterized by graspable causes, but rather of one in which reality is always ‘in the making,’ to borrow a phrase from William James.”90 Secondorder cyberneticians and artists like Willats recognized both the impossibility of ever fully observing their worlds from within their own embodied selves and the significance of observing social systems within which individual minds and bodies perform. The contingency of relationships among ideas, material objects, and observers is ever-present in what is being observed, stressing the “in-the-making” and performative aspects of our interactions, in other words, the resilience of meaning(s) on many scales.

Conclusion On Giving Up and Compromise

In 1965, Willats painted Change Exercise No. 13, a nearly square abstract work in blue, red, green, black, and white, as discussed in Chapter 1 (Figure 1.3). The top and right edges appeared to cut off the quadrilaterals of the painting. The left-hand edge reinforced this illusion as its penciled width appeared related to the implied movement of the rectangles up and to the right. They “slid,” visually widening the space at the left. Seven paired triangles oriented vertically or horizontally within rectangles touched at their points and created more pairs of triangles in the negative spaces. The second column of colored shapes, which became solid green at the bottom, anchored the composition. This drawing (for me) briefly suspended time and motion, stilling the momentum for change. Willats created other “change exercises” in 1965, numbering each one. Of his “time-based” drawing process, he wrote that it “provide[d] a way of developing ideas with myself, where the drawing acts as a notational representation that can be adapted and changed according to the picture it sends back to me.”1 While British artists in the mid-1960s were grappling with abstraction versus realism in a milieu of rapid cultural, social, and technological changes, the young Willats laid down a gridded composition that, remarkably, visualized aesthetic concerns that threaded through his art in subsequent decades. By representing his thoughts, he clarified and communicated them, making art that he described as “a vehicle for social exchange.” Writing in 2014, he noted: [T]he drawing can be both descriptive, in that it gives a view of something that already exists, or prescriptive, in that it seeks to represent something that does not yet exist but is imagined as a possibility—for, once it exists as thought, it becomes a possibility.2

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Of course, one drawing cannot stand in for an entire sixty-year career, but Willats’s consistent commitment to “represent the possible” reverberated out from this early work. As viewers we know that our worlds can and will be upended, that uncertainty and randomness predominate. For the length of our contemplation, this drawn exercise holds further change in abeyance.

Feedback and Multiple Futures In 1972, cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster published an article in the very first issue of Instructional Science, “Perception of the Future and the Future of Perception.”3 His lecture-turned article was solicited by Gerald (Jerry) Brieske, a former student of von Foerster’s at the University of Illinois, a sometime colleague of Willats, and a founding editor of Instructional Science. In his article, von Foerster stated: “[W]ith a future not clearly perceived, we do not know how to act.” He linked our perception to current action and imaginary futures, continuing: “[I]n times of socio-cultural change the future will not be like the past.”4 Sociologist Alexis Shotwell in Against Purity (2016) reiterated this idea, stressing that “what happened in the past was not inevitable. And since the past persists and consists in the present, no particular future is inevitable either.”5 Participants in Willats’s work connected within an aesthetic framework in iterative cycles to describe, prescribe, and predict social changes. This art created new territory for mutual understanding, producing knowledge not as a commodity but as a cooperative process that used information to “integrate past and present experiences to form new activities,” as von Foerster defined it.6 Willats’s project works were further characterized by reflective interaction among a variety of people (gallerists, tenants, dockers, artists, critics, librarians, youth, municipal employees, and so on). People joined with Willats in performances of present and future scenarios; they shared affective states in relation to specific places, objects, and communities. Willats’s art avoided judgments about people’s behavior; the descriptive phase (“spinach is green”) was not conflated in Willats’s projects with qualitative commentary (“spinach is good”). The spinach examples come from von Foerster, who remarked on the need to keep process and substance separate.7 Participants in Willats’s art provided their own content (substance) in the creative process, using different media. “We,” Willats said, “are suggesting a culture of self-responsibility, self-organisation, rather than the transmission of a hierarchical type of culture.”8 The structures that Willats created to explore relationships among individuals or groups were “loaded” with content appropriate to given communities or contexts; people organized themselves in new configurations.9 They came together to discuss their current situations, ideas to alter those situations, and ways to foster transformation. The cybernetic ideas that

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Willats adapted helped control the randomness and mind-boggling variety of contemporary life. His axioms—Identity, Code, Values, and Behavior, for example—are social concepts for which he designed visual forms. In concept frame diagrams from early in his career, he delineated how people’s perceptions and environments might shift over time and in relation to these axioms, with participants providing feedback through various state changes. All of these projects could be called “change exercises.” To introduce new functions for art practice in society, Willats adopted methods and questions from psychology, linguistics, and communications, among other fields, in what he called his “social practice.” The spatial, temporal, and affective entanglements of our lives represented in and emerging from Willats’s art prompt contemplation of memory, interdependence, habit, compromise, and compliance. These terms are part of his aesthetic project because they operate as ways to shift meanings. Take memory, for example. Von Foerster wrote: “[M]emory for biological systems cannot be dead storage of isolated data but must be a dynamic process that involves the whole system in computing what is going on at the moment and what may happen in the future.”10 Shotwell, citing Sue Campbell, explained: The work of memory is part of the network of interaction that shapes us as persons. . . . Campbell frames memory as collaborative, too. Campbell discusses a shift in understandings of memory from a storehouse or archival view to a dynamic or relational view.11 By animating memory in this way, von Foerster, Shotwell, and Campbell highlighted the ways in which the past lives in the present and informs the future, in addition to shaping identity, values, codes, and behavior. Shotwell reminded us: “[T]here is never a determinate future, but instead only a present that moves in relation to what we want to move toward. There is not a single pure or perfect future toward which we stretch.”12 A key reason I was drawn to study Willats’s art in the first place was because he seemed to be involved with “a praxis of speculative futures finding ways to create a world other than the one we’re in while keeping our feet in the mud.”13 The overlaps of pasts, presents, and futures in his work initially seized my attention in 2001, and continue to do so.14 His work allowed and encouraged multiple perspectives—“not a single pure or perfect future.” Our perception is partial yet shapes our understanding of our environment; our perception of our environment influences how we perceive our current and future options. Broadening our perception to include other perspectives—which includes what I call participatory reception—is crucial to perceiving alternative futures, I would argue. Participatory reception is a give-and-take process in which participants in an ongoing art project, for example, help shape the project as they receive it, as they perceive it. I choose to use the phrase “participatory reception” because other concepts about artistic reception do not capture the feedback

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by participants involved in an artwork over time.15 Other writers have used different terms to describe similar artistic approaches, as mentioned in the Introduction. William Cleveland lamented the “unfortunate proliferation of terminology”—social practice, socially engaged practice, public art, community arts, participatory art, new genre public art, relational art, among others.16 Yet none of these terms sufficiently elides artist and audience in the way that Willats sought to do. In Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming, editors João Biehl and Peter Locke aimed to undermine “hierarchies of expertise” and blur “the distinction between the finished and the unfinished.” Their conceptualization of “unfinished” paralleled the open-ended processes in Willats’s work. The notion of becoming, which organizes our individual and collective efforts, emphasizes the plastic power of people and the intricate problematics of how to live alongside, through, and despite the profoundly constraining effects of social, structural, and material forces, which are themselves plastic. Unfinishedness is both precondition and product of becoming. . . . Unfinishedness is a feature as generative to art and knowledge production as it is to living.17 Willats was committed to consistency between his intentions and practice, writing in 1996: “An open system of explanation between all participants in a network undermines the very foundations of authoritative, hierarchical, and exclusive frameworks.”18 These open systems were always unfinished, however, and participants entered into art collaborations with widely varying assumptions and expectations; Willats’s art may best be characterized as always becoming, always unfinished. Hardly unusual in social practice, this incomplete aspect held a fundamental role in Willats’s art, reinforced by second-order cybernetics. Willats’s art counterbalanced certainty with questions, with feedback, with the unfinished.

Open Systems and Participation There are a number of strategies that Willats developed and deployed within open systems that may be instructive for others wanting to explore how art might gain a social purchase. Willats researched the visual and verbal languages of those with whom he wanted to connect and attempted to develop “codes” that would facilitate inter- and intra-group communication; the work of art was a learning system. He created a structured series of events that could be “loaded” with particular content by participants, depending on the context and duration of the project. The content ranged from interview excerpts to photographs of built environments, favorite objects, or local signage; from films to montages; from found materials to portraits. Then he

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collaborated with his partners to make this content visible to a broad public, usually starting in the location of its production. His art projects were often independent of galleries and museums so that participants did not experience barriers to entry into unfamiliar institutions. Willats designed many of his projects so that interpersonal exchange in particular locations (“the place of intervention”) was integral to the implementation and meaning of the work. Thus his projects constituted and represented a societal state, which changed over time, through interactions. In her 2011 chapter, “Collaborative Systems: Redefining Public Art,” artist Sharon Daniel described “a kind of practical ethics: de-escalating moral conflict, recognizing the value and dignity of all individuals, facilitating communication, and providing information so each person involved in a given circumstance can see the other’s point of view.” She noted that this approach was part of a “harm reduction” approach to support people who use drugs, and then she connected this strategy to a “model for the way a work of art might identify and engage its public.”19 Her stimulating essay then discussed Willats’s West London Social Resource Project, Edinburgh Social Model Construction Project, and Meta Filter, based on Willats’s documentation in Art and Social Function and considered “authorship/ authority/audience” and the ways in which those nouns intertwined, particularly in technology-based art. Willats moved among these roles in his practice: he was the author or coauthor of events and structures; an authority on the theories and concepts that he worked to apply; and an audience member as projects developed in particular places, with particular people interacting with him and giving him feedback. He designed learning systems and “learnable” systems. Of the latter, Daniel noted: Learnable systems allow the participant to develop an understanding of the structure and content of the system . . . and use it to express her own intentions within the limitations prescribed by the system. . . . [W]hen participants are allowed to contribute data to a system, it becomes a collaborative system.20 While the project works ended, Willats, the author and authority, found ways to extend them, often by repeating his audience research: follow-up interviews, or new projects in the same locations. He also expanded the projects through publication. Vision and Reality, which Willats published in 2016, was a compilation of photographs and interviews by Willats and residents of social housing with whom he worked from 1974 on. Willats the artist retained editorial power within his own financial and logistical constraints: he sought and obtained funding; he identified where and with whom he would work; he approached the buildings—“icons of certainty”— with a conviction that living in municipal flats and planned suburbs limited people’s options.21 He asked the questions, he arranged photographs into concept frames, and he found and negotiated exhibition venues. As

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instigator, interlocutor, and collaborator, he moved art beyond his studio and beyond traditional art institutions into alternative contexts, while relying on participants for content and response. Claire Bishop noted about participatory art in general: “The artist relies upon the participants’ creative exploitation of the situation that he/she offers—just as participants require the artists’ cue and direction. The relationship between artist/participant is a continual play of mutual tension, recognition and dependency.”22 Everyone who worked with Willats was a volunteer, though clearly some people, like John Foster in Brentford Towers, felt an internalized obligation to help. Many of the collaborating artists in works like Macro to Micro were engaged in similar performance or social practice art and thus were philosophically aligned with Willats’s approaches. Most people were appreciative of opportunities to join a process that allowed them to learn more about themselves and others. Some were frankly mystified by Willats’s explanations and approaches. In response to a question in the 1973 Edinburgh Social Model Construction Project, one participant from Gorgie added: “P.S. this set of problems would be best answered by a computer!!”23 For Willats’s 1978 project in Oxford at the Friars Wharf housing estate, someone anonymously wrote on the explanatory flier: “If you were hoping this is going to be of any use to the residents and wider groups of people, why on earth do you couch this pamphlet in phraseology which is totally meaningless to most of us[?]”24 Experimental art can be uneven; “insight development,” an influential idea for Willats, was not linear or straightforward.25 As insights emerged, the language to articulate new understanding also had to be developed, and it was rarely easy. In trying to encode behaviors to reduce ambiguity, Willats’s coded language could be so abstract that it was confusing. Such obscurity sometimes is evident in art criticism as well, as writers try to grasp durational, complex work; others have accomplished analysis with admirable clarity. Beyond his own publications, Stephen Willats has received substantial attention in art history and criticism over the last two decades; many citations are listed at the back of this book.26 Art historian Grant Kester included Willats in his 2004 book, Conversation Pieces.27 Kester argued for communication models in art that link to “the avant-garde position (specifically, that the work of art can elicit a more open attitude toward new and different forms of experience).” Kester viewed Willats as a transition figure in connecting “new forms of intersubjective experience with social or political activism.”28 Later in the book, Kester noted that rather than creating an “avant-gardist spectacle,” Willats produced “a critical community consciousness through an extended process of collaborative exchange.” He pointed to Willats’s prioritization of “a process of autonomous decision making and self-reflection among communities that are typically treated by the state and private sector as a kind of inert raw material.” He labeled the collaborations among Willats and residents of social housing as aesthetic productions, as did Willats himself. Kester suggested that the tenants with whom Willats worked “reflect[ed]

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back critically on the network of visible and invisible forces that pattern that world. The aesthetic distance, of ‘defamiliarization,’ typically achieved in a modernist painting through the manipulation of representational conventions [was] created here through collaborative production itself.”29 Using Kester’s analytical terms, Willats might be viewed as using cybernetics to “defamiliarize” his productions in order to refamilarize his audience with what surrounded them; “you had to go down to go up,” as he cryptically said.30 In order to reflect on and respond to networks and patterns in systems, Willats created models and programs that gave some distance and perspective both to him and to his collaborators. Claire Bishop’s book, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (which did not discuss Willats), argued that the “aesthetic” has dropped out of much participatory art, to the detriment of its own potential excellence as well as the ways in which it could enrich the arts in general. She wrote: I would argue that it is . . . crucial to discuss, analyze and compare this [participatory] work critically as art, since this is the institutional field in which it is endorsed and disseminated, even while the category of art remains a persistent exclusion in debates about such projects. (Emphasis in original) A bit later in the text, she noted that there are criteria that could be used to evaluate this work aesthetically, for example: “the achievement of making social dialogue a medium, the significance of dematerializing a work of art into social process, or the specific affective intensity of social exchange.”31 Bishop defined participatory art as art “in which people constitute the central artistic medium and material” motivated by “a shared set of desires to overturn the traditional relationship between the art object, the artist and the audience.”32 She described the challenge of representing large-scale, multiyear projects as “chaotic polyvocality.”33 While Bishop argued that participatory art should be evaluated within art world constructs, and she was not wrong in that assertion, it remains a challenge to discuss Willats’s art across the fields in which he worked. Not only were Willats’s projects internally “polyvocal,” but Willats attempted to communicate across a diversity of disciplines as well. As esoteric as cybernetics can seem, it nevertheless provided a vocabulary and set of tools with which to think and gain perspective.34

Thinking with Cybernetics Michael Apter’s 1969 article surveyed cybernetics and the ways in which its various aspects had been incorporated into art practice.35 He divided

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cybernetics into three groups: information theory, control theory, and automata theory. Using mid-century publications by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver as key shapers of information theory, Apter described their understanding of how messages move through a series of steps in time to transfer information, and how those messages could be broken down to measure that transference. Apter noted: In general, the more random and therefore unpredictable a sequence of symbols constituting a longer message is, the more information in the message. (The contemporary artist’s obsession with randomness may be seen as an attempt to increase the information he is conveying.)36 In other words, unexpected events convey more information because they are less likely. Clichés are boring; inventive phrases are memorable. Willats’s works were often unexpected interventions into very structured physical environments that contained and challenged the people who lived there. Willats aimed to bend or break those limits in an iterative process— defamiliarizing to refamiliarize, if you will—through close examination of objects, placing items in new contexts, moving through spaces, and talking about alterations with people who had made them. Willats often used symbols of information theory, including arrows and rectangles, to visualize interpersonal communication, artist-environment interactions, and noise interference. Abstract theories, when applied to art, often took the form of models or diagrams. The diagrams had visual appeal and intellectual purpose: by tracing interconnections within or among systems, shapes and lines represented processes as well as constituted understanding of these processes as they were observed. Willats’s research, models, and interviews aimed to break down barriers to interaction and to analyze how information was shared. In order to foster communication, many of Willats’s projects were designed to lengthen the time that people spent interacting with the artwork, thus (ideally) introducing new perceptions to the participants. Regarding the Oxford Community Data Stream (2013), Willats wrote: “The longer the entity passes through our field of experience the higher our perceptual resolution can become, one perception leading to another[,] giving more complex relationships with a subsequent increase in the range of possibilities open to us.”37 Apter also explained control theory, particularly how systems regulate themselves, and how information is used within those systems to effect control. A key term, “negative feedback,” describes how a system’s output is fed back into that same system to inform behavior. Homeostatic systems are exemplars of this process: these systems maintain stability by responding to negative feedback. Homeostasis and, within a larger frame, cybernetics, emphasized process and supported a shift away from object production to feedback for optimal environmental conditions. Also important for philosophical and artistic reasons, control theory addressed the future. If

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a future event caused a variation, a system might be able to adjust itself to still achieve stability. How we perceive a situation significantly affects our actions; thus Willats’s art often experimented with perception and cognition, aiming to broaden perceptions and deepen knowledge across different groups. Cybernetics made disciplinary lines less distinct in his art, expanding his own practice and pushing the boundaries of the art world. This approach required flexibility and willingness to improvise on content and structure, “an openness to the possibility of things being otherwise,” as Shotwell described it.38 Continuously changing life situations underlay Willats’s use of diagrams—descriptive, prescriptive, predictive—pointing toward possible futures and alterations of life codes. These diagrams informed his analyses of people’s varied uses of space and social resources as well as decisionmaking behaviors. Because of Willats’s long-term engagement with some groups, cycles of outputs in response to new inputs were evident in many of his works, in positive and negative feedback loops.39 The “black box” is an idea from science and engineering that refers to an entity understood in terms of inputs and outputs without regard to its internal mechanisms.40 Initially used in electronics as an abstract way of accounting for changes, the theory of the “black box” was picked up by cyberneticist Ross Ashby, as well as Norbert Wiener, and later by psychologists. Ashby noted: “In our daily lives we are confronted at every turn with systems whose internal mechanisms are not fully open to inspection.”41 Black box theory assumed that very complex systems with a multitude of events occurring simultaneously (Ashby’s “inconvenient reality”)42 might be better understood by containing some of those events within a black box so that just the inputs and outputs could be studied. Black boxes essentially isolated parts of systems to focus attention on a particular process outside of the box and, as Willats pointed out, removed the responsibility of understanding what was inside the box. Black box theory also assumed that we could, in fact, come to understand the inputs and outputs that we chose to study. That assumption “veiled” other aspects of knowledge, according to Andrew Pickering. Pickering argued that the ways “we imagine the world and how we act in it reciprocally inform each other,” and those imaginings do not fit within a box.43 Willats’s art intertwined these approaches, drawing on cognitive science, cybernetics, and speculations about space and time. This book has attempted to examine the workings of Stephen Willats’s practice not only to understand certain inputs and outputs but also to consider that which it may not be possible to represent: the spaces between the inputs and the outputs, the multiple directions generated by certain processes, and the uncertainties that attend any collaborative effort. My discoveries have involved deduction, to be sure, but also research about historical contexts, conjectures about affect and impact, and probing people for details about interactions among them. There is no precise isomorphism between Willats’s art and my understanding, as there is, for instance, between a photographic

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negative and the print made from it.44 Rather, I hope my understanding is “complete so far as it goes,” a relevant fraction of an imagined whole. Ashby was sympathetic to the observer of very large systems: There comes a stage . . . as the system becomes larger and larger, when the reception of all the information is impossible by reason of its sheer bulk. . . . When this occurs, what is [the observer] to do? The answer is clear: he [sic] must give up any ambition to know the whole system. His aim must be to achieve a partial knowledge that, though partial over the whole, is none the less complete within itself, and is sufficient for his ultimate practical purpose.45 Giving up, here, is a sort of compromise: there are aspects of Willats’s work that I do not understand well; there are new questions yet unformed. Every book is a compromise of writing and illustration.46 My effort to understand the art of Stephen Willats may contribute to others’ explorations and point to some spots of mutual understanding; it certainly leaves out work that I hope will be investigated in the future.47

Compromise Not Compliance In 2007, Willats asked: [W]hat is agreement? It’s not acquiescence, it’s not compliance, it’s a mutual understanding between people and we sometimes lose sight of that. An agreement is about compromise so, if you don’t want compromise, you’ve got fascism, you’ve got the implementation of one thing on another— you’ve got compliance. Now I’m not interested in compliance.48 To be uninterested in compliance implies an interest in multiple ways of doing and living; to be in favor of compromise means a willingness to shift one’s own way of doing and living. By extension, compromise is relational. Shotwell argued that interdependence was key to thinking about compromise.49 What does coming to agreement look like? In the present? For the future? How might we navigate conflicting ideas and explore a new “cognitive” territory?50 One needs imagination and empathy to compromise: How does it feel to be in another’s skin? How did they arrive at their conclusions? What are the larger contexts for their experiences? How do systems function beyond the individual? What are the commonalities among us? Compromise is rarely easy or comfortable, and it is often complicated by each person’s or group’s own contradictions and complexities. What Shotwell labeled a “habit-of-being problem [is] a problem of what we

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expect, our ways of being, bodily-ness, and how we understand ourselves as ‘placed’ in time.”51 Willats and von Foerster, in their different ways, were catalysts to disrupt those “habits-of-being,” with new inputs introducing uncertainties into systems. Compromise was often the result within an art project, within the social relationships. Compromise occurs in context: it involves multiple pasts and presents. Compromise is not an isolated phenomenon, but rather a messy conglomeration of the temporal and the spatial among unequal participants. Compromise is not only cognitive; the transitions involved in “coming to agreement” are performative and embodied, from stability to instability to some new configuration, and so on. Compromise takes time. Compromise requires that we imagine a future together, to some extent, and that we release or suspend past and present commitments. As Pickering commented, “Getting on in the world is a performative achievement, continuously or from time to time performatively renegotiated.” Pickering asked “the question . . . of how to imagine the world differently; how to break the spell of cognition and language and to enliven instead our imagination of performance and emergence.”52 These quandaries point to the urgent need to practice “coming to agreement,” where the stakes are comparatively low and the participants are in their own environment; those who do not participate (for a variety of reasons) need to be considered as well, if only to acknowledge the partial aspect of participation and compromise. Areas of disagreement will shift when political contexts change; areas of agreement may hold fast, but not necessarily. Compromise has power arrangements embedded in it: those in power will likely negotiate to maintain their power; those who have been historically and are currently oppressed rightly challenge efforts to cede hard-won victories; why should those who suffer in the status quo be compliant? Sara Ahmed has expanded on the word “no” to point to the power of refusal. If one has the acknowledged right to truly say yes or no, then the power dynamics have shifted. “A no can be expressed in how you do not go along with something; how you do not participate in something.”53 Coming to agreement, for instance, could be agreeing to say “no”: we will not compromise with the existing power structure, for example. Since Willats began his career in the late 1950s, artistic responses to social and political concerns have both proliferated and met with resistance, as they always have. There are many ways to say “no,” as art historian Larne Abse Gogarty argued in 2017 about the problem of “useful art”; she questioned whether being useful might be an acquiescence to the status quo and thus useful for compliance, rather than social transformation.54 Arte útil, or useful art, is associated with the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera (b. 1968) who established the Asociación de Arte Útil (AAU) in 2011.55 Committed to its focus on artistic means to “change how we act in society,” Alistair Hudson, codirector of AAU and director of the MIMA from 2014 to 2017, has been a key proponent of arte útil and the “useful museum.” Aiming to “re-establish

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art as a transformative process, operating in society and in ordinary life, beyond the structures in which we once expected art to perform,” MIMA commissioned Willats’s project Human Right in 2017.56 With Human Right, Willats responded to local issues and featured Middlesbrough activists, but this project was not more or less useful than Willats’s similar works in Berlin and Stockholm about the same time (Berlin Local, 2014; THISWAY, 2016).57 In other words, while the usefulness of Willats’s social practice is hard to measure, instrumentalizing its impact may limit how others receive it. Its multiple layers and multiple channels remain crucial to its materiality, its affective force, its process, and its later iterations. Effectiveness and art exist in uneasy tension, given so many variables in production, circulation, and reception. The ineffable may also be useful in that it cannot be instrumentalized and thus co-opted. An example of such evocative and compelling work that included social housing (unrelated to Willats) was Fugitive Images, “a platform for artist collaborations” around the changes at Haggerston and Kingsland Estates in east London.58 Founded in 2009 by Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Lasse Johansson, and Tristan Fennell, these artists have collaborated with others over the past decade on publications, films, workshops, and exhibitions. Their book, Estate, was a “meditation on how history is forever rewritten but never easily told.”59 After seven years, in 2015, Zimmerman completed the film, Estate: A Reverie, which was part-documentary, part reenactment and role play, and part-artistic intervention.60 “Acts of making and reception become mutually bound,” Willats wrote in 2012.61 Given the open-endedness of Willats’s work, there are numerous directions that his acts of making might go as others receive them; arte útil is one set of approaches; “fugitive images” offers another. Gesturing to yet another example, closely related to Willats himself, is a series of workshops associated with a retrospective about Control Magazine at Tate Liverpool in April 2018.62 This “live manifestation” of Control included not only exhibits of works and ephemera related to artists who were featured in older issues of the magazine but also three workshops at the museum by younger artists who published in the 2014 issue of Control (no. 19) or the 2017 issue (no. 20):63 Andrea Francke (b. 1978) teamed up with Radio Anti for Maintaining Control, a reading group and radio broadcast about infrastructural and domestic maintenance and the maintenance of art;64 artist Rosalie Schweiker (b. 1985) with curator Sarah Jury (b. 1986) organized Control Audit, about participation and art;65 and Reading as Rhythm was a “sonic exploration of the visual vocabulary of Control Magazine,” created and performed by Ross Taylor and Romanian artist Madalina Zaharia (b. 1985).66 These events at the Tate Gallery in Liverpool demonstrated how generative Control Magazine has been as “an artwork in dispersed form.” This book is one invitation to join a “free zone” and to reflect on interdependence: to consider being in the lift of a tower block, visiting installations by tenants; to imagine joining other operators in Sheffield

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to share responses to collaged photographs or sharing a walk through Middlesbrough or south London; to offer, post-facto, answers to dilemmas posed in Willats’s multiple panels; to observe oneself observing systems, no longer an “independent observer who watches the world go by; [but rather] a person who considers oneself to be a participant actor in the drama of mutual interaction of the give and take in the circularity of human relations,” as von Foerster described it.67 Cybernetics-in-action is an ongoing experiment. Willats has long instigated art projects in the social realm to consider alternate futures. Spending time within various social models, participants may observe themselves observing, share their particular perspective, learn about others’ points of view, ask questions, and recognize the creative possibilities of uncertainty as well as mutuality. In a temporarily stable state, may we all take a breath before everything shifts again, generating new space-times, linked to past and present.

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Preface 1 The Center for Artistic Activism, “Assessing the Impact of Artistic Activism Summary” (February 27, 2018) https​://c4​aa.or​g/wp-​conte​nt/up​loads​/2018​/02/ A​ssess​ing-t​he-Im​pact-​of-Ar​tisti​c-Act​ivism​-Summ​ary.p​df (accessed September 12, 2019). Thanks to Kevin Hamilton for the link. 2 Stephen Willats, Person to Person People to People (Milton Keynes, UK: Milton Keynes Gallery, 2007), 12. 3 Stephen Hawking, Black Holes: The BBC Reith Lectures (London: Bantam Books, 2016), 53. In conversation with me, Stephen Willats referred to Hawking’s BBC lectures and his thinking about time in relation to them (London, May 2, 2016). I appreciate this pointer. Other scientists are also exploring alternative ways of thinking about time. For example, see Charlotte Higgins, “‘There Is No Such Thing as Past or Future’: Physicist Carlo Rovelli on Changing How We Think About Time,” The Guardian (April 14, 2018), www.t​hegua​rdian​.com/​books​/2018​/apr/​14/ca​rlo-r​ovell​i-exp​lodin​g-com​monse​ nse-n​otion​s-ord​er-of​-time​-inte​rview​(accessed April 17, 2018). 4 Many thanks to Karen Winter-Nelson for this phrase, offered on one of our many walks. 5 Sharon Irish, “The Performance of Information Flows in the Art of Stephen Willats,” Information & Culture: A Journal of History 47, no. 4 (2012): 457–86. 6 Stephen Willats to author, November 21, 2012, fax. 7 The Willatses indicated that they believed “his relationships with Stroud Cornock and Ernest Edmonds were not important to his work.” It depends on what “important” means, but I submit that Cornock and Edmonds are in fact a significant part of the context of Willats’s work. Email correspondence with Rachel Taylor, Victoria Miro Gallery, August 10, 2018. 8 Heike Munder, “Stephen Willats – Languages of Dissent,” Stephen Willats – Languages of Dissent (Zürich: Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and Scheidegger & Spiess, 2019), 5. 9 Steven Nelson, “Issues of Intimacy, Distance, and Disavowal in Writing about Deana Lawson’s Work,” Hyperallergic (June 4, 2018) https​://hy​peral​lergi​c.com​ /4448​83/is​sues-​of-in​timac​y-dis​tance​-and-​disav​owal-​in-wr​iting​-abou​t-dea​na-la​ wsons​-work​/ (accessed September 19, 2018).

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10 Dushko Petrovich, “Intimacy, Distance, and Disavowal in Art Publishing: Conversations with Dushko Petrovich,” Art Journal Open (August 16, 2018) http:​//art​journ​al.co​llege​art.o​rg/?p​=1016​9 (accessed September 19, 2018). 11 On fair use, see Sara Benson’s excellent video, “Fair Use”: go.illinois.edu/ FairUseVideo and the College Art Association’s Code of best practices in fair use for the visual arts (February 2015) https​://ww​w.col​legea​rt.or​g/pdf​/fair​-use/​ best-​pract​ices-​fair-​use-v​isual​-arts​.pdf (accessed August 22, 2019). Thanks so much to Sara Benson for her timely advice. 12 James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 133–53.

Acknowledgements 1 “Productive Margins: Regulating for Engagement,” www.productivemargins. ac.uk/ (accessed July 22, 2017). 2 “Walking as Knowing as Making: A Peripatetic Investigation of Place,” www. walkinginplace.org/converge/; and Kevin Hamilton, “Walking as Knowing as Making,” http:​//com​plexf​i elds​.org/​past-​proje​cts/m​obili​ty/wk​m (accessed July 22, 2017). 3 “Learning to See Systems: Technology Studies and Knowledge Infrastructures across the Humanities” was a graduate student program funded through the Graduate College (2013–17), http://seeingsystems.illinois.edu/; and “Recovering Prairie Futures: Midwestern Innovation and Inter-disciplinary Design Developments” was a funded initiative of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, https​://pu​blish​.illi​nois.​edu/p​rairi​efutu​res/ (accessed July 28, 2017). 4 Sharon Irish, “Critical Spatial Practices in U.S. Cities since 1960,” in Companion to American Urbanism, ed. Joseph Heathcott (New York: Routledge, 2016). 5 “FemTechNet manifesto,” https​://fe​mtech​net.o​rg/pu​blica​tions​/mani​festo​/ (accessed July 29, 2017). 6 Maren Harnack, Sebastian Haumann, Karin Berkemann, Mario Tvrtkovic, Tobias Michael Wolf, and Stephanie Herold (eds.), Community Spaces: Conception, Appropriation, Identity (Berlin: ISR Impulse Online/Institut für Stadt- und Regionalplanung, 2015).

Introduction 1 This phrase is Willats’s, to explain his overall goal. Clare Morris, “Mss” (August 25, 2016), email to author. 2 Willats’s sixty-year practice has included other approaches to art that have not involved participation or collaboration to the extent that his project works do. That artwork deserves attention but will not receive it here.

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3 Ronald R. Kline, The Cybernetics Moment, or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 12. 4 Andrew Pickering, “Islands of Stability: Engaging Emergence from Cellular Automata to the Occupy Movement,” Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 1 (May 2014): 128. 5 Ibid., 128, 130. 6 Stephen Willats’s exhibit from January 27 to March 10, 2018 at Galerie Thomas Schulte in Berlin was titled “Endless.” www.g​aleri​ethom​assch​ulte.​de/ ex​hibit​ion/e​ndles​s/# (accessed April 18, 2018). 7 Examples of cybernetic publications issued in or just prior to the 1960s include W. Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1958); Frank H. George, Cybernetics and Its Importance for Society (London: Brunel University, 1968); Gordon Pask, An Approach to Cybernetics (London: Hutchinson, 1961). See Stephen Willats, Beyond the Plan: The Transformation of Personal Space in Housing (Chichester, UK: WileyAcademy, 2001), 32, n. 1. 8 David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 5, 285; see also Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (New York: J. Wiley, 1948). 9 Patrick Crogan, Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 3. Thanks to Jodi Byrd and Veronica Paredes for this reference. 10 Roy Ascott, “The Construction of Change [1964],” in Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness, ed. Edward A. Shanken (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 100. 11 Michael J. Apter, “Cybernetics and Art,” Leonardo 2(1969): 263. 12 Stroud Cornock, “The Interactive Art System,” in Ideas before Their Time: Connecting the Past and Present in Computer Art, ed. N. Lambert, J. Gardiner, and F. Franco (London: British Computer Society, 2010), 16. 13 Emily Pethick, “Art Society Feedback,” Mousse Magazine Issue 27, http:​//mou​ ssema​gazin​e.it/​artic​olo.m​m?id=​645 (accessed April 8, 2015). 14 www.rossashby.info/ The biographical information used here was compiled and written by Ashby’s daughter, Jill Ashby, in 2008 (accessed June 27, 2015). The homeostat was initially called an “isomorphism making machine.” 15 “Science: The Thinking Machine,” Time Magazine 53, no. 4 (January 24, 1949): 68. The 1948 homeostat was heavy but Ashby travelled around with it. It met a sad fate in my hometown of Urbana, Illinois, after Ashby left it at the Biological Computing Laboratory at the University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign, after his 1970 retirement. Flooding in the storage area destroyed the machine. 16 W.R. Ashby, “The Electronic Brain,” Radio-Electronics (March 1949): 79. Ashby exhibited an alarming (to me) confidence in expertise and technology when in 1949 he pondered the possibilities of building an “electronic brain”:

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The world’s political and economic problems . . . seem sometimes to involve complexities beyond even the experts. Such a machine might perhaps be fed with vast tables of statistics, with volumes of scientific facts and other data, so that after a time it might emit as output a vast and intricate set of instructions, rather meaningless to those who had to obey them, yet leading, in fact, to a gradual resolving of the political and economical difficulties by its understanding and use of principles and natural laws which are to us yet obscure. Ashby saw problems with this machine in “large scale social planning and coordination,” and yet he suggests making “the thing” and seeing what happens! (p. 80). Ashby presented his homeostat at the Ninth Macy Conference in 1952, the same year in which he published Design for a Brain (London: Chapman & Hall). 17 Ronald Kline in his book, The Cybernetics Moment, asserted that [t]he allure of cybernetics rested on its promise to model mathematically the purposeful behavior of all organisms, as well as inanimate systems. . . . The basic analogy of cybernetics [is] that all organisms use informationfeedback paths to adapt to their environment. Kline traced multiple trajectories of cybernetics across a number of countries, noting that “the rich discourse of cybernetics and information theory was flattened in the utopian information narrative.” Kline, The Cybernetics Moment, 4, 7. 18 Pask, An Approach to Cybernetics, 24; John J. Corso, “What Does Greimas’s Semiotic Square Really Do?” Mosaic (Winnipeg) 47, no. 1(March 2014), Academic OneFile Web (accessed March 1, 2016). Willats cited Abraham Moles, Information Theory and Aesthetic Perception, trans. Joel Cohen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966) in his article, “The Externalisation of Models in Art Practice,” Control 8(1974): 11. 19 Sarah Hamerman and Stephen Willats, “Control: Publishing as Cybernetic Practice” (January 10, 2018), Avant.org http:​//ava​nt.or​g/art​ifact​/step​hen-w​illat​s/ (accessed January 29, 2018). 20 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 288. If, as Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Evelyn Fox Keller, Carolyn Merchant, and other feminist critics of science have argued, there is a relation among the desire for mastery, an objectivist account of science, and the imperialist project of subduing nature, then the posthuman offers resources for the construction of another kind of account. 21 Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 13, 18–19. See also Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011). 22 Kline, The Cybernetics Moment, 244. 23 Etan J. Ilfeld, “Contemporary Art and Cybernetics: Waves of Cybernetic Discourse within Conceptual, Video and New Media Art,” Leonardo 45,

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no. 1(2012): 57–63; Catherine Mason, A Computer in the Art Room: The Origins of British Computer Arts 1950–80 (Fakenham, UK: JJG Publishing, 2008). Edward Shanken was an early and key scholar in this area: Edward A. Shanken, “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art,” Leonardo 35, no. 4(2002): 433–8, in addition to his important work on and with Roy Ascott. All the contributors to White Heat, Cold Logic have been significant to my thinking. Paul Brown, Charlie Gere, Nicholas Lambert and Catherine Mason (eds), White Heat, Cold Logic: British Computer Art, 19601980 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008). 24 Christopher T. Goldie, “‘Radio Campanile’: Sixties Modernity, the Post Office Tower and Public Space,” Journal of Design History 24, no. 3(2011): 207–22. 25 Geoffrey Bowker, “How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943– 70,” Social Studies of Science 23, no. 1(February 1993): 117. While midcentury cyberneticians sought commonalities among biological, mechanical, and social systems, more recent scholarship has analyzed the disunity of cybernetic approaches. See Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011). 26 Daniel Blaeuer, “A Cybernetics and Performance: The Two Roles of Feedback,” International Journal of Art and Art History 4, no. 1 (June 2016): 21. Dupuy considered one approach within cybernetics that aimed to mechanize the mind and make mathematical models out of consciousness. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science, trans. M.B. DeBevoise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 27 Pethick, “Art Society Feedback.” 28 Phil Husbands and Owen Holland, “The Ratio Club: A Hub of British Cybernetics,” in The Mechanical Mind in History, ed. P. Husbands and O. Holland (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 91–148. 29 Patrick Lichty, “The Cybernetics of Performance and New Media Art,” Leonardo 33, no. 5 (October 2000): 352. Lichty, citing Anders: “Performance is a cybernetic system in that it creates a self-regulating system of cognitive exchange between the performers’ actions and audience response.” 30 T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848–1851 (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 85. 31 Richard Cork, “Collaboration without Compromise,” Studio International 195, no. 990(1980): 16. 32 Social practice art is particularly vulnerable to the multi-homeostat problem: to stay with the communication analogy, there are just so many variables that interfere with clear signals, add noise and prevent stasis. Grant Kester, “Starting from Zero: Stephen Willats and the Pragmatics of Public Art,” Afterimage 19 (May 1992): 8–12. 33 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 278. In support of art and the social “in continual tension,” Bishop wrote of Guattari: Guattari’s paradigm of transversality offers one such way of thinking through these artistic operations: he leaves art as a category in its place,

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but insists upon its constant flight into and across other disciplines, putting both art and the social into question, even while simultaneously reaffirming art as a universe of value. 34 Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011), 13; Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook (New York: Jorge Pinto Books, 2011), 3–8. 35 Stephen Willats, Art and Social Function (London: Ellipsis [1976] 2000); Intervention and Audience (London: Coracle Press, 1986), n.p. 36 “Alpha Rhythm Applied to Art [on Stephen Willats],” New Scientist 426(January 14, 1965), 76: “his own particular interest . . . is the need to re-educate the human brain and eye to see objects more in terms of ‘percept’ and less in terms of ‘concept.’” 37 Stephen Willats, Person to Person People to People (Milton Keynes, UK: Milton Keynes Gallery, 2007), 12, 14. 38 Stephen Willats, Artwork as Social Model: A Manual of Questions and Propositions (Sheffield, UK: RGAP, 2012), 13D. 39 Stephen Willats, “Private Journeys,” Control Magazine 15(April 1996): 18. 40 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 186 (Medalla), 37 (Deller); Stephen Willats, The Artist as Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour ([London: Gallery House Press, 1973] Occasional Papers, 2010). 41 Tom Morton, “Networking,” Frieze (April 14, 2007), www.frieze.com/article/ networking (accessed August 23, 2020). 42 Stephen Willats, Multi-Channel Vision (London: Control, 2000), n.p. 43 Willats, Art and Social Function. 44 Willats used this phrase “icons of certainty” in many publications. One instance is here: Stefan Römer, “Interview with Stephen Willats,” Conceptual Paradise (September 20, 2002) http:​//kun​strau​m.leu​phana​.de/p​rojek​te/Co​ncept​ ual_P​aradi​se/w/​i/l/W​illat​s_Cha​pter_​1.ht ml (accessed January 2, 2018). 45 First published in Artforum, Jack Burnham’s “Real Time Systems” was republished in Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the Meaning of PostFormalist Art (New York: Braziller, 1974), 55. See also, Willats, The Artist as Instigator of Changes. 46 Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Sydney: Power Publications, 1995), 20. Italics are mine.

Chapter 1 1 This information is drawn from my own interviews with Willats over the years, as well as unedited notes from Emily Pethick of her interviews with Willats in 2013, conducted in preparation for the Raven Row exhibit of his 1960s work. Thanks to Emily for her generosity and support. Emily Pethick and Stephen Willats, “Chronology 1958–1969,” in Alex Sainsbury

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(ed.), Control. Stephen Willats. Work, 1962–1969 (London: Raven Row, 2014), 69–79. The anarchist cafes were on Fulham Road, Earls Court, and Charing Cross Road. In 1963, he often visited the L’Auberge Café on Richmond Hill (on the corner of Richmond Hill and Richmond bridge), and he joined a quintet that met nearby in Southfields, led by saxophonist Barbara Thompson. She became a well-known figure in modern jazz: www.t​emple​-musi​c.com​/gall​ery/b​arbar​a-tho​mpson​/ (accessed January 23, 2018). 2 Pethick and Willats, “Chronology,” 69. 3 Alastair Grieve, Constructed Abstract Art in England After the Second World War: A Neglected Avant-Garde (London: Yale University Press, 2005), 48–9; David Mellor, The Sixties: Art Scene in London (London: Barbican Art Gallery, 1993), 216; Andrew Wilson, “Stephen Willats. Work 1962–69,” in Sainsbury (ed.), Control, 17. Wilson noted that Yaacov Agam had an exhibit in 1959 at Drian. 4 Marlowe Russell, “Denis Bowen,” The Guardian (March 30, 2006), www. t​hegua​rdian​.com/​news/​2006/​mar/3​1/gua​rdian​obitu​aries​.arts​obitu​aries​ (accessed February 6, 2016). See also, Kenneth Coutts-Smith, “Foreword,” Denis Bowen Recent Work (London: John Whibley Gallery, November 11–29, 1969). Between 1950 and 1969 Denis Bowen himself had taught at the art schools of Kingston, Hammersmith, Luton, Central, Ealing, Harrow, Hornsey, the London School of Printing and Graphic Arts, the Royal College, and the Birmingham College of Art and Design. The New Vision Centre Gallery, opened in April 1956, was international from beginning, with 58 percent of 220 artists shown from abroad. “The practice of giving unknown, young, foreign artists one-man shows was almost unique in London at that time and was only possible because the gallery was a nonprofit-making organization. Few commercial galleries were interested in nonfigurative art” (Coutts-Smith, 4). 5 The Denis Bowen Papers include a booklet, Denis Bowen and the New Vision Centre Gallery, with useful historical text by Margaret Garlake, especially pp. 24–5, TGA 8724.2.1–17, Tate Library and Archive, London, UK. 6 To get a sense of Eric Willats, who was a reference librarian and assistant curator at Islington Public Library from 1949 to 1984, when he retired, see Eric Willats, “The Innocents Abroad: ‘Biblio-Paris’ ou la gaieté des bibliothécaires anglais, 1967,” The Assistant Librarian 60:8 (August 1967), 157–60. See also, Matt Cook, “Orton in the Archives,” History Workshop Journal 66(Autumn 2008), 163; and a series of articles by Eric Willats, “Lenin and London,” Islington Gazette, 18, June 25, July 2 and 9, 1968; and Streets with a Story: The Book of Islington (London: Islington Local History Education Trust, 1987). 7 Catherine Mason, “A Cybernetic Art Matrix: Roy Ascott, Stroud Cornock, and Stephen Willats,” A Computer in the Art Room: The Origins of British Computer Arts 1950–80 (Fakenham, UK: JJG Publishing, 2008), 72. 8 David Robbins (ed.), The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), 45, 47. The ICA’s program included discussions of issues that emerged from Independent

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Group meetings, such as automation, pop culture, product design, and marketing. 9 Andrew Wilson, “The Audience is the Rationale,” in Anja Casser and Philipp Ziegler (eds), Stephen Willats: Art Society Feedback (Nürnburg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2010), 31. Stephen Bann cited Harold Rosen, “Language and Class: A Critical Look at the Theories of Basil Bernstein,” The Urban Review 7:2(April 1974), 97–114, in “A View over the Balcony: Recent Work by Stephen Willats,” Conceptual Living (London: Victoria Miro, 1991), n.p. Rosen critiqued Bernstein’s reductionist approach (101): The working class in his discussion are for the most part the unskilled working class. No further attempt is made at differentiation, whether in terms of history, traditions, job experience, ethnic origins, residential patterns, level of organization, or class-consciousness. . . . When Bernstein talks of social control, he is not talking of the ways in which one class controls or is controlled by another, but only of the ways in which members of the same class control each other. 10 Stephen Willats, with Hannah Redler Hawes, “Configurations of Reality,” in Human Right: Stephen Willats, Miguel Amado (ed.) (Middlesbrough, UK: Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, 2017), 39. 11 Stephen Willats, “Art and Cybernetics,” AND: Journal of Art and Art Education 18/19(1989), 51. This publication reprinted several early essays by Willats. 12 Wilson, “Stephen Willats. Work 1962–69,” 19. Willats designed the Shift Box, for example, to flash on and off randomly, knowing that people try to impose patterns on the unpredictable. For images and discussion of these works, see also George Mallen, “Stephen Willats: An Interview on Art, Cybernetics and Social Intervention,” Bulletin of the Computer Arts Society, Page 60(Spring 2005), 2–4. All issues of Page have been digitized and are available online: http:​//com​puter​ -arts​-soci​ety.c​om/pa​ge?st​artid​x4260​6=36 (accessed March 22, 2016). 13 Noel Forster (1932–2007) had a generous and outgoing personality. Anthony Benjamin (1931–2002) had just returned to London from a fellowship year in Italy (1960–1) and was known for abstract works in various media. William Green (1934–2001) was briefly famous for his large “action” paintings, such as Napoleon’s Chest at Moscow (1957), now destroyed, which was created by riding a bicycle over a canvas, with bitumen and enamel paint; he then faded from the art world from 1965 to 1995. William Green, Untitled (1958), www.t​ate.o​rg.uk​/art/​artwo​rks/g​reen-​untit​led-t​07905​ (accessed February 6, 2016); also see Mellor, The Sixties, 213, 227; Bernard Cohen, “Noel Forster,” The Guardian (January 8, 2008), www.t​hegua​rdian​.com/​cultu​re/20​08/ja​n/08/​ obitu​aries​.main​secti​on (accessed January 23, 2018); “Anthony Benjamin,” www.t​ate.o​rg.uk​/art/​artis​ts/an​thony​-benj​amin-​737 (accessed January 23, 2018); and A. de Chassey, “International Exchanges: Abstraction sans frontières,” Tate Etc. 31(Summer 2014), www.tate.org.uk/context- comme​nt/ ar​ticle​s/abs​tract​ion-s​ans-f​ronti​eres (accessed January 23, 2018). 14 For example, Ascott’s exhibit, Diagram Boxes and Analogue Structures, was held in February 1963 at Molton’s. Mellor, The Sixties, 217. Willats passed

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out copies of some of the manifestos he was writing at Ascott’s 1965 exhibit at Hamilton Galleries. Pethick and Willats, “Chronology,” 73. 15 Mason, Computer in the Art Room, 58, 60, on Willats’s first exposure to cybernetics. Also see Mellor, The Sixties, 216. For more on Ashby (1903– 72), see Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); on the homeostat, see Pickering, 98 and 416n62. Bibliography on Gordon Pask (1928–96) is extensive. See Paul Pangaro’s website, http://pangaro.com/pask-pdfs.html (accessed February 23, 2018). In 1959, C.P. Snow delivered the Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge on “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” arguing that the “fanatical belief” in specialization in the British educational system had hampered scientific literacy, and had created a rift that he called “two cultures”—that of “mutual incomprehension” between literary scholars and scientists. Humanists, he argued, could not define the Second Law of Thermodynamics; scientists struggled to read Charles Dickens. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (The Rede Lecture, 1959). (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 4, 13, 16, 17. Snow’s analysis was and remains influential among British and US intellectuals as disciplinary divides continue to confound us. Snow spoke his truth about the men among whom he circulated, but, in fact, twentieth-century science has had enormous and varied impacts on twentieth-century art. He hinted that there was at least a “third culture,” but he opted to stick with his unsubtle divide, which worked polemically, but ignored significant cultural developments. Artist Gustav Metzger (1926–2017) wrote a short essay in 2007, “The Third Culture,” in which he referred to Snow’s lecture: “There is no doubt that discussion on the Two Cultures had a considerable effect on my own activities at that time. The year 1959 marked the point where I turned from painting and sculpture and published the first auto-destructive art manifesto.” Metzger acknowledged that “interaction between artists and scientists,” what he called “The Third Culture,” crossed generations, classes, and social groups. Gustav Metzger, “The Third Culture,” Theory, Culture & Society 24:1(2007), 137. 16 Mason, Computer in the Art Room, 56. See also Stephen Willats, “Visual Transmitters 1 & 2,” Structure 1(Spring 1968), 22–4. A copy of this publication, edited by John Sharkey, is housed in the British Library, London, UK. 17 Roy Ascott, “The Construction of Change [1964],” in Edward A. Shanken (ed.), Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 97, 100, 102. Painter and film director Eddie Wolfram quoted Ascott: “How, today, can the artist operate in a pertinent relationship to society?” Eddie Wolfram, “The Ascott Galaxy,” Studio International 175:897(February 1968), 60. 18 Interview with Willats by author, May 6, 2014, and Richard Cork, “Art,” The Listener 2947(February 13, 1986), 37, noted Willats’s view out of a nearby window. Mellor, The Sixties, 215, on graphic designers. Chapman Taylor Partners was founded in 1959. See also “Chapman Taylor at 30,”

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Building Design 946(July 21, 1989), 20–1. The early Campden Hill Tower has been slated for refurbishment for some time, now labeled an “ugly sixties tower.” Ruth Bloomfield, “Makeover for Notting Hill Gate,” London Evening Standard (April 3, 2009), www.s​tanda​rd.co​.uk/n​ews/m​akeov​er-fo​r-not​ting-​ hill-​gate-​68687​76.ht​ml (accessed July 13, 2015). For more about the area of Notting Hill in the 1950s, see Leif Jerram, Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe’s Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 302. Also, Mellor’s The Sixties provides a useful map of many artists’ studios in the Notting Hill Gate area. 19 A March 1959 photo of a London County Council model of the Notting Hill Gate area showed the scheme to join two Underground stations and widen adjacent roads. London Metropolitan Archives, GLC/AR/PH/01 (Miscellaneous, 1934–85), London, UK. According to the label, the model was shown at County Hall as part of a Roads Works Ahead exhibit in March 1959. 20 See, for example, drawings held at the British Museum: “Building Series” No. 3 (December 1986) and No. 11 (August 1989), London, UK. Digitized versions of these drawings can be viewed online at www.b​ritis​hmuse​um.or​g/ res​earch​/coll​ectio​n_onl​ine/s​earch​.aspx​, but I appreciate that the museum staff pulled out the originals for me to view one Friday afternoon in 2013. 21 Stephen Willats, “Drawings,” in Casser and Ziegler (eds), Art Society Feedback, 252; some of the drawings are reproduced there as well: Organic Exercise Series 2 No. 1, No. 4, No. 6 (1962). Andrew Wilson also writes about these drawings and Willats’s text in “Stephen Willats. Work 1962–69,” in Sainsbury (ed.), Control, 17. There are two works that have the same title and date but are done in different media: Organic Exercise No. 1, Series 2, 1962, is both a sculpture and a drawing. The drawing is published in Art Society Feedback, 253; the sculpture is published in Sainsbury (ed.), Control, 8. 22 Emily Pethick, Unpublished interview notes (2013). Willats also made a vacuum-formed plastic helmet as an accessory to the clothing. A lot of the sewing machine work was done by Felicity Oliver, who was Willats’s partner at the time. The furniture was never put into production as Willats couldn’t find buyers. See Stephen Willats, “Multiple Clothing”: Designs 1965–1999 (Köln: Walther König, 2000); Ada Fung and Stephen Willats, “Multiple Clothing,” SHOWstudio, http:​//sho​wstud​io.co​m/pro​ject/​multi​ple_c​lothi​ng (accessed April 21, 2016). 23 Lygia Clark had an exhibit at Signals Gallery in London in 1965; Oiticica exhibited his parangolés at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1969. For more on Clark, see Cornelia H. Butler, Luis Pérez-Oramas, and Antonio Sergio Bessa, Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014); and on Clark and Oiticica, see Simone Osthoff, “Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica: A Legacy of Interactivity and Participation for a Telematic Future,” Leonardo 30:4(1997), 279–89. 24 In 1960, Willats had worked at weekends at the Graphic Art Studio run by Polish designer Stefan Starzynski; there he was introduced to silkscreen and the basic tenets of graphic design. See Wilson, “Stephen Willats. Work 1962–69,” 69.

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25 Artists who didn’t teach had a few other options to make a living, such as in broadcasting, advertising, and/or graphic design. Bridget Riley (b. 1931), for example, worked for the advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson. Frances Follin, Embodied Visions: Bridget Riley, Op Art and the Sixties (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 114. Willats visited the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) with Mark Boyle. See Pethick and Willats, “Chronology,” 75. 26 Christabel Stewart, “Conceptual Design, Stephen Willats in Conversation with Christabel Stewart,” in Sainsbury (ed.), Control, 56–7. 27 Colour Variable #3 (1963) was one of six constructions that had the viewer arrange small cubes as desired and use a form to document their arrangement; these forms were then displayed with the work. The set of variables increased from work to work, moving from a wall construction where only small changes of hinged planes were possible to the omni-directional possibilities of the large red cube, surrounded by sets of smaller cubes which could be plugged in on any of its six faces. Stephen Willats, Concerning Our Present Way of Living (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery & Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1979), 14. In line with the multi-homeostat problem described in the Introduction, Willats aimed “to reduce the variables so that viewers’ toleration levels became restricted and areas of information did not become overcrowded.” Adrian Glew, “Transmitting Art Triggers: The Early Interactive Work of Stephen Willats,” in Paul Brown, Charlie Gere, Nicholas Lambert and Catherine Mason (eds), White Heat, Cold Logic: British Computer Art, 1960–1980 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 23. 28 The Form archive is now at Princeton University. See also Gwen Allen, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011), 261. 29 Stephen Bann in conversation with author, March 28, 2015, Bristol, UK. 30 Emily Pethick, Unpublished interview notes, with additions by Stephanie Willats (2013) (spellings corrected, some deletions when unclear) 1966 visitors: Sharkey, Bann and Dom Sylvester Houédard, Philip Steadman (image magazine), Dennis Bowen, Mark Berkowitz (Brazilian curator, organizing a show of Brazilian art in UK and São Paulo Biennial), John Newall (from BBC), Logie Barrow (very regularly), Stan Pescott (artist), Clay Perry (photographer), Michael Kidner (artist), Ralph Selby (educator), Gustav Metzger, Dr. Forester (doctor who organized Chester Beatty exhibition), Kenneth Coutts-Smith (writer), Camargo (French Constructivist), Paul Caffle (artist, regular visitor), Bernard Farmer (ran AIE gallery), Dave Saunders (artist), Paul Keeler (Signals Gallery), Tom Phillips (artist), Marcello Salvadori, Pete Matthews (graphic designer), Andrew Hudson (theoretician), Robin Page (Fluxus artist), Derek Carruthers (educator, ran a course at Leicester), Alan Uglow (artist), Mark Boyle (artist), Jasia Reichardt (curator), Anthony Benjamin (artist), Roy Harper, Roy Ascott, Max Robinson (Australian artist), Peter Upwood (Australian artist), Maurice Agus and Peter Jones (artists who collaborated on big environmental works), Jasper Vaughan (artist), Crabtree Gallery (showed British Constructivist works), Mike Kenny

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(artist), Mrs. Deighton (curator of Bear Lane Gallery, Oxford). Willats also met Peter Blake and Eduardo Paolozzi. He went to Paolozzi’s studio in Dovetail Street in Chelsea. He was also in contact with architect Peter Cook (who contributed to Control 3 in 1967). 31 Four essays discuss kinetic art in the twentieth century: Frank Popper, “Kinetic Art – Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow”; Philip Steadman, “Colour Music”; Reg Gadney, “Aspects of Kinetic Art and Motion”; Stephen Bann, “Unity and Diversity in Kinetic Art.” Four Essays on Kinetic Art (St. Albans, UK: Motion Books, 1966). 32 Frank Popper, Origins and Development of Kinetic Art, trans. Stephen Bann (Studio Vista/New York Graphic Society, 1968), 198. 33 Stephen Willats, “Mechanistic Crisis: An Examination into Tolerance Levels in Society and its Application to the Transmission of Information,” handwritten lecture/course notes regarding mechanistic crisis n.d., n.p. (pink wallet, 1966), Willats personal archives, London, UK. Many thanks to Stephen Willats for letting me study this material. Willats worked full-time at the Ministry of Housing for about nine months in 1966–7, which gave him needed income but also enough flexibility to continue his art practice. In an unpublished draft of a 2013 interview with Emily Pethick, he noted that his job was “to implement smoke control orders in order to help clear up the atmosphere. He found this interesting in relation to decision-making systems.” Willats’s handwriting on this manuscript is difficult to read, penned on lined yellow paper with a faint blue Ministry of Housing stamp on it. I added some punctuation in transcribing it, for clarity. He intended to present this paper at a symposium, the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS), that took place in London, September 9–11, 1966. One of the organizers, John Sharkey (1936–2014), was an important colleague of Willats, and gallery manager of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA, then on Dover Street in London). As it happened, Willats never presented his paper at DIAS because Hermann Nitsch’s performance beforehand slaughtered the schedule along with a sheep. On the importance of ICA, see Anne Massey and Gregor Muir, Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1946–1968 (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts/Amsterdam: Roma Publications, 2014); Pierre Coinde and Gary O’Dwyer, “The Centre of Attention,” www.thecentreofattention. org/dgamp.html (accessed January 9, 2016). 34 Glew, “Transmitting Art Triggers,” 20. 35 Tate Liverpool organized a retrospective on Control Magazine, April 23 to May 17, 2018, www.victoria-miro.com/news/952 (accessed April 15, 2018). 36 Willats’s manifestos continue to appear in compilations, such as Michalis Pichler (ed.), Publishing Manifestos: An International Anthology from Artists and Writers (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019). 37 I am distinguishing the less-formal, project-related booklets from artist’s books. These are the publications that I consider artist’s books, due to their design and small print run: The Artist as Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour (Gallery House Press, 1973); The Lurky Place (Lisson Gallery, 1978); Cha Cha Cha (Coracle Press/Lisson Gallery, 1982); Intervention and Audience (Coracle Press, 1986); The House that

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Habitat Built (Cornerhouse Press, 1989); Stairwell (Coracle Press, 1990); Corridor (Imschoot, 1991); Balcony (Imprint 93, 1994); Shopping Parade (Little Cockroach Press, 1997); and Artwork as Social Model: A Manual of Questions and Propositions (Sheffield, UK: RGAP, 2012). 38 For example, in Artist as Instigator (1973), Willats cited Gordon Pask’s paper, “The Self-Organising System of a Decision Making Group,” Third International Symposium on Cybernetics (Namur, Belgium: Association Internationale Cybernetique, 1961; Gauthier-Villars, 1964), 27–74, as well as Warren McCulloch’s “Agatha Tyche: Of Nervous Nets – the Lucky Reckoners,” Mechanisation of Thought Processes, National Physical Laboratory, Symposium no.10, vol. 2 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1959), 612–34. In Art and Social Function (London: Ellipsis [1976] 2000), he cited Stafford Beer, Decision and Control (London: John Wiley and Sons, 1966), among other cybernetic texts. 39 Willats, “Art and Cybernetics,” 51. Andrew Wilson, Conceptual Art in Britain, 1964–1979 (London: Tate Publishing, 2016), 21. Wilson noted that at Ealing “theory preceded practice.” Willats repeated this idea in an interview with Hannah Redler Hawes, “Configurations of Reality,” in Miguel Amado (ed.), Human Right: Stephen Willats (Middlesbrough, UK: Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, 2017), 39. 40 Allen, Artists’ Magazines, 1, pointed out that “[d]uring the 1960s and 1970s magazines became an important new site of artistic practice, functioning as an alternative exhibition space for the dematerialized practices of conceptual art.” In the case of Control, however, materiality mattered, as Hudek pointed out. Antony Hudek, “Meta-Magazine. Control 1965–68,” in Sainsbury (ed.), Control, 33–40. 41 Dean Bradley designed the initial logo for Control Magazine and helped with other graphics. Willats noted that initially the title was just Control, until he “was told of an electronics journal called Control,” so he added Magazine. Willats printed runs of 600 copies for each issue. Jonas Magnusson, Axel Wieder, and Cecilia Grönberg, “Self-Organised Publishing/Publishing as Self-Organisation – An Interview with Stephen Willats (London, November 19, 2015),” OEI Journal 71–72(Stockholm: Statens Kulturråd, 2016), 214, 220. See also Allen, Artists’ Magazines; Willi Bongard, “A Survey of Contemporary Art Magazines,” Studio International (September–October 1976), 161–2; Emily Pethick, “Interview with Emily Pethick [and Stephen Willats], August 2002,” Cognition Control: Materials 02(Cambridge: Institute of Visual Arts, 2002), n.p.; Clive Phillpot, “Art Magazines and Magazine Art,” Artforum (February 1980), 251–2. 42 Emily Pethick, Unpublished interview notes (2013). 43 Willats, The Artist as Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour ([London: Gallery House Press, 1973] Occasional Papers, 2010), 7; Edward de Bono, The Use of Lateral Thinking (London: Cape, 1967); Magnusson et al., “Self-Organised Publishing/Publishing as SelfOrganisation,” 213. 44 Sarah Hamerman and Stephen Willats, “Control: Publishing as Cybernetic Practice,” (January 10, 2018), Avant.org http:​//ava​nt.or​g/art​ifact​/step​hen-w​ illat​s/ (accessed January 29, 2018).

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45 Pethick, Unpublished interview notes (2013). 46 Hudek, “Meta-Magazine,” 35. 47 In his interview with Bronac Ferran, Willats noted that arrows were fundamental “directional symbols.” Ferran, “The Conceptual Designer in 1965: Stephen Willats Interviewed by Bronac Ferran,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 42:1–2(2017), 202. 48 Stephen Bann told me that Willats was categorized early on as a kinetic artist because no one knew how to label what he was doing (March 29, 2015). 49 Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain, 138. This diagram appeared in W.R. Ashby, “The Application of Cybernetics to Psychiatry,” Journal of Mental Science 100(1954), 120. 50 Andrew Wilson, “The Audience is the Rationale,” in Casser and Ziegler (eds) Art Society Feedback, 23; see also Wilson, “Stephen Willats. Work 1962–69.” 51 Many thanks to Alex Sainsbury for his energy and insight in curating this excellent exhibit and editing the catalogue, Control. Stephen Willats. Work 1962–68. 52 Glew, “Transmitting Art Triggers,” 24–5; Visual Homeostat was designed by Willats with Peter Whittle and Chris Grimshaw using diode-transistor logic and marked an early use of transistors, as opposed to vacuum tubes. Visual Homeostatic Information Mesh was published in “Some Recent British Kinetic Works,” Studio International 180:926 (October 1970), 130, and exhibited in 1970 as part of “Kinetics – International Survey” at the Hayward Gallery, London. Willats published his 1969 description of Visual Homeostatic Information Mesh in “Art and Cybernetics,” AND, 54. See also Willats’s account of Visual Homeostatic Maze, a proposal for another project with “four variables . . . controlled by the position and direction of movement of a person.” Klaus Groh (ed.), If I Had a Mind . . . [Ich Stelle mir vor . . .]: Concept-Art, Project-Art (Köln: Verlag M. Dumont Schauberg, 1971), n.p. 53 Pethick, Unpublished interview notes (2013). In 1966, Willats participated in the Kunst Licht Kunst exhibition at the Stedelijk Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, a show about kinetics (Visual Field Automatic was exhibited there according to Stephanie Willats). In January 1969, he was included in an exhibit at Greenwich Theatre Gallery, Five Light Artists (with Bill Culbert, Stuart Brisley, Peter Sedgeley and Don Mason). Mellor, The Sixties, 222. At the 1967 Brighton Festival, Willats was part of “K4,” organized by a group from Hornsey, https​://br​ighto​nfest​ival.​org/n​ews/f​estiv​al_fi​fty_f​i ve_s​hows_​ from_​1967/​(accessed February 9, 2018). 54 Ferran, “Conceptual Designer,” 202. Mellor, The Sixties. The exhibit had eleven sections: Action, Dissent, A New London, Places, Situations, A New Sculpture, Codes, Packages, Bodies and Gender, A Light Fantastic, and Spaces Beyond. Willats was included in at least four sections: A New London, Codes, A Light Fantastic, and Spaces Beyond. Thanks to Andrew Wilson for this comment in conversation with me on May 12, 2015. 55 Stephen Bann in his essay “Unity and Diversity in Kinetic Art,” in Four Essays on Kinetic Art (40–3), wrote about a similar art installation, the “Labyrinthe” series created in 1965 for the Contemporaries Gallery, New York, by the

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Groupe Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV); it aimed to increase spectator participation by creating a maze through which visitors moved. 56 Pethick and Willats, “Chronology,” 78. Willats told Pethick that he believed that the Visual Transmitters were “too phenomenological,” too “sixties,” and “too abstract.” 57 In 2005, Willats commented to George Mallen: “Looking back it’s clear that ideas and philosophy were in advance of technology so it was difficult to make the hardware to realise the ideas.” Mallen, “Stephen Willats,” 4. 58 Pethick, Interview with Stephen Willats (July 22, 2015); Paul Pieroni, “Stephen Willats,” Frieze Magazine 164 (June–August 2014), www.f​rieze​ .com/​issue​/revi​ew/st​ephen​-will​ats1/​ (accessed January 7, 2016). Powis Square had been taken over by artists and activists “for the community” in June 1968. Mellor, The Sixties, 222. 59 See image in Pethick and Willats, “Chronology,” 79, of Willats working with Oliver and Shotbolt; Willats also credited George Mallen in Pethick, Interview with Stephen Willats (July 22, 2015). 60 Mellor, The Sixties, 110. Some of the works by Willats illustrated in this catalogue are titled differently from the titles I have used: that is, p. 58, Tower Block Exercise of 1963, I call Organic Exercise Series 2, No.6. This exhibition catalogue has a useful cultural timeline of the 1960s in London, 212–23. 61 Mason, Computer in the Art Room, 66, 69–70. 62 In addition to Cornock and Willats, artists exploring this territory included Ernest Edmonds and Edward Ihnatowicz. See Paul Brown, Charlie Gere, Nicholas Lambert, and Catherine Mason (eds), White Heat, Cold Logic: British Computer Art, 1960-1980 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008). 63 Stroud Cornock, “The Interactive Art System,” in N. Lambert, J. Gardiner and F. Franco (eds), Ideas Before Their Time: Connecting the Past and Present in Computer Art (London: British Computer Society, 2010), 18, 22. Images of “Gemini” can be seen here: http:​//str​oudco​rnock​.com/​inter​activ​eimag​es.ht​ml (accessed March 3, 2018). 64 Glew, “Transmitting Art Triggers,” 25. Many thanks to Mr. Glew for meeting me at the Tate Archive in June 2011. Visual Meta Language Simulation was initially exhibited in Nottingham at the Midland Group. See also Wilson, “The Audience is the Rationale,” 39–41. Willats wrote about the work in “Prescriptions,” Control 7(1973), which was republished and illustrated in Casser and Ziegler, Art Society Feedback, 282–5. 65 Conway Lloyd Morgan, “Art: Cognition and Control Project,” New Scientist 56:817(October 26, 1972), 234. Willats wrote about this work in Control Magazine 6(1971). It used transistor-transistor logic (TTL), according to Glew, “Transmitting Art Triggers,” 25. 66 Willats recalled in an interview with George Mallen (“Stephen Willats,” 6) that the Visual Metalanguage Simulation piece was about co-operation and competition interaction and it was very successful. After Hayward it was in

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the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, then to the Computer Art Society’s INTERACT in Edinburgh. It was pretty well hammered to death. But these pieces were based on what I called the phenomenological approach from the 60s. I then moved on to trying to show that a work of art could work in any environment. 67 Willats, Artist as Instigator, 70; see also Wilson, “The Audience is the Rationale,” 39. 68 Lloyd Morgan, “Art: Cognition and Control Project,” 234. 69 Stephen Bann wrote about “passive participation” in his 1966 essay in Four Essays on Kinetic Art, 39. He paired this with “the idea of an audio-visual synthesis which gives the spectator a greater ‘unified’ response.” He noted that Frank Malina, Nicolas Schöffer, Robert McKinnon-Wood, and Gordon Pask were working along these lines. 70 Willats, Artist as an Instigator, 66. Willats wrote: [S]imulation models enable a subject or participant to be given a structured adaptive system that presents her or him with a problem-type Environment with which she/he can interact to buil[d] mental models and heuristics as solutions to problems through their contextual Environment. 71 Pethick, Interview with Stephen Willats (July 22, 2015). Roy Ascott, too, was experimenting with the social and the technical. He apparently went online for the first time in 1978. In 1983, he launched “La Plissure du Texte,” a distributed, collaborative “planetary fairy tale” that used an I.P. Sharp timesharing network. In 2010, this work was revived as “LPDT2.” See Michael Hampton, Unshelfmarked: Reconceiving the Artists’ Book (Axminster, UK: Uniformbooks, 2015), 115–16; Roy Ascott, “Art and Telematics: Towards a Network Consciousness [1984],” in Shanken (ed.), Telematic Embrace, 185–200; and Omar Kholeif (ed.), Electronic Superhighway: From Experiments in Art and Technology to Art after the Internet (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2016). 72 The Ipswich effort was “to set up a new experimental Art School to be called EC (Energetic Core).” Willats, “Art and Cybernetics,” 51. For more on Ascott, see Ian Cole (ed.), Gustav Metzger: Retrospectives, vol. 3(Oxford: Museum of Modern Art Papers, 1999). These papers were part of a conference, “Hand in the Fire” (November 1998) and included Frank Popper on Ascott: “The Artist in the Electronic and Virtual Age,” 57–67. 73 In 1965, Willats described some of the course problems at Ipswich, often drawn from information theory. This account was reprinted in Willats, “Art and Cybernetics,” 51. 74 Typewritten statement in Willats archive, London, UK. 75 Pethick, “Interview,” n.p. Many thanks to Emily Pethick for giving me this catalogue, as well as such substantive support over the course of my research. 76 Mason, Computer in the Art Room, 66, 74. 77 See “Correspondence,” Studio International 176:902 (July/August 1968), 6–7, as an example. A lecturer in psychology and management, D. J. Warren, noted that the “present system falls far short. . . . Education is not a thing that

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can be imposed, it requires a mutual commitment of everybody involved.” Studio International often had these discussions, according to Mason, Computer in the Art Room, 64. See William Coldstream, First Report of the National Advisory Council on Art Education (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1960). A few years later, there was further discussion in response to a second report by the National Advisory Council on Art Education. See David Warren Piper, “Art and Design Education,” Studio International 181:933 (May 1971), 194–7. ICA supported the Hornsey occupation, see Massey and Muir, Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1946–1968, 151. 78 Alison Jeffers and Gerri Moriarty (eds), Culture, Democracy and the Right to Make Art: The British Community Arts Movement (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 7, quoting Albert Hunt, Hopes for Great Happenings: Alternatives in Education and Theatre (London: Eyre Methuen, 1976), 65. 79 Victor Burgin (b. 1941) taught there as well, from 1967 to 1973. www. g​aleri​ezand​er.co​m/en/​artis​t/vic​tor_b​urgin​/biog​raphy​; www.ntu170years. co.uk/#from-1843 (accessed March 23, 2015). For more on Nottingham in the 1960s see Hannah Neate, “Provinciality and the Art World: The Midland Group 1961–1977,” Social & Cultural Geography 13:3 (May 2012), 275–94. 80 Magnusson et al., “Self-Organised Publishing/Publishing as SelfOrganisation,” 222. The manifesto is reproduced on 224–9. See also “Life Structures and Behavioural Nets,” reprinted in Willats, “Art and Cybernetics,” 52. 81 Pethick, Interview with Stephen Willats (July 22, 2015). See also Willats, “Art and Cybernetics,” 52. 82 Stephen Willats to Reg Hayden, October 11, 1972, typewritten letter in Willats archive, Rye, UK. Hayden was at Liverpool Polytechnic. 83 For example, in an undated reading list for Nottingham Polytechnic, Willats included James Deese, Psychology of Learning (McGraw-Hill, 1958); John Rose, Survey of Cybernetics (Iliffe Books, 1969); and Jagjit Singh, Great Ideas in Information Theory, Language and Cybernetics (Dover, 1966). Willats archive, London. 84 Emily Pethick interview with Stephen Willats (July 22, 2015). The outsiders included David Greene, who was a part of Archigram, and George Mallen. 85 Pethick, “Interview,” Cognition Control, n.p. In the interview between Emily Pethick and Stephen Willats (July 22, 2015), Willats said: The interesting thing about [Man from the Twenty-First Century] was that while the rest of the academic staff were having a total repressive alienation from what I was doing, the actual administrative staff [of the school] got hold of it. They understood what it was all about: the idea of taking art beyond the art gallery into the fabric of the community and working with people who didn’t have a knowledge of art, but you’d develop within their frame of reference. They all got behind it, which meant, amazingly, I got requisitions, bills, everything went through instead of taking months of arguments, it all went through within 24 hours. . . . So that meant when we developed this project, we got the money for it. When we set up that initial reconnaissance survey, it was supported by the admin staff. Later on, when

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we went to develop the car and the other elements of the project, again they supported it. But I was getting more and more alienated from the actual staff there who really seriously wanted to get rid of me. 86 Willats, Artist as Instigator, 88; Stephen Willats, Beyond the Plan: The Transformation of Personal Space in Housing (Chichester, UK: WileyAcademy, 2001), 7–9; also published in Willats, Art and Social Function, 228–9. 87 Willats, Art and Social Function, 228; Julieta González, Hombre del siglo XXI (Mexico, DF: Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, 2015), 21. Curated by Julieta González, this concise and excellent exhibit surveyed Willats’s work for the first time in Mexico. González also noted that Willats used response sheets in 1962 with Environmental Box. 88 On Bramcote Hills outside Notthingham, see “Picture the Past,” www.p​ictur​ ethep​ast.o​rg.uk​/fron​tend.​php?k​eywor​ds=Re​f_No_​incre​ment;​EQUAL​S;NTG​ M01 5539&pos=2&action=zoom&id=70433 (accessed January 10, 2016). Chris Matthews, Homes and Places: A History of Nottingham’s Council Houses (Nottingham: Nottingham City Homes, 2015) 53, 60. For example, the St. Ann’s redevelopment was launched on January 30, 1970, resulting in the demolition of thousands of houses. As controversial as that demolition was, many people were grateful for new council houses with indoor plumbing and up-to-date kitchens, in a “mix of blocks ranging in height,” including high-rises. See also, Douglas Whitworth, Nottingham in the 1960s and 70s (Stroud: The History Press, 2009), 6. 89 Willats, “Cognition and Advertising,” in Casser and Ziegler, Art Society Feedback, 287. 90 Postwar England had witnessed increasing quangocratic processes that sorted people into rigid categories. Government agencies also demolished substandard housing, relocating those residents into new government-funded housing, and building new towns on city peripheries. As Geoffrey Bowker and S. Leigh Star noted in 1999, “Classifications are material as well as symbolic. . . . People get put into categories and learn from those categories how to behave. . . . Aided by bureaucratic institutions, such cultural features take on a real social weight.” Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 39. 91 In Issue 7 (1973) of Control, contributors (D. Hamlyn, Kevin Lole, John Stezaker, and Willats) examined learning theory, particularly in an effort to arrive at a common language that would allow people from different specialties and/or social classes to communicate. This issue demonstrated the very real challenges of finding terms and concepts that connected across social locations, technologies, arts and sciences; much of the writing in the articles was hard to understand. Stephen Willats, “Prescriptions for Task Orientated Methodologies in Constructing Operational Models of Art Practices,” Control Magazine 7(1973), 10. 92 Willats, Artist as Instigator, 88. The canvassers were associated with “deviousness, unreliability, slyness, untrustworthiness, verging on the criminal.”

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93 Willats, “Cognition and Advertising,” 286–90 (originally written 1972). 94 Mellor, The Sixties, 191. In Art and Social Function, 229, Willats noted that a Volkswagen was to have been made to resemble a sort of spaceship, but that the canvassers used public transport to collect their data. 95 See Mark Wigley, “Recycling Recycling,” in Amerigo Marras (ed.), Eco-Tec: Architecture of the In-Between (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 39ff. London-based artist Joe Tilson created “Astronaut Seat,” 1968. See Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, TILSON (Milan: Pre-Art, 1977). 96 Willats, “Cognition and Advertising,” 288. 97 Willats, Art and Social Function, 229. 98 The game-like aspect of Man from the Twenty-First Century cards showed up again in another unfinished work from Willats’s time in Nottingham, The Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs (1972). 99 Stephen Willats, World Without Objects (Antwerp: Annie Gentils Gallery, 2013), n.p. 100 Willats, Beyond the Plan, 8, 10.

Chapter 2 1 Stephen Willats, Art and Social Function (London: Ellipsis [1976] 2000). 2 Willats, Art and Social Function, 231. 3 Antony Hudek, “A Porous Entity: The Centre for Behavioural Art at Gallery House, 1972-73,” in Jo Applin, Catherine Spencer and Amy Tobin (eds), London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent, and Ephemeral Networks, 1960–1980 (College Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2018). Hudek pointed to the importance of the Centre for Behavioural Art being a voice for “social conceptualism” in contradistinction to what was becoming defined as conceptualism: the analytic/linguistic version of Art and Language. Luis Camnitzer used the term “social conceptualism” in Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009); and Lee Mingwei’s work has been described as “social conceptualism” by Irina Aristarkhova, Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 160ff. 4 Some of the Cognition Control materials are in the archive at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford (MAO); others are in Stephen Willats’s personal archives. Emily Pethick cocurated (with Stefan Kalmár) an eponymous exhibit at the Institute of Visual Culture in Cambridge in 2002, which included some of the projects from the 1972 effort. Many thanks to Pethick for giving me Materials 02 (2002), which served as the catalogue for the exhibit. Besides Oxford, the only other site that worked out was Nottingham, where Willats was teaching at the time. (Sussex had been on the list.) In Nottingham, based at the Midland Group Gallery, the artists included David Bugden, Mick Burrows, Stroud Cornock, Ernest Edmonds, Jan Kopinski, Andy McKay, David Martin, John Sharkey, and Jack Shotbolt. Mick Burrows’s “Mass-Media People” took place

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in June 1971 in Nottingham and was “the first” call-in talk show in the UK. Not all the projects were completed. Author interview with Stephen Willats, April 7, 2015. See also Hannah Neate, “Provinciality and the Art World: The Midland Group 1961– 1977,” Social & Cultural Geography 13:3 (May 2012), 275–94. Willats recalled that an art critic from Kunst Forum came and wrote about the Nottingham Cognition Control and that the New Reform Gallery in Belgium was interested as well, though not much notice was taken of it in the UK. Nayia Yiakoumaki, “Interview with Stephen Willats, January 2014,” Stephen Willats: Concerning Our Present Way of Living (London: Archive Gallery, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2014), n.p. 5 Emily Pethick, Interview with Stephen Willats (August 4, 2015). This interview is the second one partially funded by the Art Writers grant that I received in 2014; I transcribed this interview. 6 Francesca Franco, Generative Systems Art: The Work of Ernest Edmonds (New York: Routledge, 2017), 38–48. See also http://stroudcornock.com/ (accessed March 1, 2018). 7 Cognition Control: Materials 02(Cambridge: Institute of Visual Arts, 2002), n.p. 8 Willats identified four tennis clubs in hilly Nottingham and solicited their participation by letter. The Nottingham clubs were located in Valley Road, Bramcote, The Park and Mapperley. Stephen Willats’s personal archive. In analyzing tennis clubs, he distilled four reasons for people to join: “1) boy meets girl; 2) remedial; 3) playing out power and dominance drives; 4) reinforcement of existing attitudes.” Once Willats had posited these reasons, as well as examined the physical environment of the clubs, he wanted to “remodel” the game of tennis. He created a Tennis Club Manual using information from the clubs and about their members. This manual included photographs of the clubs and members’ houses, as well as the area surrounding the clubs, similar to the “visual glossary” he had compiled for Man from the Twenty-First Century. The manual asked that individuals choose associations between objects; for example, what roles are associated with an umpire’s chair? The choices were: “observer, a higher form of control, arbitration, teacher.” Other parts of the manual had open-ended questions, including “How do you think a score monitor affects player and spectator behaviour?” The next stage of the project involved the I-Spy Book of Tennis, which was mailed to participants who chose to continue (and was based on the children’s book series published in the 1950s and 1960s, I-Spy). Stephen Willats, “Cognition and Advertising,” in Anja Casser and Philipp Ziegler (eds), Stephen Willats: Art Society Feedback (Nürnburg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2010), 289–90; images of the manual’s cover and inside page are published in Willats, Artist as Instigator. Willats also made about nine “Tennis Super Girl Posters” that featured physical aspects of the area—gardens, courts, houses, and so forth—with a Super Girl, another advertising strategy that used photographs of young women models to call attention to a product. The number of posters created is unclear: mentions vary between eight and twelve. Other Super-Girl posters were reproduced in the catalogue Cognition Control (2002),

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n.p. Participants would spot posters that had been distributed in the areas of the four clubs, and match incomplete details in their I-Spy booklets to complete the clue on the poster. The project was to have ended with a compilation of information from the filled-in booklets, which would have been shared with the participants. Had the project continued, the various clubs participating would have held meetings to discuss the returns from the I-Spy Book and Tennis Club Manual, during which they would have formulated proposals for adapting the game of tennis around the information retrieved from the returns. This group of meetings was to have led to a tennis tournament where members of the four tennis clubs would have played out their proposed remodeled games of tennis. Other relevant materials are held in Willats’s personal archives and published in Willats, Art and Social Function, 231. 9 In Artwork as Social Model: A Manual of Questions and Propositions (Sheffield: RGAP, 2012), 14C, Willats writes as if the work were finished: “They played . . . a tournament for the Willats Cup under devised new rules.” This tournament never took place. On the Willats Cup, see Willats, The Artist as Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour ([London: Gallery House Press, 1973] Occasional Papers, 2010), 95. 10 Pethick interview (August 4, 2015). “David Bugden did an advertising project; Don Mason did a project. . . . That happened more or less at the end of Gallery House.” Graham Pullen was also involved; a work by Colston Sanger was perhaps replaced with a work by Pullen. The correspondence is unclear. There is considerable correspondence about this effort, as well as “Cognition and Control Project,” Press Release October 14 to November 5, 1972, Modern Art Oxford (MAO) archives, Oxford, UK. Thanks to Jonathan Weston at MAO for making these materials available to me in 2015. 11 Cognition Control materials about Willats’s project are in the archive at MAO, Oxford, UK. 12 Cognition Control materials, MAO Archives. Uncataloged documents indicate that Garey Gunby and Mick Steele exhibited a piece called Gnomore, which included a slide and audio documentation of the piece, which was only described as “data” collection around Oxford. 13 Geoffrey Goodman, “Obituary: Jack Jones, One of the Last Great Trade Union Leaders of the 20th Century,” The Guardian (April 22, 2009), www.t​hegua​ rdian​.com/​polit​ics/2​009/a​pr/22​/jack​-jone​s-uni​on-le​ader-​obitu​ary (accessed March 1, 2018). Jones was general secretary of the Transport and General Workers” Union from 1969 to 1978. Members of the United States National Guard were on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio in spring 1970 in response to student protests against the US war in Vietnam and Cambodia. On May 4, 1970, 28 Guards shot into crowds of protesters, killing four students and injuring another nine. Jerry M. Lewis and Thomas R. Hensley, “The May 4 Shootings at Kent State University,” www.kent.edu/may-4-historical-accuracy (accessed March 1, 2018). 14 George Mallen, “The Role of Simulation in Social Education,” Programmed Learning and Educational Technology 10:4 (July 1973), 251. Mallen noted

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that the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” project “mark[ed] a clear beginning in the use of abstract dynamic models for stimulating public discussion on great social issues,” 250. See also Herbert W. Franke, Computer Graphics – Computer Art, 2nd rev. edn, trans. Gustav Metzger and Antje Schrack (New York: Springer-Verlag [1971], 1985). Mallen’s background was in engineering. He cofounded System Simulation Ltd in 1970, after working with Gordon Pask at System Research (1964–70). He was a cofounder of the Computer Arts Society (CAS), along with John Lansdown and Alan Sutcliffe; the CAS publication Page is all online, http://computer- arts-society.com/ page?startidx42606=36. Nick Lambert’s talk, “The Computer Arts Society in Context: How and Why CAS Was Founded in 1969” (Leicester, May 29, 2012), usefully lays out this history, https://vimeo.com/43333480 (accessed March 21, 2016). Mallen also helped establish the Department of Design Research at the Royal College of Art in the 1970s, and the Department of Communication and Media Production at Bournemouth University (1983–5). See also Mallen, “Early Computer Models of Cognitive Systems and the Beginnings of Cognitive Systems Dynamics,” Constructivist Foundations 9:1(2013), 137–8. Gordon Pask wrote extensively on learning theory as well, for example, Pask, “Strategy, Competence and Conversation as Determinants of Learning,” Innovations in Education & Training International 6:4(1969), 250–67. 15 Mallen, “The Role of Simulation in Social Education,” 251–6. 16 Emily Pethick and Stephen Willats, “Chronology 1958–1969,” in Alex Sainsbury (ed.), Control. Stephen Willats. Work, 1962–1969 (London: Raven Row, 2014), 69. He defined mutualism as the process in which “the audience determines something for themselves using their own experience, and the artist is the provider of tools that might enable this.” 17 Rosalyn Deutsche, “Property Values: Hans Haacke, Real Estate and the Museum,” in Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 162. 18 Pethick interview (August 4, 2015). Willats also said: [A]s I was getting to grips with the idea of setting up this Centre, which initially involved a lot of people from Cognition Control, . . . I was invited to teach at the Slade with the post-graduates, especially with a group of people, artists there, who I think had had something to do with Art and Language, because they’d been at Coventry. They wanted me to be their tutor, or advisor, or reader, whatever it’s called. So I found myself going into the Slade and developing there some interactive computer-based programming projects with this group of students, and they also then got involved with the Centre for Behavioural Art. An exhibition at Raven Row in February and March 2017, This Way Out of England: Gallery House in Retrospect, curated by Alex Sainsbury and Antony Hudek, included the Centre for Behavioural Art: www.r​avenr​ow.or​g/exh​ibiti​ on/th​is_wa​y_out​_of_e​nglan​d_gal​lery_​house​_2/ (accessed June 24, 2017). As contextualized by a recent exhibition catalogue about Gustav Metzger, the Centre for Behavioural Art

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was part of a centuries-long tradition of artists exploring the creative possibilities of technology. In the Sixties, however, conceptual art and minimalism provided the grounds for artistic exploration of technology, and more widely, fields beyond art itself. [Gustav] Metzger was one of several artists whose practice developed as a mode of enquiry, and involved experimental and collaborative work with scientists … . Alongside figures such as Stephen Willats, John Latham, the Artists’ Placement Group and EAT [Experiments in Art and Technology], Metzger blazed a trail between early conceptual art and interdisciplinary practices, artistic activism, and forms of art as research. Elizabeth Fisher, Gustav Metzger: Lift Off! (Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard, 2014), 14. This small catalogue also discussed Signals, which “encapsulated the character of the London-based avant-garde at that moment,” 13. See also Andrew Wilson, “A Poetics of Dissent: Notes on a Developing Counter-Culture in London in the Early Sixties,” in Chris Stephens and Katharine Stout (eds) Art & the Sixties: This Was Tomorrow (London: Tate Britain, 2004), 93–111. Metzger also served as the editor of Page, the publication of the Computer Arts Society. In 1967, Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) was started by engineers and artists in New York City. See Copper Giloth and Lynn Pocock-Williams, “A Selected Chronology of Computer Art: Exhibitions, Publications, and Technology,” Art Journal 49:3(Autumn 1990), 285; and Omar Kholeif (ed.), Electronic Superhighway: From Experiments in Art and Technology to Art after the Internet, 2016–1966 (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2016). The “Institute for Research in Art and Technology” (IRAT) opened in London in September 1969. See John Lifton, “Institute for Research in Art and Technology,” Bulletin of the Computer Arts Society Page Four (August 1969), 2. 19 Cognition Control, 2002, n.p. Centre participants included Peter Smith, John Stezaker, Victor Burgin, Robert Bell, George Mallen, Stuart Pound (a computer programmer and later director of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science). The Centre for Behavioural Art Thursday evening seminar series included presentations by Robert Bell (mathematician), Ross Longhurst, George Mallen, Kevin Lole (former coeditor of magazine Analytical Art), Victor Burgin, Derek Aulton, Stephen Willats, Colston Sanger, and Sørreson from Denmark, among others. These last two names were added by Willats in conversation with me on March 10, 2015; I am not sure of the spelling of Sørreson. See also Stephen Willats, “Concern of the Centre for Behavioural Arts,” Control Magazine 7(1973), 2. 20 In 1960–1, Willats had encountered a group from Cambridge through the British Constructivism exhibition at Drian Gallery. They had wanted to start an institute or a center that would bring together mathematicians, artists, and philosophers, but the idea was never implemented. While that project wasn’t realized, Willats’s interest in a think tank gestated for a decade until he organized the Centre for Behavioural Art. Unpublished version of Emily Pethick and Stephen Willats, Timeline, 2015. Thanks to Emily Pethick for this material. 21 John Holloway (ed.), “International Science-Art News,” Leonardo 6(1973), 166. Leonardo was founded in 1968 to promote dialogues among artists focused on science and technology.

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22 Stephen Willats, “Editorial,” Control Magazine 7(1973), 1. Communication scholar Fred Turner described what he called a “network forum” in terms that usefully captured the real work that Willats’s Centre took on. Turner wrote: Like the boundary object, [the network forum] can be a media formation such as a catalog or an online discussion system around or within which individuals can gather and collaborate without relinquishing their attachment to their home networks. But like the trading zone, it is also a place within which new networks can be built, not only for social purposes, but for the purpose of accomplishing work. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 72–3. 23 See Carmen Juliá, “You Saw It Here First,” Tate, etc. 24(Spring 2012), www. t​ate.o​rg.uk​/cont​ext-c​ommen​t/art​icles​/you-​saw-i​t-her​e-fir​st (accessed July 18, 2017); the MAO has a 1968 flier for CASSA in its archives, Oxford, UK. 24 Pethick, Interview with Stephen Willats (August 4, 2015). 25 Cited by Stephen Willats, “Speculative Modelling with Diagrams,” in Anja Casser and Philipp Ziegler (eds), Art Society Feedback (Nürnburg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2010), 518, n. 5. Gordon Pask, “The Self-Organising System of a Decision Making Group,” Third International Symposium on Cybernetics (Namur, Belgium: Association Internationale Cybernetique, 1961; GauthierVillars, 1964), 27–74. 26 Willats mentioned the Westminster Social Resource Project, “which didn’t get very far, but . . . laid the groundwork for things to come,” in Pethick, Interview (August 4, 2015). An Oxford Proposal from 1969 is in Willats’s personal archive; the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, has materials on the 1973 project there. Oversize materials there include a large sheet (A11 7/4/8) with grids and models of conventions between groups, plus heuristic frames sketched out, along with mention of the Hounslow Social Environment Model Project (hereafter cited as Dean Gallery). On the left of the large sheet in handwriting is the following: Project objectives Project attempts to show how people, social groups, relate to each other, and how social conventions determine that relationship, which are not generally articulated consciously by members of a social group. The project would then show how people could relate to each other, or it could set up a framework whereby people could postulate their own relationships to each other. As a community model building project, it would establish a framework that enabled a community to construct a representation of themselves, which over a period of time would modify according to membership, and environmental changes. The process by which a community constructs a representation of themselves, could also show at various stages the relationship that group has to another one, and enable members from both groups to restructure relationships. Thank you to the Dean Gallery staff for their help with these materials.

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27 Stephen Willats, “Project Operators Manual: [Edinburgh] Social Model Construction Project,” No. 39 (Self-published, 1973), 2, collection of the author. 28 Stephen Willats, Means of Escape (Greater Manchester: Rochdale Gallery, 1984). Thanks to Jill Morgan for allowing me to study her copy of this catalog while I was in Middlesbrough. 29 Stephen Willats, “Art Work as Social Model,” Studio International 191:980 (March/April 1976), 101. 30 Stephen Willats, “The Externalisation of Models in Art Practice,” Control Magazine 8 (1974), 10. Willats cited John M. Dutton and William H. Starbuck, Computer Simulation of Human Behaviour (London: John Wiley and Sons, 1971) as a source for the three classes of models, descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive. 31 Stephen Willats, Handwritten note in the margin of a previous draft of this section of my manuscript, June 2016. 32 Edward Shanken, “From Cybernetics to Telematics: The Art, Pedagogy, and Theory of Roy Ascott,” in Edward A. Shanken (ed.), Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 13–15. 33 Stephen Willats, “Speculative Modelling,” 515. Other artists in Willats’s circle, such as Roy Ascott and Stroud Cornock, used diagrams as well. See Catherine Mason, A Computer in the Art Room: The Origins of British Computer Arts 1950–80 (Fakenham, UK: JJG Publishing, 2008), 155; Shanken, “From Cybernetics to Telematics,” 14–15. See also Willats, “The Externalisation of Models in Art Practice,” 11. 34 Willats, “Art Work as Social Model,” 102. Emphasis on “evolving” is mine. 35 Willats, “Speculative modelling,” 514–25. 36 Willats, Art and Social Function, 8–9. In the August 4, 2015, interview with Emily Pethick, Willats related the difficulties of recruiting participants—they tried distributing leaflets through people’s doors, putting up posters, and using advertisements in local papers: “[W]e realized the only way we were going to get any response was to actually physically knock on people’s door and talk to them.” In an interview with OEI Journal later that year, he noted that the project at Ipswich was the first in which he used “questions and response sheets.” Jonas Magnusson, Axel Wieder and Cecilia Grönberg, “Self-Organised Publishing/Publishing as Self-Organisation – An Interview with Stephen Willats (London, November 19, 2015),” OEI Journal 71–72(Stockholm: Statens Kulturråd, 2016), 214. 37 Archival material related to this project is housed in the Library Special Collections of the Chelsea School of Art collection, www.c​helse​aspac​e.org​ /arch​ive/w​illat​s-ima​ges.h​tml. Many thanks to Gustavo Grandal Montero for providing access to this collection. This project has been published in numerous places, including Willats, Art and Social Function, 15–156, and Artwork as Social Model: A Manual of Questions and Propositions (Sheffield: RGAP, 2012), 15B. 38 Stephen Willats, Artwork as Social Model, 15A, 15C.

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39 Alan A. Jackson, Semi-Detached London: Suburban Development, Life, and Transport, 1900–39 (Wild Swan Publications, 1991). 40 Stephen Willats, West London Social Resource Project Public Monitor (London: CHELSEAspace, 2011), n.p. “In all 47 participants completed the Manual from all the areas except Area Four (Harrow), the upper middle class area, from which not a single return was obtained despite repeated attempts.” In 2014, I visited all four areas of west London where Willats created the work: Osterley, Hanwell, Greenford, and Harrow. Traveling by train, bus, and foot allowed me to experience the distances among the project areas, gain a sense of shopping and residential districts, and visit gathering areas that, while certainly changed in the intervening years, still continue to provide services to the local residents. 41 Willats, Artwork as Social Model, 15C: originally the project was intended to take three months. 42 Gerald F. Brieske (1937–2010) was an engineer who had completed his doctoral thesis in 1969 on a “learning-teaching system” under Heinz von Foerster at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, United States. Another of his mentors was W. R. Ashby, who was also at the University of Illinois at that time. Brieske and his wife, Nancy, left for the UK in August 1969; that September he was working “on some type of learning project” with Gordon Pask at System Research Ltd, along with George Mallen. He edited the journal Instructional Science, which was first issued in 1972. Nancy Brieske to Heinz von Foerster, September 25, 1969, 11/6/26 Box 4, Heinz von Foerster Papers, University of Illinois Archives, Urbana, Illinois. 43 Pethick, “Interview,” Cognition Control, n.p.; See also Willats, “The Book as Interactive Tool: The Modelling Book,” in Casser and Ziegler, Art Society Feedback, 354–8, originally published in Artists’ Bookworks (London: British Council, 1975). 44 Willats, Artwork as Social Model, 18B. The idea of generating interest by having Super Girls active in the project areas and featured on publicity was eventually abandoned. 45 Willats, West London Social Resource Project Public Monitor (London: CHELSEAspace, 2011), n.p. 46 Stephen Walker, Gordon Matta-Clark: Art, Architecture and the Attack on Modernism (London: I.B.Tauris, 2009), 72, quoting Jonathan Hill, The Illegal Architect (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1998), 46. 47 Magnusson et al., “Self-Organised Publishing/Publishing as SelfOrganisation,” 243. The 71–2 (2016) issue of the OEI Journal reproduced a significant amount of the “West London Social Resource Project” materials, 231–42. 48 Willats, West London Social Resource Project Public Monitor (CHELSEAspace, 2011), n.p. 49 Magnusson et al., “Self-Organised Publishing/Publishing as Self-Organisation,” 243. 50 Willats, Artwork as Social Model, 18B.

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51 Willats, West London Social Resource Project Public Monitor. The installation at Gallery House was a freestanding walled space within a room, measuring 16 feet × 8 feet, with the display walls also 8-feet high. 52 Willats, “The Externalisation of Models in Art Practice,” 11. Willats had visited an art school in Edinburgh in the spring of 1973. See Willats, “The Edinburgh Social Model Construction Project,” in Ross Birrell and Alec Finley (eds), Justified Sinners: An Archeology of Scottish Counter-Culture, 1960–2000 (Edinburgh: Morningstar Publications, 2002), n.p. For further description, see Sharon Irish, “The Performance of Information Flows in the Art of Stephen Willats,” Information & Culture: A Journal of History 47:4(2012), 457–86. 53 Willats’s project received £400 of support from the Computer Arts Society (Mason, Computer in the Art Room, 122). Other sponsors included the Scottish Arts Council, the Leith Festival Committee, and the corporations Xerox and ICL. See GMA.A11/05/01, Printed Matter from the Project, Dean Gallery. 54 GMA.A11 7/4/8, Dean Gallery. 55 As the BBC put it in their 2016 “Make It Digital” series brochure, “an algorithm is a precisely defined . . . procedure that, given some input, will produce the desired output.” BBC, “Digital Technology Past and Present,” https​ ://cs​s2.op​en.ac​.uk/o​utis/​docs/​publi​catio​ns/OZ​RDIG.​pdf (accessed April 20, 2016). 56 Stephen Willats Collection, TGA 999/1 Willats Meta Filter Notebook, Tate Archive, London, UK. 57 George Mallen, “Stephen Willats: An Interview on Art, Cybernetics and Social Intervention,” Bulletin of the Computer Arts Society, Page 60(Spring 2005), 1, 6. 58 Stephen Willats, “Xerox as an Agent of Social Change,” in Casser and Ziegler, Art Society Feedback, 294–5. 59 Willats, Art and Social Function, 178. 60 Project Operators Manual, Social Model Construction Project (photocopied booklet), 3, 13. Collection of the author. 61 Ibid., 3; undated draft of circular for Social Model Construction Project, GMA.A11/01/01, Correspondence, Social Model Construction Project, Dean Gallery. 62 GMA.A11/04/02/03, Completed Problem Sheets: Slateford, Dean Gallery. This example also contains attitudes toward professional expertise. 63 In 2015, he said that this lag “was a feature of the sixties, a sort of thinking going beyond the ability of the then current technology to realise the intentions of the artist.” Magnusson et al., “Self-Organised Publishing/Publishing as SelfOrganisation,” 216. 64 These notebooks are in the Tate Archive, London, UK. 65 Willats, Art and Social Function, 159. 66 Ibid., 158, 159. Writer and artist Michael Corris presented homeostasis as the biological analog to cybernetics: each is a system “in a state of dynamic

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equilibrium with its environment.” “Systems Upgrade: Conceptual Art and the Recoding of Information, Knowledge and Technology,” in Josephine Berry Slater and Pauline van Mourik Broekman (eds), Proud to be Flesh: A Mute Magazine Anthology (New York: Autonomedia, 2009), 108. 67 Willats referred to the work of social psychologist James H. Davis, Group Performance (London: Addison Wesley Publishing, 1969). 68 Willats, Art and Social Function, 171. 69 Stephen Willats, “Edinburgh Project: Steve Willats Discusses His Social Model Construction Project,” Art and Artists (January 1974), 9. 70 Willats, “Externalisation of Models in Art Practice,” 13. 71 GMA.A11/04/02/01, Completed Problem Sheets, Dean Gallery. 72 Thanks to ElizaBeth Simpson for helping me to understand mutualism in the context of symbiosis. See also Willats, “Art Work as Social Model,” 101–2. 73 Willats, Artist as Instigator, 11. Meta Filter was included in Rudolf Frieling, Boris Groys, Robert Atkins, and Lev Manovich (eds), The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now (San Francisco/London: San Francisco Museum of Art/Thames & Hudson, 2008), 128. 74 Stephen Willats to Margret MacKay, February 2, 1984, Registration Files, GMA 2296, Dean Gallery. 75 Pethick interview (August 4, 2015). Willats noted that in 1973–4 he was very ill in hospital: “wiped out a year and a bit of my life.” 76 John A. Walker, Left Shift: Radical Art in 1970s Britain (London: I.B.Tauris, 2002), 92–7; Willats in conversation with me, October 7, 2010; Pethick interview (August 4, 2015); about Nicholas Wegner, see Pierre Coinde and Gary O’Dwyer, “The Gallery,” in “The Centre of Attention,” www.t​hecen​ treof​atten​tion.​org/d​gtheg​aller​y.htm​l (accessed February 2, 2016); page proof of “Depart from Zero,” September 8, 1987, TGA 999/8, Tate Archive, London. 77 Thanks to Lisa Goodrum for helping me make this point. 78 Stephen Willats to me, October 7, 2010. 79 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), xiv. Thanks to alex cruse for encouraging me to look at Hayles. 80 www.stephenwillats.com (accessed February 6, 2016). 81 Anders Kreuger, The Welfare State (Antwerp: H MKA, 2015), 17. 82 Richard Cork, Everything Seemed Possible: Art in the 1970s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 130. See also Clive Phillpot and Andrea Tarsia, Live in Your Head: Concept and Experiment in Britain, 1965–75 (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2000), 160–1. 83 “The basis of interpersonal behaviour is largely conditioned by the internal representations a person constructs of another as a response to his display of ‘Life Codes.’” Willats, “Artwork as Social Model,” in Casser and Ziegler, Art Society Feedback, 346. Willats credits Basil Bernstein for his thinking about

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codes. See Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control: Theoretical Studies towards a Sociology of Language (New York: Schocken Books [1971] 1975). 84 ”Meta Filter Notebook,” n.p., TGA 999/1, Stephen Willats Collection, Tate Library and Archive, London, UK. 85 Willats, Artist as Instigator, 31. 86 Andrew Wilson, “Art:Politics/Theory:Practice, Radical art practices in London in the seventies,” in Astrid Proll (ed.), Goodbye to London: Radical Art & Politics in the 70’s (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 129. 87 Francis Marshall, “Museum of London/Recent Acquisition of Conrad Atkinson’s ‘Garbage Strike: Hackney,’ 1970,” Photomonitor (May 2012), www.photomonitor.co.uk/atkinson/ (accessed March 12, 2018). 88 Wilson, “Art:Politics/Theory:Practice,” 129. 89 “A Brief History of the Women’s Workshop of the Artist’s Union, 1972–73 (c. 1973),” in Hilary Robinson (ed.), Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology, 1968–2000 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 87. 90 Richard Cork, “Collaboration without Compromise,” Studio International 195:990(1980), 7. In 1974, the Institute of Contemporary Art in London organized “Art into Society/Society into Art: Seven German Artists,” featuring Gustav Metzger, Hans Haacke, and Joseph Beuys, among others, showing the “increasingly close relationship between artistic expression and politics coming from West Germany.” www.i​ca.ar​t/wha​ts-on​/art-​socie​ty-so​ciety​-art (accessed March 10, 2018).

Chapter 3 1 Emily Pethick, Interview with Stephen Willats (August 4, 2015). With partial support from my funding from the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant Program, Emily Pethick conducted two long interviews with Willats in 2015; I transcribed the recordings. Thanks to both Pethick and Willats for their time and investment in this project. 2 Francis Marshall, “Museum of London/Recent Acquisition of Conrad Atkinson’s ‘Garbage Strike: Hackney,’ 1970,” Photomonitor (May 2012), www.photomonitor.co.uk/atkinson/ (accessed March 12, 2018). 3 Siona Wilson, Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 139–40. Wilson wrote, “photography itself was undergoing a theoretical renaissance unseen since the . . . interwar period, and a more generalized trope of amateurism was one of the first art world manifestations of this shift.” 4 The Place of Work (1979) was a two-panel work made in cooperation with staff of S&D Fashions in east London. The workshop made leather garments. Willats described this work in the booklet, Stephen Willats: Concerning Our Present Way of Living (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2014), n.p.

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5 Kathryn Rattee, “Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt, and Mary Kelly, ‘Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry, 1973–5’” (September 2002), www.t​ate.o​rg.uk​/art/​artwo​rks/h​arris​on-hu​nt-ke​lly-w​omen-​ and-w​ork-a​-docu​ment-​on- the-d​ivisi​on-of​-labo​ur-in​-indu​stry-​1973-​t0779​ 7 (accessed March 12, 2018); see also Judith Mastai (ed.), Social Process/ Collaborative Action: Mary Kelly 1970–1975 (Vancouver, BC: Charles H. Scott Gallery and the Emily Carr School of Art and Design, 1997); and Wilson, Art Labor, Sex Politics, Chapter 4. 6 Stephen Willats, Artwork as Social Model (Sheffield, UK: RGAP, 2012), 15A. 7 Person A is illustrated on Willats’s website, but no dimensions are given: http:// stephenwillats.com/work/person/ (accessed September 6, 2019). 8 Stephen Willats, “Life Codes—Behaviour Parameters,” in Anja Casser and Philipp Ziegler (eds), Stephen Willats: Art Society Feedback (Nürnburg: Verlag für modern Kunst, 2010), 341. 9 Pethick, Interview with Stephen Willats (August 4, 2015). 10 Stephen Willats, Life Codes and Behaviour Parameters (Münster, Gallery December, 1974). See http://stephenwillats.com/work/person/ and http:​//ste​ phenw​illat​s.com​/text​s/lif​e-cod​es-be​havio​ur-pa​ramet​ers/ (accessed July 19, 2017). 11 Perceptions was made in 1974 with a couple, one of whom was a banker. It was, according to Willats, “[o]ne of the first works that I made specifically intended for an art gallery.” Pethick, interview (August 4, 2015). See also, the illustrated work at http:​//ste​phenw​illat​s.com​/work​/perc​eptio​ns-ma​rried​-coup​le/ (accessed July 19, 2017). 12 Stephen Bann, “A View over the Balcony: Recent Work by Stephen Willats,” in Conceptual Living (London: Victoria Miro, 1991), n.p. 13 Stephen Willats: Concerning Our Present Way of Living (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery/Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1979), n.p. 14 He distilled much of this reading in Stephen Willats, “The Externalisation of Models in Art Practice,” Control Magazine 8(1974), 11. See also Claude E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” The Bell System Technical Journal 27(July 1948), 379–423. Shannon’s well-known diagram in this article used neatly arranged squares and arrows to represent a message translated into a signal, which moved from transmitter to receiver along a channel. The signal was decoded into the message again at the receiving end. Noise interfered with the signal to some extent. Shannon maintained that the “new concept of information was semantic,” and did not necessarily carry meaning. The diagram appears in the 1948 Shannon article, which does not name Warren Weaver, and then appears again in Weaver, “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in Weaver and Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963), 7–8. See also John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945–1976 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 43–5; and Ronald R. Kline, The Cybernetics Moment, Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), passim.

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15 Gordon Pask, An Approach to Cybernetics (London: Hutchinson, 1961), 9; see also Tara H. Abraham, Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016). 16 Pask, An Approach to Cybernetics, 11. 17 Josephine Berry and Pauline van Mourik Broekman, “King of Code,” Mute 1:17 (July 10, 2000), www.m​etamu​te.or​g/edi​toria​l/art​icles​/king​-code​ (accessed March 4, 2016). 18 George P. Richardson, Feedback Thought in Social Science and Systems Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991) has been useful to my thinking about Willats’s work. Thanks to Andy Pickering for the reference. 19 Willats cited Abraham Moles, Information Theory and Aesthetic Perception, trans. Joel Cohen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966) in his 1974 article, “Externalisation of Models,” which pointed to the connections Willats saw between aesthetics and information. 20 Stephen Willats, “Speculative Modelling with Diagrams,” in Casser and Ziegler, Art Society Feedback, 519, n. 7. 21 Experimental psychologist, Donald Broadbent (1926–93), for example, published Perception and Communication (1958) focusing on selective attention. His theories contributed to the “single channel hypothesis,” which aimed to explain how we filter information in a stimulus-rich environment. Willats continued to refer to Broadbent’s work decades after it was published. See also, William H. Gladstones, Michael A. Regan and Robert B. Lee, “Division of Attention: The Single-Channel Hypothesis Revisited,” The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A 41:1(2007), 1–17. 22 The rest of the text of Life Net Encoder reads: DP1, DP2, etc=Descriptive Parameters, which underlie existing behaviours of the groups. PP1, PP2, etc=Prescriptive Parameters, which underlie possible behaviours of the groups. BA=Behavioural Axis within a group. This forms the focal point of a group’s behaviour sources, and is constructed around an intersection between parameters. a, b, c, etc=Life Codes, which form a derivative structure stemming from a group’s Behavioural Axis. A,B,C, etc=Parameter Values. A change in the value of a parameter restructures the Behavioural Axis of a group. P77-1984, Prints and Drawings Collection, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK. 23 This sheet was in a folder with material from 1978. Modern Art Oxford Archives, Oxford, UK. 24 Willats created a diagram, “Oppositional State of Concept Frames,” in conjunction with a 1977 multi-panel work, “I Don’t Want to Be like Anyone Else.” This diagram is reproduced in Anders Kreuger (ed.), The Welfare State (Antwerp: Museum of Contemporary Art [M HKA], 2015), 56–7. Willats explained the thinking behind that work in several places, including Willats, “Speculative Modelling,” 518, n. 7. 25 Stephen Willats, “Xerox as an Agent of Social Change,” in Casser and Ziegler, Art Society Feedback, 294–9.

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26 Stephen Willats to Margret MacKay, February 2, 1984, Registration Files, GMA 2296, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Dean Gallery, Edinburgh. 27 Stephen Willats, “Between a Symbolic World and a Contextual Reality: The Artwork as a Vehicle for Forwarding Counter-Consciousness,” Control Magazine 10(1977), 13–20. 28 Stephen Willats, “From a Coded World,” Studio International 194:988 (1978), 229. 29 Pethick, interview (August 4, 2015). 30 Stephen Willats, “From a Coded World,” in Richard Cork, Art for Whom? (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), 63–4. 31 Ibid., 69. Willats recorded discussions with the project operators and participants, which appeared in Audio Arts 3:4(1977). 32 Pethick, interview (August 4, 2015). Team members included Nicholas Serota, in 2016, the director of the Tate; Richard Cork, the critic; historian Sandy Nairne; and art writer Jane Kelly. The work “got quite a lot of publicity; it was in the Evening Standard.” 33 Ibid. 34 He aimed to “collapse the vertical determinism of Authoritative Structures into the horizontal mutuality inbuilt into Co-operative Structures.” Willats, “Between a Symbolic World and a Contextual Reality,” 16. 35 Ibid., 14; italics mine. 36 Willats, “From a Coded World,” in Art for Whom?, 66. 37 Pethick, interview (August 4, 2015). 38 Willats, “From a Coded World,” in Art for Whom?, 64. He labeled the models as the Symbolic Group and the representations of different structures, the Symbolic World. 39 Ibid., 65. 40 Stephen Willats, “Working with Life and Institutions,” Control Magazine 12(1981), 9, n. 5, indicated that problem displays were used first in From a Coded World. 41 Willats, “From a Coded World,” in Art for Whom?, 71. 42 Pethick, interview (August 4, 2015). 43 Pethick, interview (August 4, 2015). 44 Richard Cork, “Stephen Willats: The Perivale Project,” in Art for Whom? (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), 29. 45 Donald Smith (curator), ‘#37 The West London Social Resource Project Public Monitor 1972: Stephen Willats (London: CHELSEA space, August–September 2011), www.c​helse​aspac​e.org​/arch​ive/w​illat​s-ima​ges.h​tml (accessed July 19, 2017). 46 A. A. Bronson, “Introduction,” in Philip Aarons and A. A. Bronson (eds), Queer Zines, vol. 1 (Printed Matter, 2013), 7. Thanks to Tender Books, London, for exhibiting the Bronson material. For more on Bronson and

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General Idea, see www.aabronson.com/aaindex.html (accessed February 26, 2016). For more on FILE, see Maria Fusco, “That’s Life!” Frieze 119 (November–December 2008), www.frieze.com/issue/article/thats_life/ (accessed July 19, 2017). FILE was published between 1972 and 1989. 47 Willats wrote some version of this in many of his publications: One such polemic idealisation, with many dependent sign systems, that I have been drawn towards is associated with modernist building developments of the 1960s and 1970s, especially those that projected a relationship between the inevitable concrete mass and a future way of life. Stephen Willats, Secret Language: The Code Breakers (Berlin: Thomas Schulte, 2012). Italics in the original. 48 Stephen Willats, The New Reality (Derry, NI: The Orchard Gallery, 1982), 3. Willats remarked that the “new reality” was often bleak and repetitive. Emphasis in original. 49 Gordon Pask, “The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics,” AD 39 (September 1969), 494. Emphasis in original. 50 Ibid., 9. Willats exclaimed: “I hate the idea of professional and amateur. It’s really what you make from it that matters.” Margot Heller, “Conversation between Margot Heller and Stephen Willats, March 2012,” Surfing with the Attractor (South London Gallery, 2012), 21. See also Frances Follin, Embodied Visions: Bridget Riley, Op Art and the Sixties (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 115–18, on class-based connotations of professionalism. 51 Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, “Bringing their Worlds Back: Using Photographs to Spur Conversations on Everyday Place,” Visual Studies 31:1 (2016), 1, 18. I so appreciate Bendiner-Viani sharing this article with me. See also Bendiner-Viani, “The Big World in the Small: Layered Dynamics of Meaning-Making in the Everyday,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31(2013), 708–26. 52 Urbanist Ben Campkin argued that the “east–west dynamic features strongly in commentaries on London’s post-industrial architecture, art and urbanism. . . . However, over-emphasis on these areas precludes a more nuanced understanding of the shifts . . . that took place elsewhere.” Ben Campkin, Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture (London: I.B.Tauris, 2013), 12. Stuart Brisley was another artist engaged with people in the area where he lived; the Georgiana Collection (1981 on) was a “developing institution” that took several forms but was “concerned with notions of private and public territory.” Stuart Brisley, Georgiana Collection (Glasgow: Third Eye Centre/Derry: Orchard Gallery, 1986), 3. Artists Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson published The East London Health Project in Control Magazine 11 (November 1979), 23–5. Dunn and Leeson lived and worked in east London during the 1970s. 53 Nayia Yiakoumaki, “Interview with Stephen Willats, January 2014,” Stephen Willats: Concerning Our Present Way of Living (London: Archive Gallery, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2014), n.p. Some materials related to Inside an Ocean are held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, UK. Thanks to Nayia Yiakoumaki for her assistance with these materials. The Whitechapel Gallery was founded in 1901 to be readily accessible to those who lived in the East

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End, historically one of the poorest areas of London. See Richard Cork, “Collaboration without Compromise,” Studio International 195:990(1980), 5. 54 Yiakoumaki, “Interview with Stephen Willats.” 55 Stefanie Hessler, “Tio frågor: Stephen Willats,” Kunstkritikk (March 18, 2016), www.k​unstk​ritik​k.se/​artik​ler/t​io-fr​agor-​steph​en-wi​llats​/ (accessed July 19, 2017). 56 Yiakoumaki, “Interview with Stephen Willats.” Contained Living is alternately called Learning to Live within a Confined Space on Willats’s website. The archive from Contained Living, Learning to Live within a Confined Space is held at the Southampton City Art Gallery. Thanks to Curator of Art Tim Craven for his help in viewing that work. Friars Wharf Estate is not far from Modern Art Oxford (MAO); Willats noted in his proposal that it was “particularly appropriate as many of the residents came from St. Ebbe’s, the area in which the museum still stands.” Willats, “Proposed Project Work for Oxford,” undated typescript, MAO Archives Oxford, UK. In Leeds in 1987 Willats created From Different Worlds, which had a similar structure to that at Oxford and at Ocean. In Berlin, in 2014, Willats created installations both in the MD72 gallery and in nearby community locations, Berlin Local. Berlin Local was presented in tandem with How Tomorrow Looks from Here at the daadgalerie in Berlin. Ariane Beyn et al., How Tomorrow Looks from Here (Berlin: Künstlerprogramm des DAAD, 2014). Willats’s Human Right, 2017, was installed inside the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima) and in the Forbes Building on Parliament Road, together with video displays in shop windows along the route between mima and the Forbes location. Stephen Willats, “Inside Outside—Outside Inside—Bringing Art Practice into the Fabric of People’s Lives,” Human Right: Stephen Willats, Miguel Amado (ed.), (Middlesbrough, UK: Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, 2017), 19. 57 In 1957, the newly named but already existing Association of London Housing Estates (ALHE) focused on “the development of self-help methods in building up a sense of community and civic pride on the estates”; by 1977, the National Tenants’ Organization had been formed. John Hayes, “The Association of London Housing Estates: A Study in Contemporary Urban Social History,” MPhil thesis (Canterbury: University of Kent, 1979), Chapter 3, p. 8. Available at the London Metropolitan Archives, LMA/4196/07/004. Also see “Discussion Paper: Towards a Community Engagement Strategy for the Ocean,” Strategic Urban Futures (March 31, 2010), 2, http://strategicurbanfutures.com/ wp- conte​nt/th​emes/​stuft​heme/​Ocean​_Esta​te_Co​mmuni​ty_En​gagem​ent.p​df (accessed March 9, 2015). Michael Edwards et al., Final Evaluation of Central Stepney RB (Regeneration Budget) (London: Tower Hamlets, 2003), 5, http:​// dis​cover​y.ucl​.ac.u​k/507​5/1/5​075.p​df (accessed March 9, 2016). 58 “Ocean Waves Its Distress Signal,” East London Advertiser (February 23, 1979), from the clippings file at the Local History Collection, Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, London. A June 29, 1979, ELA clipping noted a report on problems of Stepney’s Ocean Estate produced earlier in 1979. The report by the Ocean Estate Tenants Association and Bethnal Green’s London Tenants Association focused on the four oldest and most-troubled

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blocks. The block names Tunis, Malacca, and Bengal reference former colonial locations—Malacca is a state and strait in Malaysia; Tunis is the capital of Tunisia; and Bengal is a region of the Indian subcontinent, divided in the 1947 Partition. The latter now includes Bangladesh and the Indian State of Bengal. Bothnia is part of the Baltic Sea. This naming of blocks of flats is one example of many of the continuity and affirmation of colonialism by the welfare state. 59 Hayes, “The ALHE,” indicated that “tenant participation schemes” were not effective in power sharing (Chapter 6, p. 1). Cf. Colin Ward, Tenants Take Over (London: Architectural Press, 1974). 60 Christopher Chaumont, THE OCEAN: A Short History of the Ocean Housing Estate in Stepney from 1937–2004 (London: Ragged School Museum Trust Ocean Collection Project, 2005), 25. 61 Joe Kerr, “Blowdown: The Rise and Fall of London’s Tower Blocks,” in Joe Kerr and Andrew Gibson (eds), London from Punk to Blair (London: Reaktion Books, 2003). 62 Stephen Willats, Between Buildings and People (London: Academy Editions, 1996), 100–1. Stuart Brisley was another artist who collaborated on projects with residents. In 1976–7, under the auspices of the Artist Placement Group, he worked in the new town of Peterlee to generate a collective history. The town included workers from mining villages in which the pits had been depleted. See Michael Archer, “Neither One Thing nor the Other,” in Brisley, Georgiana Collection, 6; and Marc Crinson, “The Incidental Collection— Stuart Brisley’s Peterlee Project,” Mute Magazine 1:28(Summer/Autumn 2004), www.m​etamu​te.or​g/edi​toria​l/art​icles​/inci​denta​l-col​lecti​on-st​uart-​brisl​eys-p​eterl​ ee- project (accessed March 14, 2016). 63 When the Whitechapel Gallery reinstalled Concerning Our Present Way of Living in 2013, The Ideological Tower (1977) was in the exhibit. Standing in the gallery during the opening, Willats explained to me that the concept frames in that image were essentially rotated and superimposed onto the photographs of workers and tenants in the panels on display. Conversation with Willats at Whitechapel, April 24, 2014. See also, Willats, Between Buildings and People, 100–7; and Kreuger, Welfare State, 49–53. 64 Willats, Between Buildings and People, 105–6. 65 Ibid., 100. 66 Ibid., 100, 106. 67 Yiakoumaki, “Interview with Stephen Willats.” 68 Willats, Between Buildings and People, 106. 69 Philip Peters, Stephen Willats: Code Breakers (Amsterdam: Torch, 1988), n.p. 70 Of course, architects and contractors are not the only individuals responsible for urban development. See Aggregate, Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012). I offer names here as a “way in” to further investigation: W. Peter Moiret (1910–79) was an Austrian architect; Tersons Ltd was the contractor. The estate’s community center, the Dame Colet House,

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now demolished, was designed by Bridgewater and Shepheard between 1954 and 1959, as far as I have been able to determine. See Stefan Muthesius and Miles Glendinning, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (London: Yale University Press/Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1993); and Simon Pepper, “High-Rise Housing in London, c. 1940 to c. 1970,” in Peter Guillery and David Kroll (eds), Mobilising Housing Histories: Learning from London’s Past (London: RIBA Publishing, 2017), 128–30, 138. Excellent photos of these projects are located at the London Metropolitan Archives, SC/PHL/02/838. See also Chaumont, THE OCEAN. 71 Stephen Willats, audio recordings with Ocean Estate residents, WAG/ EXH/2/285, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. Thanks to Nayia Yiakoumaki for her assistance with these materials. 72 Stephen Willats, Concerning Our Present Way of Living/Over onze actuele leefwijze (Eindhoven: StedelijkVan Abbemuseum, 1980), 8, quoted in Kreuger, Welfare State, 55. 73 Rosemary Shirley remarked on the “notion of combining scientific and artistic methods for experimental social investigation” and how Willats’s practice “echoe[d] the early experiments of Mass-Observation.” Shirley, Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Culture (London: Ashgate, 2015), 79. 74 Antisocial behavior on housing estates is very complicated, of course, and there is a lot of literature related to these problems. I can only gesture to this challenge here. Geographer Alice Coleman (b. 1923), Margaret Thatcher’s “guru” regarding social housing, published her controversial book, Utopia on Trial (1985), applying the “defensible space” theory of Canadian architect and planner Oscar Newman (published in 1972) to large urban estates in the UK. Coleman claimed somewhat deterministically that the design and (lack of) maintenance of the estates gave inhabitants opportunities to behave criminally. This argument was used to support Thatcher’s Right to Buy program with the idea that if people owned their properties, they would maintain them because they were invested in their own success. If properties were maintained, then bad behavior would not thrive. While there is much I am omitting here, this policy failed to address entrenched poverty and economic injustice. See Alice M. Coleman, Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing (London: Hilary Shipman, 1985); Paul Spicker, “Poverty and Depressed Estates: A Critique of Utopia on Trial,” Housing Studies 2:4(1987), 283–92; Jane M. Jacobs and Loretta Lees, “Defensible Space on the Move: Revisiting the Urban Geography of Alice Coleman,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37:5 (September 2013), 1559–83; Michael Collins, The Great Estate: The Rise and Fall of the Council House, Chris Wilson, director, Leanne Klein, executive producer (London: BBC TV, August 2011), www.youtube.com/ watch?v=WVGMyo40SyE (accessed March 16, 2016). 75 Stephen Willats: Concerning Our Present Way of Living (London: Archive Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery), n.p. Ephemera from the Ocean Estate Project is also held at Chelsea College of Arts Special Collections, London.

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76 Natalie Kennard, “Ocean’s Little Pearls of Wisdom,” East London Advertiser (February 16, 1979), n.p., from the clippings file at Local History Collection, Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, London. 77 Yiakoumaki, “Interview with Stephen Willats.” 78 Martino Stierli and Mechtild Widrich, “Whose Participation? Introductory Remarks,” in Participation in Art and Architecture: Spaces of Interaction and Occupation (London: I. B.Tauris, 2016), 4. The quotation in context reads: In both art and architecture there is no simple causal account featuring people or things, artworks or buildings, artistic encounters or architectural models, manifestoes or media initiatives as purely active or passive triggers or inhibitors of interaction. . . . [T]he relations of participation between these entities, now concentrated in agents, now in things or spaces or institutions, derive their power as much from representational strategies . . . as from actual acts and structures, which are intertwined. Therefore, a stalled debate about the presumed single source of agency (and, by extension, democracy) in contemporary practice, be it artistic or architectural or political, seems best overcome by a pluralist focus on sites of interaction and participation. 79 Cork, Art for Whom?, 5. 80 Ibid., 3. 81 Loraine Leeson, Art: Process: Change: Inside a Socially Situated Practice (London: Routledge, 2018), 92–3; Cork, “Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson,” Art for Whom?, 15. 82 Cork, Art for Whom?, 3, 8.

Chapter 4 1 A few sources on UK housing that have been especially useful to me besides those cited below include Paul Barker, “Non-Plan Revisited: Or the Real Way Cities Grow,” Journal of Design History 12:2(1999), 95–110; Jonathan Hughes and Simon Sadler (eds), Non-plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2000); and Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture: The History of a Social Experiment (London: Routledge, 2001). 2 Andrew Higgott, Mediating Modernism: Architectural Cultures in Britain (London: Routledge, 2007), 12. Emphasis in original. 3 Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting (1968), 241, 252, quoted in Kenneth R. Allan, “Marshall McLuhan and the Counterenvironment: ‘The Medium is the Massage,’” Art Journal 73:4(Winter 2014), 36–7. Willats included two 1967 publications by McLuhan in his bibliography in Stephen Willats, Between Buildings and People (London: Academy Editions, 1996), 114. 4 See Ben Campkin, Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture (London: I.B.Tauris, 2013); Stephen Elkin, Politics and Land-Use

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Planning: The London Experience (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Rob Imrie, Loretta Lees and Mike Raco (eds), Regenerating London: Governance, Sustainability, and Community in a Global City (London: Routledge, 2009). I so appreciate my interactions related to these issues with Ben Campkin and Jane Rendell. 5 Simon Pepper, “High-Rise Housing in London, c. 1940 to c. 1970,” in Peter Guillery and David Kroll (eds), Mobilising Housing Histories: Learning from London’s Past (London: RIBA Publishing, 2017), 124. 6 Mark Clapson and Peter J. Larkham, “The Blitz, Its Experiences, Its Consequences,” in The Blitz and Its Legacy: Wartime Destruction to PostWar Reconstruction (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 9. See also Mark Clapson, “Destruction and Dispersal: The Blitz and the ‘Break up’ of Working-Class London,” 99–112, in the same volume. 7 I am grateful to the Colston Fellowship from the University of Bristol, which I held in 2014, for introducing me to Morag McDermont, who was a principal investigator on the “Productive Margins” project on which I worked. Morag’s research examines the regulatory practices of housing administration and her work contributed enormously to my understanding of the bureaucratic aspects of housing. See, for example, David Cowan and Morag McDermont, Regulating Social Housing: Governing Decline (London: Routledge-Cavendish, 2006). Also helpful is this film by the Greater London Council: Some Where Decent to Live (1967) www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1A2wa9yeAKk Reference No: GLC/DG/PRB/11/03/001 Collection: Film (London Metropolitan Archives) (accessed May 15, 2015). 8 Stefan Muthesius and Miles Glendinning, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (London: Yale University Press/Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1993), 55, 56, 58, 62. Hollamby is quoted on p. 120, from an article in Architecture and Building 3(1960), 88. A “point block” is a scheme in which the lifts and stairs are at the center of the structure, with residential spaces toward the building’s exterior. Muthesius and Glendinning stated that this design came from Sweden’s punkthus and contrasted with the slab block, which was, as its name implies, longer than it was tall, a slab of residences that allowed for higher density because it was bigger (56). Royston Landau, in New Directions in British Architecture (New York: George Braziller, 1968), 47–51, gave an account of the “doctrinal” differences in the Housing Division of the London County Council, somewhat apparent in the point versus slab block solutions. The Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies at the Edinburgh College of Art now maintains an online resource called Tower Block, based on the Muthesius and Glendinning archive, which has been expanded to include other countries: http://fields.eca.ac.uk/gis/ (accessed July 14, 2015). See also “Symposium on High Flats,” Journal of RIBA 3(1955), 195–213; and JRIBA 4(1955), 251–61. 9 I am indebted to Julieta González, former curator at Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico, DF, for her insights into Willats’s art and context, including marking 1977 as an important year for Willats. Many thanks to her and the other museum staff—Amanda Echeverria, Tonatiuh López, Ixel Rion

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and Juan Gaitán, Director—for hosting me in February 2015, during the exhibition González organized with Ixel Rion, “Stephen Willats: Man from the 21st Century.” The museum published an illustrated booklet of the same name with an excellent essay by González, Hombre del siglo XXI (Mexico, DF: Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, 2015) http:​//mus​eotam​ayo.o​rg/ex​ posic​iones​/ver/​steph​en- willats-hombre-del-siglo-xxi (accessed July 17, 2015). 10 Victoria Miro Gallery gives the date of Compartmentalised Cliff as 1976 on their website, but Modernologies dated it June and July 1977. Stephen Bann, who wrote the catalogue entry, also stated that this two-panel work was the first use by Willats of “coloured photographs.” Sabine Breitwieser (ed), Modernologies (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2009), 210. Perhaps tinting the photographs was a way to enrich the often-bleak world of the banlieue, but, according to Francis Marshall, also countered the expectation of black-and-white documentary photography. Francis Marshall, “Conrad Atkinson, ‘Garbage Strike: Hackney,’” Photomonitor (May 2012) www.photomonitor.co.uk/2012/05/atkinson/ (accessed July 17, 2017). 11 Dawn Foster, “Right to Buy: A History of Margaret Thatcher’s Controversial Policy,” The Guardian (December 7, 2015) www.theguardian.com/ housing- netwo​rk/20​15/de​c/07/​housi​ng-ri​ght-t​o-buy​-marg​aret-​thatc​her-d​ata (accessed January 1, 2018). Mark Swenarton noted that Thatcher’s policies consolidated rather than heralded the end of an era of ambitious house building. Swenarton, “Politics versus Architecture: The Alexandra Road Public Enquiry of 1978–81,” Planning Perspectives 29:4(2014), 423–46. 12 Stephen Willats, Intervention and Audience (London: Coracle Press, 1986), n.p. 13 Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson, “Adjusting Culture to Practical Function: Reflections and Projections,” Control Magazine 10(1977), 8. 14 Willats, “Speculative Modelling with Diagrams,” in Anja Casser and Philipp Ziegler (eds), Stephen Willats: Art Society Feedback (Nürnberg: Verlag für modern Kunst, 2010), 514. First published in Speculative Modelling with Diagrams (Utrecht: Casco, 2007). 15 Willats, “Speculative Modelling,” 517. 16 Stephen Willats, Multichannel Vision (London: Control, 2000), n.p. 17 Willats, “Speculative Modelling,” 516. 18 Other projects in the UK with tower blocks and their residents (that will not be discussed in this book) include From Different Worlds (Leeds, 1987); Living Tower (London, 1992); and Meeting of Minds (Liverpool, 2003). On the Liverpool project, see Sharon Irish, “Tenant to Tenant: The Art of Talking with Strangers,” 61–7; Marcia McNally, “Going beyond the Plan: The Bandwidth that is Stephen Willats” 68–9; and Willats, “Art as Social Practice: Meeting of Minds,” 58–60, all in Places Journal 16:3 (October 2004). See also Willats, Meeting of Minds (London: Control, 2006), and Willats, Artwork as Social Model: A Manual of Questions and Propositions (Sheffield: RGAP, 2012), 30A–30D. 19 “Stephen Willats Talks about His New Solo Show and Commission at Modern Art Oxford [2013]” https://vimeo.com/64952351(accessed July 20, 2017).

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20 Out of this exploration, Willats produced The Lurky Place (London: Lisson Gallery, 1978). See further discussion in Chapter 5. 21 Catalogue entry for “Living with Practical Realities, 1978,” The Tate Gallery 1980–82: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions (London: Tate, 1984) www.t​ ate.o​rg.uk​/art/​artwo​rks/w​illat​s-liv​ing-w​ith-p​racti​cal-r​ealit​ies-t​03296​/text​-cata​ logue​-entr​y (accessed May 18, 2015). Arthur Skeffington, a Labour member of Parliament (for the part of Hillingdon that included Hayes) and Private Secretary to the minister of housing and local government from 1967 to 1970, was appointed in March 1968 to chair a committee charged with “improving communication between planning authorities and residents and to recommend ways of getting the public involved in forming” housing schemes. The Skeffington Committee was “seen as the first concerted effort to encourage a systematic approach to resident participation in planning and the decision-making process.” This twenty-six-person committee considered these processes for sixteen months and agreed that “when policies were imposed from above it led to frustration” and “all too easily to alienation between the authority and the people.” Committee members “wanted surveys and initial proposals to be published in easily digestible forms . . . [and] a series of public meetings and exhibitions . . . supplemented with films or slides.” After the release of the Skeffington Report, many readers were skeptical of its vague recommendations ever being implemented voluntarily by local councils. Indeed, “[t]here was no effective systematic approach, no obligation, no sanctions, and no timetable.” Peter Shapely concluded that “[t]he Report had never fully grasped the shift in power at the local level needed to make participation effective. . . . When it came to facing this reality, local authorities clung on to their power and authority.” Peter Shapely, People and Planning: Report of the Committee on Public Participation in Planning (The Skeffington Committee Report) (London: Routledge, 2014), ix, 3, xviii. While community forums, pamphlets, and slide shows may have helped neighborhoods to be more informed, the idea of “participation” was narrowly defined, as a means of reducing resistance to development plans. Jon Broome wrote about “dweller control,” an idea developed by John Turner in the 1970s. Broome, “Mass Housing Cannot Be Sustained,” in Peter Blundell Jones, Doina Petrescu and Jeremy Till (eds), Architecture & Participation (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2005), 66–7. Broome cited R. Fichter, J. Turner and P. Grenell, “The Meaning of Autonomy,” in J. Turner and R. Fichter (eds), Freedom to Build: Dweller Control of the Housing Process (New York: Macmillan, 1972). 22 Brigitte Franzen, “The Significance of Tower Block Architecture for Stephen Willats,” in Casser and Zeigler, Art Society Feedback, 89. 23 Stephen Willats, “The Counter-Consciousness in Vertical Living,” Control Magazine 11(1979), 5. Two months after completion of the project (in October 1978), Willats interviewed a number of residents, visitors, and project operators about their experience of the project. Richard Cork is quoted and then identified in the references. This article is illustrated with a photograph of the Skeffington Court tower in relation to some of the low-rise housing.

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24 The Greater London Council withdrew resident caretakers and maintenance began to decline over a number of years. John Hayes, in his 1979 thesis, indicated that “tenant participation schemes” were not effective in power sharing, citing Colin Ward, Tenants Take Over (London: The Architectural Press, 1974). Hayes noted that standardized procedures designed to handle large numbers of tenants meant that individuals often were poorly served. J. L. Hayes, “The Association of London Housing Estates: A Study in Contemporary Urban Social History,” MPhil thesis (Canterbury University of Kent, 1979), Chapter 6, 1–2, London Metropolitan Archives, LMA/4196/07/004. 25 Stephen Willats, Beyond the Plan: The Transformation of Personal Space in Housing (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Academy, 2001), 20. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 22. 28 The Third Problem Display is called “Thinking about what we need to make home improvements,” and features a young white woman and white man; the Fifth Problem Display, “Finding a way of getting out and enjoying ourselves with other people,” focuses on a middle-aged white couple. 29 Willats, “Counter-Consciousness in Vertical Living,” 9. 30 Recordings with participants from autumn 1978 are available via Audio Arts TGA200414/7/3 Tate Archive, London, UK: Stephen Willats, Vertical Living supplement © William Furlong, January 1, 1980, www.t​ate.o​rg.uk​/audi​o-art​s/ sup​pleme​nts/s​tephe​n-wil​lats-​verti​cal-l​iving​ (accessed July 16, 2015). 31 In another publication, Representing the Possible, Willats dated The Twin Towers as 1975 (London: Victoria Miro, 2014), n.p. The date is given as 1977 in Casser and Zeigler, Art Society Feedback, 151. 32 Willats, “Counter-Consciousness,” 11. 33 Willats, Beyond the Plan, 22. Franzen dates Willats’s use of the term “counter-consciousness” to 1979, “Significance of Tower Block” 93, which was when he published his essay in Control using that phrase. 34 Franzen, “Significance of Tower Block,” 83, quoting from A State of Agreement (2008) www.c​ontro​lmaga​zine.​org/s​tateo​fagre​ement​.php (accessed May 22, 2015). 35 Gordon Pask, “The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics,” AD 39 (September 1969), 495. 36 Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York: Routledge, 2001), 72. 37 Stephen Willats, The New Reality (Derry, Northern Ireland: The Orchard Gallery, 1982), 5. 38 Catherine Mason, A Computer in the Art Room: The Origins of British Computer Arts 1950–80 (Fakenham, UK: JJG Publishing, 2008), 4. 39 Ranulph Glanville, “Second-Order Cybernetics,” in Francisco Parra-Luna (ed), Systems Science and Cybernetics: Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (Oxford: EoLSS Publishers, electronic, 2003) http://cepa.info/2326 (accessed June 28, 2017).

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40 Franzen, “Significance of Tower Block,” 85. 41 Ibid., 89. 42 This symbiosis helps define the cybernetic aspects of Willats’s tower block projects. Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter extends this idea further than Willats would have done in the 1970s, I think, but, by thinking transversally, her writing puts Willats’s approach in relief by insisting on “the interlacing of the mechanosphere, the social sphere, and the inwardness of subjectivity.” Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 114. She drew here on Félix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies ([1986] 2000). 43 Muthesius and Glendinning, Tower Block, 277. 44 Redevelopment and motorway construction coincided with the merger of Chiswick and Brentford into the Borough of Hounslow. This reorganization created many tensions between the local municipalities and the Greater London Council (GLC). John Davis, “From GLC to GLA: London Politics from Then to Now,” in Joe Kerr and Andrew Gibson (eds), London: from Punk to Blair (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), 109–16. 45 William Furlong and Stephen Willats, “Brentford Towers,” Audio Arts 8:1:Side B (January 1, 1986) www.t​ate.o​rg.uk​/audi​o-art​s/vol​ume-8​/numb​er-1 (accessed July 17, 2015). 46 Willats Archive, National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Lisson Gallery mailer. Thanks to Matt O’Dell, archivist and registrar at Lisson Gallery, London, for giving me access to the Lisson materials related to Willats in April 2015. 47 Furlong and Willats, “Brentford Towers.” 48 Ibid. 49 Willats reproduced participant names, photographs, display boards, and transcripts of interviews in Between Buildings and People, 108–23, as well as in Beyond the Plan, 58–61. 50 Stephen Willats, Explanatory text, Brentford Towers, Chiswick Library Archives, London. Thanks to James Marshall for helping me view this material. The Chiswick Library houses the archive of materials related to Brentford Towers. At Chiswick, there are only twelve display boards. I do not know if the initial fifteen were all created, or where the other three might be if they were. Transcripts of interviews with Mr. Spiteri and Ms. Wood, as well as some documentary images, were published in Willats, Beyond the Plan, 58–9; 60–1. 51 Willats, Between Buildings and People, 108. 52 Stephen Willats, “Brentford Towers,” Artwork as Social Model, 16C. 53 Willats, Between Buildings and People, 109. 54 This excerpt ends with “In fact the acts of making and reception become mutually bound.” I used this quotation to title Chapter 2. Stephen Willats, “Specifying the Audience,” Artwork as Social Model, 15A. 55 Richard Cork, “Art,” The Listener 2947(February 13, 1986), 37. Other accounts of Brentford Towers include a photocopy of a clipping in Willats’s

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archives by Robert Harris, “A Look at Life in the Towers,” that has no further citation information, and Waldemar Januszczack, “The Other Flat Earth Society,” The Guardian (October 26, 1985), 11. 56 The transcript of Willats’s interview with Mr. Mitchell is published in Between Buildings and People, 111. 57 The transcript of Willats’s interview with Ms. Wood is published in Between Buildings and People, 113–15. 58 Willats, Explanatory text, Brentford Towers. 59 Ibid. 60 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 20. Bennett noted that “context” does not capture “vibrant matter” to the extent she intended; thus her use of the term “assemblage” (29). I admit “context” is probably too human-centric, but it has the advantage of being a familiar term. 61 In an interview with the author, Willats called the council “leftist,” May 6, 2014. Colin Bloxham was the arts officer whom I believe Willats worked with, though I have been unable to trace him. I appreciate the help of Andrea Cameron and James Marshall of Chiswick Library. Muthesius and Glendinning, Tower Block, 277. 62 Willats, Explanatory text, Brentford Towers; Muthesius and Glendinning, Tower Block, 310: We have referred to the Architectural Review’s tradition of selecting unflattering pictures of buildings it wanted to condemn. . . . Similar methods were used in the equally influential onslaught of 1967 [in Architectural Review] on high blocks, entitled “The failure of housing,” and edited by Nicholas Taylor. 63 Willats, Between Buildings and People, 22–3. Willats’s work, Between Institutions was featured in AND: Journal of Art and Art Education 13/14(1987). Helen Chadwick (1953–96) created Model Institution in 1981–4; Willats published this work in Control Magazine 12(1981). See also Stephen Walker, Helen Chadwick: Constructing Identities between Art and Architecture (London: I.B.Tauris, 2013), 6–11; Walker, “Helen Chadwick: The Model Institution and Personal Identity,” in Soumyen Bandyopadhyay and Guillermo Garma-Montiel (eds), The Territories of Architectural Identity: Architecture in the Age of Evolving Globalisation (London: Routledge, 2013); and the reinstallation and reconsideration of Chadwick’s work by Hive for “The House of the Noble Man,” Boswall House, Cornwall Terrace, Frieze Art Fair (October 2010), text Douglas Park and Charlotte Norwood https​://tr​inity​align​ed.fi​les.w​ordpr​ess.c​om/20​12/02​/hive​_mode​l_ins​titut​ion_w​ eb1.p​df (accessed July 23, 2015). 64 Interview with author, February 20, 2014; Stephen Willats, Concrete Window (Antwerp: Annie Gentils, 1991), n.p. 65 Wates is “viable economically for the building of 250 dwellings in high-rise blocks . . . of flats up to 25 stories.” Rudolph M.E. Diamant, Industrialised Building (London: Iliffe & Sons, 1968), 25; system-building was also used at Feltham, 28. See also Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material History (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 159–65.

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66 For further human history of the Brentford area, see www.hounslow.info/ libraries/local- history-archives/discover-hounslow/#bre (accessed July 20, 2015). 67 Stephen Willats, “Art Creating Society,” Control Magazine 14 (September 1990), 1. 68 Stephen Willats, “Art Creating Society,” statement in Modern Art Oxford archives, Oxford, UK. Thanks to Jonathan Weston, Programme Coordinator, MAO, for giving me access to the materials related to Willats. 69 Willats persuaded director-curator David Elliott at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford to set up the symposium. Jonas Magnusson, Axel Wieder, and Cecilia Grönberg, “Self-Organised Publishing/Publishing as SelfOrganisation—an Interview with Stephen Willats (London, November 19, 2015),” OEI Journal 71–72(Stockholm: Statens Kulturråd, 2016), 218. The list of invitees to “Art Creating Society” is a trove for future research. I generated this list from documents in the archive of Modern Art Oxford; asterisks indicate people listed in the final program: AUSTRIA: Richard Kriesche*; BELGIUM: Luc Deleu*, Ria Pacquée*, Marc Schepers*, Daniel Dewaele*; CANADA: Mark Lewis*; FINLAND: Timo Valjakka; FRANCE: Fred Forêt*, Frank Popper; GERMANY: Frank Barth*; Ivan Dusanek*, Lili Fischer*, Hilmar Liptow*, Ilke Ronig*, Bernhard Sandfort*, Rob Schremmer*, Andreas Seltzer*, Endre Tót*; NETHERLANDS: Jan Hoet*, Regina Maas*, Phillip Peters*, Gert Meijerink*, Michael Gibbs*, Pink*, Martijn van Nieuwenhuzen, Rob Schrama; POLAND: Jaroslaw Koslowski*; SWITZERLAND: Lucius Burkhardt*, Sigmar Gassert, Christian Philip Müller*; UK: Black Film Collective, Jon Bewley* (Edge 90), Brian Chadwick*, Simon Cutts*, David Dawson*, Ernest Edmonds*, Declan McGonagle, Jill Morgan*, Artangel Trust (John Carson* and Roger Took*), Art and Society*, Gray Watson*, Andrew Wilson*, Projects UK (Simon Herbert*), Peter Clark, David Batchelor, Stephen Bann*; USA: Dennis Adams*, Dan Graham, Vito Acconci*, Martha Rosler*, Guerilla Group (I assume this is Guerilla Art Action Group), John Ahearn, Anita Koutini, Tim Rollins* and KOS, Lawrence Weiner*. The ten-day event was funded by the British Council, the German Embassy, Canada House, and Goethe Institute of London. 70 Documentation about Multi-Storey Mosaic was published in a booklet of the same name (London: Control, 1990). In Beyond the Plan, 49–54, Willats gave dates of both 1980 (an error, I assume) and 1990. Willats’s website uses 1990: stephenwillats.com (accessed July 20, 2015). Multi-Storey Mosaic was supported by the Hounslow Borough Council, the Elephant Trust, and the Greater London Arts Association. 71 Willats, Beyond the Plan, illustrated the work between two residents (50). A flier for the work, in the Willats material at the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, noted there were eight participants. Four installations were placed on landings in Homecourt, one of the tower blocks. Between April and October 1990, Willats also collaborated on From a Walk to the Supermarket with a resident at Highfields Estate. See Stephen Willats, Conceptual Living (London: Victoria Miro, 1991), n.p.

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72 The mixed development of Warwick and Brindley Estate (1958–62) was more completely executed than the housing by Max Lock and Associates at Brentford Towers. See Stephen Willats, Tower Mosaic: Brinklow House, Princethorpe House (London: Control, 1992), and Sharon Irish, “Art in Public at Warwick and Brindley Estate, London,” in Maren Harnack, Sebastian Haumann, Karin Berkemann, Mario Tvrtkovic, Tobias Michael Wolf and Stephanie Herold (eds), Community Spaces: Conception, Appropriation, Identity (Berlin: ISR Impulse Online/Institut für Stadt- und Regionalplanung, 2015), 78–89. Many thanks to Sebastian Haumann and Maren Harnack for organizing, with others, the “Community Spaces” conference in Darmstadt, Germany, in 2012, when I first presented this paper, and then for including my chapter and editing the publication. Willats, Beyond the Plan, 64, 74–5, 86, documents Living Mosaic in Bath. Museum Mosaic: Stephen Willats (Liverpool: Tate Gallery Liverpool, 1994) is a small booklet that accompanied the exhibition and is held at the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Willats also made Book Mosaic in Helsinki in 1990. 73 Willats, Beyond the Plan, 49. 74 Stephen Willats, Multi-Storey Mosaic (London: Control, 1990), n.p. The library at Chiswick has the display boards and worksheets related to this project. A large preparatory worksheet indicates a number of directions Willats considered, and which he developed in other works, such as “contained realities that typify contemporary society: housing block, office block, shopping centre, leisure centre.” Many thanks to librarian James Marshall for helping me see all this work. 75 Willats, “Conceptual Living (1988),” Conceptual Living, n.p. This brief statement is also reprinted in Breitwieser, Modernologies, 210. 76 Michael Archer, “Recent Project Works,” Stephen Willats: Three Essays (ICA London/Mappin Art Gallery Sheffield, 1986), 29. 77 Since Hunter House has been refurbished, it is hard to tell if Willats used its image in this collage. 78 Willats, Artwork as Social Model, 23A. The testimony of another resident is on 23C. 79 Andrea Cameron et al., Feltham and Its Library Past and Present, rev. edn (London: Hounslow Library Local Studies and Hounslow Cultural and Community Studies, [1986] 2006). 80 Andrea Cameron interview with author, May 13, 2014. I so appreciate Ms. Cameron’s willingness to visit me in Hounslow. 81 Architects for Social Responsibility, “The Truth about Grenfell Tower: A Report” (July 2017) https​://ar​chite​ctsfo​rsoci​alhou​sing.​wordp​ress.​com/2​017/0​ 7/21/​the-t​ruth-​about​-gren​fell-​tower​-a-re​port-​by-ar​chite​cts-f​or-so​cial-​housi​ng/ (accessed March 27, 2018). 82 Caroline Mortimer, “Chalcots Estate Evacuation: Camden Residents Face Third Night in Leisure Centre amid Grenfell Cladding Aftermath,” The Independent (June 25, 2017) www.i​ndepe​ndent​.co.u​k/new​s/uk/​home-​news/​ chalc​ots-e​state​-camd​en-co​uncil​-clad​ding-​ fire-​risk-​grenf​ell-t​ower-​georg​ia-go​

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uld-a​78078​01.ht​ml (accessed March 27, 2018). Thanks to Lisa Goodrum for alerting me to this evacuation. 83 For more information on the Grenfell Action Group, see their blog, https​://gr​ enfel​lacti​ongro​up.wo​rdpre​ss.co​m/ (accessed March 27, 2018). 84 Willats, Artwork as Social Model, 26A. 85 Meiling Cheng, In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 129–30. 86 Suzanne Lacy, “Debated Territory: Toward a Critical Language for Public Art,” in Suzanne Lacy (ed), Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1995), 178. Also quoted by Cheng, In Other Los Angeleses, 130. 87 Martha Rosler, If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory and Social Activism, A Project by Martha Rosler, Brian Wallis (ed) (Seattle,WA: Bay Press, 1991), based on works she did in the 1980s. 88 Martha Rosler, “Brunch à la Loft from The Rewards of Money,” Control Magazine 14(1990), 21. In the original photomontage, the foreground was in color and the background in black and white. Thanks to Ms. Rosler and her gallery, Mitchell-Inness & Nash, for their prompt cooperation. This is the whole text published in Control, p. 20: Housing is a human right—but one that has fallen under siege. In the US, the past couple of decades have witnessed a wholesale return of prospering professionals to cities, in a process dubbed “gentrification.” The twin pincers of gentrification and abandonment have combined to displace the poor, mostly nonwhite residents to whom the “inner city” was left as a result of the “white flight” and suburbanisation of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Artists are often seen as a pivotal group easing the return of the middle class to centre cities. Ironically, artists are often themselves displaced by the same wealthy professionals—their clientele—who have followed them into these now-chic neighbourhoods, moving into what used to be the artists’ lofts. Urban cycles of decline, decay, and abandonment, followed by a “renaissance” of rehabilitation, renovation, and reconstruction, may appear to be natural processes. In fact, however, the fall and rise of cities are consequent not only on financial and productive cycles and State fiscal crises but also on social policy. The New York story is painfully familiar: The price exacted for relative fiscal stability has been a wholesale turnover of the city to banks and developers. While Manhattan “Manhattanizes,” sprouting highly concentrated zones of grandiose office towers and palatial hotels and residences, the “outer boroughs” suffer planned shrinkage—the withdrawal of essential services, from fire protection to bank mortgages. Privatisation and de-control of housing stock, together with the withdrawal of federal funding for low-income construction, have slashed the proportion of renters and driven the number of homeless skyward. And projects in New York have provided models for many other Western cities. In London “loft living” and wholesale re-engineering of working-class dockside communities into a sanitized professional-managerial ghetto is

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exemplified by Docklands and Canary Wharf, a mega-project backed by international capital. No surprise in the country whose national government has a deep understanding with our own, and which has a lesson still to teach the US on the selling off and selling out of the public sector. Rosler has published widely and been published about frequently. See, for example, Decoys and Disruptions, Selected Writings, 1975–2001 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004); and Nina Möntmann, “(Under)Privileged Spaces: On Martha Rosler’s ‘If You Lived Here . . . ,’” e- flux (2009) www.e​-flux​.com/​ journ​al/09​/6137​0/und​er-pr​ivile​ged-s​paces​-on-m​artha​-rosl​er-s-​if-yo​u-liv​ed-he​ re-82​30/ (accessed July 20, 2017). 89 Charlie Gere, “Armagideon Time,” in Kerr and Gibson, London from Punk to Blair, 117–22, wrote about the film The Long Good Friday, released in 1980 and showing the Docklands right before it began “regeneration.” According to Gere, the film “is an allegorical anticipation of the dislocations about to be wrought by a decade or so of capitalist deregulation, unfettered development and globalization” (117). This same book, London from Punk to Blair, published photos by Mike Seaborne of wharves on the Isle of Dogs (1984). 90 Since 1997, the Isle of Dogs has been part of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets: www.l​ddc-h​istor​y.org​.uk/i​od/in​dex.h​tml#H​istor​y (accessed April 8, 2015); www.b​ritis​h-his​tory.​ac.uk​/surv​ey-lo​ndon/​vols4​3-4/p​p686-​691 (accessed April 6, 2015). 91 Michael Edwards et al., London Borough of Tower Hamlets Central Stepney SRB: Final Evaluation (May 2003), 5. Thanks to Ben Campkin of the Bartlett School of Planning for sharing this report with me. The article, “The Colonizers of the Isle of Dogs,” The Times (June 10, 1974), 14, described the contrasts between the “posh tastes” of the middle-class people moving into private residences and the shopping habits of the working-class people who had long lived in the area. 92 Rosler, If You Lived Here, 15. 93 Ibid., 35. 94 For further information on the Docklands Community Poster Project, see also Loraine Leeson, Art: Process: Change: Inside a Socially Situated Practice (London: Routledge, 2018). 95 Email correspondence between the author and Loraine Leeson and Peter Dunn (November 11 and 12, 2015). Dunn noted: The process began with a discussion about what we wished to communicate with an image, then we would go away and work on it and bring it back to the group—possibly several times as the image progressed—until the final stage. We did not relinquish our skills and neither did they—we pooled them so that the whole was greater than the sum of the parts. I’m grateful to Leeson and Dunn for their helpful clarifications about this project. 96 www.a​rte-o​fchan​ge.co​m/con​tent/​dockl​ands-​commu​nity-​poste​r-pro​ject-​1981-​ 8 (accessed October 1, 2015). Joan Gibbons, Art & Advertising (London:

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I.B.Tauris, 2005), n.p. The photomurals were funded by borough councils and the Greater London Council. See also Javier Rodrigo, “Docklands Community Poster Project, Interview with Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson,” in A. Collados et al. (eds), Transductores (Granada, Spain: Centro José Guerrero, 2010), 89–97; 254–6. http://cspace.org.uk/articles/ (accessed October 1, 2015). 97 Quoted by Peter Suchin, “Mistaken as Red,” Mute (March 26, 2007) www. m​etamu​te.or​g/edi​toria​l/art​icles​/mist​aken-​red (accessed October 1, 2015); John Roberts, Postmodernism, Politics and Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 97–8. 98 Diane Ghirardo, Architecture after Modernism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 181. 99 Another relevant project was Vibe Detector (1998–2003), a years-long collaborative undertaking by artist Jeanne van Heeswijk (b. 1964) about rapid “regeneration” in east London. It was a mobile sound kit that was moved to about 100 events in east London and involved 3,000 participants. Inspired by the curator Amy Plant and assisted by Raoul Bunschoten of CHORA (an office for architecture and urbanism), van Heeswijk collected Londoners’ responses to urban changes. See Jeanne van Heeswijk, “The Artist Will Have to Decide Whom to Serve,” in Andrea Phillips and Fulya Erdemci (eds), Actors, Agents and Attendants: Social Housing—Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 77–89; www.jeanneworks.net (accessed March 28, 2018); Nato Thompson (ed), “Jeanne van Heeswijk,” Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991– 2011 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012), 258–9; and Kotryna Valiukevičiūtė, “Radicalising the Local: Jeanne van Heeswijk Interview,” ALF03 (2013) http:​//lei​diniu​.arch​fonda​s.lt/​en/al​f-03/​inter​views​/jean​ne-va​ n-hee​swijk​(accessed March 28, 2018). 100 The twenty-five-story Kelson House was designed in 1964 by Gordon Tait (1912–99; firm of Sir John Burnet, Tait & Partners) for the London County Council on a marvelous site. In a May 24, 1992, interview with Willats, one of the residents stated: “[I]t’s all on its own on the edge of the river like a great big monolith that just sticks out above the rest of the buildings around here.” Willats, Between Buildings and People, 137. 101 Willats had sited a project between two buildings before, in Leeds, for the 1987 From Different Worlds. On the work in Leeds, with residents of Marlborough Towers and Lovell Park Towers, see “From Different Worlds,” AND: Journal of Art and Art Education 15/16(1988). The project was installed at both towers and in the City Art Gallery. 102 Stephen Willats, Personal Islands (London: 5 London Mews, 1993). Other documentation of this project can be found in Stephen Willats, Vision and Reality (Axminster, UK: Uniform Books, 2016), 217–37. 103 Willats, Vision and Reality, 223. 104 The architects of Exchange Tower were Frederick Gibberd Coombes & Partners and the main contractor was Fairclough. www.b​ritis​h-his​tory.​ac.uk​/ surv​ey-lo​ndon/​vols4​3- 4/pp707-724#h3-0018 (accessed July 22, 2015).

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105 Stephen Willats to Val Wridgway, Charter PLC, July 14, 1992, Willats Archive. Many thanks to Stephen Willats for making these materials accessible to me. 106 The staff at Museum of London Docklands was so helpful in working with me to locate these buildings among the ongoing construction in May 2016. 107 Ghirardo, Architecture after Modernism, 184.

Chapter 5 1 See, for example, R. Ingham and Ronald Barham, “Dis-investment in Housing—The U.K. Experience,” International Journal for Housing Science and Its Applications 22:1(1998), 37–47; Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture: The History of a Social Experiment (London: Routledge, 2001). 2 Dawn Foster, “Right to Buy: A History of Margaret Thatcher’s Controversial Policy,” The Guardian (December 7, 2015) www.theguardian.com/housingnetwo​rk/20​15/de​c/07/​housi​ng-ri​ght-t​o-buy​-marg​aret-​thatc​her-d​ata (accessed January 1, 2018). 3 Graham Stewart, Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s (London: Atlantic Books, 2013), 184: “Privatization and an end to widespread industrial subsidies ensured that the trade and industry’s department’s budget fell by 38.2 per cent in real terms.” 4 John Davis, “From GLC to GLA: London Politics from Then to Now,” in Joe Kerr and Andrew Gibson (eds), London: From Punk to Blair (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), 109. “There has been no more turbulent period in London politics than the last quarter of the twentieth century, years that saw the emergence of radical forms of municipal socialism and municipal conservatism, clashes between local and central government leading to the abolition of the Greater London Council, and, finally, the establishment of a new, experimental, elected mayoralty.” 5 See Harris Beider, White Working-Class Voices: Multiculturalism, Community-Building and Change (Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2015), 62, 81. “The emergence of punk and 2 Tone [a union of diverse elements of the working class, merging to celebrate difference] created a platform for diverse communities to reshape identities based on multiculturalism, class identity and space.” 6 Willats frequently wrote about self-organization. Here is a representative excerpt: As an abstraction, self-organisation is the notion of a system determining its own parts and how each part behaves in relation to the other. As an actuality affecting the way we live, it is expressed in the basic drive to create one’s own order, both psychologically and interpersonally, and to project it on to what is there, leading to an inherent relativity in perception. Such a drive to express the existence of the self is in implicit opposition to the universal determinism inherent in the reductions made by institutional

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society. It therefore exists as a counter-consciousness often in marginal or coexisting relationship with those dominant norms. Stephen Willats, Between Buildings and People (London: Academy Editions, 1996), 8. 7 Cf. Stine Hebert and Anne Szefer Karlsen (eds), Self-Organised (London: Open Editions/Hordaland Art Centre, 2013), 12, 16. 8 Stephen Willats, The Artist as Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour ([London: Gallery House Press, 1973] Occasional Papers, 2010), 74. 9 Bruce Clarke and Mark B.N. Hansen, “Introduction: Neocybernetic Emergence,” in Bruce Clarke and Mark B.N. Hansen (eds), Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 7, quoting N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 280. Beyond the scope of this book, Willats’s interest in self-organization relates to “emergence,” that concept within systems theory that describes something large and different emerging out of many smaller contributions that do not necessarily resemble the larger entity. 10 See Dale Lake, Perceiving and Behaving (New York: Teachers College Press, 1970), 18–21, a book cited by Willats in a number of his own publications. 11 Stephen Willats, Intervention and Audience (London: Coracle Press, 1986), n.p. 12 Suzanne Lacy, “Debated Territory: Toward a Critical Language for Public Art,” in Suzanne Lacy (ed.), Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1995), 174, 178. See also Sharon Irish, Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 13–21. 13 Irish, Suzanne Lacy, 13. Meiling Cheng’s work has been crucial to my thinking. She asks how, in Lacy’s work, the “audience voluntarily become[s] . . . the artist’s participatory other/selves?” Cheng, In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 130, italics in original. 14 Stephen Johnstone, “Introduction: Recent Art and the Everyday,” in Stephen Johnstone (ed.), The Everyday (London: Whitechapel/Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 12–13. Johnstone quoted Stephen Harris and Deborah Berke, The Architecture of the Everyday (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), 28. 15 Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 123. 16 Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson, “Adjusting Culture to Practical Function: Reflections and Projections,” Control Magazine 10(1977), 8. 17 Jonathan Hughes, “Non-planning for a Change,” Mute 1:21 (September 10, 2001). www.m​etamu​te.or​g/edi​toria​l/art​icles​/non-​plann​ing-c​hange​ (accessed July 17, 2017).The Enterprise Zone was one outcome of the “non-plan” idea introduced by Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall, and Cedric Price in 1969. See also Banham et al., “Non-plan: An Experiment in Freedom,” New Society (March 1969), 435–43. Hughes noted: “Tellingly, the impetus behind

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the Docklands had, in part, come from [urban geographer] Peter Hall’s continued support for the relaxation of controls during the 1970s.” Other useful citations include Paul Barker, “Non-plan Revisited: Or the Real Way Cities Grow,” Journal of Design History 12:2(1999), 95–110; and Anthony Fontenot, “Notes toward a History of Non-planning,” Places (January 2015) https://doi.org/10.22269/150112 (accessed July 21, 2017). 18 Transport for London, “Docklands Light Railway,” https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/ about- tfl/c​ultur​e-and​-heri​tage/​londo​ns-tr​anspo​rt-a-​histo​ry/dl​r (accessed July 25, 2015). 19 Diane Ghirardo, Architecture after Modernism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 176–94. 20 The 1979 exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery was curated by Martin Rewcastle; Nicholas Serota was then the gallery director. The communitybased projects, in addition to Working within a Defined Context, included Sorting Out Other People’s Lives and The Place of Work. 21 In an interview, Willats said that the Whitechapel Gallery provided the connection for him to the London Docklands authorities. Nayia Yiakoumaki, “Interview with Stephen Willats,” Stephen Willats: Concerning Our Present Way of Living (London: Archive Gallery/Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2014), n.p. 22 Yiakoumaki, Stephen Willats, n.p. Many thanks to Nayia Yiakoumaki for her help during my visits to Whitechapel. 23 Texts on Working in a Defined Context include Panel 1: “If all we got coming in is ten ton we only want one gang.” Other texts read: “Find the connection”; “There’s no point in hanging around.” Panel 2: “I sign his pass and punch a hole in it.” “Associate the function”; “We will cash in and help one another.” Panel 3: “There’s a small gratia payment for doing it.” “Re-order the relationship”; “Whether there’s a possible job has a great deal of effect.” Panel 4: “We finalise everything they have actually done.” “Create the meaning”; “Dockers realised long ago that education is a step forward.” 24 I so appreciate artist and tugboat captain Pamela Hepburn’s thinking with me about the Port of London and the rise of containerization in the 1970s. Also, thanks to her I have a landing spot in New York City and a companion with whom to visit art exhibitions, such as English Summer, at Elizabeth Dee Gallery in July 2015, which included two of Willats’s works. 25 In Willats’s drawing, The Twin Towers (1977), the axioms are: Behavior, Identity, Value, and Code; related to that image Willats wrote that “identity” and “value” were critical counter views. This note appears on the lower right of the drawing. 26 Yiakoumaki, “Interview,” n.p. 27 See Chris Ellmers and Alex Werner, Dockland Life: A Pictorial History of London’s Docks, 1860–1970 (London: Mainstream Publishing/Museum of London, 1991). This book also noted that the 1951 film, Waters of Time, directed by Basil Wright, provided a visual documentary of the operation of the port (p. 111).

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28 http:​//ste​phenw​illat​s.com​/work​/work​ing-w​ithin​-defi​ned-c​ontex​t/ He distilled the steps thus: “1. Reception of item—home reality; 2. Administration of item—social reality; 3. Handling of item—economic reality; 4. Dispatch of item—cultural reality” (accessed July 26, 2015). 29 Ellmers and Werner, Dockland Life, 188. 30 Grant Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 34, 31–2. 31 Andrew Pickering, “Islands of Stability: Engaging Emergence from Cellular Automata to the Occupy Movement,” Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, 2014:1 (May 2014), 130. 32 Kester, The One and the Many, 34. 33 David V. Newman, “Emergence and Strange Attractors,” Philosophy of Science 63:2(June 1996), 246, quoting C.D. Broad, The Mind and Its Place in Nature (New York: Humanities Press, 1929), 23. 34 Living with Practical Realities explanatory panel at Whitechapel; from Whitechapel Archives, WAG/EXH/2/285/1 1979 exhibit, London; transcripts (1977) indicate that Mrs. Moran moved from Shepherd’s Bush, where she had lived for twenty-five years, and previously on an estate at White City, both parts of London. Thanks to Nayia Yiakoumaki, curator, Archive Gallery, at the Whitechapel for making these materials accessible to me. 35 Panel 2 shows Mrs. Moran in profile moving along the walk that leads to her building. The text on Panel 2 reads, “When deciding what I need it’s not much use looking at other people. Can you find a solution that will help me change the economic realities I now face.” The first concept frame in Panel 2 has text in rectangles that read: “On a careful budget it is the price that matters”; “Where I shop is restricted by where I can go”; “Not worrying about that bit extra”; and “To go out means spending what I collect each Tuesday.” Images in the second concept frame show allotment gardens and a fenced construction site, together with the text “Using the memory of past conditions to build ourselves a more secure future”; and “Cooperating with others who have found their own alternative to the system.” Panel 3 shows a full-length profile of Mrs. Moran walking in the car park. The text reads, “For company I usually have to wait until people come to visit me at my place. What do you propose is the way for me to form new relationships within this isolated tower.” The concept frame around the image of Skeffington Court reads: “Trying to brighten up the outside landing”; “Getting by without an official response”; “Forgetting the fear of travelling in the lifts at night”; and “I never feel safe going out after the schools finish.” Below that set of images and text is the second concept frame for Panel 3, which includes rectangles with the text: “Acquiring somewhere which will enable us all to form into a real community”; and “Making potential resources available to everyone as a vehicle for social interaction.” In addition to the car park, Panel 3 includes photographs of the canal that runs along the edge of the estate and a nearby shop front. 36 “The symbolic world was presented to the viewer in association with a question that would transform what was depicted into a problem situation for

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the viewer, who in response would perceptually link up discrete references.” Stephen Willats, Beyond the Plan: The Transformation of Personal Space in Housing (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Academy, 2001), 16–18. 37 Stephen Willats, Artwork as Social Model: A Manual of Questions and Propositions (Sheffield: RGAP, 2012), 12B. In this brief section, “Embracing Complexity,” Willats noted: “The psychologist Basil Bernstein showed in his work in the early 1960s that meaning surrounding a narrowly derived language tied to a specific context is indeed richer than a loosely defined language tied to nothing in particular. However such a restricted language does require a prior knowledge of its references.” 38 Willats, The New Reality (Derry, Northern Ireland: Orchard Gallery, 1982), 3. The Orchard Gallery promoted artists’ writings; Willats’s writing was commissioned by then-director Declan McGonagle. See Gabriel N. Gee, “The Catalogues of the Orchard Gallery: A Contribution to Critical and Historical Discourses in Northern Ireland, 1978–2003,” Journal of Art Historiography 9(December 2013), 5, 6. 39 Stefan Muthesius and Miles Glendinning, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (London: Yale University Press/Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1993), 95. 40 Willats, New Reality, 3. 41 David Cowan and Morag McDermont, Regulating Social Housing: Governing Decline (London: Routledge-Cavendish, 2006), xii, xv. 42 Stephen Willats, The Lurky Place (London: Lisson Gallery, 1978). While he knew about the area, Willats did not start exploring the wasteland near Avondale Estate until 1976. Willats, Beyond the Plan, 47, n. 8. See also Willats, New Reality, 18, n. 11. While The Lurky Place is not readily available, Willats’s statement about it was published in Stephen Willats: Concerning Our Present Way of Living (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery/Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1979), 41, and again in Stephen Johnstone (ed.), The Everyday: Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 184–6. Stephen Willats, “Transformers,” Beeld 4 (Amsterdam, 1989), was reprinted in Anthony Hudek, The Object (London/Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2014), 77–80; it is about The Lurky Place. 43 Stephen Bann, “A Hole in the Wire,” The Boundary Rider: 9th Biennale of Sydney (The Biennale of Sydney, 1992), 25. See also Stephen Willats, “Pat Purdy and the Glue Sniffers Camp,” in Anja Casser and Philipp Ziegler (eds), Stephen Willats: Art Society Feedback (Nürnberg: Verlag für modern Kunst, 2010), 382–91. 44 The London art scene, while far from monolithic, was remarkably marketdriven. Charles and Doris Saatchi opened their art gallery in 1985 (the firm, Saatchi and Saatchi was a leading British advertising firm). In the 1990s, the Saatchi Gallery promoted the Young British Artists (YBA), who showed together first in 1988 and were labeled as a group by Michael Corris in 1992. Many who became part of the YBA were enrolling as students at Goldsmiths College in the mid-1980s, inspired by Saatchi’s promotion of contemporary art of the United States. Stewart, Bang!, 234.

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45 Willats, Intervention and Audience, n.p. 46 See Stephen Willats, “Pat Purdy and Anne Tuffin,” Beyond the Plan: The Transformation of Personal Space in Housing (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Academy, 2001), 82–3. 47 Stephen Willats, “Pat Purdy and the Glue Sniffers’ Camp,” Between Buildings and People, 58. Italics added for emphasis. 48 Bann, “A Hole in the Wire,” 27. 49 Rosemary Shirley wrote of the litter “as evidence of how the place is used by local residents almost as a zone of resistance.” Further, “glue, a substance which in the everyday world is used for construction and repair, . . . is transformed into a drug—a means of communal exuberance and escape.” Shirley, Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Culture (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015), 80–1. 50 Stephen Willats, “Lessons from Marginal Diversity,” Intervention and Audience (London: Coracle Press, 1986), n.p. 51 Stephen Willats to Keith Hartley, July 13, 1981, Registration Files, GMA 2296, Dean Gallery, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. Willats collected Mark Perry’s zine, Sniffin’ Glue and Other Rock ‘n’ Roll Habits, that Perry published for a year, from July 1976, inspired by a Ramones song. See Mark Perry, in Terry Rawlings (ed.), Sniffin’ Glue: The Essential Punk Accessory (London: Sanctuary Books, 2000). 52 Mark Sladen, “Introduction,” in Mark Sladen and Ariella Yedgar (eds), Panic Attack: Art in the Punk Years (London: Merrell/Barbican, 2007), 9. 53 Christian Kravagna, “Working on the Community: Models of Participatory Practice,” in Anna Dezeuze (ed.), The “Do-It-Yourself” Artwork: Participation from Fluxus to New Media (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 252. Anna Dezeuze pointed out that the imperative form “do” and the indexical pronouns “it” and “yourself” are, grammatically speaking, performative; they are contingent on the specific situation in which they are used. . . . The verb “do” suggests an emphasis on process and actions to be performed by an active spectator in real time and space, while the pronoun “it” remains open, as the result of this process will be determined by each individual’s unique personal experience. Dezeuze, “An Introduction to the ‘Do-It-Yourself’ Artwork,” in The “Do-ItYourself” Artwork, 3–4. Dezeuze provided a useful genealogy of DIY approaches back through twentieth-century art, noting the importance of Frank Popper’s 1975 book, Art, Action and Participation, which was “the first to register the full extent of participatory practices in Europe, North and South America.” Further, as George McKay noted, DIY culture has broad social implications: “Anything from a drop-in advice centre to a living space is evidence of DiY’s aim to combine party and protest, to blur the distinction between action and living.” George McKay (ed.), “DiY Culture: Notes Toward an Intro,” DiY Culture: Party & Protest in Nineties Britain (London: Verso, 1998), 26–7. Dezeuze, too noted this blurring of life and action: “[M]any do-it-yourself artworks have sought to bypass both commercial and institutional modes of display and exchange, in the same way as DIY activists

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have developed independent media such as zines, as well as self-sufficient networks of production and communication.” Dezeuze, The “Do-It-Yourself” Artwork, 8. 54 “Electric Avenue” was number two on the UK singles chart in 1982. The opening lyrics stated: “now in the street there is violence/and lots of work to be done.” Also, a second extended Irish Republican hunger strike in Maze Prison, in which Bobby Sands died along with nine others, occurred in 1980–1, in addition to many more deaths that took place in sectarian violence outside of prison. 55 Paul Rogers was the son of a friend of Willats. See Willats, “Brandon Estate,” Vision and Reality (Axminster: Uniform Books, 2016), 73. 56 The Stockwell Skatepark was built in 1978 by the Lambeth Council. https:// friendsofstockwellskatepark.com/ (accessed March 30, 2016). Brandon Estate deserves more attention and, fortunately, the Municipal Dreams blog has excellent posts about it: https​://mu​nicip​aldre​ams.w​ordpr​ess.c​om/20​15/12​ /15/t​he-br​andon​-esta​te- southwark-part-one/; and https​://mu​nicip​aldre​ams.w​ ordpr​ess.c​om/20​15/12​/22/t​he- brandon-estate-southwark-part-two/ (accessed March 31, 2016). See also “Freeing the Skyline,” The Architect’s Journal 124:3220(November 15, 1956), 686. 57 Stephen Willats, The New Reality, 3. 58 Willats, Beyond the Plan, 103. 59 Willats, New Reality, 6. 60 Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body (New York: Berg, 2001), 156. Borden discussed the history of skate parks in the UK, though no mention was made of Stockwell (pp. 68–71.) 61 Willats reported that he learned about the Cha Cha Club in 1981 from a former student, Kevin Whitney. “The Cha Cha Club,” Flash Art 49:311 (November/December 2016), 61; “Stephen Willats: A Man for the Twenty-First Century,” Modern Matter 8(2014), 42–3; Willats, “Taboo Housing Estate,” Between Buildings and People, 66; Willats, “Tottenham Hale Estate,” Vision and Reality, 99. 62 Willats, Artwork as Social Model, 25B. 63 Tom Holert, “Capsules Out of Control: Stephen Willats and the Heuristics of the Margins,” in Casser and Ziegler, Art Society Feedback, 67. These collaborative works with Cha Cha Club members were usually made in Willats’s studio. He recalled how Stephanie (Willats, his wife) would cook and these young people would show up; there would be a big table in the middle of the studio where they shared dinner before their “one-night” program. Willats lauded their creativity but noted they didn’t have a plan. Interview with author, April 21, 2015, London. 64 Holert, “Capsules Out of Control”; Willats, Between Buildings and People, 72–9; Willats, Beyond the Plan, 130–3 (on Leigh Bowery); and Willats, Artwork as Social Model, 31A. 65 Willats asked how Bowery would like people to react to what he is wearing, and he reflected: “I want them to start thinking why I’m dressed like that, why

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is he using such diverse things, what’s he trying to get at, where does he want to go.” Willats, Between Buildings and People, 76. 66 The Australian-born Bowery, at Willats’s urging, proposed the breeze block tower. Bowery was a performance artist, fashion designer, clubber, actor, and model. Among other publications, see Sue Tilley, Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999). Bowery appeared in Cerith Wyn Evans’s film of 1984, Epiphany, as his selffashioned “Paki from Outer Space.” Sladen and Yedgar, Panic Attack, 16. The 2002 musical Taboo was loosely based on Bowery’s nightclub of that name, which he established in 1985. From 1990 to 1994, Bowery was the model for and subject of a number of paintings and prints by Lucien Freud (1922–2011) www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/freud- leigh-bowery-t06834/ text-summary; www.n​pg.or​g.uk/​colle​ction​s/sea​rch/p​ortra​it/mw​74731​/Leig​ h-Bow​ery-W​hat-i​s-he-​tryin​g- to-get-at-Where-does-he-want-to-go (accessed October 23, 2015). 67 Bowery described the vandalism he and his flatmate did to hasten their move out of their previous flat: “We sort of ended up pretending our front door [in a different part of London] was being burnt down, someone tipped petrol through our letterbox, that the neighbours were hassling us and things like that, so eventually they [the Council] got us this place,” Buildings and People, 73; this interview was reprinted as “Leigh Bowery, 5 March, 1984,” in Modern Matter 8(2014), 50–1. 68 In 1979, Willats completed a two-panel work called The Place of Work made in cooperation with staff of S&D Fashions in east London. The workshop made leather garments. Willats described this work in the booklet, Stephen Willats: Concerning Our Present Way of Living (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2014), n.p. 69 Alistair O’Neill, London: After a Fashion (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 203. 70 Willats, Between Buildings and People, 73. 71 Sonnet Stanfill (ed.), From Club to Catwalk: 80s Fashion (London: V&A Publishing, 2013), 9. 72 O’Neill, London, 202; Stanfill, From Club to Catwalk, 12. “Paki” is considered a disrespectful, even racist, descriptor of people of South Asian descent, but the white-identified Bowery had few qualms about being outrageous. He likely considered it a slang term to label all South Asians. 73 Willats, Artwork as Social Model, 31A. 74 Willats, Between Buildings and People, 74–7. 75 Thanks to the staff of the Heinz Archive who helped me view these drawings on April 16, 2015, at the National Portrait Gallery, London, UK. 76 Stephen Willats, World without Objects (Antwerp: Annie Gentils Gallery, 2013), n.p. 77 Richard Francis, “Stephen Willats,” Three Essays (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1986), 8. Willats explored “rubbish,” or discarded objects in many of his works.

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78 Stephen Willats, “Intervention and Audience,” in Sladen and Yedgar, Panic Attack, 195, 193. 79 Ben Judah, This Is London: Life and Death in the World City (London: Picador, 2016). Thanks to Lisa Goodrum for suggesting I read this book. The lives that Judah portrayed point to painfully stark contrasts in people’s life circumstances. 80 Sara Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 29, 37, 41. 81 Ibid., 32, 34, 35. 82 Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 37ff. 83 Willats, Intervention and Audience, n.p. 84 Willats, Between Buildings and People, 117. 85 Willats, World without Objects, n.p. 86 Willats wrote: “Residents’ conceptualisation made in response to the displays are recorded and also displayed opposite.” Brentford Towers worksheet at Chiswick Central Library, London. Thanks to James Marshall, Local Studies Librarian at Hounslow and Chiswick Libraries, for allowing me to study these materials. 87 Willats, World without Objects, n.p. 88 National Tower Blocks Network, The National Tower Blocks Directory (London: Community Links, 1992), 62. One page from an edition of the Tower Blocks Directory is reproduced in Stephen Willats, Artwork as Social Model, 25C. 89 Private Journeys was financially supported, in part, by the London Borough of Hounslow and the Elephant Trust. Andrea Cameron, then the local history librarian for Hounslow and Chiswick libraries, facilitated connections for Willats at the estate. Faye Duxberry, “Born with History Genes in Me,” Richmond and Twickenham Times (March 31, 2006) www.r​ichmo​ndand​twick​ enham​times​.co.u​k/new​s/720​511.b​orn_w​ith_h​istor​y_gen​es_in​_me/ (accessed April 15, 2016). Ms. Cameron noted that there was a shop in Heston that sold mid-century modern items that had drawn Willats to the area in the first place. Many thanks to Ms. Cameron for meeting me on May 13, 2014; after retiring, she continued to be a local historian of the area, give walking tours and publish. The Leisure Services Department of the Borough of Hounslow, together with Willats, published a booklet on the project, Private Journeys (1994), which is available at the Hounslow Central Library. Worksheets for Private Journeys, drawn by Willats, are housed at the Chiswick Central Library. Thanks to librarians James Marshall and Ann Greene for allowing me to study this material and providing contact information for Ms. Cameron. Willats listed others who helped monitor the project in the community room for its five-day run, including art students Ian Garaghty and Jonathan Goslaan, and artists Denniese Hawysio http://hawrysio.com/about/, John Spinks http:// east.co/artists/johnspinks/, and Andrew Robinson www.shu.ac.uk/faculties/

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aces/media-arts- commu​nicat​ion/s​taff/​Andre​wRobi​nsonp​rofil​e.htm​l (accessed April 15, 2016). 90 Stephen Willats, “Heston Farm Estate, Heston, West London,” Artwork as Social Model, 26D; Willats, “Henry Elba” and “Nicola Astill,” Beyond the Plan, 72–3; 106–7. 91 Stephen Willats, “Private Journeys,” Control Magazine 15 (April 1996), 18–19. 92 Stephen Willats, “Private Journeys Worksheet,” Chiswick Central Library Collection. This large worksheet also had Willats’s list of titles for the piece prior to settling on “Private Journeys”: “Peripheral” and “Possible” were other options. 93 Willats, “Private Journeys,” 19. 94 Willats, “Heston Farm Estate,” 26D. 95 Conversation with author, March 28, 2015, Bristol, UK. I so appreciate the time and insights from this prolific and wise scholar. 96 Stephen Willats, Vision and Reality, 10. 97 Willats’s fifty-four-page artist’s book, Cha Cha Cha, was published by Coracle Press with Lisson Gallery. It combines photographs of the Charing Cross club, portraits of the people there, including Scarlett Cannon, and related texts. 98 Dana Thomas, “Galliano and McQueen: Clubland Couture,” Evening Standard (February 25, 2015) www.s​tanda​rd.co​.uk/l​ifest​yle/e​smaga​zine/​galli​ ano-a​nd-mc​queen​-club​land-​coutu​re-10​06935​6.htm​l (accessed January 8, 2018). Emphasis in original. 99 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 9.

Chapter 6 1 Johanna Burton, “Mystics Rather than Rationalists,” in Donna De Salvo (ed.), Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970 (London: Tate Publishing, 2005), 67. Italics in the original. 2 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 9. 3 Stephen Willats, Through Symbolic Worlds (London: Control, 2002), n.p. 4 Stephen Willats, Surfing with the Attractor (London: South London Gallery, 2012), 21. 5 Stephen Willats, Representing the Possible (London: Victoria Miro, 2014), n.p. 6 Stephen Willats, “The Oxford Community Data Stream,” Control Magazine 19(2014), 19. 7 Paul Pangaro noted that “strange attractor” basically described a system converging on a goal, where the “goal” is learning. Pangaro, “The Past-Future

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of Cybernetics: Conversations, von Foerster and the BCL,” in Albert Mueller and Karl H. Mueller (eds), An Unfinished Revolution? Heinz von Foerster and the Biological Computer Laboratory | BCL 1958–1976, (Vienna: Edition Echoraum, 2007), 164. 8 Heinz von Foerster’s student Gerald (Jerry) F. Brieske (1937–2010), for example, worked on The West London Social Model Resource Project with his then-wife, Nancy Brieske. Jerry Brieske maintained an active correspondence with von Foerster in Illinois in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as with W. Ross Ashby, who was also at Illinois. Jerry Brieske completed his PhD in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois in 1969. The Heinz von Foerster papers containing this correspondence are at the University of Illinois Archives, Record Series 11/6/26. Jerry Brieske worked with Gordon Pask and George Mallen at System Research Ltd, starting in 1969. Thanks to Jamie Hutchinson at the University of Illinois for reminding me of these papers, and thanks to George Mallen in London for sharing his memories of Jerry Brieske. 9 Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Conversations: The Future of Artistic Practice, the Artist as Urbanist” (June 18, 2011; published December 7, 2012) www.youtube.com/ watch?v=5EZwvKCLWZA (accessed March 28, 2016). 10 Hans Ulrich Obrist, “The Social Meaning of Art,” Abitare 504 (July/August 2010), 25. Obrist called attention to an idea known as the “non-plan” in this interview with Willats. The “non-plan” was associated with free zones of unregulated use. See also Paul Barker, “Non-plan Revisited: Or the Real Way Cities Grow,” Journal of Design History 12:2(1999), 97; Jonathan Hughes, “Non-planning for a Change,” Mute 1:21(September 10, 2001); Hughes and Simon Sadler (eds), Non-plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism (London: Routledge, 2000). 11 Raymond Williams, The City and the Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 179, quoting George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical (1866). 12 Katie Allen, “Recession Puts the North–South Divide Back on the Misery Map,” The Guardian (November 9, 2011) www.t​hegua​rdian​.com/​busin​ess/2​ 011/n​ov/10​/nort​h- south-divide-widens-pwc-study (accessed March 19, 2016); John Tomaney, North East England: A Brief Economic History (Newcastle, UK: Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies, 2006) www.n​erip.​ com/D​ownlo​ad/31​1/Joh​n+Tom​aney+​-+Nor​th+Ea​st+En​gland​+-+A+​Brief​+Econ​ omic+​Histo​ry+-+​Repor​t.doc​.aspx​ (accessed March 19, 2016). 13 Max Lock, “Middlesbrough: A People’s Plan,” The Listener 874 (October 11, 1945), 403. 14 David Renton, “Crossing Occupation Borders: Migration to the North-East of England,” www.h​istor​y.ac.​uk/ih​r/Foc​us/Mi​grati​on/ar​ticle​s/ren​ton.h​tml (accessed March 19, 2016). 15 Angela Krewani, “Urban Hacking and Its Media Origins,” Digital Culture and Society 3:1(2017), 140. 16 Jane Kelly, “Stephen Willats: Art, Ethnography and Social Change,” Variant 2:4 (Autumn 1997), 20–1. 17 The nodes in Middlesbrough were the Ace Community Centre, the Newport Library at the Settlement, the shopping center, and the museum. Originally,

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one of the nodes was a media cafe, but it closed prior to the start of the project. Jane Kelly, “With the Audience in Mind,” Stephen Willats: Changing Everything (London: South London Gallery, 1998), 37, n. 9. Thanks to Jane Kelly for her insights into Willats’s work, shared with me during my visit to her home in 2015. 18 Other walking projects by Willats included Random Encounter (1998) in Southampton, and Dangerous Path (1999). See Rosemary Shirley, Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Culture (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015), 77–85. Willats also had published “walking” work by other artists in Control Magazine, such as by Hamish Fulton in Issue 16 (2001). 19 Stephen Willats, Vision and Reality (Axminster, UK: Uniform Books, 2016), 8. 20 The Middlesbrough Art Gallery mounted a larger exhibition of Willats’s work at the same time (September–October 1997) called Between Me and You. The gallery simultaneously published the booklet, Stephen Willats, The Art Museum in Society: Collected Writings (1997). 21 Thanks to Helen Welford and Chloe Lawrence at MIMA for arranging for me to see the items in store. 22 The text under 5A reads: “IT’S HAVING GUARD OF THEIR SELF IDENTITY. THEY DON’T WANT TO LOOSE [sic] THEIR SELF IDENTITY. THEREFORE THEY HAVE TO BATTLE, THEY HAVE TO CONVINCE THE OTHERS THAT THEY EXIST BY SHOWING A DIFFERENT WAY OF BEHAVING. Under 14C, the text reads: VERY MYSTERIOUS. ALMOST AS IF YOU HAVE TO BE IN THE KNOW, TO HAVE THE GUTS TO WALK INTO THOSE SHOPS IN THE FIRST PLACE. AND LOTS OF THEM ARE CLOSED ALL THE TIME OR OPEN AT ODD HOURS HERE AND THERE. ‘CLOSED’ CLOSED SIGNS, BACK IN 15 MINUTES OR WHATEVER. 15C text reads: IT IS EVIDENT THAT THERE IS NOTHING FOR CHILDREN TO DO AROUND THIS AREA AT ALL. REALLY NOTHING EXCEPT HANG AROUND ON STREET CORNERS IN THE NIGHT. IF YOU GO FOR A WALK ON A NIGHT YOU SEE LOTS OF CHILDREN STOOD ON STREET CORNERS WITH NOTHING TO DO.” 23 According to Paul Barker in 1999, Oxford Street was in eleventh place on a retail index, with the first four places held by malls. Barker, “Non-plan Revisited,” 107. 24 Kelly, “Stephen Willats,” 20. 25 Stephen Willats, The Artwork as Interactive Simulation (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield City Museum and Art Gallery, 1998), 28. This multilevel approach to documenting an environment was the basis for Willats’s later “data streams.” 26 The original computer equipment still worked when Freezone was installed at the daadgalerie in Berlin in 2014–15: an Intel Pentium processor was networked to the color monitors. 27 As someone born and raised in the United States, I was intrigued by words such as “gob-smacked,” “browned off,” and “spiv.” More familiar (to me) words, even if related in meaning, did not result in “agreement.” For example, annoyed and impatient, and joyful and cheerful, were not considered synonymous by the program. Most of the terms were nouns. A book that

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Willats cited in The New Reality examined person perception studies and contained a description of a study that is related to Freezone: Dale Lake, Perceiving and Behaving (New York: Teachers College Press, 1970), 35, and appendices. Willats, The New Reality (Derry, Northern Ireland: Orchard Gallery, 1982). Lake outlined a study in which subjects played “35 rounds of a 70-round interpersonal bargaining game. In this game the subject can produce individualistic, cooperative, competitive, or defensive products.” Subsequent tasks in the study involved the opportunity for the subject to learn “what a new ‘Other’ bargainer is going to be like by selecting statements supposedly from the ‘Other’s’ Q sort.” Lake’s appendices were tables of contrasting words, or semantic differential instruments. 28 Willats, Artwork as Interactive Simulation, 32. 29 He defined “concept frame” as: “nodes of information (but nodes that still in some specified way belong together, for example with different but dependent functions), are assembled in a holding frame, the frame being a subset of a set of frames that gives a ‘whole.’” Stephen Willats, “Speculative Modelling with Diagrams,” in Casser and Ziegler (eds), Art Society Feedback, 517. Philipp Ziegler also wrote about Freezone in “The World as It Could Be,” Stephen Willats, How Tomorrow Looks From Here (Berlin: Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD, 2014), 15–16. 30 Erika Blasom, “On the Grid,” in Omar Kholeif (ed.), Electronic Superhighway: From Experiments in Art and Technology to Art after the Internet (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2016), 45. Many thanks to Omar Kholeif for conversations over the years. 31 Willats, Artwork as Social Model: A Manual of Questions and Propositions (Sheffield, UK: Research Group for Artists Publications, 2012), 10A. 32 Willats, Artwork as Interactive Simulation, 31. 33 Many thanks to Stephanie Willats for connecting me with Ariane Beyn at the daadgalerie, as well as to Kenny Cupers for being a wonderful host during my visit to Berlin. 34 Willats, Artwork as Interactive Simulation, 31. 35 Ibid., 28. 36 Iwona Blazwick, “Electronic Superhighway,” in Kholeif, Electronic Superhighway, 21. Blazwick described the space of video games as a “virtual no-place.” 37 Christine Tamblyn, “Computer Art as Conceptual Art,” Art Journal 49:3 (Fall 1990), 255. Tamblyn wrote: “The direct kinesthetic engagement in the interactive simulation fostered by computer games . . . compensates for the low visual resolution of the video display systems they utilise.” 38 Stephen Willats, Multichannel Vision (London: Control, 2000), n.p. Multichannel Vision was reprinted in Casser and Ziegler, Art Society Feedback, 488–96. 39 Thanks to Kristina Williams at the University of Illinois for introducing me to the awkward term “mediatization.” A helpful orientation is Andreas Hepp, Stig Hajarvard, and Knut Lundby, “Mediatization: Theorizing the Interplay

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between Media, Culture and Society,” Media, Culture & Society 37:2 (March 2015), 314–24. 40 I want to thank the following people who graciously responded to my inquiries about the ownership of Creativeforce, which remains somewhat murky: Jane Brake (former education and community manager of Photo 98); Paul Brookes (former CEO of Photo 98); Anne McNeill (former artistic director of Photo 98); Nicola Stephenson; and Tim Whitten (former project administrator for Mappin Art Gallery). Hannah Brignell, curator of the Ruskin Collection and Visual Art at the Graves Gallery in Sheffield, has been a great companion in trying to untangle this mystery. For example, she told me the Arts Council archives are at the Victoria and Albert Museum and an archivist there was looking into whether the Photo 98 materials were among them, though the end date is 1997. The ownership (and thus maintenance) of Creativeforce is, by default, with Museums Sheffield. 41 Many thanks to Stephen Willats for showing me a six-minute Super 8 film of Creativeforce during one of my visits on May 6, 2014, as well as on June 30, 2010. Due to financial and storage constraints at the Museums Sheffield (consolidated in about 2003 and including the Mappin Art Gallery), I have not been able to see this project in action. 42 Willats, Multichannel Vision, n.p. In a later publication, Willats described how “a fluid, dynamic relationship between the conceptual model proposed by the artist, the audience and the context of reception can in itself be taken to form a self-organising system that represents a simulation in a symbolic sense of what is possible for society.” Willats, Artwork as Social Model, 26A. 43 Willats, Artwork as Interactive Simulation, 33–6. 44 Prue Chiles, “What if? . . . a Narrative Process for Re-imagining the City,” in Peter Blundell Jones, Doina Petrescu and Jeremy Till (eds), Architecture & Participation (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2005), 195. Doreen Massey, World City (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 43. Massey noted that government policies, including deregulation, privatization, and higher-rate income tax cuts primarily benefited the private sector, which were located in London and the South East, at the expense of the public sector and manufacturing, such as working-class Sheffield. 45 Works displayed in the large 1986 exhibition in Sheffield included Person A, Living with Practical Realities, the Doppelgänger series of 1982–3, and Private Icons of 1983. The documentation of this exhibition is housed at Museums Sheffield. Thanks to Hannah Brignell for arranging for me to study those materials. 46 Willats, Artwork as Interactive Simulation, 33. Various top-down efforts were introduced in the late 1990s to revive Sheffield: Yorkshire Forward, a regional development agency; Sheffield One, to create a master plan; and, later, designation of Sheffield as an EU Objective 1 region for 2000–9. Gordon Dabinett, “Competing in the Information Age: Urban Regeneration and Economic Development Practices in the City of Sheffield, United Kingdom,” Journal of Urban Technology 12:3(2005), 23. 47 David Harding, “Hard Lines,” Public Finance (May 15–21, 1998), 20, from Vertical File, Archives and Local Studies, Sheffield Central Library. Harding

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wrote: “As a symbol of the 1990s you could do worse than choose the Supertram” (21). For estate housing, see Malcolm Mercer, A Portrait of the Manor in the 1930s: The Evolution of a Council Estate (Sheffield, UK: Pickard Publishing, 1997); On the Manor, a 1988 video in the Local Studies collection of the Sheffield Central Library; Municipal Dreams blog, “The Manor Estate, Sheffield: ‘The Worst Estate in Britain?’” https​://mu​nicip​aldre​ams.w​ordpr​ess. c​om/20​14/11​/18/t​he-ma​nor-e​state​-shef​field​/ (accessed March 29, 2016) and Peter Jones, Streets in the Sky: Life in Sheffield’s High Rise (Sheffield, UK: Selfpublished, 2008); and Museums Sheffield, “Picturing Sheffield-Kelvin Flats” (July 22, 2015) www.y​outub​e.com​/watc​h?v=Q​eQqRU​qWWFw​#t=11​7.954​83 (accessed March 29, 2016). 48 Jonathan Romney, “The Full Monty,” The Guardian (August 29, 1997) www. theguardian.com/film/1997/aug/29/1 (accessed July 22, 2017). 49 Willats, Artwork as Interactive Simulation, 39. 50 Massey, World City, 206, 216. 51 Kelly, “With the Audience in Mind,” 32. The areas of Peckham and Camberwell have become much more middle class in the intervening years. 52 Willats characterized this process: Once inside the symbolic world the territory can open up and new pathways can be found and speculatively explored, and in doing so the environment within that world can further generate its own meaning. Without the connection with what is already perceived as already meaningful at the point of access by the audience, an inhibition is the likely outcome, a resistance to undertake what, after all, is a deviation from existing established patterns of behaviour, perceptions and thought, thus resulting in a termination of engagement. Willats, Through Symbolic Worlds, n.p. 53 Stephen Willats, “Conversation between Margot Heller and Stephen Willats, March 2012,” Surfing with the Attractor, 9. 54 The topics that were distilled from the group meetings were identity, public and private, personal values, social barriers, personal history, stability and change, safety, different generations, conditions and outlook, disability and aid, secret worlds, and communication. 55 Adrian Glew, “Psycho-Social Spheres,” in Willats Changing Everything, 42. See also www.s​outhl​ondon​galle​ry.or​g/pag​e/ste​phen-​willa​ts-ch​angin​g-eve​rythi​ng (accessed April 1, 2016). 56 Itai Palti and Moshe Bar, “A Manifesto for Conscious Cities: Should Streets be Sensitive to Our Mental Needs?” The Guardian (August 28, 2015) www.t​ hegua​rdian​.com/​citie​s/201​5/aug​/28/m​anife​sto-c​onsci​ous-c​ities​-stre​ets-s​ensit​ivemental-needs (accessed February 17, 2016). These designers argue for cities that respond to people’s changing needs, to “restore significance to spaces,” but each person will make significance in their own ways. 57 Changing Everything seemed to address questions that artist Jane Trowell of PLATFORM also has posed: What story can be told that is specific to this place but leads us to the general? How can we use the here-and-now nature of this place to put

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dynamism under the wider issue? . . . [B]y putting the body into public space one implicates the self in a way that is different than intellectual approaches. Critical Spatial Practice Reading Group (Nicholas Brown, Ryan Griffis, Kevin Hamilton, Sharon Irish, Sarah Kanouse), “What Makes Justice Spatial? What Makes Spaces Just? Three Interviews on the Concept of Spatial Justice,” Critical Planning 14(Summer 2007), 23. Jane Trowell further noted: “As an approach to deep change, we believe that public space practices are indispensable, precisely because of the vulnerability that all (including the facilitator) have to grapple with as an intrinsic part of the process” (25). Many thanks to the Critical Spatial Practice Reading Group at the University of Illinois for such a stimulating and productive several years of discussion. See also Malcom Miles, Urban Avant-Gardes: Art, Architecture and Change (New York: Routledge, 2004), 196. Doreen Massey also discussed PLATFORM’s work in World City, 202ff. Francis Alÿs was another artist who created artwork from experiences in the streets. See, for example, his Seven Walks (2005), commissioned by Artangel, which captured “takes” on behaviors seen and heard in London. For more on spatial practice, see Nicolas Whybrow, Art and the City (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011); see also, Francis Alÿs, “Interview with James Lingwood, 2006,” in Stephen Johnstone (ed.), The Everyday (London: Whitechapel Gallery/Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 140–1. 58 In conversation with Stephen Willats, September 4, 2012. Willats also noted that the diagram of Multi-Channel Mosaic influenced the idea of the data stream. Willats, Surfing with the Attractor, 12. 59 Willats, Changing Everything, 7; Willats, Surfing with the Attractor, 7. 60 Antony Hudek, “A Porous Entity: The Centre for Behavioural Art at Gallery House, 1972–73,” in Jo Applin, Catherine Spencer and Amy Tobin (eds), London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent, and Ephemeral Networks, 1960– 1980 (College Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2018). 61 The theory of epic theater developed by Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) was published in 1949. He argued that the audience should not identify with characters in a play but rather watch a drama unfold with detachment, with an “alienation effect” that promotes the examination of human behavior. “Alienation effect” is a misnomer, really. Brecht aimed to make the familiar strange and thereby promote critique of the alienating effects of capitalism. See Henry Bial, “Gestus,” in Meiling Cheng and Gabrielle Cody (eds), Reading Contemporary Performance: Theatricality across Genres (New York: Routledge, 2016), 118–19. Bial provides further bibliography. 62 In October 1997, Willats published an artist’s pamphlet called Shopping Parade: Bilton Road, Stills from the Film (Toronto: Art Metropole/Little Cockroach Press, 1997). Bilton Road runs through Perivale, the setting of From a Coded World of 1977. This pamphlet was number 7 in a series of 20 by a range of artists, created in memory of Jorge Zontal of the art collaborative General Idea, who had died in 1994, https://artmetropole.com/ shop/1558; and on Zontal, see Roberta Smith, “Jorge Zontal, 50, Partner in Canadian Art Group,” New York Times (February 8, 1994) www.n​ytime​s.com​ /1994​/02/0​8/obi​tuari​es/jo​rge-z​ontal​-50-p​artne​r-in-​canad​ian-a​rt-gr​oup.h​tml (accessed April 7, 2015).

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63 The categories illustrated in Jansz’s diagram, from top to bottom, left to right are material fabric, facial expression, the ground, group to objects, relation to other people, atmospheric conditions, ambient sound, personal expression, body expression, group to external objects, institutional signs, relation to objects, expression in group. The diagram was reproduced in Stephen Willats, “Macro to Micro, A Report,” Camera Austria 73(Graz, 2001), 44–56. The text of this essay was reprinted in Art Society Feedback, 509–13. 64 Brooke D. Wortham-Galvin, “An Anthropology of Urbanism: How People Make Places (and What Designers and Planners Might Learn from It),” Footprint 13:3(Autumn 2013), 21. See also Street Plans Collaborative publications, www.street-plans.com/ (accessed April 5, 2014). 65 The writers for the guide included Nicola Kearton and Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt. Nesbitt indicated that Willats had done similar work in Bremen and Stuttgart. Perhaps Willats created projects for the exhibition in Bremen, “Do All Oceans Have Walls?” of 1998, www.g​ak-br​emen.​de/en​/exhi​bitio​ns/do​-all-​ ocean​s-hav​e-wal​ls/ (accessed April 7, 2016); and in Stuttgart for “Multichannel Vision” in 1999, but I haven’t found documentation. 66 Willats, Artwork as Social Model, 10A. 67 Willats also worked with a widowed mother on the Friars Wharf Estate in Oxford to create a three-panel work, Single-Parent Family, in 1978. See Stephen Willats, “Working with Life and Institutions,” Control Magazine 12(1981), 5–9. Modern Art Oxford has archival materials related to the 1978 exhibit, Living within Contained Conditions. Many thanks to Tim Craven at Southampton City Art Gallery and Jonathan Weston at MAO for their assistance. 68 An initial proposal was to connect the two neighborhoods with networked terminals, with the data stream on view at MAO as well. See “Minutes,” May 4, 2011, Willats Minutes Meetings Folder, MAO Digital Archive. 69 Alice Coleman, whom I mentioned in Chapter 3, discussed the Blackbird Leys estate in her study, Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing, 2nd edn (London: Hilary Shipman, 1990). 70 Stephen Willats, Conscious-Unconscious: In and Out the Reality Check (Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2013), 9. See also Stephen Willats, “The Oxford Community Data Stream,” Control Magazine 19 (July 2014), 19–23. 71 Views of the MAO exhibit can be seen here: http:​//ste​phenw​illat​s.com​/work​/ cons​cious​- uncon​sciou​s-and​-out-​reali​ty-ch​eck-e​xhibi​/ (accessed April 7, 2016). 72 I visited both areas in Oxford on foot. It was a pleasant walk out of Oxford to Kennington. To reach Blackbird Leys, I needed to take the bus, which was a long and relatively expensive journey (£3.50 return in 2015) from the city center. 73 Phone conversation with the author, March 24, 2015. 74 Phone conversation with the author, March 24, 2015. 75 Phone conversation with the author, March 25, 2015. 76 Phone conversation with the author, March 23, 2015. 77 Gordon Pask, “The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics,” AD 39 (September 1969), 494.

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78 Steve Johnson, Emergence (New York: Scribner, 2001), 39–40. Johnson also wrote: [W]hat Engels observed [in Manchester in 1842] are patterns in the urban landscape, visible because they have a repeated structure that distinguishes them from pure noise. . . . They are patterns of human movement and decision-making that have been etched into the texture of city blocks, patterns that are then fed back to the . . . residents themselves, altering their subsequent decisions. . . . A city is a kind of pattern-amplifying machine. Italics in original. This pattern amplification and description of feedback fit Willats’s data streams so well. 79 Willats, “The Oxford Community Data Stream,” 19. 80 According to Bernard Pavard and Julie Dugdale, a property is emergent when it cannot be anticipated from knowing how the components of the system function. Emergence is not due to incomplete information regarding the components of the system, but to the non-linear and distributed character of the interactions. Pavard and Dugdale, “The Contribution of Complexity Theory to the Study of Socio-technical Cooperative Systems,” in Ali A. Minai and Yaneer Bar-Yam (eds), Unifying Themes in Complex Systems: New Research Volume IIIB, Proceedings from the Third International Conference on Complex Systems (2000), 46. Thanks to Jerome McDonough at the University of Illinois for this citation. 81 In 2012, he was also working in Oxford and in New York City on related projects. For Willats’s one-person exhibition at Reena Spaulings on East Broadway in New York’s Chinatown (The Strange Attractor, September 17 to October 23, 2011), he created Data Stream: A Portrait of New York, which was a long, two-sided wall with ten rows of fifty-seven images and texts from group documentation of Delancey Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City in March 2011. 82 Willats, Surfing with the Attractor, 21, 32. 83 Johnson, Emergence, 150. 84 Tiziana Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning: On the Cultural Politics of Information,” Social Text [Technoscience] 80(Fall, 2004), 52. 85 In 2009, People in Pairs was part of Cybernetic Still Life No. 2, a wall installation featuring two abstracted buildings and film projections. 86 Willats, “World between People: Walking towards the Strange Attractor,” World Without Objects (Antwerp: Annie Gentils Gallery, 2013), n.p. The quotation actually reads: “going forwards a strange destiny,” but I assume “towards” was the intended word. 87 Willats, Surfing with the Attractor, 18. 88 Useful articles on complexity and systems theory include William N. Kaghan and Geoffrey C. Bowker, “Out of Machine Age?: Complexity, Sociotechnical Systems and Actor Network Theory,” Journal of Engineering and Technology Management 18(2001), 253–69; Mark Mason, “What Is Complexity Theory and What Are Its Implications for Educational Change?” Educational Philosophy and Theory 40:1(2008), 35–46; and Marshall Scott Poole, “Systems,” in Linda L. Putnam and Dennis K Mumby (eds), The SAGE

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Handbook of Organisational Communication: Advances in Theory, Research, and Methods, 3rd edn (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2014), 49–74. Thanks to Jerome McDonough and ElizaBeth Simpson for these citations. 89 Ute Meta Bauer, “Interview with Stephen Willats,” in Willats ConsciousUnconscious, 14. 90 Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 20, 19.

Conclusion 1 Stephen Willats, Representing the Possible (London: Victoria Miro, 2014), n.p. 2 Ibid. 3 Heinz von Foerster, “Perception of the Future and the Future of Perception,” Instructional Science 1:1 (March 1972), 31–43; originally presented March 29, 1971, at the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado, Boulder. 4 Ibid., 31–2. Von Foerster further noted: “[I]f we wish to be subjects, rather than objects, what we see now, that is, our perception, must be foresight rather than hindsight” (31). Many thanks to the Anticipation Research Group at Bristol University; they invited me to present a paper, “Predictive and Prescriptive Thinking: Considering Stephen Willats,” in April 2016. I read this von Foerster article in preparation. 5 Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 17. 6 Von Foerster, “Perception of the Future,” 32. 7 Ibid., 33. 8 Stephen Willats, Person to Person People to People (Milton Keynes, UK: Milton Keynes Gallery, 2007), 14. 9 He described this process as “really developing logistical frameworks which would enable this new kind of practice to take place.” Willats, Person to Person, 12. 10 Heinz von Foerster, “Preface,” in Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (New York: Springer-Verlag, 2003), viii. 11 Shotwell, Against Purity, 62. See also Sue Campbell, Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 12 Shotwell, Against Purity, 186. 13 Ibid., 172. 14 The artist Anna Callahan told me about Willats’s work in 2001. 15 Walter Benjamin’s phrase “simultaneous collective reception,” which he applied to experiencing architecture and film, did not incorporate the idea of feedback. Walter Benjamin, Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 264.

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16 William Cleveland, “Bravo, Sort of: Public Art, Language, and Accountability,” Public Art Review (October 30, 2015) http:​//for​ecast​publi​cart.​org/p​ublic​-art-​ revie​w/201​5/10/​bravo​-sort​-of/ (accessed July 17, 2017). 17 João Guilherme Biehl and Peter Andrew Locke (eds), “Foreword,” Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), xii, x. Thanks to the Slought Foundation for this citation. 18 Stephen Willats, Explain Yourself: A Proposal for an Internet Site (London: Serpentine Gallery [written in 1996], 2008), 12. 19 Sharon Daniel, “Collaborative Systems: Redefining Public Art,” in Margot Lovejoy, et al. (eds), Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2011), 56. 20 Ibid., 74. Emphasis in original. 21 This statement is representative of his conviction: “A ‘new reality’ both social and physical has emerged that is authoritatively shaped and controlled by ‘institutions’ which have the function of manifesting the ideological foundations of our culture into people’s daily lives.” Stephen Willats, The New Reality (Derry, Northern Ireland: Orchard Gallery, 1982), 3. 22 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 279. Bishop noted that “‘project’ has . . . come to replace ‘work of art’ as a descriptor for long-term artistic undertakings in the social sphere” (174). She defined “project” as “open-ended, post-studio, research-based, social process, extending over time and mutable in form” (194). Like Stuart Brisley, Willats lists “project works” on his website (http://stephenwillats.com/context/) separately from his other work. 23 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Dean Gallery, GMA.A11/04/02/03, Completed Problem Sheets: Slateford. 24 Modern Art Oxford, Stephen Willats archive, “Friars Wharf Estate” project flier, June 1978. The “offending” paragraph on the flier reads: The mediating, constraining influence exercised by the physical environment in which we live on our social consciousness forms the central area of attention of the work “Contained Living.” . . . Within the work the physical reality of the estate is seen as a symbol of the dominant authoritative aspirations of our society, while the daily lives of residents are viewed as a counter consciousness of a mutually based interaction. The pressure on the individual from the physical composition of the estate is to isolate and distance self from others (The Authoritative Consciousness), while the social relationships that have been established are in an oppositional state in the pre-determined structure (Counter Consciousness). 25 Stephen Willats with Hannah Redler Hawes, “Configurations of Reality,” in Miguel Amado (ed.), Human Right: Stephen Willats (Middlesbrough, UK: Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, 2017), 47. 26 Key texts on Willats include work by Bann, Berry, and van Mourik Broekman, Cieslik, Cork, Daniel, Glew, Hudek, Kelly, Kester, Mason, Obrist, Pethick, Wilson, and the essays in Art Society Feedback, edited by Casser and Ziegler, all listed in the Bibliography.

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27 Grant Kester first put me in touch with Willats in 2003, for which I am very grateful. Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Kester’s next book discussed related issues in a global context: The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 28 Kester, Conversation Pieces, 9. 29 Ibid., 91, 93. 30 Sarah Hamerman and Stephen Willats, “Control: Publishing as Cybernetic Practice” (January 10, 2018) Avant.org http:​//ava​nt.or​g/art​ifact​/step​hen-w​illat​s/ (accessed January 29, 2018). 31 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 12–13, 22. Italics in the original. 32 Bishop provided a valuable prehistory of a “surge of artistic interest in participation and collaboration that has taken place since the early 1990s.” Bishop, Artificial Hells, 2, 1. 33 Ibid., 254; Sharon Irish, Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 34 Willats with Hawes, “Configurations of Reality,” 43. See also, Geoffrey Bowker, “How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943–70,” Social Studies of Science 23:1 (February 1993), 107–27. 35 Michael J. Apter, “Cybernetics and Art,” Leonardo 2(1969), 257–65. 36 Ibid., 258. Claude E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” The Bell System Technical Journal 27 (July 1948), 379–423. In the book version, Warren Weaver contributed an overview for a wider audience. Shannon and Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949). 37 Willats, “The Oxford Community Data Stream,” 19. I regularized punctuation and grammar for readability, indicated by the brackets. 38 Shotwell, Against Purity, 155, quoted Ladelle McWhorter: “What’s good is that the world remain ever open to deviation.” See McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 164. 39 George P. Richardson, Feedback Thought in Social Science and Systems Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 5. “A causal loop that characteristically tends to reinforce or amplify a change . . . is called a positive loop. . . . A causal loop that characteristically tends to diminish or counteract a change . . . is called a negative loop.” 40 Stephen Willats defined black box in this way in 2017: “you took a complex process and reduced the level of resolution to the essential elements, and you could therefore look at something without really having shown all the manifestations of how it works.” Willats with Hawes, “Configurations of Reality,” 45. 41 W. Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1958), 86. 42 Ibid., 96.

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43 Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 22. 44 Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics, 94. 45 Ibid., 104–6. 46 Artist Joe Tilson (b. 1928) complained about writers in 1977: “Writers on art never emphasize enough the critical acts contained in the actual WORK of artists. We are asked to comment, explain, put into words critical concepts which are contained in our work in the full paradoxical non-linear complexity.” Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, TILSON (Milan: Pre-Art, 1977), 77. 47 For clarity and length reasons, I reluctantly deleted discussion of Willats’s Trying to Forget Where We Came From (1977), and his work at the Barbican Centre in London (2004–5) and in Milton Keynes (2006–7). Installations such as Living Like a Goya of 1983—www.victoria- miro.​com/a​rtist​s/11-​steph​ en-wi​llats​/work​s/art​works​8387/​ (accessed July 10, 2017)—deserve further investigation, along with project works that Willats produced in Germany, Holland and France. 48 Willats, Person to Person, 15. 49 Shotwell, Against Purity, 18. 50 Willats, Person to Person, 12. 51 Shotwell, Against Purity, 38. 52 Andrew Pickering, “Islands of Stability: Engaging Emergence from Cellular Automata to the Occupy Movement,” Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, 2014:1 (May 2014), 122. 53 Sara Ahmed, “No” (June 30, 2017) https://feministkilljoys.com/ (accessed July 3, 2017). Emphasis in original. Thanks to Radhika Gajjala for alerting me to this particular post. 54 Larne Abse Gogarty, “‘Usefulness’ in Contemporary Art and Politics,” Third Text 31:1 (2017), 119. 55 www.arte-util.org/about/colophon/; also see John Byrne, “Social Autonomy and the Use Value of Art,” Afterall 42(2016), 61–72. There are many publications about Bruguera, some of which are listed on her website: http:// taniabruguera.com/ (accessed April 17, 2018). See also W.J.T. Mitchell, “How to Make Art with a Jackhammer: A Conversation with Tania Bruguera,” Afterall 42(2016), 48–59. Anton Vidokle provided a useful perspective on the political economy of art in his essay, “Art without Market, Art without Education,” e-flux journal 43 (March 2013), 1–10, www.e​-flux​.com/​journ​al/43​ /6020​5/art​-with​out-m​arket​-art-​witho​ut-ed​ucati​on-po​litic​al-ec​onomy​-of-a​rt/ (accessed July 22, 2017). 56 Alistair Hudson, “This-Century Thinking,” in Miguel Amado (ed), Human Right: Stephen Willats (Middlesbrough, UK: Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, 2017), 6. This website has background on the “useful museum”: www.visitmima.com/about/team/director/; Alistair Hudson became director of the Whitworth and Manchester Art Gallery in January 2018, see www.m​anche​ ster.​ac.uk​/disc​over/​news/​alist​air-h​udson​--dir​ector​-manc​heste​r-art​-gall​ery-u​niver​ sity-​of-ma​nches​ter-w​hitwo​rth/ (accessed April 17, 2018).

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57 Ariane Beyn et al., Berlin Local: MD 72 + Neighbourhood/Stephen Willats (Berlin: Künstlerprogramm des DAAD, 2014); Stefanie Hessler, “Tio frågor: Stephen Willats,” Kunstkritikk (March 18, 2016) www.k​unstk​ritik​k.se/​artik​ler/ t​io-fr​agor-​steph​en-wi​llats​/(acc​essed​ July 16, 2017). 58 Fugitive Images, www.fugitiveimages.org.uk (accessed April 17, 2018). 59 Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Lasse Johansson, Tristan Fennell and Paul Hallam, Estate (London: Myrdle Cournt Press, 2010), 4. 60 Estate: A Reverie (2015) www.f​ugiti​veima​ges.o​rg.uk​/proj​ects/​estat​efilm​/ (accessed April 17, 2018). Jane Rendell, a prolific scholar and, among other things, supporter of Fugitive Images, has articulated critical spatial practices, incisively exploring spaces between art, architecture, and social justice. See, for example, Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London: I.B.Tauris, 2006); and Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism (London: I.B.Tauris, 2010). David Roberts, also a Fugitive Images collaborator, has done excellent work on Balfron Tower, as well as organizing other social housing events and publications. Together with Ben Campkin, director of the UCL Urban Laboratory, David and Jane have been fantastic interlocutors with me, for which I am very grateful. See also Ben Campkin, “Out-of-Sync Estates,” 163–76 and David Roberts, “‘We Felt Magnificent Being Up There’—Ernő Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower and the Campaign to Keep it Public,” 141–61, both in Peter Guillery and David Kroll (eds), Mobilising Housing Histories: Learning from London’s Past (London: RIBA Publishing, 2017), and in Ben Campkin, David Roberts and Rebecca Ross, Regeneration Realities: Urban Pamphleteer #2 (London: UCL Urban Laboratory, 2013). 61 Stephen Willats, Artwork as Social Model (Sheffield, UK: RGAP, 2012), 15A. 62 Tate Liverpool, “Stephen Willats: Control” (April 25 to May 16, 2018) www. t​ate.o​rg.uk​/what​s-on/​tate-​liver​pool/​tate-​excha​nge/w​orksh​op/st​ephen​-will​atscontrol (accessed April 15, 2018). Thanks to Bronac Ferran for alerting me to this exhibit. 63 Andrea Francke, “On How Art Should Help Us Imagine Different Futures and How Art Discourse Could Be Stopping Us from Getting There,” Control Magazine 19(2014), 12–15; Radio Anti, “An Appendix for Radio Anti,” Control Magazine 20(2017); Rosalie Schweiker, “Dilemmas in Art,” Control Magazine 19(2014), 6–7; Ross Taylor and Madaline Zaharia, “Walls with Holes In,” Control Magazine 19(2014), 26–9. www.controlmagazine.org/ previous.php (accessed April 17, 2018). 64 London-based Andrea Francke was born in Peru and works collaboratively on a range of issues including intellectual property, authorship, parenthood, and DIY practices: www.andreafrancke.me.uk/ (accessed April 17, 2018). Radio Anti, an occasional online and FM radio station, uses intermittent broadcasts to explore a variety of topics: http://radioanti.co.uk (accessed April 17, 2018). 65 Rosalie Schweiker is a German artist based in London: www.a​rtsad​min.c​o.uk/​ artis​ts/ro​salie​-schw​eiker​; http://rosalieschweiker.info/. Sarah Jury is codirector of Res: http://beingres.org/ (accessed April 17, 2018). 66 www.t​intyp​egall​ery.c​om/ar​tists​/mada​lina-​zahar​ia/ (accessed April 17, 2018). 67 Von Foerster, “Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics,” in Understanding Understanding, 298.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources I have had many interactions with Stephen Willats since our first meeting in 2003, in addition to consulting his personal archives. Sometimes our interactions were more formal but usually they were conversations on which I took notes during or after our meetings.

I also interviewed the following people: Three people involved in the Oxford Community Data Stream project whom I have chosen not to name to protect their privacy, in addition to Stephen Bann, Andrea Cameron, Hannah Redler Hawes, Jane Kelly, Ines Kretzschmar, George Mallen, and Emily Pethick. Emily Pethick shared with me her unpublished notes on interviews she conducted with Willats, and I commissioned Emily to conduct two more interviews with Stephen Willats in the summer of 2015.

I consulted the following art, library, and manuscript collections: In Edinburgh: Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Dean Gallery; Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. In London and nearby: British Library Reference and Sound and Moving Image Collections; British Museum Prints and Drawings; Chelsea College of Art Library, Special Collections, Stephen Willats Archive; Chiswick Central Library Archives; Hounslow Central Library; Lisson Gallery Archives; London Metropolitan Archives; National Portrait Gallery Reference Collection, Heinz Archive and Library; RIBA Library; Tate Library and Archive, Denis Bowen Papers and Stephen Willats Collection; Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives; Victoria and Albert Museum, Prints and Drawings Collection and National Art Library; University of Westminster, Max Lock and Partners Papers; Whitechapel Art Gallery Archive. In Middlesbrough: Central Library; Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. In Nottingham: Central Library. In Oxford: Central Library; Museum of Modern Art Oxford. In Sheffield: Central Library; Graves Gallery. In Southampton: City Art Gallery. In Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Archives, Heinz von Foerster Papers; University Libraries.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

253

Selected Writings by Stephen Willats (Listed Alphabetically) “Art and Cybernetics,” AND: Journal of Art and Art Education 18/19(1989), 50–5. “Art and Intervention,” AND: Journal of Art and Art Education 13/14(1987), 3–9. Art and Social Function (London: Ellipsis [1976] 2000). “Art as Social Practice: Meeting of Minds,” Places Journal 16:3(October 2004), 58–60. “Art Creating Society,” Control Magazine 14(September 1990), all. The Art Museum in Society: Collected Writings (Middlesbrough, UK: Art Gallery, 1997). “Art Work as Social Model,” Studio International 191:980(March/April 1976), 100–6. The Artist as Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour ([London: Gallery House Press, 1973] Occasional Papers, 2010). The Artwork as Interactive Simulation (Sheffield: Sheffield City Museum and Art Gallery, 1998). Artwork as Social Model: A Manual of Questions and Propositions (Sheffield: RGAP, 2012). Between Buildings and People (London: Academy Editions, 1996). “Between a Symbolic World and a Contextual Reality: The Artwork as a Vehicle for Forwarding Counter-Consciousness,” Control Magazine 10(1977), 13–20. Beyond the Plan: The Transformation of Personal Space in Housing (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Academy, 2001). “The Book as Interactive Tool: The Modelling Book,” in Artists’ Bookworks (London: British Council, 1975). “The Cha Cha Club,” Flash Art 49:311(November/December 2016), 61–2. Changing Everything (London: South London Gallery, 1998). Conceptual Living (London: Victoria Miro, 1991). “Concern of the Centre for Behavioural Arts,” Control Magazine 7(1973), 2. Concrete Window (Antwerp: Annie Gentils, 1991). “Configurations of Reality,” with Hannah Redler Hawes, in Miguel Amado (ed.), Human Right: Stephen Willats (Middlesbrough, UK: Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, 2017). Conscious-Unconscious: In and Out the Reality Check (Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2013). “The Counter-Consciousness in Vertical Living,” Control Magazine 11(1979), 5. “Edinburgh Project: Steve Willats Discusses His Social Model Construction Project,” Art and Artists 8(January 1974), 9. “The Edinburgh Social Model Construction Project,” in Ross Birrell and Alec Finley (eds), Justified Sinners: An Archeology of Scottish Counter-Culture, 1960–2000 (Edinburgh: Morningstar Publications, 2002). Explain Yourself: A Proposal for an Internet Site (London: Serpentine Gallery [written in 1996], 2008). “The Externalisation of Models in Art Practice,” Control Magazine 8(1974), 11. “From a Coded World,” in Richard Cork (ed.), Art for Whom? (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), 62–72. “From a Coded World,” Studio International 194:988(1978), 229. Intervention and Audience (London: Coracle Press, 1986).

254

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“Inside Outside – Outside Inside – Bringing Art Practice into the Fabric of People’s Lives,” in Miguel Amado (ed.), Human Right: Stephen Willats (Middlesbrough, UK: Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, 2017), 16–19. The Lurky Place (London: Lisson Gallery, 1978). “Macro to Micro, a Report,” Camera Austria 73(2001), 44–56. Means of Escape (Greater Manchester: Rochdale Gallery, 1984). Meeting of Minds (London: Control, 2006). Multi-Channel Vision (London: Control, 2000). Multi-Storey Mosaic (London: Control, 1990). “Multiple Clothing”: Designs 1965–1999 (Köln: Walther König, 2000). Museum Mosaic: Stephen Willats (Liverpool: Tate Gallery Liverpool, 1994). The New Reality (Derry, Northern Ireland: The Orchard Gallery, 1982). “The Oxford Community Data Stream,” Control Magazine 19(July 2014), 19–23. Person to Person People to People (Milton Keynes, UK: Milton Keynes Gallery, 2007). Personal Islands (London: 5 London Mews, 1993). “Prescriptions for Task Orientated Methodologies in Constructing Operational Models of Art Practices,” Control Magazine 7(1973), 10. “Private Journeys,” Control Magazine 15(April 1996), 18–19. Random Networks (Control in association with Artlab, November 2003). Representing the Possible (London: Victoria Miro, 2014). Secret Language: The Code Breakers (Berlin: Thomas Schulte, 2012). “Selected Writings, 1961–2009,” in Anja Casser and Philipp Ziegler (eds), Stephen Willats: Art Society Feedback (Nürnburg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2010), 239–529. Shopping Parade: Bilton Road, Stills from the Film (Toronto: Art Metropole/Little Cockroach Press, 1997). Stephen Willats: Concerning Our Present Way of Living (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery/Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1979). “Stephen Willats: A Man for the Twenty-First Century,” Modern Matter 8(2014), 36–53. Surfing with the Attractor (London: South London Gallery, 2012). Through Symbolic Worlds (London: Control, 2002). Tower Mosaic: Brinklow House, Princethorpe House (London: Control, 1992). “Transformers [1989],” in Anthony Hudek (ed.), The Object (London/Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2014). Vision and Reality (Axminster, UK: Uniform Books, 2016). “Visual Transmitters 1 & 2,” Structure 1(Spring 1968), 22–4. “The West London Social Resource Project,” Leonardo 7:2(Spring 1974), 155–8. West London Social Resource Project Public Monitor (London: CHELSEAspace, 2011). “Working with Life and Institutions,” Control Magazine 12 (1981), 5–9. World Without Objects (Antwerp: Annie Gentils Gallery, 2013).

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INDEX Note: Page numbers in italic type indicate photographs or gray boxes that contain information about Willats’s works. activism  x, 8, 58, 119, 172 advertising  20, 31, 44, 135 Agam, Yaacov  16, 22 Ahmed, Sara  135, 177 algorithms  48 amateurs/ordinary people  xii, 57–8, 68–9, 114, 128, 156, 209 n.3. See also everydayness; professionals/experts Apter, Michael  3, 173–4 Archer, Michael  100 Archigram  24 architecture. See built environment art contexts for experience of  7–10, 20–1, 38, 57–8, 69–70, 98–9, 197 n.85 contexts for production of  2, 16, 30, 51, 98–9, 234 n.53 science in relation to  1, 3, 18, 39, 60, 119, 189 n.15, 216 n.73 social role of  29, 35–55, 57–8, 76–7, 104 usefulness of  177–8 Art and Language  199 n.3, 202 n.18 Artangel Trust  94 “Art Creating Society” (symposium)  99, 224 n.69 Art for Whom? (exhibition)  76–7 artist audience in relation to  20, 83, 96, 113–15, 122, 135, 170, 172 role of, in production/reception of art  2, 16 social role of  8, 16, 17, 20, 21, 40, 55 tools and technologies for  64

The Artist as an Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour (exhibition)  40 Artist Placement Group  215 n.62 Artist’s Union  55 Art Journal Open (digital journal)  xiv Arts Council  57 Ascott, Roy  3–4, 17–18, 22, 26, 28, 41, 60, 196 n.71 Ashby, W. Ross  3–4, 6, 17, 18, 25, 39, 175, 176, 183 n.16 “The Electronic Brain”  4 Asociación de Arte Útil  177 Atkinson, Conrad  76 “Garbage Strike: Hackney”  55 audience artist in relation to  20, 83, 96, 113–15, 122, 135, 170, 172 participation of, in the art work  12, 15, 27–8, 51–2, 76, 114, 144, 158, 169–70 role of, in art experience  18, 23 Willats’s work and  9–10, 15, 17, 23, 27–8 Audio Arts (magazine)  23, 92 Aulton, Derek  26, 27, 52 Avondale Estate, London  123, 124, 125 Balsom, Erika  151 Bann, Stephen  21–2, 59, 63, 124, 125, 139–40 Four Essays on Kinetic Art  22 Bannister, Denis  4 Barbican Centre  25 Bartsch, Susanne  133 Bauer, Ute Meta  166

270

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Beer, Stafford  30 behavior as axiom  62–3, 83–4, 89, 117, 169, 231 n.25 built environment’s effect on  74– 5, 79, 80, 85–8, 90–1, 98, 153, 216 n.74 behaviorism  28 Bendiner-Viani, Gabrielle  69 Benjamin, Anthony  17, 188 n.13 Bennett, Jane  222 n.42, 223 n.60 Berlin  70, 99, 124, 178 Berlin Local  214 n.56 Bernstein, Basil  17, 30 Biehl, João  170 Bishop, Claire  8, 10, 172, 185 n.33, 248 n.22 Artificial Hells  173 Black, Phillip  154 Blackbird Leys  160–3 black box theory  175 body and embodiment communicative role of  53 cybernetics and  5, 6 Willats’s work and  6 Boolean logic  50 Borden, Iain  128 Bowen, Denis  16, 187 n.4 Bowery, Leigh  129–34, 136, 235 n.65, 236 n.66 Bowker, Geoffrey  6, 198 n.90 Bowles, Hamish  140–1 Bradley, Dean  20, 24 Bramcote Hills, Nottingham  31–3 Brandon Estate, London  81, 125, 127–8, 128 Brecht, Bertolt  159, 244 n.61 Brentford Towers, London  92–8, 93, 94, 136 Brieske, Gerald (Jerry)  44, 168, 206 n.42, 239 n.8 Brieske, Nancy  44 Brisley, Stuart  16, 213 n.52, 215 n.62, 248 n.22 Brixton riots  127, 128 Broad, C. D.  119 Broadbent, Donald  30, 211 n.21 Bronson, A. A.  68 Brooks, Rosetta  38, 44

Bruguera, Tania  177 Bruner, Jerome  30 built environment behavioral effects of  74–5, 79, 80, 85–8, 90–1, 98, 153, 216 n.74 feedback of residents of  69, 85, 90–1 modernist (“new reality”)  68, 79–83, 91, 92, 213 nn.47–8 Willats’s work and  76 Burnham, Jack  13 Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts  17 Cameron, Andrea  101 Campbell, Sue  169 Campden Hill Towers, London  18, 19 Campkin, Ben  213 n.52 Canary Wharf, London  104, 107 Cannon, Scarlett  140–1, 238 n.97 Center for Artistic Activism  x Centre for Advanced Study of Science in Art  39 Centre for Behavioural Art  11, 27, 35, 38–40, 44, 158, 202 n.18, 203 nn.19–20 Cha Cha Club, London  129–30, 140–1 Chapman Taylor Partners  18 Charter Group  108 Cheng, Meiling  102 Chester Beatty Research Institute  18– 19 Chomsky, Noam  30 cities. See urban systems City Art Gallery, Leeds  156 Clark, Krissy  152 Clark, Lygia  20 Clark, T. J.  7 Clarke, Bruce  113 Cleveland, William  170 clothing  20–1, 31–2, 190 n.22 codes. See also life codes as axioms  62–3, 83–4, 89, 117, 169, 231 n.25 built environment’s use of  91 communicative use of  36 early exposure to  17

INDEX

Willats’s work and  28, 29, 54, 64–8, 170, 172 Cognition Control (exhibition)  27, 36–8, 57, 99, 160, 199 n.4 cognitive science  33, 119, 148, 175 Coleman, Alice  216 n.74 collaboration/cooperation  25, 27–30, 125, 127, 129–34, 137–40, 157–8, 172, 235 n.63. See also mutualism collage  10, 15, 32, 37, 44, 49, 64, 81, 89, 101, 105, 117, 119, 126, 130, 140, 147, 151, 161, 179 communities  30–3, 35–55. See also housing complexity theory  166 compromise  176–7 concept frames  5, 60–4, 72, 83–4, 89, 108, 116, 119–22, 148, 150–2, 169, 211 n.24, 215 n.63, 241 n.29 Concerning Our Present Way of Living (exhibition)  69–70, 215 n.63 Conservative Party  55, 98, 111–12 contingency  41, 166 Control, Stephen Willats, Work 1962–68 (exhibition)  25 Control Magazine  11, 15, 23–4, 26, 36, 39, 58, 77, 81, 83, 90, 99, 102–4, 114, 138, 164, 178, 193 n.41, 240 n.18 covers  24, 81, 100 control theory  174–5 Cork, Richard  8, 54, 55, 67, 76–7, 86, 97 Cornock, Stroud  4, 26, 36, 38, 181 n.7 Gemini  26 Corris, Michael  233 n.44 counter-consciousness  90, 96, 108, 113, 115, 117, 128, 221 n.33, 230 n.6 Courbet, Gustave  7 Cowan, David  123 cybernetics artists’ engagement with  3–4, 18, 173–4 built environment and  68–9 current interest in  5–6, 184 n.17, 185 n.25

271

first-order  3 military links of  3, 6, 7 mind-body issues and  6 overview of  2–6, 60, 91 second-order  3, 11, 91, 97, 109, 144, 166, 170 social practice in relation to  1–2, 35, 54 state graphs  60 Willats’s work and  xii–xiii, 1, 2–7, 15, 90, 112–13, 119, 166, 168–9, 173–6 DAAD Gallery, Berlin  152 Daniel, Sharon  171 data streams  158, 160 Davis, James H.  30 De Bono, Edward  24 decision making  6, 18, 27–8, 38, 54, 97 defamiliarization  173–4 Deller, Jeremy  10 Dennett, Terry  57 Derby School of Art  29 Design Communications  20 Deutsche, Rosalyn  38 Dezeuze, Anna  234 n.53 diagrams  17, 41, 59–64, 72, 83, 174, 175 display boards  44–5, 50, 65–7, 74–5, 88–91, 95–7, 99–100, 106–7, 109, 136, 139 DIY (Do It Yourself) approaches  124–7, 132, 140, 234 n.53 Docklands, London  104–8, 115, 230 n.17 Docklands Community Poster Project  104–5 dockworkers  116–18 Drian Gallery, London  16 Dunn, Peter  76–7, 83, 102, 104–5 “Adjusting Culture to Practical Function”  114–15 Ealing Club  15 Ealing College of Art  16–18 east London  69–70, 102–8, 115–18, 178

272

INDEX

Edinburgh  46–51 Edinburgh Fringe Festival  46, 57 Edmonds, Ernest  36, 38, 181 n.7 Communications Game 2, 36 Edwards, Michael  104 Elephant Trust  94 Eliot, George, Felix Holt, the Radical  145 Ellis, David  154 emergence  119, 164, 230 n.9, 246 n.80 ethics  96, 171 Evans, Christopher Riche  39 everydayness  114, 140. See also amateurs/ordinary people Exchange Tower, London  108 experts. See professionals/experts face-to-face approach  6, 49, 52, 54, 69, 89–90, 139, 153–4, 165 Farrell House, London  130, 131, 132–3 feedback art production and reception reliant on  2, 16 built environment and  69, 85, 90–1 cybernetic concept of  2 negative  3, 7, 174, 178, 249 n.39 organisms’ use of  184 n.17 positive  178, 249 n.39 Willats’s work and  4, 5, 144 Fennell, Tristan  178 Fenton House, London  137–9, 138 FILE Megazine  68 Flash Art (magazine)  23 Form (magazine)  21–2 Forster, Noel  17, 24, 41, 188 n.13 Foskett, Silvia  101 Foster, John  94–5, 172 found objects  125, 130, 132–3, 135. See also objects, meaning of Francis, Richard  134–5 Francke, Andrea  178, 251 n.64 Franzen, Brigitte  91–2 Fugitive Images  178 The Full Monty (film)  155 Fulton, Hamish  240 n.18 Furlong, William  92–3

furniture  20–1, 190 n.22 future  168–9, 174–5 Gadney, Reg  22 galleries. See museums/galleries The Gallery, London  52 Gallery December, Münster  59 Gallery House, London  27, 38–40, 45 game theory  28 Garlake, Margaret  16 genre art  139–40 George, Frank  3–4, 18, 30 Ghirardo, Diane  105, 108 Glendinning, Miles  80, 98, 122 Goethe Institute, London  38 Gogarty, Larne Abse  177 Goldsmiths College  233 n.44 Grant, Eddy, “Electric Avenue”  127, 235 n.54 Graphic Arts Studio  16 Greater London Council  70, 80, 111, 221 n.24 Green, Trevor  25 Green, William  16, 17, 23, 188 n.13 Greimas squares  5 Grimshaw, Chris  26 Groundcourse, Ealing College of Art  17–18 Guattari, Félix  13, 185 n.33 Haacke, Hans  38 Hackney Flashers  58 Haggerston Estate, London  178 Hall, Liz  155 Hamadi, Rob  149 Hamilton, Richard  17 Hammersmith School of Art  16 Hansen, Mark  113 happiness  135 Harper, Douglas  69 Harrison, Margaret  58 Hartley, Keith  126 Harvey House, Brentford Towers, London  92–8, 94, 136 Hawking, Stephen  xi Hayles, N. Katherine  53, 141, 143–4 How We Became Posthuman  5

INDEX

Heeswijk, Jeanne van, Vibe Detector  228 n.99 Heller, Margot  164 Heston Farm Estate, London  137–9, 138 Higgott, Andrew  79 Highfields Estate, London  99–102 high-rise buildings. See tower blocks Hill, Jonathan  44 history, relevance of, to an art work’s meaning  x–xi Holert, Tom  130 Hollamby, E. E. (Ted)  80, 128 homeostasis art as interruption of societal  13 in communities  40, 81 defined  1 feedback as crucial to  174 Willats’s work and  1, 4, 9, 12, 24–7, 50, 61–2, 66–7, 113, 119, 163 homeostats  4, 24–7, 50, 61, 109, 119, 183 n.15. See also multihomeostat problem Hornsey School of Art  29 Hounslow Borough Council  97–8 housing. See also communities; social housing behavior in  74–5, 79, 216 n.74 self-organization concerning  120– 3 Thatcher-era cuts and neglect  70, 111–12, 140, 221 n.24 tower blocks  79–109 Willats’s work and  12, 69–76, 79–102, 105–9, 120–3, 136–41 Housing Act (1980)  111 Hudek, Antony  24, 158 Hudson, Alistair  177 Hunt, Albert  29 Hunt, Kay  58 Hyperallergic (online forum)  xiii Hyson Green, Nottingham  31–3 Ibsen, Peter  37 ICL. See International Computers, Ltd identity, as axiom  62–3, 83–4, 89, 169, 231 n.25 Ilfeld, Etan  6

273

Information and Culture (journal)  xii information theory  7, 11, 60, 174 Institute of Contemporary Arts, London  17, 156 Institute of Practitioners in Advertising  20 Instructional Science (magazine)  168 International Computers, Ltd (ICL)  48, 50 intervention, Willats’s work as  8, 13, 76, 79, 113, 115, 118, 157, 171, 174 Invention of Problems II (symposium)  36 Ipswich Civic College  15, 26, 28–9 Isle of Dogs, London  104–8, 109, 115–18 Jackson, Shannon  8 James, William  5, 166 Jansz, Eleanor  159 Johansson, Lasse  178 Johnson, Stephen  163, 165, 246 n.78 Johnstone, Stephen  114 Jones, Jack  37 Joseph, Miranda  135 Jury, Sarah  178 Keeler, Paul  39 Kelly, Jane  148, 156–7 Kelly, Mary  58 Kelson House, London  106, 107 Kennet House, London  81, 82 Kennington  160–3 Kester, Grant  8, 114, 119, 172–3 Conversation Pieces  172 Kettle’s Yard Gallery, Cambridge  99 Kiesler, Charles and Sara  30 kinetic art  21, 22, 25, 194 n.48 King, Alfred  98 Kingsland Estate, London  178 Kline, Ronald  1, 184 n.17 The Cybernetics Moment  5 Kosice, Gyula  16 Krauss, Sigi  38 Kravagna, Christian  127 Kretzschmar, Ines  162 Kreuger, Anders  53

274

INDEX

Labour Party  55, 98, 155 Lacy, Suzanne  102, 114 Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle  156 Lake, Dale  30 Lane, Barry  25 Languages of Dissent (catalogue)  xiii Lansdown, John  38 lateral thinking  23–4, 39, 152 Latham, John  24 Lawson, Deana  xiii–xiv Laycock School Experiment  76 LCC. See London County Council League of Socialist Artists  55 learning theory  16, 30, 59, 119, 198 n.91 Lee, Mingwei  199 n.3 Leeds  70, 214 n.56 Leeson, Loraine  76–7, 83, 102, 104–5 “Adjusting Culture to Practical Function”  114–15 Leete, Cedric  149, 154 Leith Festival, Edinburgh  46, 57 Leonardo (journal)  23, 39, 203 n.21 Lichty, Patrick  7 life codes  54, 62, 175 light art  25 Lisson Gallery, London  92 Lobel, Michael  xiii Lock, Max. See Max Lock and Partners Locke, Peter  170 London  12, 61, 77, 92–8, 148–55, 164–6. See also east London; south London; west London London County Council (LCC)  80, 128, 190 n.19 London Docklands Development Corporation  104–5, 115 McCulloch, Warren  30, 60 McDermont, Morag  123 McHale, John  32 McKay, Donald  30 McKay, George  234 n.53 MacKay, Margret  52, 64 McKenzie, Jon  91 McKinnon-Wood, Robin  18 McLuhan, Marshall  79–80

Malina, Frank  22 Mallen, George  26, 37, 39, 52, 201 n.14 Ecogame  37–8 MAO. See Modern Art Oxford Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield  153, 155, 156 Marshall, James  101 Marx, Erica  39 Mason, Catherine  91 Computer in the Art Room  6 Mason, Don  29, 37 Massey, Doreen  156 Max Lock and Partners  92 Medalla, David  10, 39 Mellor, David  26 Mercury, Freddie  16 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  16 Metzger, Gustav  18, 22, 189 n.15, 202 n.18 Middlesbrough  12, 70, 145–8, 214 n.56 Middlesbrough Art Gallery  145, 156 Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA)  177–8 Ministry of Housing  192 n.33 Ministry of Works  6 models  41. See also social models Modern Art Oxford (MAO)  15, 25–6, 27, 37, 70, 99, 160–2 modernism  35, 68, 73, 79–83, 100, 213 n.48. See also “new reality” Moiret, Pierre  73 Molton Gallery, London  41 Montero, Gustavo Grandal  68 Moran, Mrs.  120–3 Morton, Tom  10 Motorola Semiconductor Company  27 multi-homeostat problem  2, 7, 48, 61, 119, 151, 185 n.32, 191 n.27 multimedia  144, 159 Munder, Heike  xiii Museum of Modern Art Oxford. See Modern Art Oxford museums/galleries, transformation/ reconception of  7, 10, 23, 30, 35, 38, 57–8, 61, 67, 70, 119, 158, 166, 171–2

INDEX

Muthesius, Stefan  80, 97, 122 mutualism. See also collaboration/ cooperation art-audience relationship  8, 38, 96, 202 n.16 art-society relationship  66, 76–7 built environment and  68–9 community-based  76 pedagogical use of  30 Willats’s work and  5, 11–12, 38, 51, 53, 64–6, 71, 76, 99, 115–16, 119 Nalecz, Halina  16 Nationalist Front  129 National Physical Laboratory  30, 39 National Tower Block Directory  137 Nealon, Nick  26 negative feedback  3, 7, 174, 178, 249 n.39. See also feedback Nelson, Steven  xiii–xiv Neuberger Museum  xiii Newman, Oscar  216 n.74 “new reality” artistic languages appropriate for  7 citizens’ response to  68–9, 83, 113, 122, 126, 128, 133 modernism and  68–9, 79–83 planned, prescribed, and controlling nature of  68–9, 91, 92, 101, 122, 126–7, 248 n.21 Willats’s commentary on  122, 213 n.48, 248 n.21 New Scientist (magazine)  23, 28 New Vision Centre Gallery, London  16, 187 n.4 Nottingham  31 Nottingham School of Art  11, 15, 29–30 objects, meaning of  134–7, 140. See also found objects Obrist, Hans Ulrich  144 Ocean Estate, Oxford  70–6, 73 Oiticica, Hélio  20 Oliver, Felicity  26, 44, 190 n.22 omnidirectional thought  22–3, 24 O’Neill, Alistair  132

275

open-ended systems/approaches. See also systems deterministic  79, 85 sculpture as  26 strategies for  170–3 urban spaces as  145 Willats’s work and  1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 12, 40, 44, 48–9, 50, 90, 109, 120, 145, 166, 170–3, 178 operators. See project operators Orchard Gallery, Derry  127, 156 ordinary people. See amateurs/ordinary people Oxford  37, 70–6, 160–4 Pangaro, Paul  238 n.7 participatory art  76, 170, 172–3 participatory reception  12, 51, 114, 169–70 Pask, Gordon  2–6, 18, 30, 37, 39, 40, 91, 163, 166 An Approach to Cybernetics  60 “The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics”  68–9 Pearlman Moiret Associates  73 pedagogy  28–30 People’s Armada to Parliament  105 Pepper, Simon  80 performance  6, 7, 10, 17, 32, 54, 159, 168, 172 Perivale  64–8, 65 Peterlee  215 n.62 Pethick, Emily  4, 6, 22, 29, 30, 59, 64 Petrovich, Dushko  xiii–xiv Photo 98  153 photo-elicitation  69, 74 Photography Workshop Ltd  57–8 Picasso, Pablo, Bull’s Head  132 Pickering, Andrew  2, 119, 166, 175, 177 The Cybernetic Brain  5 Pocock, Melanie  161 point blocks  80, 85, 89, 218 n.8 Popper, Frank  22 Art, Action, and Participation  234 n.53 Origins and Development of Kinetic Art  22 Port of London Authority  116

276

INDEX

posthumanism  5, 184 n.20 Post Office Tower (now BT Tower), London  6 Pound, Stuart  48, 50 Prince, Richard  xiii problems, Willats’s statement of, as integral component of his art  27, 46, 48–54, 62, 64–6, 68, 70, 74–6, 84, 88–91, 122 professionals/experts  68–9, 76, 98, 122–3, 126–8, 170. See also amateurs/ordinary people project operators  43–5, 48, 50, 65, 77, 89–90, 148–9, 152–4, 178 Public Art at Royal Oak  76 punk  xiii, 11, 68, 124, 126, 136 Purdy, Pat  124–7 Radio Anti  178, 251 n.64 random variables  7, 17, 23, 119, 166 Rank Xerox  49 Raven Row Gallery, London  25 Regional College of Art, Bradford  29 response sheets  58, 64, 67, 74–6, 89–90, 96, 139, 147, 158 responsive-ability  102–5, 114 Roberts, John  105 Rochdale Art Gallery, Greater Manchester  156 Rogers, Paul  125, 127–8 Rosler, Martha  102 Brunch à la Loft from the series The Rewards of Money  103–5, 103, 226 n.88 If You Lived Here  104 Rothenstein, Michael  17 Royal Institute of British Architects  80–1 Russell, Marlowe  16 Saatchi, Charles and Doris  233 n.44 Salvadori, Marcello  39 Schöffer, Nicolas  17 Schweiker, Rosalie  178, 251 n.65 science-art relationship  1, 3, 18, 39, 60, 119, 189 n.15, 216 n.73 Selby, Ralph  29 self-organization

community-based  41, 54, 71, 112–41 counter-consciousness as example of  90 DIY and punk as expressions of  124, 127, 234 n.53 furniture based on  20 Willats on significance of  229 n.6 Willats’s work and  5, 8, 12, 20, 54, 112–41, 168 Serpentine Gallery, London  76 Shannon, Claude  174, 210 n.14 Shapely, Peter  220 n.21 Sharkey, John  24 Sheffield  12, 153–6 Shirley, Rosemary  216 n.73 Shotbolt, Jack  26 Shotwell, Alexis  168, 169, 175, 176 Signals Gallery, London  39 simulation  12, 26–8, 44, 52, 148, 151–4 The Sixties (exhibition)  25 skateboarding  128 Skeffington, Arthur, and Skeffington Report  220 n.21 Skeffington Court, London  85–92, 86, 87, 120–3, 121 Sladen, Mark  126 Slade School of Fine Art  202 n.18 Snow, C. P., “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”  189 n.15 social class  31–3, 42, 122–3 social conceptualism  35, 199 n.3 social housing  79, 112, 129, 140, 171, 172, 178, 216 n.74. See also tower blocks social models  40–1, 45–51, 144, 179 social practice cybernetics in relation to  1–2, 35, 54 electronic arts integrated with  38 multi-homeostat problem in  185 n.32 overview of  7–10 varieties of approaches to  118–19 Willats’s work and  1, 7–10, 113, 119, 169 social resource projects  11, 33, 35, 37–8, 40–2, 204 n.26

INDEX

sociotechnical systems  12, 26, 91, 102, 115, 122 south London  127, 156–8 South London Gallery  156, 158, 164 Spear, Ruskin  16 Spence, Jo  57–8 Stanley, Michael  x Star, S. Leigh  198 n.90 state graphs  60 Steadman, Philip  21–2 Stewart, Graham, Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s  111–12 Stierli, Martino, and Mechtild Widrich, Participation in Art and Architecture  76 Stockholm  178 Stone, Kit and John  71–2 strange attractors  xv, 7, 144, 163, 238 n.7 Striking Back: Works Since 1972 (exhibition)  155 Stroud, Peter  24 Studio International (magazine)  23 subliminal communication  20 Supertram, Sheffield  154–5 Surfing with the Attractor (exhibition)  164 Sutcliffe, Alan  38 System Research Ltd  18, 37 systems. See also open-ended systems/ approaches art production and reception as  18, 143 cybernetics and  4–6, 60, 143–4 housing  71–6, 91–2 mutualism in  5, 68–9 objects’ roles and values within  134–7 self-organizing  112–13 social  60, 62 sociotechnical  12, 26, 91, 102, 115, 122 urban  97, 108, 143–66 Willats’s work and  9–10, 12, 21, 26, 28, 52–3, 71–6, 91–2, 102, 112–13, 115, 141, 143–66 systems theory  3, 166 Tate Gallery, Liverpool  99, 156, 178

277

Taylor, Ross  178 tennis  36–7 Terranova, Tiziana  165 Thatcher, Margaret  111–12, 216 n.74 Thorp, David  156 Tidswell, Alison  155–6 Tilson, Joe  24 time, as component of works  1, 8–10, 40, 45, 47, 51, 59, 61–2, 66, 84, 91, 92, 114, 116, 137, 164–71, 174 Time Magazine  4 Top Mast Point, London  106, 107 tower blocks  18, 71–6, 79–109, 112, 120–3, 137–9. See also social housing Townshend, Peter  16 transience  9, 144, 163, 165–6 Transport and General Workers Union  37, 117 Treadway, Helen  101 Trowell, Jane  243 n.57 Turner, Fred  204 n.22 uncertainty cybernetics and  4 in performance  7 self-organizing systems and  113 social resource projects and  50 Willats’s work and  2, 6, 7, 177 urban systems  97, 108, 143–66 useful art  177–8 values, as axiom  62–3, 83–4, 169, 231 n.25 Victoria Miro Gallery, London  xii–xiii Von Foerster, Heinz  2, 3–4, 144, 166, 168, 169, 177, 179 wastelands  123–6, 133, 135, 137–9 Wates Construction Company  98 Weaver, Mike  21 Weaver, Warren  174 Wegner, Nicholas  52 west London  42–6, 81, 85–92, 124, 137 Whitechapel Art Gallery, London  69–70, 116, 118, 157

278

INDEX

white supremacy  128–9 Whittle, Peter  26, 39 Wiener, Norbert  3, 175 Willats, Eric A.  16 Willats, Stephanie  xi Willats, Stephen artistic practices and working methods of  83 conceptual designer as self-assigned role of  20 control over his work’s interpretation  x–xi, xiv–xv critical and scholarly works on  172 descriptions of project works of  x, 7, 9, 168 goal of works of  xii, 1, 35, 51, 96, 114 influences and early training  15– 18, 25, 39 studio of  18, 26 teaching career of  11, 15, 26, 28–30 Willats, Stephen, art by Art + Cognition  15, 29–30 Berlin Local  214 n.56 Brentford Towers  12, 92–9, 93, 94, 95, 96, 112, 136–7, 136, 143, 172 Changing Everything  12, 156–8, 157 The Compartmentalised Cliff  81, 219 n.10 Contained Living  70, 160 Creativeforce  12, 153–6, 153 Dangerous Path  240 n.18 Data Stream: A Portrait of New York  246 n.81 Data Stream Portrait of London  160, 164–6, 164 Edinburgh Social Model Construction Project  46–51, 46, 47, 64, 171, 172 Freezone  12, 148–55, 149, 150, 158 From a Coded World  11, 64–8, 65, 66, 77, 143, 146 From a Walk to the Supermarket  224 n.71

From Different Worlds  214 n.56 Human Right  178, 214 n.56 Inside an Ocean  71, 73–6, 73, 75, 157 The Kids Are in the Streets  12, 112, 127–9, 127 Living Like a Goya  250 n.47 Living with Practical Realities  12, 85, 86, 112, 120–3, 121, 126, 232 n.35 Macro to Micro  158–60, 159, 172 Man from the Twenty-First Century  10–11, 30–3, 31, 62, 197 n.85 Meta Filter  11, 35, 51–4, 52, 57, 62, 143, 152, 156, 171 Multi-Storey Mosaic  99–101, 101, 139 Museum Mosaic  99 Oxford Community Data Stream  160–4, 161, 174 Oxford Insight Development Project  37 Pat Purdy and the Glue Sniffers’ Camp  12, 112, 124–7, 125, 135 People in Pairs  165–6, 165 People Mosaic  99 Perceptions of a Married Couple  59, 210 n.11 performance as component of  7 Person A  58–9, 151 Personal Islands  105–8, 106, 107, 109, 146 The Place of Work  58, 209 n.4 Private Journeys  12, 112, 137–9, 139, 146, 237 n.89 Random Encounter  240 n.18 The Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs  36–7, 146, 199 n.98, 200 n.8 Sorting Out Other People’s Lives  71–2, 71 technology for  26 Tower Mosaic  99 The Transformer  145–8, 146 Trying to Forget Where We Came From  250 n.47 Vertical Living  85–92, 86, 88, 96, 99, 220 n.23

INDEX

Visual Meta Language Simulation  27–8, 27, 33, 40, 50, 51, 195 n.66 West London Social Resource Project  40, 42–6, 43, 44, 64, 68, 171, 206 n.40 Westminster Social Resource Project  204 n.26 What Is He Trying to Get At? Where Does He Want to Go?  12, 112, 129–36, 129, 235 n.65 Working within a Defined Context  12, 112, 115–18, 116, 231 n.23 Willats, Stephen, clothing by Multiple Clothing  20 Willats, Stephen, drawings by Art Society Feedback  2, 3 Change Exercise No. 13, 21, 21, 167 Concept Frames  62, 63 Concept Frames through Time  62, 63 Homeostat Drawing No. 1, 4, 4, 25 Homeostat Drawing No. 2, 61, 61, 67 The Ideological Tower  83–5, 84, 90, 215 n.63 Life Net Encoder  61–2, 62, 64 Organic Exercise No. 6, Series 2, 18, 20 Preparatory worksheet for Brentford Towers  96, 137 Preparatory worksheet for (Leigh Bowery) What Is He Trying to Get At? Where Does He Want to Go?  133–4, 134 Preparatory worksheet for MultiStorey Mosaic  225 n.74 Preparatory worksheet for Private Journeys  237 n.89, 238 n.92 The Twin Towers  90, 231 n.25 Willats, Stephen, ephemera associated with project works by  68 Willats, Stephen, film by A State of Agreement  90 Willats, Stephen, furniture by Corree Design  20

279

Willats, Stephen, sculptures by Colour Variable #3  143, 191 n.27 Manual Variable constructions  18, 23 Organic Exercise No. 1, Series 2  19 Shift Boxes  17, 25 Variable Shift Machine  17 Visual Automatics  17, 25, 160 Visual Homeostat  25 Visual Homeostatic Information Mesh  25 Visual Transmitters  17, 25 Willats, Stephen, writings by Art and Social Function  8, 11, 35, 42, 171 The Artist as Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour  31, 40, 192 n.37 Artwork as Social Model  9, 58, 160, 193 n.37 Balcony  193 n.37 Beyond the Plan: The Transformation of Personal Space in Housing  31 Cha Cha Cha  140, 192 n.37, 238 n.97 Corridor  193 n.37 “The Counter-Consciousness in Vertical Living”  90 The House that Habitat Built  192 n.37 Intervention and Audience  8, 113, 125, 129, 130, 192 n.37 The Lurky Place  123-4, 123, 125, 192 n.37 “Mechanistic Crisis: An Examination into Tolerance Levels in Society and Its Application to the Transmission of Information”  22–3, 81 Multichannel Vision  153 The New Reality  122, 127 proliferation of  23 “Propositions for Relevant Social Practice”  9 Shopping Parade  193 n.37 Stairwell  193 n.37 Vision and Reality  140, 171 World without Objects  134

280

Wilson, Andrew  25, 54–5 Wilson, Harold  85 Wilson, Siona  57–8 Women and Work (two exhibitions)  58 Women’s Workshop  55 Woo, Rosten  152 Wood, Ronnie  16

INDEX

Wood, Sharon  93–4 Young British Artists  233 n.44 Zaharia, Madalina  178 Zimmerman, Andrea Luka  178 zines  68