Year In Rearview

Description

The range, size, and scope of LG Williams’s artistic and intellectual production are almost embarrassingly comprehensive. Painter, poet, dishwasher, scholar, surfer, and self-proclaimed “anti-theorist,” Williams emerged in the late 1990s as one of the few artists capable of reconciling eros and entropy, art and prophylaxis, sincerity and farce.

Best known for his conceptual “inventions” — artworks that hybridize satire, philosophy, and the debris of daily life — Williams has developed a visual language that thrives on contradiction. His 1998 photo book, Year In Rearview , is exemplary: a collection of black-and-white images of used condom wrappers, collected and photographed over twelve months, transforming the residue of pleasure into a relic of reflection — a cool meditation on risk and protection at the century’s uneasy end.

A romantic contrarian nihalist, Williams’s art operates at the juncture of the sacred and the disposable. His tone veers from the lofty to the ludicrous; his humor disguises a metaphysical ache. In both art and life, Williams performs what Dr. Seymour Howard once described as “an unending, life-enhancing dance of creation that is re-creation.”

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"I know that for a while I didn't see how deeply personal these pictures were or, to say it another way, how much they have the flavor — Duchamp might have said the 'scent' — of particular human life because I had been told and wanted to believe that LG was never subjective. I think that Edward Munch said the soul could get to heaven in one leap but that, if it does, it leaves a demon in its place. Sink through the levels of these pictures — their attention to the year, their ideas about it, the particular human consciousness the pictures reflect LG's profound immediacy and sense of stamina." — Jenny Saybaugh

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Seymour Howard (1928-2018) research interests included Classical art and its afterlife; restoration and fabrication of ancient sculpture; major issues of forms, dynamics and meanings in art history, theory, criticism, psychology and perception. He lectured widely at international, national, and sectional archaeological and art historical congresses and museums, including the Louvre, British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, the Hermitage, the National Gallery, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, as well as major universities in the United States and abroad. He also created paintings, posters, and sculpture in various media which he exhibited nationally and internationally since 1952.