Saatchi Online Magazine Critic's Choice
Paul Carey-Kent
London-based Samuel Williams isn't due to graduate from the Royal College of Art's MA course until next year, but has already made an impact in several shows with his sculptural practice, which has two related strands.
First, objects which on the one hand look as if they might aspire to be sleekly minimal, but on the other are obviously made of scrappy materials and wear very visible signs of their rough and ready making. Thus Williams' forms might be seen as skew-whiff versions of Judd or LeWitt; he uses odd sections of shelving and left-over bits of wood, cable ties and ping pong balls; and a feature is made of the screws, drill holes, tape and hardened drips of glue which show how they were - just about - put together. Williams has recently extended the approach to a kinetic work which causes a pool ball to go smoothly up and down a ramshackle tower.
Even better, perhaps, are what you might call his 'video sculptures'. These follow a parallel logic by reducing a traditionally considered, exacting and time-consuming process to the absurdity of ridiculously rushed performances. 'Twenty Second Sculptures' (2009) shows Williams making twenty original sculptures in twenty seconds each, for example by frantically sticking together plastic cups with sellotape, or drilling in ten screws at two seconds each - it's addictively funny. 'The Natural World' adopts the same format to 'remake' twenty iconic works of Land Art and Arte Povera in twenty seconds each: so Walter de Maria's vast 'Lightning Field' is 'recreated' by sticking cutlery in the ground; and Williams finds a muddy enough field to make a passable attempt on Richard Long's meditative 'A Line Made By Walking' in the allotted time. Williams' latest video, 'We Are the Robots', shows the tooled-up arms of robots tackling the medium of instant sculpture. It's reassuring to find they're amusingly incompetent, especially in the absurd task of banging nails into potatoes.
In both strands, the balance between tribute to and deflation of modern sculptural practice is beautifully and wittily struck, and through that the work takes on its own appealingly tenuous allure.
Paul Carey-Kent
London-based Samuel Williams isn't due to graduate from the Royal College of Art's MA course until next year, but has already made an impact in several shows with his sculptural practice, which has two related strands.
First, objects which on the one hand look as if they might aspire to be sleekly minimal, but on the other are obviously made of scrappy materials and wear very visible signs of their rough and ready making. Thus Williams' forms might be seen as skew-whiff versions of Judd or LeWitt; he uses odd sections of shelving and left-over bits of wood, cable ties and ping pong balls; and a feature is made of the screws, drill holes, tape and hardened drips of glue which show how they were - just about - put together. Williams has recently extended the approach to a kinetic work which causes a pool ball to go smoothly up and down a ramshackle tower.
Even better, perhaps, are what you might call his 'video sculptures'. These follow a parallel logic by reducing a traditionally considered, exacting and time-consuming process to the absurdity of ridiculously rushed performances. 'Twenty Second Sculptures' (2009) shows Williams making twenty original sculptures in twenty seconds each, for example by frantically sticking together plastic cups with sellotape, or drilling in ten screws at two seconds each - it's addictively funny. 'The Natural World' adopts the same format to 'remake' twenty iconic works of Land Art and Arte Povera in twenty seconds each: so Walter de Maria's vast 'Lightning Field' is 'recreated' by sticking cutlery in the ground; and Williams finds a muddy enough field to make a passable attempt on Richard Long's meditative 'A Line Made By Walking' in the allotted time. Williams' latest video, 'We Are the Robots', shows the tooled-up arms of robots tackling the medium of instant sculpture. It's reassuring to find they're amusingly incompetent, especially in the absurd task of banging nails into potatoes.
In both strands, the balance between tribute to and deflation of modern sculptural practice is beautifully and wittily struck, and through that the work takes on its own appealingly tenuous allure.
© 2011 Samuel Williams
