Ten Questions: Stephen Willats. By Stefanie Hessler.
Stephen Willats’ artistic work is concerned with people’s lives. For over fifty years, the British conceptual artist has produced works that look at the variables of social relationships and function as catalysts for change. Willats’ practice draws on diverse fields such as learning theory, advertising, semiotics and cybernetics, which he uses as vehicles for modelling his ideas. His art is dedicated both to documenting and diagraming social contexts, and to creating self-organized dynamic models that intervene in the structures that define people’s relationships with one another and with the material world around them.
Willats studied at the Ealing School of Art under British systems artist Roy Ascott between 1968 and 1973. Later, he worked as an educator himself at the Nottingham College of Art and Design, where he implemented a non-hierarchical system of self-organization and self-responsibility. For a short period in the 1960s, he called himself a “conceptual designer” and created clothes allowing wearers to mediate their relationship with other people, built self-organizing furniture and founded Control Magazine, which he still edits and publishes today...
