Stephen Willats's Super 8 film A Progression of Signs, one component of his mixed-media work In the Beginning, 2011, recalls Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma, 1970. In both films, shots of public space click by in a steady rhythm: street signs, homemade posters, advertising, litter. Frampton gives each of his New York sites a linguistic equivalent, decontextualizing and ordering it as a letter of the alphabet. In contrast, the images in A Progression of Signs remain part and parcel of Lewisham, the London neighborhood in which they were filmed. A newly married couple recorded the footage in the area around their apartment building. It plays on a floor-level television to the left of three collages of photographs of the couple’s apartment and interview quotes about their expectations for the future. Arrows connect the collage elements: Toothbrushes point to garbage cans, a childhood toy to a teapot, individual objects to interior spaces, the private environment to portraits of the couple. The film yokes their immediate external world with this network of lived spatial and material experience. Despite Willats’s reputation as one of the UK’s first Conceptual artists, this work is the antithesis of what Benjamin H. D. Buchloh calls Conceptualism’s emblematic “aesthetic of administration.” Willats’s subjects are not simply contained and controlled by the architectures in which they dwell. Instead, administrative strictures are negotiated with, subtly altered, rendered personal.

As demonstrated by the recent works in this show, “Living for Tomorrow,” Willats’s aesthetic has remained consistent since the late 1970s. Long before Thomas Hirschhorn began staging interventions in lower-income communities, Willats was interviewing residents of modernist housing blocks, tracing the ways in which, through subcultures connected to feminism, drugs, and music, identity is asserted amid collective life. This practice derives from an abiding interest in cybernetics. He drew “art society feedback” loops as early as 1959, and in 1962, while at Ealing Art College, Willats first encountered the cybernetician Gordon Pask, for whom he later worked on studies of conversation and learning. In 1969, Willats drew abstract renderings of William Ross Ashby’s self-regulating Homeostat system, replete with connective arrows, which would influence his formal language from that point forward. He later devised the Centre for Behavioural Art, 1972–73, which initiated the first of his interactions with social groups with the aim of “the operation of a socially orientated stance by the artist.”

Pursuing an artistic practice founded in social science and research methodology without merely visualizing content is a difficult balancing act. The array of houses, siding, pavements, and signs that confront the viewer in the collages of Yesterday Today Tomorrow, 2011, could easily be mistaken for a postmodernist hodgepodge of everyday images, when in fact the collection essentially denotes relationships between texts and urban design in a specific locality. At his best, Willats celebrates the potential ambiguities of his diagrammatic lexicon. In No. 44 and No. 45, both 2011, from the long-running “Conceptual Tower” series begun in 1984, photographic prints of housing blocks are inexplicably linked to brightly colored polygons. The images of the buildings, rendered trapezoidal by the ground-level perspective of the photographer, are turned at unexpected angles and colored pink and blue. While the arrows here still connect elements, their logic is now obscure, even playful. Another work, People in Pairs, 2013, maps boxes and arrows in different configurations over video footage of couples walking along crowded streets. The colors and orientations of these diagrams keep shifting, as if caught up in the dynamism and ambiguity of feedback itself.

—Daniel Quiles