Tenant to Tenant: The Art of Talking with Strangers [Research and Debate: Art as Social Practice]

From Conceptual Designer to Co-CreatorIn April 2003, when I knocked on the door of Willats's London fl at, his tall fi gure bent forward under a low doorway to greet me.Now sixty-one years old, he beckoned me upstairs, where we had tea in his effi cient but tight space.Here he moved from kitchen to seating area to typewriter in one or two great strides, as a collection of angular and colorful desk lamps, all turned on, brightened the afternoon.Willats began by telling me of his early interest in cybernetics and self-organizing systems.Working in a London gallery in 1957, he became acquainted with the Israeli painter and sculptor, Yaacov Agam (b.1928), whose works quite directly involve the viewer as a participant in creating meaning.Gordon Pask, author of The Self-Organising System of a Decision Making Group (1965), was another early infl uence, fostering in Willats the realization that human interaction is the meaning of a work, and that there is no overall controlling factor, particularly not the artist.In these early years, Willats worked for a time at a think tank run by Pask, Systems Research, where he met a number of cyberneticians.He also founded Control Magazine in July 1965, a publication which he continues to write for and edit, and in 1971 he launched the Centre for Behavioural Art in London.In keeping with his ideas about Research and Debate: Art as Social Practice Places 16.3 61