Bedwyr Williams: Coachtripping with the Carbootsale Clairvoyant

There's an immediate, intimidating question of scale posed to exhibitors by the large open space of Tramway's T2. So what's Bedwyr Williams' spatial strategy in his Glasgow International exhibit Echt? Park a coach in there.

In this coach's luggage compartment will be screened a film set in the not-too distant future. After some kind of disaster, new royal families have appeared, their status secured by having stolen or hoarded certain consumerist goods or items, now precious as manufacturing has come to an end. To use Williams' example, "In your street the king has stolen everyone's lawn mowers and ornaments." Scaling this up, the highest king and queen sit in the local nightclub, with the last of the supply of toilet paper behind their thrones. For those who know Williams' work, it won't be a surprise that the entire film is narrated by a man with legs three times the size of normal legs, asleep next to some old people taking refuge in a village hall.

Deciding to screen the film on the side of a coach came with heavy associations for Williams, specifically their use during the miners' strikes in the 1980s as transportation for strikebreakers and pickets, as well as the familiar image of asylum seekers being bussed in and out of the country. On a less political note, the suitcases spread around T2 – as well as providing seating – quote that moment at the end of a coach trip after "Everybody's been singing and they're chilled out. But as soon as they go outside everyone turns into an arsehole because they think someone's going to damage their suitcase or nick it or something's going to get lost. Except for the IKEA sale, it's the closest thing we've got in this country to when they drop food parcels when there's famine." From refugee crises and the de-industrialisation of Britain, to the vicissitudes of coach tripping, it's with an unselfconscious speed that Williams square-goes these heavyweight subjects.

This instant punch of anxiety that comes with his work betrays the hair-pulling anxiety Williams feels towards certain worrying cultural developments. Though some elements of the film's premise at first feel obviously funny or deliberately absurd, Echt's ruling class of powerful plunderers is not just a moment of fancy. Speaking about the inspirations for the film, Williams describes the recent emergence of a class of four-wheel drivers that consider themselves the "survivors" of the economic recession. These tweed and Barbour-wearing jeep-drivers  are "The sort of person that if they could, would carry guns. They're the first clue we've got of the kind of society that's in the future where the weak get weaker and the strong get stronger." There's no attempt to disguise this seriousness of intention, writ large in the exhibit's title Echt: German for 'real.'

As well as coming from his fears of intensifying individualism, also important to Echt was the carbootsale community that has remained intact despite the internet's otherwise complete transformation of the retail experience. One market in Cardiff, the intriguingly-names Splott, was of particular importance as a source of props. Opening early in the morning, Splott takes place in a cold warehouse "and it's just all the stuff that's been in the charts two years ago in a CD case with a coffee ring stain on it or a drill that doesn't quite work. I found that quite inspiring as a scenario of how I imagined the future would be: me picking amongst the detritus of the fads of last year." With some fondness, he describes these markets as "Like little museums, fast-moving, with weird people running them."

Though Williams' wit (whether in his work or in conversation) often cuts a little too close to the bone, he observes that humour as an artistic ambition is "secretly frowned upon". Accepting that laughter "is quite an unusual response to get from someone in an art gallery," it's nevertheless this strangeness that makes it a valid response for him. "Making someone laugh, you're making them do probably the closest thing to an orgasm in public. There's no other response quite like it, except crying. If I can make them cry or laugh I'm happy. I don't want to make them just interested." Further acknowledging the important role of humour in his work, Williams will discuss this topic further on Sunday 6 April in Tramway.

With each of the artists also giving performances as part of the event, Williams continues a trend of accompanying his exhibited work with a performance. Giving these performances, he is looking to establish a more immediate relationship between himself and his audience. "As an artist I like to get the reaction with me being there. I don't want to make a little white sculpture and hear months later that somebody liked it. I need an instant kind of hit from the thing." It's clear that genuine engagement and reactions are what matters most to him, in the "hit" of experiencing first-hand his audience's reactions or by provoking immediate involuntary responses to his work, whether laughing or weeping.

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"Making someone laugh, you're making them do probably the closest thing to an orgasm in public." – Bedwyr Williams

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As would be expected from Williams' unusual artistic motivations and ambitions, the standard discussion of "influences" takes a wrong turn somewhere. What comes up instead is the first ten minutes of the latest remake of War of the Worlds, when various suburban trivialities are interrupted by aliens. Then it's the usual alien fighting for the rest of the two hours. But of far more interest to Williams is "that kind of peripheral stuff that goes on in apocalyptic films. Because you could actually make quite a banal film about the apocalypse. It could be the end of society but if you were living just in the suburbs it could just be that everyone shares a bottle of milk and they build a little protective keep. It's more like thinking about it in a more oblique way." Just as important as getting away from the conventions of the blockbuster apocalypse, Williams was keen to avoid "the art video look." To this end, when making his film work in Echt he continued his collaboration with Casey Raymond and Ewan Jones Morris, better known for directing music videos for the likes of DJ Shadow and The Human League.

Careful not to close the interview by calling Glasgow "apocalyptic," Williams nevertheless identifies certain elements of Tramway and Glasgow that make it an appropriate setting for Echt. He contrasts Glasgow to the "wedding cake" of Edinburgh – with which he has become better acquainted from writing one of the Collective gallery's Observer's Walks. Compared to the capital, Glasgow "is much more of a sweeping, broad situation." The Tramway is for him just one example of the many parts that "feel like there was once a lot of activity and now it's quiet. There's no really big buildings around the Tramway. It looks like, say, if there was an apocalypse in the the UK, all the arty people would hide in there." Again slipping effortlessly between perfect comedy and discomforting prophecy, like the sloppy dentist of his 2013 work The Starry Messenger, Williams gives us just enough laughing gas to let him drill deeper and deeper into our backmost molars.