Christopher Williams's new photographs: From Gastro porn to airbrushed models

It's a show that veers between enigmatic and plain boring, says Zoe Pilger

Taking on the machine: Williams's works, including a posing rooster and bruised apples, look at the struggle to feel good in an airbrushed, consumer-driven world

A few years ago, I went on the set of a TV ad for a Christmas food campaign by a major supermarket. The lighting was soft and sensual, the flesh of the turkey was plump and juicy, the close-ups were slow. For about an hour, I watched gravy being poured again and again. The stream of gravy sparkled under the lights, somehow evoking waterfalls… this was not just gravy. The mood created on the set was that of a love scene.

In the past, food photographers would use tricks to make the food look more appetising. They would microwave tampons, then stuff them in the cavity of the turkey. Tampons go on steaming for a long time. Now legal restrictions are tighter – the humble turkey has to look more or less as glamorous in real life as it does on the screen.

The American artist Christopher Williams is obsessed with the conventions of commercial photography, including food, fashion and less racy subjects such as botany and mechanics. Like the creative director of an ad campaign, he organises the set design, models and lighting, without necessarily taking the pictures himself.

A retrospective of Williams's conceptual photographs, The Production Line of Happiness, has just opened at London's Whitechapel Gallery, following runs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago. By today's standards of food fetishism, these images are bland. They are bureaucratic, flat and defensive. Sometimes they are painfully sentimental. Williams has an antagonistic relationship with the clichés of American consumerism; he likes to play with them, take them apart. As the title suggests, his work explores how images and desire are produced under capitalism.

Taking on the machine: Williams's works, including a posing rooster and bruised apples, look at the struggle to feel good in an airbrushed, consumer-driven world

A typical Williams photograph shows a bunch of red apples on a tree. They are fresh, wet, ripe – and average. The background is a flat blue, not of the sky, but a studio backdrop. The image looks as though it belongs in a dusty old book, found in a healthy living section of a charity shop. If you google "red apples", you will find a montage of very similar images.

I didn't expect to like his work, but it has a mysterious quality. It is about what is left out, what he calls the "silence" of the medium of photography. Rather than see that silence as a "fault… to be corrected by language", he wants to increase it. Many of the photographs are subtle, and create a calm state. And many are just boring.

The photograph of apples could be a stock photo, except for the slight bruise on the skin of one of them. This is the splinter in the eye, an aberration that would be airbrushed out of a commercial photo shoot. Williams loves things that seem perfect on the surface, then reveal themselves to be flawed. This is a surprisingly simple, even naive concept for an artist who is often associated with high theory.

Indeed, the title of the exhibition comes from a documentary by Jean-Luc Godard, in which a factory worker finds escapism in his hobby of filming insects and birds on a Super 8 camera. The mechanisation of daily life is counterpoised to the bliss of nature. Williams has said: "The title was unnecessary, but it served to underline or highlight the cruel set of relations set in place by the managers of culture."

Williams was born in Los Angeles in 1956. His family worked in the movies, and he spent time on sets as a child. He studied at the California Institute of the Arts under the first wave of West Coast conceptual artists, including John Baldessari and Douglas Huebler, but his contemporaries are the Pictures Generation: Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger. All of these influences are evident in his work.

Kruger too uses the language of advertising to critique it, but her text and image works are bold and directly political. Williams's critique is secretive. It is hidden. Sometimes it disappears completely.

Much of the mystery of his work is due to the curation. There are no labels, no wall text, no explanations whatsoever – this has the effect of making you look at the work itself. Also, the gallery looks rough. The walls have not been painted their usual pure white, the text has not been taken down from the previous exhibition. Everything is a bit dirty.

Williams has done this on purpose; he is interested in critiquing the conditions under which art is displayed in institutions. Again, this could be pretentious and empty, but in the downstairs gallery it works. Without the formality of the typical white cube atmosphere, you can relax. There is less pressure to yield some great meaning from the works. Their vacant quality offers a pleasant holiday from thinking.

The food theme continues: there is a photograph of a pile of maize with green husks in a white studio. A Kodak three-point reflection guide is included in shot to flag up the artificiality. There is a rooster, alive and posing.

Next comes women. A photograph shows a naked female foot, a hand reaching down to roll on a red sock. Like the bruise on the apple, there is the faintest suggestion of a blister on her heel. This points to ordinariness and pain, which again would usually be erased from a commercial shoot.

The fight against airbrushing positions Williams alongside the Dove Real Beauty campaign of a few years ago, which claimed to celebrate female imperfection, and provides a good example of how capitalism tries to co-opt any attempt to go beyond it.

Upstairs, the works lose their elusiveness, and are much less interesting. A series of photographs all show JFK in the year he was shot. In each, his back is turned to the viewer – Williams seems fascinated by this pose. He has said: "It's a cliché that photographs show you everything and tell you nothing." One shows JFK as a dark figure, bent over a desk. He is the great man exiting the world stage – this seems trite.

I also didn't like Williams's series of photographs of glass flowers, which each represent a country where Amnesty International has reported political "disappearances". The kola nut from Angola is shown in close-up, like a botanical specimen.

A series of four photographs of an Asian woman on the street, seemingly captured without her knowledge, show her slowly turning away from the viewer, and recall the photographic portraits of Chris Marker. Here is the muse held at a distance in the lonely city. But they lack Marker's magic.

The most unashamedly clichéd photograph shows a palm tree on a tropical beach. Perhaps Williams found it in a Sandals brochure. The scene is set for lovers to kiss on honeymoon, but the foreground is empty of figures. If Williams wants his viewer to search for flaws, then we can pick out the long shadow cast by the tree trunk and the darkening sky over the ocean. But they seem inconsequential.

Despite his insistence on the "silence" of photography, this kind of image speaks straight to high theory. In fact, the whole exhibition is dependent on theory to justify its banality. Williams is also a professor at the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, and he has described the exhibition as "thinking about the culture industry as a kind of machine and our subjectivity as being its product". It seems we need the text to decipher the work after all.

The Production Line of Happiness is at the Whitechapel Gallery, London E1 (020 7522 7888) until 21 June