Tillmans photographed for magazines such as iD and Spex before the art world discovered him. The Berliner by choice and rave chronicler presents his biggest solo show to date at the MoMa.
Fruit, vegetables and cassettes in the photo: “still life, New York” by Wolfgang Tillmans (2001).COURTESY OF WOLFGANG TILLMANS, David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, Maureen Paley, London
Wolfgang Tillmans moves carefree through the galleries on the fifth floor of the MoMa. Jeans, sneakers, an open shirt – he casually chats with the visitors of the preview of his monumental exhibition “To look without fear”. One has the feeling that he is receiving guests in his Berlin studio rather than opening an exhibition in one of the most important art institutions in the world.
The nonchalance certainly has something to do with the fact that Tillmans has been in and out of the big houses around the world for many years. The Tate Modern exhibited him as early as 2003, and later he even sat on the board of directors of the London museum. He is a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin and Chairman of the London Institute of Contemporary Art. He has exhibited at the Pinakothek der Moderne and the Stedelijk in Amsterdam. Tillmans is not afraid of contact with large institutions.
In this respect, the solo exhibition at the MoMa is no longer a huge step for the Tilmanns, even if it is an honor that not many living artists are bestowed with. Cindy Sherman and Richard Serra are among the more recent examples, just before the pandemic began it was the feminist performance artist Adrian Piper.
Berlin down-to-earthness
The fact that Tillmans moves so naturally through the recently expanded and more airy galleries of the MoMa is certainly also due to the fact that the idea of a work exhibition or the canonization of his person and his work tends to resist him. From the outset, Tillmans did not see the show at MoMa, the largest solo exhibition in his career spanning more than 30 years, as an ennobling, as an ascent into a pantheon of contemporary art. Rather, it was an opportunity for him.
The work as original and artefact has never meant much to Wolfgang Tillmans. The fact that his artistic work began with photocopies speaks volumes in this regard, as does the apparent casualness of his images. And the fact that he always hangs his works unframed with paperclips or Tesa tape underscores this conscious subversion of the ideology of the unique.
One of the exhibition rooms of the big Tillmans show at MoMa. On the left the black and white photo with Jochen Klein and the deer from 1995.Emile Askey
The installation, the way in which his works change and create space, has always been far more important to Tillmans. And so the offer from MoMa curator Roxana Marcoci to design all the rooms on the fifth floor of MoMa that had been vacant for two years was certainly irresistible for Tillmans. Especially since the museum largely gave him a free hand.
The image in space, the narrative freely selectable
The Tillmans exhibition in New York is anything but a traditional retrospective. Certainly, Tillmans has presented various facets of his work since the early 1990s: topics such as “portrait and subculture”, “photocopies”, “light” or “astronomy”. Above all, however, he wants to create spaces of experience that enable the visitor to enter into a direct dialogue with the works.
This is matched by the complete absence of descriptions of the more than 400 works on display. In line with Tilmann’s specifications, the MoMa refrains from labeling and categorizing a work that is already reluctant to do so. The museum is thus following its chosen path of self-deconstruction. Since reopening in 2019, 53rd Street has scrupulously avoided offering hierarchical, didactic “master” narratives. Giving an artist like Tillmans an entire floor fits in perfectly with the concept.
The artist Wolfgang Tillmans, photographed in 2022.And Ipp
The exhibition is anything but an intellectual attempt to organize a life’s work, to uncover lines of development, to understand the artist’s thinking. The exhibition is roughly chronological, but it works in a far more direct way. Tillmans selected all of the exhibits from his own archive or even reproduced them from scratch, leaving the 40 works in the MoMa collection in the basement. Tillman’s selection parameters were purely subjective: the only criterion for him, as he says, was whether a piece touched him or at least evoked the memory of an emotion.
Many of his more well-known works are included: the photo of the ragga dancers from Jamaica, the iconic picture of his friends Lutz and Alex in a tree, the kiss between two men in the London gay club Cock or the encounter between his partner Jochen Klein, who has since died, and a deer on the Strand from 1995. Through the size of the prints, the composition of the spaces and the dialogue with the surrounding works, they become part of moods, states of mind of a certain period of life and work to which Tillmans transports himself and the viewer back through the filter of memory .
The rave as a common thread
The club life of the 90s naturally plays a major role, as does the emancipatory power that Tillmans has always ascribed to rave. His political moments also come into play, for example in the cycle “Soldaten” with photocopied newspaper clippings, also from the 1990s. And then there are his quieter works, his still lifes, as well as his experiments in abstraction such as the “Freischwimmer” cycle, in which he exposed photographic paper with flashlights and enlarged it over a large area. All of this is pervaded by a deep skepticism about his media and an almost desperate attempt to wrest some form of veracity from images in the midst of our oversaturated world of images.
After the rave is before the rave: the work “wake” (2001) by Wolfgang Tillmans can also be seen at the MoMa.COURTESY OF WOLFGANG TILLMANS, David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, Maureen Paley, London
A similar desperation speaks from his installation “Truth Tables”, a room in the middle of the exhibition, in which newspaper clippings and pictures are mixed and overlaid on tables. It is something of a demonstration of futility to dig through the jungle of our information overload and find anything that feels true.
This fits with Tillman’s method of casually and constantly photographing and afterwards sifting through the mass of images to see if anything jumps out at him. In the end, however, this work remains melancholy, a kind of mourning for an immediacy that never existed anyway. The installation at the exit of the exhibition also exudes this same melancholy – Tillmans’ large-format photo of an empty room the day after a party. Tillmans staged it together with Isa Genzken in the middle of a three-dimensional mirror construction for the MoMa. The space puts the visitor in a state of hangover and disorientation. Certainly a condition that is not alien to the artist.
The exhibition To look without a fear can be seen at MoMa in New York until January 1, 2023.