at the Busch-Reisinger Museum,
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
October 25, 2002-February 23, 2003
Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) proves that for every ying there is a
yang. Remember Tillmans?
The year 2000 was that halcyon year in which this artist
won the Tate’s Turner Prize, Britain’s postmodern
spectacle of diminished expectations. The prize judges at
the time praised
the German-born, London-based photographer for his
depictions of “constraint-free lifestyles of youth cultures and
alternative
concepts of beauty, sexuality, and politics,” as well
as his “ability to present sensitive subject matter, such as gay
sex and a man urinating on a chair, in ways that challenge
conventional definitions of art.”
To his supporters, Tillmans combined the
progressivism of Cool Britannia with the benighted folksiness of
the jet-set. Here was a new chronicler of a new
modern life.
Tillmans’s most successful series of photographs
concerned
the Concorde—the jet of the jet-set, the icon of intercontinental good
living, packaged into a snapshot-like flip-book of Concorde
taking off, Concorde above a barn, Concorde in the clouds,
Concorde far away, Concorde up close, Concorde in the morning,
Concorde at night.
Tillmans mixed in a few potted sentences about
socioeconomic juxtapositions and space-age dreams. Sometime after
the prize was announced, a friend bought me this book in Germany. He said it
made him laugh. It made me laugh too.
Before Tillmans began dabbling in not-so-serious art in
the early 1990s, he lived as a successful fashion
photographer working
for publications like the British lifestyle magazine
i-D. Turn this logo ninety degrees clockwise and you may
notice a typographical wink. Get it? True to this design,
the success of Tillmans’s genre of contemporary art, more like a
sociological
phenomenon,
rested in contradictory
sensibilities: to scandalize and to secure
profit, to work hard in appearing feckless, to
butter-up formal concerns with a feel-good sentimentality.
We have seen this
for a generation.
Yet in his mumbo-jumbo pretensions and high-gloss
shine, Tillmans for me came to represent the worst kind
of safe artist.
In the exhibition catalogue, Nathan Kerman calls Tillmans’s
compositions “a metaphoric social utopia.” It speaks to the
downtrodden state of the human spirit, in our conceptions of
Thomas More’s famous island, that we now aim so low. Just down
the hall from the Fogg’s sublime David Smith exhibition,
Tillmans’s series at Busch-Reisinger depicts household leftovers
and dirty tupperware (Kitchen Still Life, 1995), an image of
the gamine model Kate Moss (Kate McQueen, 1996), a
cross-dresser named Christian (Christian, Hamburg, 1991), some
crusty gym shorts (Turnhose [Sandalen], 1992), a frequent-flyer
exposing his genitalia beneath a seat-back tray (AA
Breakfast, 1995), and a piece called Sportflecken (1996)—a
closeup of a stained white T-shirt. A Harvard graduate student
named Benjamin Paul, who curated this show with the Fogg’s Linda
Norden, writes in the catalogue, “in the ivory stains that fleck
the monumental white T-Shirt of Sportflecken, we see the traces
of what may be the outcome of … delirious undressing.”
If an exhibition of this kind is to
succeed, curators should approach it with
skepticism.
The Harvard curators rightly spilled some wind from
Tillmans’s sails by departing from the artist’s usual dorm-room paste-up
style of gallery presentation—the prints are now mounted in
evenly spaced museum frames. Yet I couldn’t quite determine
whether this rehanging was meant to tap Tillmans with academic
honors (beauty in the banal) or to cast in doubt the
aesthetic criteria of his project. My guess is that it was the
former—but it feels more like the latter.
Benjamin Paul’s catalogue essay went
further in
confirming these suspicions. You might question the need for the
world’s premier graduate school to train students
in
contemporary art history (a bit of an oxymoron, yes?). Without a
critical archive from which to draw, the depth of inquiry into
contemporary art is invariably shallow. Writing on
Tillmans, Paul praises his images of “individuality as a
meaningful way to achieve emancipation from the commodity culture
of advanced capitalism.” We learn that “Still Life,” by way of a
Mellon grant and a Theodore Rousseau Graduate Student internship,
grew out of a research paper Paul wrote for a seminar on “Queer
Theory” that compared Tillmans to (who else?) Nan Goldin, the Old
Master of glossy alternative-lifestyle photography.
In June 1986, Jed Perl asked in these pages, “why is there this
haste to transform the contemporary into the
historical?”—something museums and academic institutions do by
their very nature. Critics of the academy cite its
removal from contemporary life as a cause for alarm, which is
often true. Yet there are times when the model of the
ivory tower works best, as in confronting a contemporary-art figure like
Wolfgang Tillmans.