Caroline Smith
Since the early
nineties, Wolfgang Tillmans has bridged the art and commercial divide,
simultaneously exhibiting in galleries and shooting for style magazines
(albeit less often these days). In both contexts, his images have collated a
version of the real that is unconcerned with the properties of conventional
representation, wandering instead through the ephemera and detritus of the
everyday. By adhering to the ordinariness of the photographic language, his
work highlights the medium’s inherent artifice. He assembles series of
images – some new, some previously shown – to construct multiple meanings.
One image holds no more truth than another; history is private, malleable
and up for grabs.
Tillmans’ works seduce by blurring testimony, abstraction and fiction.
Consequently, meaning is in a state of flux, rendering the viewer complicit.
Gaps must be filled in; clues must be searched for. He has been criticised
for only showing a small number of works in his exhibitions. For his Turner
Prize-winning installation at Tate Britain in 2000, however, Tillmans showed
over seventy pieces, exhausting his signature style of the insatiable
snapper. It reinforced his commentary, but stitched up too many holes that
work best when left open.
In his recent installation at Interim Art, he continues to be the
pleasure-seeker, the serial chronicler of memories, but the works show an
increasing detachment from the real. Rain obscures a scenic route viewed
from inside a car, a quarry is made idyllic through surreal colour, and
shimmering waters serve up ethereal glimpses of a utopian underworld.
Large-scale inkjets of colour imply the painterly brushstrokes of the
expressionist. A documentary image taken at a party, or a still life of
flowers in a kitchen, seems at once staged yet spontaneous.
Absent from this installation are the sexualised overtones – the fetishising
of crumpled clothes, the visual pun of the phallus – which were an important
feature of his seminal Concorde series. Tillmans’ gaze has become more
exacting in contrast to the nomadic distraction of his earlier works. This
is most obvious in his new video, Lights (Body). In the ‘nightclub’ setting
of the blacked-out gallery space upstairs, a projection shows club lights
and colour diffusers edited to twist and turn in time to the dance beat
being churned out. The absurdity of the machinery’s stiff dance routines,
escalating to the blinking mirror squares of a dizzy disco ball, is both
comical and alienating. That the equipment and the dispersal of light are
trapped on screen makes for a curious experience – like being locked out of
a party, and watching the action through a window. Tillmans manifests the
impossibility of representing the real, lived-in experience through the
lens.
Eastern European writer and artist Bruno Schulz produced works at the turn
of the century in which the imagined, the past and the ideal collided. His
artistic goal was to mature into childhood; a regression from adulthood that
would open up boundless possibilities. Tillmans is offering up a similar
rhetoric; his fictions have a childlike, curious and naive essence. He has
often dismissed the claims of others that he is the documentarian of his
generation, but this is missing the point. Fiction and myths convey more
profound truths than an apparently accurate image that strains under
interrogation, context and new belief systems over time. No doubt Tillmans’
images will have staying power. If in the past his work has leaned towards
the documentary, or even the photojournalistic, it is now more akin to
poetic reverie.
Wolfgang Tillmans was at Maureen Paley/Interim Art, London, 9 March – 21 April 2002.