Special features
THE WAY WOLFGANG TILLMANS OBSERVES LIFE REALLY DAZZLES ME
by Pierce Eldridge for Worms Magazine
There’s a superpower in being able to make the benign sparkly. I’ve only ever seen a Wolfgang Tillmans on an iPhone screen, scrolling through Instagram, and on the cover of Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart that I keep perched on my bedside table. I’m quite fond of following, via my main social accounts, thot-post-profiles where Tillmans’ photographs find regular feature; puncturing flesh and smut with lust on a dancefloor, all of which dazzle and delight.
When I enter the retrospective, I think one of the largest for the still active artist, at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York, I audibly gasp, breaking a precursory silence that feels necessary, to take a moment within whilst observing the vast configurations before me. If you’re familiar with Tillmans you’ll know well that the ‘exhibition format’–that of a glossy show standardised with framed portraits, aligned in height and curation across a space–is rejected here. Instead, all traditional functions are removed, including any wall text or explanations as photographs–literally hundreds in various sizes, pinned and taped to the walls–collage each surface: over emergency doors, in the crevices of through ways connecting rooms, and perched as high up as the ceiling where you have to gawk on extended tiptoes to catch a glimpse. This arrangement of his most favoured works is profound and makes complete sense in its slayed and abstracted presentation, representing a mirage of the worlds Tillmans comes to occupy and capture, be it in the portraits of stars like Frank Ocean, or in more refined spaces of dimly lit raves, trashy spectral discos, festivals, lush green landscapes, between the bodies of lovers, and in the close inspection of fabrications, boxers, and underwear strewn over bannisters. All of this together, flashing across the space, takes a moment to settle within; and once there, it’s a thing of complete and utter beauty.
What I’m privy to is a show that ties together Tillmans’ at the beginning of his experiments in the ‘80s culminating to the exhibition of recent works, but this chronology–and the articulation of his evolution–is not a feature; instead, you’re seamlessly invited to bounce between moments where your interpretation is firing between extracts of raw personality, eroticism, and largely the ‘everyday’. I’m engrossed instantly in the frames that occupy less space, the ones that don’t reveal much. Attached on a wall, dividing Space 1, a hand caressing an exposed back makes me shiver. I feel an immediate desire to reveal my queer skin, to shave my head and take on a punk aesthetic that feels dripped in saliva and prickly with rebelion. To wear sparkly chiffon crop tops, with an oversized and tattered denim jacket. To be fucked, to piss on a stool, to merit my marginalisation with a tactile, open-wide, mouth to mouth pashing. Everything here moves me even if I sit beyond its original contextualisation, and unlike any other photographic show I’ve seen before, I can–in each photograph–find myself as another figure, a fragmented light sprawled across the frame, or a water bottle half empty. Finding and extracting my own meaning feels like what is desired of me from the exhibition, and Tillmans’ expertise, often so personally refined, makes it easy to create legible backstories where I feel I was there–then, a generation ago–through an ancestor I don’t even know.
The aesthetic quality is my passage into becoming kindred with the photographs, something Tillmans has been meticulously crafting for decades. Enlarged during the ‘90s when his photographs appeared in the fashion magazine i-D, I come to stand before a set of cheeky youngsters Alexandra Bircken and Lutz Huelle in the famed Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees (1993), featuring the two balancing on branches wearing nothing but a trench coat open, exposing their flesh. This photo, and a shot of Alex holding Lutz’s phallus, feels representational of Tillmans experimenting in a ‘fashion’ context whilst still purposefully and responsibly retaining his own sensibility.
The erotic dimensions of his work are most predominately remembered through Soldiers, a series beginning in 1999 where Tillmans re-photographed images of buff young men at war, cutting and pasting headlines into frame to describe their heroic machoism. Observing these, I feel wartime collides with Tillmans’ queerness as he accepts masculinity, in this series, for its litany of pain and dominance. But, by softening the boys in the frame and setting them to a war backdrop, we get the sense he is making ‘camp’ on the seriousness of ‘boys and their toys’ with gestures toward ‘don’t ask don’t tell’, speculatively building a world of ravishing that is less about bombs and more about bottoms. Imagining these studs at the frontline is humourous, their faces too precious, and as I walk around I abstract my view of them to think they are some collection of kinky porn posters - the faces don’t match the ruggedness war-aesthetics demand.
Midway through the exhibition, I start to think about photographic showcases and the importance of images in my life. Some of my most favoured things are photographic books from queer artists like J Davies, Karlo Martinez, and Dylan Kelleher (of SMUT Collective); and I feel them here in the room with me. They are wildly different, yet they all hold a similar sparkle to Tillmans.
I come up behind a couple, walking around the room, who have stopped and are discussing something impassioned loudly. They say to one another, ‘where is the art? This isn’t art. It’s all shit and fucking boring.’ It takes me a moment to recalibrate away from my excitement for the showcase into attempting to see what they might be experiencing. I lull myself into an empathic gaze and my first thought is: it’s an aesthetic issue based on technology accessible to us in our contemporary culture. I think about their conversation, rephrasing it in my mind with more truthful sentiments to what I believe they are getting at: ‘I could achieve this’ or ‘I take photos like this all the time.’
The age of technology, blah blah, has put a camera in all our hands, and feigned moments–as they appear to us–are becoming more-and-more popularised on social media; something I can only describe now as having a neo-post-punk vibe. I think there’s probably many people surrounding me that are less brave to say they agree with these folk who are very loudly tearing at the collection and MoMA more broadly. But something I feel what they miss is an ongoing temperament to the photographs that, although separated by decades of experimentation, isn’t able to be mimicked. However many people will try, as they still do to this day, the consistent quality and ambition Tillmans showcases here, can’t be matched. His attention to intimacy via placing importance behind the eyes, arses, or pits of those captured is felt in texture and temperament; unparalleled.
I use the youths' thoughts–on this not being art–against my own photographs on my phone as an example of how wrong they are, scrolling through my collection of images affirming internally that they are nowhere near the same calibre to what I’m witnessing in front of me. I’m tempted to ask for their highlights reel, to show me what they might think of theirs is better than his, but I restrain myself, becoming distracted by an image of Patti Smith next to a coming out story. Nothing really evokes quite the same sense of ambiguity and wonder as his selections do in front of me now, compared to my own collection, and I’ve lived these moments!
Tillmans always manages to place a universal human experience into the photos, even if that means sharpening his focus on various body parts as the central frame of inquisition. An example of this is seen in the 2000’s studies on a London Underground train, where he imaged travellers' armpits peeking out from their shirt sleeves and their hands gripping poles. Same for 2014, at a Black Lives Matter protest in New York, where he focused on the palms of protestors in beautiful detail.
Even when bodies aren’t immediately present, it’s not hard to imagine them far away. In his 2002 work Lights (Body), one of the few videos featured within the exhibition, Tillmans offers footage of a basement club’s strobing and swirling lights. You can never see or hear dancers, bartenders, or cruising men grunting at one another, but the glistening of these lights are felt to be refracting on those bodies. It’s as if the lights are some form of force field, a shield for the ostracised to be witnessed in fragmentary bursts when the light catches them. Most strikingly, in his 2014 photograph 17 Years’ Supply, Tillmans pictures a box filled with prescriptions for Didanosine and other medications used to treat HIV. It’s a poignant reminder that bodies–including the one belonging to Tillmans, who is HIV positive—are fragile things.
He memorialises this where he can, across the 16 rooms, leaving you at the end of the exhibition with two large mirror sculptures – inviting you to place yourself into his frame.
