Wolfgang Tillmans
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One measure of Tillmans’s talent is his accomplished handling of multiple genres: formal and impromptu portraits, still lifes, cityscapes, landscapes, and experimental abstractions. In his hanging of the show (which lacks the customary curatorial apparatus of titles, dates, and commentary in wall texts), provocative pieces–frank depictions of private parts, homosexual acts, and wastes being voided–are juxtaposed with innocuous, even mundane offerings. This is what I see in my days and long nights, he seems to say, this is what my friends show me or I get them to do in front of me. When not sensational, the subjects are often ordinary: there are several shots of dirty laundry strewn across nondescript floors and steadily observed if blurry scenes of art-world bacchanalia. Surely these things don’t matter, you think–but then a trail of discarded socks makes a sufficiently recognizable pattern to justify the title, Genome. All the images ultimately insist on the miracle of the quotidian.
It may be Tillmans’s preoccupation with transience that makes the experience of youth so central to his work. Born in 1968 in Germany but now living in London, he began taking photos at 10, had his first solo show before he was 20, and won Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize when he was 31. He’s clearly avid and full of sap, favoring as subjects those Shakespeare calls the “golden lads and girls” who “must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust.” Whether writhing and sweating in clubs or marching to protest W or the WTO, Tillmans’s subjects are brazenly alive, and his feeling for them is intense. Still, the almost total absence of older subjects suggests an insider’s narcissism: his vision is less inclusive than he’d like to think. You wonder whether he’ll start to record the middle-aged and elderly as he himself grows older. Meanwhile some of his images smack of adolescent smirking, like the shot of a semiengorged penis stretching like a bridge from the lap of an airline passenger toward his cluttered breakfast tray.
When: Through 8/13
