Wolfgang Tillmans: Older, Wiser, Cooler
NEW YORK TIMES
By Matthew Anderson Published Aug. 29, 2022
In a 35-year career celebrated at MoMA this fall, the artist has concerned himself with “the poetry of looking,” blurring the line between party and protest.
But, increasingly, it’s politics on his mind.
BERLIN — It was shortly after 11 a.m., and Wolfgang Tillmans’s studio was coming to life. Assistants had gathered in a corner of the huge, light-filled space and were running Tillmans through their plans. Hundreds of artworks were packed and ready to go, but there were a few busy days still ahead.
Although masking is increasingly rare in Berlin these days, everybody’s face was covered.
Tillmans was worried that a coronavirus outbreak could derail the final preparations for his most significant exhibition to date: “To Look Without Fear,” a career retrospective that opens at the Museum of Modern Art on Sept. 12 and runs through Jan. 1, 2023. His first major institutional show in New York, it had been postponed for 18 months because of the pandemic.
Just a few days earlier, he and many of his staff had celebrated the opening of a new building around the corner that Tillmans designed himself, with his home and exhibition space. “Afterwards we were all in a bar, smoking and shouting,” Tillmans said, and made a face behind his mask.
One of the studio workers later tested positive.
With MoMA technicians due at the studio the following week to collect the works and take them to New York, the stakes were high.
“To Look Without Fear” will be Tillmans’s largest-ever show, occupying all of the museum’s sixth-floor galleries.
It looks set to cement his position as one of the world’s most significant living artists, vindicating what he sees as a 35-year artistic mission that, because of its adjacency to youth culture and mass media, wasn’t always taken so seriously.
Although MoMA owns over 40 of Tillmans’s works, everything on the wall in the exhibition will be a personal print, drawn from his archive or reprinted for the occasion.
All his major exhibitions are put together this way, allowing Tillmans to be completely in charge over the size and quality of each image.
He and his team hang the unframed prints from binder clips, or tape them to the walls, clustering them in groups, or spreading them out in breezy arrangements that are, in fact, controlled to the millimetre.
Those presentations jumble images he has made in some recognisable art-historical categories — portraits, still life, landscapes — with works that fit loosely into photographic genres like reportage and fashion shoots, depictions of the sky and stars, and abstract pieces made with light but no camera.
It’s only when the pictures come together, though, that Tillmans’s overall vision becomes clear, said Maureen Paley, his longtime London gallerists.
“His work is the installation of the work,”
She said.
“Heis not someone that you could just define
by a single image.”
Yet many of Tillmans’s solo pictures will be familiar to MoMA visitors even if they aren’t regular museumgoers, like a portrait of Frank Ocean in the shower that appeared on the cover of the rapper’s album, “Blonde,” or “The Cock (Kiss),” a carefree 2002 snap of two men making out in a London nightclub: In 2016, that image went viral on social media after the homophobic mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla.
The change in the picture’s meaning
— from a celebration of gay desire to a defiant assertion of civil rights
— reflects a shift in Tillmans’s work.
He is a photographer, sure — but he is also a video artist, installation maker, D.J., singer, record producer and architect. He has edited books, given performance lectures and published interviews with philosophers, pop stars and scientists. “He’s a polymath, really,” said Roxana Marcoci, the curator of the MoMA show.
“I never thought of him just in terms of photography”
She added. His work can be music, she said, or sculpture, or
“it can be the cover of a record, or it can be the layout of a magazine.”
“We were getting up into a new age,” Tillmans recalled. “The new ’90s, a new Europe, breaking down borders, we’re in this together: That’s where my language came from.”
His photographs from the time were about-
“Translating these particular experiences, in the moment, into universal pictures,”
He said.
They weren’t about saying, “This is my party”
he added, but rather,
“Hey you can be part of this”
In “17 Years’ Supply,” a photograph Tillmans took 17 years after Klein’s death, he shows a cardboard box full of pill bottles for the antiretroviral drugs that have kept him alive.
His abstract pieces, such as the “Freischwimmer” series — camera-less pictures he makes by shining flashlights at the photographic paper in the darkroom — have rhythm and movement, but aren’t about anything at all.
At MoMA, “Moon in Earthlight” will be presented as an installation in a specially designed room, with a complementary video.
It was during a sabbatical from photography, in 2014, that he came “to fully embrace making music again,” Tillmans said. Even when he hadn’t been making his own tracks, he D.J.’d occasionally at clubs in London and Berlin, and music remained a central concern of his photography, from the early rave pictures to his famous portraits of pop stars, including Chuck D and Lady Gaga.
In 2015, Tillmans photographed Frank Ocean in Berlin for the fashion magazine Fantastic Man;
Afterwards, he said, the two went out clubbing at Berghain, a techno club.
Later, he said, Ocean asked to use a section from Tillmans’s track “Device Control,” a bouncy but melancholy synth-pop number, as a short intro for a new album.
When Ocean dropped “Endless” unexpectedly, in the summer of 2016, Tillmans was surprised to find not just an excerpt at the start, but the whole track at the album’s end.
The architect for the new property, a simple but handsome six-story corner building in the Kreuzberg district, is Tillmans himself.
It features a downstairs exhibition and event space, studio areas and archive facilities, plus the artist’s own home, on the penthouse level, and eight apartments that Tillmans said he was in the process of renting.
(Refugees from Ukraine were already living in one of the apartments, he added.) Viktor Neumann, a Between Bridges curator, said upcoming work at the site would include “exhibitions, conversations, performances, neighborhood events, reading groups, printed matter and more.”
“Just because I am engaged in the poetry of looking, and touched by music, and nightlife, and musicians, and youth culture, it isn’t a contradiction to be interested” in how things actually function, he said.
But he will be 54 when his show opens, and lately he has been thinking, “Maybe it’s time to take responsibility.”
“I like to think in these seven-year cycles,” he said, and it had been more than that long since the last one. It was time to pause and reflect.
At lunchtime on the day of the studio visit, Tillmans and I took a break and went downstairs to an Italian restaurant. His work space is in an annex of a modernist building from the early 1930s with huge rectangular windows. It was designed by the Bauhaus architect Max Taut as a cooperative, worker-run department store, a utopian project that didn’t last. Once the Nazis took power, they denounced consumer co-ops as “Jewish-Marxist” organizations.
“You are interested in the building? Then I will show you something,” Tillmans said. He took me into a lobby where one of the walls was covered by a huge black-and-white photograph of the square outside.
The building’s gleaming facade looked so sleek, and it seemed incongruous to see people in front wearing the long coats and hats of the early 1930s. Tillmans pointed at some lampposts whose stacked cone bases looked like spaceships.
