At MoMA, the sizes go from billboard to small, from huge near monochromes to postcard-size pictures. We see the show one work at a time but also in a helixing whoosh. Sometimes he fills whole rooms floor to ceiling with constellations of images. ![]() ![]() The number of pictures in a Tillmans installation will vary. “I never thought of a picture as being bodiless,” he has said. They are uncannily alive this way with life spans of their own. It’s refreshing to see photographs freed from their sepulchral air locks. Often unframed and taped directly to walls, his pictures ripple or pucker from humidity. The way Tillmans installs his art changes the way audiences see it. ![]() How to access that vision? Here are three formal skeleton keys that may prove useful for seeing the syntax and structures making Tillmans an artist to reckon with each key begins with the word how: The first is how he displays his work, the second how he explores genre, and the third how he altered the graphic field of photography.Īugust self portrait (2005). Tillmans’s ecstatic vision lies beyond his ostensible subject matter, which, in addition to his intimate portraits, includes landscapes, still lifes, and abstractions. They suggest that the primal buzz we get from life comes from being with one another - that this is what makes us sublime. Tillmans has discussed using processes that “amplify voices that I feel need strengthening,” and “To look without fear” is full of amplifications of various tribes and subcultures. The overhead image of the friends in camo was what turned me around: the uniforms, the camaraderie, the proximity, the flesh. There were things previously published in i-D, a portrait of the dancehall singer Patra in a glowing red gown and dangly earrings, and a guy with his dick out sprawled on the floor as another guy places his foot on his head. He had several unframed photographs, mostly of young people they were hanging out, sharing secrets, smoking, and dancing. debut in a group show at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, I did not recognize what he was doing as photography or even as art. Tillmans’s photos - influenced as much by raves and post-punk as the fall of the Berlin Wall - broke through that malaise. Having fought for its high-art status for more than 150 years, photography, by the late 1980s, was overinformed by postmodernists who made work that mainly only the art world liked. It is no coincidence that the best photographer of his generation came out of such a varied background. ( His album from last year is great!) He has been a performer, a filmmaker, an activist, and a DJ. He shot the album cover for Frank Ocean’s Blonde, contributes to i-D magazine, and makes music. In 2000, at age 32, he became the first photographer to win the Turner Prize, and he has been the subject of two Tate exhibitions. The 54-year-old German is much more than a photographer he’s a visionary polymath who has melted the borders between high and low, insider and outsider, commercial and esoteric. The Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective of Tillmans’s work, “To look without fear,” is a similar summoning of abundance. ![]() The rhapsodic rapport Tillmans has with his subjects gives his work a tenderness that seems almost sacred. But these aren’t the usual club-kid, gay-bar, grunge-life photos. The people we see are often Tillmans’s friends: artists, musicians, designers, dancers. It’s in a man holding a naked woman’s legs apart and looking below her exposed bush to the grassy dunes beyond. It’s in an overhead shot of friends wearing camo and military garb sprawled on the beach in a frondlike configuration and cradling one another - becoming a single organism with tentacles. Tillmans intuited that the sublime had shifted, had alighted on us. His work conveys that the bigness of it all is no longer in God, the ceilings of the Renaissance, the grandeur of nature, or the allover fields of the Abstract Expressionists. Over the course of his 36-year career, the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has created what I think of as a new sublime.
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