A central figure in contemporary art, winner of the Turner Prize in 2000, the German Wolfgang Tillmans has a profoundly queer way of thinking about photography, distribution included. No simple precept holds, except that of opening eyes and minds. At the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), the extensive exhibition To look without fearits premiere in Canada, is proof of that.
From his impressions of the 1980s, resulting from the use of a photocopier, to his recent work spreading horizontally images and written documents, Tillmans challenges the norms. Photography is not just an image. Is not picture. It is an object, which exists as matter (a paper), by its volume (as thin as it is), by its weight.
The photographer born in 1968 describes his images as wandering, since they change meaning over the years and contexts. “Their free movement, writes the curator of the exhibition, Roxana Marcoci, allows them to embrace mobility, diversity, as well as the variety and mutability of sexual identities in the world. »
In Toronto, the AGO exhibition is the affair of the spring. And summer; it is on view until October. The retrospective conceived at the MoMA in New York is worth the price of admission: each room of the 5e floor is lined with photos.
Small, large and occasionally huge formats rub shoulders, in black and white or in color, portraits, landscapes, nudes, still lifes… There is everything, everywhere, including high up, near a skylight . Wolfgang Tillmans is a photographer, but these are installations that he signs. A 32-page guide, free, helps you find your way around.
Camouflages
The first walls announce what will follow: constellations of images, floating stories and a very physical experience of the place. The audience is constantly approaching and moving away from the walls, heads are constantly turning. The ratios of scale and distance, Tillmans exploits them to the umpteenth power.
In the images, these connections are palpable, especially in the 1992 portraits of a couple of friends. The very funny Lutz & Alex holding cockwhose composition lies in a trick so as not to exhibit the genital organ, and the adventurous Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees are eloquent. In others, the bodies intertwine so well that they merge, even giving rise to scenes without “tail” or head — Lutz, back.
Camouflage seems to be a way to counter fixed and wayward assertions. The queer world didn’t adopt military clothing for no reason. In one of the rare themed rooms, the one devoted to the series Soldiers: The Nineties (1999-2022), the uniform is a recurring motif, a source for questioning the subject photographed. The soldiers are inactive, at rest, out of combat.
Here, Tillmans swaps his identity as a photographer for that of a collector: the images collected are enlargements of press clippings. In one of the voluminous catalogue’s texts, the AGO’s curator of photography, Sophie Hackett, notes that Tillmans “observes how camouflage inserts itself between different worlds, how its meaning changes according to the context and how its simultaneous existences play against each other”.
Political shift
The 1990s, which saw the artist blossom, were those of “deceptive optimism” – words of Roxana Marcoci – between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attacks of September 11, 2001. In the arts, these are more fragmented, less rigid practices, like those of Tillmans, which are multiplying.
His images express a field of possibilities, tinged with joie de vivre more than darkness. Amateur of astronomy since childhood, the artist is a worthy observer of what surrounds him, from the nearest to the most distant, from the sphere undergroundwhich he frequents on the planet Venus, passing by the Concorde which flies over London where he settles in 1997.
At the AGO, the series Soldiers becomes a sort of pivotal work, which takes us out of torpor. The West may be at peace, but not the world, these newspapers seem to say, although they do not show the fighting in Bosnia or Kuwait. The exhibition then takes a more explicit political turn.
Successive demonstrations against the invasion in Iraq, placards denouncing fundamentalist movements, Pride or Black Lives Matter marches (2014 version). Among them, arises The Cock (Kiss)from 2002, a close-up kiss reappeared as an icon in 2016, after the shooting at a gay bar in Florida.
The largest room is occupied by the tables of the work Truth Study Center (2006-2023). This installation of archives and images highlights one of today’s most stubborn trends, conspiracy theories. With humour, Tillmans brings together scientific studies and counterfeits. He had the idea in reaction to the supposed presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, at the time George W. Bush. Donald Trump and his fake news reactivated the work.
Sometimes poetic, sometimes political, Wolfgang Tillmans, capable of photographing without a camera, explores the processes of reproduction. Expressing differences, he does so even to the detriment of museum uses: it is with adhesive tape that he hangs his images. The very heavy ones, with leaf clips—a dozen if necessary.
Without hierarchical order, vaguely chronological, the exhibition could stun, like our era submerged in images. Yet the neat Tillmans way is gripping. His images are very real facts, which you have to live with. A unique moment that our cell phones are unable to reproduce.
Jérôme Delgado was the guest of Destination Ontario.