Wolfgang Tillmans at the Serpentine Gallery: a valiant last stand?
Prospect readers will be familiar with the notion, widespread since the 1970s, that “painting is dead.” Less well known is the recent perception that a similar fate has befallen photography, in the basic sense of taking pictures of the world. Few art photographers today feel there is much material left to photograph or, indeed, ways to photograph it. The digitally manipulated photograph, and the photo that records a scene created specifically for it, reign supreme. At the top end of the scale, the German artist Andreas Gursky has produced a marvellous new series of “Oceans” based on Photoshopped satellite images. Meanwhile the promising Lithuanian photographer Indre Serpytyte, like so many others, creates things to be photographed in her studio: bureaucratic communist objects that remind her of her late father, or models of secret-police headquarters carved in wood. Except there’s Wolfgang Tillmans—born in Germany in 1968 and winner of the 2000 Turner prize—whose new exhibition is at the Serpentine Gallery until 19th September. You won’t find many clues about the old-fashioned nature of Tillmans’s photos in the catalogue essay by Michael Bracewell—who writes, in the kind of prose that seems to justify all the suspicions one has about the contemporary art world, “For Tillmans, one feels, the potentiality of the photographic image is intimately related, at a profound level of empathetic understanding and philosophical awareness, to the messy but complicated business of being alive.” Er, so his photographs are about life, right? No, the clue to Tillmans’s project lies in its apparent incoherence. This exhibition looks at first like a smash-and-grab raid on pre-existing photographic styles. The classically composed hangs next to the anti-aesthetic of the nondescript; the great nestles next to the mediocre. But Tillmans’s images are impressively precise. Some are very “sign of the times.” In Heptathlon (2009) female athletes in revealing swimwear stand amid a sea of numerals, flags and brand logos—a telling image of the fragility of individual identity in a corporatised world. Other pictures are exercises in formal beauty. In Growth (2006), a boy in a striped brown top walks in front of a brown-brick council estate. It’s autumn, and a tree with russet leaves rises against the block of flats. This is a brilliantly observed essay in one colour, based on a fortuitous conjunction of elements. Tillmans elevates the everyday here, sometimes conveying bigger themes, as he did in his series of photos of Concorde flying over different parts of run-down London (1997, not in this exhibition), a paean to the technological sublime and a symbol of wealth’s unequal distribution. Tillmans is asserting his right to be two kinds of traditional photographer. He is, first, the photographer as tourist, who snaps interesting things that come his way; second, he is a photographer of the “decisive moment,” able to identify fleeting instants where reality is organised into a photographic composition. It is a joyful aesthetic, and a manifesto for the freedom of the 35mm camera. It’s also hit-and-miss: the blown-up photographs of flowers in a back garden are irritatingly portentous. The other half of this exhibition looks, at first sight, anything but traditional: an original and aesthetically intense project of abstract photography. The series “Urgency” (2004 onwards) consists of enormous prints in which a delicate liquid tracery of red and blue swirls through a milky expanse of white. In other installations in this exhibition, Tillmans arranges single printed sheets of colour—monochrome yet inflected with delicate shades—in irregular grids on the wall. These are bold photos—few photographers have produced memorable images that are entirely flat—and all the bolder because they use high-gloss paper, capturing the typically awkward reflections of their surroundings that photographers are meant to avoid. Tillmans is revelling in the aesthetic qualities and textures produced by good old-fashioned printing processes: the abstract patterns are constructed by shining coloured lights onto photographic paper. There is also an aesthetics of nostalgia in his work. Forest (Briol I, 2008) is a wonderfully grainy-textured black-and-white image of fir trees. That photo began life as a photocopy, while other images, dating from his student years in the late 1980s, are just that: photocopies, complete with all the wonderful blemishes of that outmoded technology. Tacked up on the wall with tape and pins, Tillmans’s photos strike a counter-blow against the squeaky clean hyper-realism of the large-format photographers that now dominate the art world. Some critics may argue that these abstractions open a new chapter in photography. But I think they are still part of the old one: more of a valiant last stand than a new dawn.
Prospect readers will be familiar with the notion, widespread since the 1970s, that “painting is dead.” Less well known is the recent perception that a similar fate has befallen photography, in the basic sense of taking pictures of the world. Few art photographers today feel there is much material left to photograph or, indeed, ways to photograph it. The digitally manipulated photograph, and the photo that records a scene created specifically for it, reign supreme. At the top end of the scale, the German artist Andreas Gursky has produced a marvellous new series of “Oceans” based on Photoshopped satellite images. Meanwhile the promising Lithuanian photographer Indre Serpytyte, like so many others, creates things to be photographed in her studio: bureaucratic communist objects that remind her of her late father, or models of secret-police headquarters carved in wood. Except there’s Wolfgang Tillmans—born in Germany in 1968 and winner of the 2000 Turner prize—whose new exhibition is at the Serpentine Gallery until 19th September. You won’t find many clues about the old-fashioned nature of Tillmans’s photos in the catalogue essay by Michael Bracewell—who writes, in the kind of prose that seems to justify all the suspicions one has about the contemporary art world, “For Tillmans, one feels, the potentiality of the photographic image is intimately related, at a profound level of empathetic understanding and philosophical awareness, to the messy but complicated business of being alive.” Er, so his photographs are about life, right? No, the clue to Tillmans’s project lies in its apparent incoherence. This exhibition looks at first like a smash-and-grab raid on pre-existing photographic styles. The classically composed hangs next to the anti-aesthetic of the nondescript; the great nestles next to the mediocre. But Tillmans’s images are impressively precise. Some are very “sign of the times.” In Heptathlon (2009) female athletes in revealing swimwear stand amid a sea of numerals, flags and brand logos—a telling image of the fragility of individual identity in a corporatised world. Other pictures are exercises in formal beauty. In Growth (2006), a boy in a striped brown top walks in front of a brown-brick council estate. It’s autumn, and a tree with russet leaves rises against the block of flats. This is a brilliantly observed essay in one colour, based on a fortuitous conjunction of elements. Tillmans elevates the everyday here, sometimes conveying bigger themes, as he did in his series of photos of Concorde flying over different parts of run-down London (1997, not in this exhibition), a paean to the technological sublime and a symbol of wealth’s unequal distribution. Tillmans is asserting his right to be two kinds of traditional photographer. He is, first, the photographer as tourist, who snaps interesting things that come his way; second, he is a photographer of the “decisive moment,” able to identify fleeting instants where reality is organised into a photographic composition. It is a joyful aesthetic, and a manifesto for the freedom of the 35mm camera. It’s also hit-and-miss: the blown-up photographs of flowers in a back garden are irritatingly portentous. The other half of this exhibition looks, at first sight, anything but traditional: an original and aesthetically intense project of abstract photography. The series “Urgency” (2004 onwards) consists of enormous prints in which a delicate liquid tracery of red and blue swirls through a milky expanse of white. In other installations in this exhibition, Tillmans arranges single printed sheets of colour—monochrome yet inflected with delicate shades—in irregular grids on the wall. These are bold photos—few photographers have produced memorable images that are entirely flat—and all the bolder because they use high-gloss paper, capturing the typically awkward reflections of their surroundings that photographers are meant to avoid. Tillmans is revelling in the aesthetic qualities and textures produced by good old-fashioned printing processes: the abstract patterns are constructed by shining coloured lights onto photographic paper. There is also an aesthetics of nostalgia in his work. Forest (Briol I, 2008) is a wonderfully grainy-textured black-and-white image of fir trees. That photo began life as a photocopy, while other images, dating from his student years in the late 1980s, are just that: photocopies, complete with all the wonderful blemishes of that outmoded technology. Tacked up on the wall with tape and pins, Tillmans’s photos strike a counter-blow against the squeaky clean hyper-realism of the large-format photographers that now dominate the art world. Some critics may argue that these abstractions open a new chapter in photography. But I think they are still part of the old one: more of a valiant last stand than a new dawn.
