26th June – 19th September
Serpentine Gallery: Kensington Gardens, London, W2 3XA
Opening Hours: Daily, 10am—6pm
Enter Wolfgang Tillmans’s world with his latest findings of the ephemera and detritus of the everyday, sporadically trailing across the Serpentine Gallery’s walls. There is a giant photograph of athletes poised at the start line placed alongside an image of stacked egg-trays. We find a house plant on a window shelf next to a comical peak up a man’s kilt (no, he isn’t wearing underwear) and then, a confrontation with the homophobic laws of the Middle East splattered across make-shift wooden table-tops. It’s been seven years, but the first photographer to be awarded the Turner Prize is back in London, with an exhibition that you would be forgiven for calling chaos.
And it’s not just the subject matter that has an astonishing range. There are small Polaroid images next to giant chromatic prints the size of a double bed. There are the saturated colours of international flags and vests in Hephtathlon (2009) placed in contrast to the quiet black and white Nanbei Hu (2009) with a zoomed-in water droplet on the surface of a leaf. Scattered amongst the various portraits, landscapes and photographed objects there are darkroom experiments resulting in a spectrum of unique c-type coloured prints, like in Silver Installation VII (2009). With images both found and hand-shot, the giant photo-installations read like an explosion of the artist’s mind and his curiosity is infectious.
Tillmans gets political too; the general playful tone of the show is sobered as you approach the table-based installation Space, Food, Religion (2010). Here, three surfaces are embellished with newspaper cuttings, leaflets and thoughts that highlight contemporary issues portrayed through the media. The most arresting image is a blown-up clipping of two Iranian teenage boys with ropes tied around their necks, just moments before execution. They had been charged for committing forbidden homosexual acts according to Sharia Law. Tillmans responds on the surrounding walls with a naked man curled in the corner of an empty room and homo-erotic charged images such as Anders pulling splinter from his foot (2004) catching a man’s naked torso arching over his foot. The overall poignant effect is an appeal to our levels of socio-political tolerance.
If there is one common thread to be found throughout the exhibition, then it would be Tillmans’s fascination with textures and surfaces. The crinkled Lighter, blue concave 1(2000) and the shimmering edge of a folded piece of c-print paper, is repetitively seen whether it be photographed or mounted and protruding out of the gallery wall. His reworking of this mundane material is yet another example of Tillmans’s ability to make the banal appear extraordinary. Then, there is also the inkjet works Ostgut Freischwimmer, right (2004) and Urgency XXII (2006) showing a black or burgundy wispy pigment across a milk-white surface. These images are produced by shooting hair, skin and muscle fibres without a lens. The resulting non-representative forms are Tillmans’s photographic take on abstract expressionism.
Tillmans nods to art history on many occasions. He acknowledges the beginnings of abstract art with Koh (2008), homage to Theo Van Doesburg’s Study for Composition VIII (The Cow) (1918). There is also the au courant Madonna and Child in Roy (2009) with a mother and baby stuck in a traffic jam. But even with historical references, a feeling of nowness remains integral to all of the works.
When the theorist Walter Benn Michael relates the photograph is recent art to a fossil, he elucidates the essence of Tillmans’s work. We do not experience the real creature or thing, but rather, it is the preserved trace of something, suspended in time, for us to consider. Tillmans’s portraits are not lines of beaming families holding artificial poses against a studio backdrop. Instead his photographs are captured moments of real life; people carrying on in their daily routine; landscapes and objects stumbled across haphazardly at the time. Tillmans shows us a man caught deep in a mobile phone conversation unaware of the camera, or a memento of the day someone has had his hair cut. These are images that will stand as visual and cultural fossils of our time for future generations.
I never loose faith in Tillmans’s explorations. The sky is simply the limit as he shows us with the illuminating constellations of in flight astro ii (2010) and the monochrome Venus, transit (2004). He might be taking on a lot in this exhibition but there is never a dull moment even if, there is admittedly a couple of confusing ones. The show remains energetic, innovative and thought provoking in its entirety. Bordering on documentary photography, the triumph of Tillmans’s eye is the way he captures a certain perspective of a real contemporary experience.
