Paper, Technology, and The Heraclitean River in the Work of Wolfgang Tillmans
The high-profile German photographer explores the relationship between man and material, technology and technique, in the only Canadian stop of his new travelling exhibit, To Look Without Fear.
Installation view, Room 2, Wall A. Wolfgang Tillmans To look without fear, Art Gallery of Ontario, April 7 - Oct. 1, 2023. Photo by Wolfgang Tillmans.
Picture this: two photos, the same but different. Indistinct figures fixed in the foreground of a crowd, in Phillipinas on street, 1993, pause, neither stood nor sat. Hands, in Playing Cards, 2018, hover, neither animated nor resting. 25 years apart in time, yet just eight feet physically between them. Together, the shots of Hong Kong tell in great detail the way in which Wolfgang Tillmans sees. The former work is densely populated, but its subjects pose a feeling of dislocation among the lighted patches on page, somewhere between shine and shadow. The latter shows few faces, of which contain only looks of pensiveness amid impatience. “It’s the same spot in the city,” Marina Dumont-Gauthier, co-curator of ‘To Look Without Fear', Tillmans’ current exhibit at Toronto’s AGO, clarifies. “On Sundays, 10,000 people, usually workers, will congregate to eat and to play card games together,” she says, before giving air to the heavier consideration: “In 25 years, will that scene still exist?”
Tillmans’ photographs test this idea time and time again. Probing the commonplace subject with the same wonder as the new. Initially, one might dissect the qualities that give character to two scenes, cross-examining both ages and stages: how have things progressed socially, economically, technologically? Is it progress? But, in attempting to understand a chronologically displayed exhibit — Tillmans' first of this kind — one might find themself inspired while also infuriated by one simple truth, as the artist expressed in a 2017 sit down: “things go forward, but they also go back.” Drawing such a comparison is consequently quite the task.
As with the positioning of artwork on the walls of many Tillmans exhibitions, the variety of angles from which one might approach their study of said works seems vast. Dumont-Gauthier spoke of the period between what they had assumed was the day the exhibit was to be finalised and the evening that doors opened to the public on April 7th. The daily adjustments fed renewed curiosity into “what has moved today? With works [now] on high beams, on the skylight.” From beginning to end, attendees witness that which flees in Tillmans’ life: the momentary — some material, some meaningful — in his attempts to grasp at a sense of permanence. A snapshot in the tempus fugit, some stability in an ever-changing world is found in this exhibit, and through his photographs.
Sitting on a slim leather couch by the exhibit’s entrance with Dumont-Gauthier, she was quick to delve into its underlying themes during our discussion. “I think the great love of Wolfgang is paper. Paper and technology.”
Wolfgang Tillmans, paper drop (red), 2006. Image by Wolfgang Tillmans. Courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, and Maureen Paley, London.
An unexpected take. Granted, Tillmans, born 1968, in straddling the digital facade of the medium and the analog form he came of age using, would surely hold some nostalgia for the physicality of film. But, in attempting to get a grasp of the renowned German-born artist through media coverage and critical review, one might sooner have expected further elaboration on Tillmans as the socially-conscious observer — the “anthropologist,” as Dumont-Gauthier described him — with dotted depictions of dance floors. Or Tillmans the activist, with an archive of posters and publishings that recurrently cause rise to deep discussions of current and age-old political matters. Or even Tillmans the multifarious musicologist — DJ sets, production credits and a feature length LP that runs from front to back in this exhibit’s lower-level within his eclectic catalogue.
Questions are myriad, in cases of multi-hyphenate mavens like Tillmans. Why is paper less credible a medium? Beyond their physicality, what sort of permanence can be experienced through the four corners of his works? Where can the contortion of paper be compared to Tillmans’ use of space? Instead, in his introductory notes at the press conference for the opening of this exhibition, he “invited visitors to not approach the pictures with ‘W’ questions, but to see them as propositions”.
The first Canadian deep dive into Tillmans’ catalogue showcases works from ‘86 to takes from just last year (African_Sheen, 2022, for instance), as it examines paper as its characteristics are given new forms, in new light. Paper as glue, binding the broad and varying formats on display from floor to skylight – the basis of all pieces was paper; as accessory in an assortment of better known works – from blown up photocopies to sprawling tables of newspaper clippings; and even as an workable artform in-and-of itself – cased, compared, and contorted.
Installation view, Room 2, skylight. Wolfgang Tillmans To look without fear, Art Gallery of Ontario, April 7 - Oct. 1, 2023. Photo by Wolfgang Tillmans.
Nature in paper, paper in nature. Inverting the themes doesn’t gut the topic of a discussion. It simply gives it new meaning, new parameters to assess. The former, encompassing works on display that present paper in the ‘natural’ world, are acutely abstract in exemplifying the qualities of paper away from sheet — perhaps closer to the type of proposition Tillmans encourages. Faltenwurf (skylight) and Luneburg (self) are shots of bed linen. Once ironed and blank, they now rest crumpled, as paper would be, from natural causes: from use, sleep, human existence. In the latter work, a self-portrait with focus drawn away from him, the subject — a mere rectangle hidden in the corner of a facetime call — there is even a human quality in the sheets. Perhaps that’s what Tillmans proposes. All three, sharing creases in trait, expresses a reflection of the wider interconnectedness between humans and nature. Tillmans is quoted in the exhibition guide as having said, “Everything is matter continually renewing itself and transforming from one aggregate state into another,” where paper is the by-product of this coexistence through technological processes.
What came to mind when scanning Room 4 was the value of sparsity. A print of yellow plastic gloves hung to dry on a window sill (Wet Room, Gloves) cornered the only wall left blank in the entire exhibit, which faces a series of photographic paper works, moulded, coloured, and labelled as fit (eg. Lighter orange concave I, Lighter, white convex I). “These [the cased, deformed paper studies] are arguably — compared to works like Stop the War [Demo, 2003] and Anti Travel Ban [Demo, 2017] that are very rich — nothing,” Dumont-Gauthier remarked. ”But these are the ones that are unique, these are the ones that are framed, and you can ask yourself - what is the reflection there?” Without meaning to, I took that literally, and began to see my own silhouette in the glare of Lighter, black concave III. My own face, by shape and feature not dissimilar from the indentation on the lower half of the work.
Profound, in the symbolism of creases, is in what they can conceal. Before the contortion of paper, it is blank, obtaining and withstanding a quality of nothingness. But, in the hidden crevices of a crease is the unknown. A certain limitlessness now alive to what could be, what already is. This speaks very much to Tillmans’ childhood fascination with astronomy, a subject matter that continued into his adulthood, as seen in a diaristic account he wrote on ‘observation’ for Crack Magazine in 2022. “Certainly the first actual date that I can remember in my life, which was 16 September, 1978 – a month after my tenth birthday – was an evening when there was a total solar eclipse”, the piece opened.
Though Tillmans believes astronomy to be “located at the limit”, he must still decipher for himself if he “see[s] something there? Is that a detail or is it just noise in the camera sensor?” There is comfort, then, in trusting that Tillmans’ pieces, in which you or I — as much as we may be an aesthetic appreciation for the ‘nothing’ works, such as his Silver Series — may not see sense in them, represent matters much greater than that at face value. What Tillmans sees and weaves into the mesh that binds each work is of a rare artistic sensibility. It is the wonder of a child, whose sense of novelty never wore off in observing the world throughout a lifetime. An example can be most clearly found in his Venus transit shots of 2004.
Installation view, Room 2, Wall E. Wolfgang Tillmans To look without fear, Art Gallery of Ontario, April 7 - Oct. 1, 2023. Photo by Wolfgang Tillmans.
The empty potential of a blank sheet, reflected by and in outer space, is, in-large, expressed through four works in this show. In returning to the idea of the ‘unattainable’, three close ups of a varying Venus, separated by a shot of a distant sky, tell of a natural world that can only exist in the eyes of the beholder. This heightens, then, how the ‘nature’ of paper is in the hands of those who hold it, a tangible wonder, an artefact. It would seem that the space(s) Tillmans comes to occupy — for a brief spell, in cases of travelling exhibits such as ‘To Look Without Fear’ — is his own sort of solar system. An expanse with solidity and space, both, that can be felt out and understood, somewhat.
400+ photographs, two video installations, and an interactive musical experience aside, the creative contents of an artist’s lifetime could not be understood in an afternoon’s viewing. “What attracts you one day, a bit like Wolfgang in life, is very different from another,” Dumont-Gauthier remarks near the end of our tour, “and the exhibition sort of replicates this outlook on life.” I, myself, made a return the following morning to test my senses afresh.
Where at 4pm on a Friday under cloud, I had, on whole, admiration for the drab and indecipherable pieces — Economy 2006, in its elastic sheen amid the abstract; Silver 78, 2010, a cold but convincing document; the like praying I & II, 1994 pair — in the light of a bright mild Saturday morning, the artworks, in cohort, felt rejuvenated. Rampacked social settings — Erasure, 1988 and the aforementioned Choir (Jubilate Deo), 1993 — even if congested, and displays of natural beauty — moonrise, Peuto Rico, 1995 and Italian Coastal Guard Flying Rescue Mission off Lampedusa, 2008 — now glossed with much greater appeal.
So, I ask what has changed? Heraclitus’ theory comes to mind: “No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” Just as Tillmans explores the changes apparent to the naked eye — the stance among people in politically-charged congregation; a shift in shape, in Headlamp, 2012, from round to slanted; a moving body of water. He is dedicated to capturing the minor modulations one can only observe over the course of a life. “He has a very omnivorous gaze, he’s attracted to anything and everything,” Dumont-Gauthier affirms. Now clear — if the scene in Hong Kong, discussed at the start of our conversation, still exists in 25 years, it won’t be the setting it was before. It will be the same but different.
"To Look without Fear" is on view at the AGO until October 1, 2023
Wolfgang Tillmans, police helicopter, 1995. Image by Wolfgang Tillmans. Courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, and Maureen Paley, London.
