Munich. In contrast to his retrospectives in the USA, in Munich’s Kunstverein Wolfgang Tillmans confines himself to a limited number of topics, which could perhaps be roughly divided into two poles: on the one hand, the individual and his or her body, via which we draw closer to someone but can also exercise violence against them, and on the other hand, a reflection on the medium of photography, its possibilities deployed reflexively and aggressively against the mainstream, or rather to create a critical life script.
Although a diverse range of motifs can be identified, as is familiar from Tillman’s photographic work, he always appears to be concerned with a deeper question underlying the perceptible situation. This concentration on the essentials is heightened still further here, as the exhibition is restricted to a few large-scale works, which mark off an unorthodox cosmos like corner-posts. Viewers can thus place themselves actively right in the midst of the problems that are raised and that nag away at the artist. It is however by no manner of means the case that everything is obvious. Tillmans does not at all block out those dark meanders of our existence, dominated by Oedipal logic. And over and above this, there is also sufficient leeway to guess the intended effect or to take an active part in generating one’s own interpretations.
The framework that is established does at any rate get under your skin. That begins with the first work, to which the eye is inevitably drawn as soon as one enters the rooms: an extremely large-format view of a female abdomen, with a vagina exposed at the centre. This sets the basic tenor, which also blocks a »neutral« reading of the subsequent motifs. Secret wishes can for example be projected onto a dark-green monochromatic surface, which despite all proclamations of openness tends to remain mute. Tillmans also picks up on elements of abstract visual idioms in his extremely decorative works from the »Freischwimmer« series. However, if one looks more closely, the trembling dark streaks against glowing white, red and green backgrounds leave a subtly shocking impression. They do not disclose their origin and hence produce merely forebodings of what lies beyond the agreeable. In an arrangement of book pages, excerpts from newspapers and other photographs spread out on tables, the repressed contents that are at stake are addressed more explicitly. Depictions of war injuries break with taboo, undermining the notion of war as something clean and tidy. Analogously the question of the possibilities of religion is posed in new terms when Tillmans confronts texts by Krishnamurti as well as a feminist critique of God’s presumed gender with shots of Christian and Islamic religious buildings.
Even if one is aware that the exhibition project in the Kunstverein München was important for Tillmans in the light of the tenth anniversary of the death of his friend Jochen Klein, the outcome is precisely the contrary of an artistic self-glorification. Tillmans presents a vision of the world that lays claim to general validity by picking up with great precision on precisely the subject-matter that is missing in standard clichés, thus rendering their incompleteness apparent.
In this sense he also takes on motifs that enjoy a long tradition in painting and carries them over into the medium of photography. For example, over-ripe fruit left lying on the lawn, or the way in which the symbolic impact of a man’s hunched posture unfolds in the work entitled »Anders pulling a splinter from his foot«.
The same can be said of many of the motifs shown. Items of clothing revealing the traces of a life that does not always adhere to official norms, such as the sperm-dotted T-shirt, referencing an occurrence that is merely ironically denied in the term »sport stains«. The motif of the vagina mentioned earlier is perhaps even more drastic than its Courbetesque model, yet it does not slot into contemporary forms of scandalous calculation but remains true to the type of philosophical realism also cultivated by Courbet’s painter friend, Wilhelm Leibl, who is also represented here with a portrait of a boy reproduced in black and white.
The video »Lights« reduces the spheres of a disco to elements of a lightshow, moving in time to the rhythm of the music in the background. Despite their relentless adherence to their programme, these computer-controlled light rays can be experienced as lovable beings, because they frame a locus of communal transgression and contribute to the success of nocturnal adventures. The disco is not documented in empirical terms either but imagined instead as a Foucaultian heterotopy, as an actually existing model of a deviant order.
Translated by Helen Ferguson