Deep beneath the banal
In its apparent simplicity Wolfgang Tillmans’s work captures those fleeting moments of insight that defy articulation in mere language
Things are happening at the Johannesburg Art Gallery — huge photographic prints hang uncovered, held by clips against the walls, with smaller postcard-sized photos attached to other walls with tape. On a table in one corner, a pile of newspapers and a collection of files and notes indicate that the artist responsible for all the comings and goings of assistants and gallery workers cannot be far away. Wolfgang Tillmans is a self-confessed news junkie whose art has for over 25 years covered a variety of issues and concerns from the club culture of 1990s Berlin to mass consumerism, the fight for affordable access to HIV treatment, LGBT struggles, Brexit, and the quiet moments of everyday life that link all of us in a common humanity that transcends borders, fearmongering and intolerance.
Born in 1968 in Remscheid, Germany, Tillmans first came to the art world’s attention in the ’90s as a photographer for i-D magazine, where he took portraits of celebrities, covered fashion and documented the Berlin club scene. Since then he’s risen to the heights of the contemporary art world, winning Britain’s Turner Prize in 2000 and many other awards including the Hasselblad Award. While Tillmans’s work consists mostly of photographs, as he tells me, sitting in a back office of the gallery, “I don’t see myself as a photographer in the primary sense — I’m an artist who has found that I can make almost all the work that I want to make with the photographic medium, with the camera or without the camera.”
Tillmans is in Johannesburg to supervise the installation of his travelling show Fragile, which has just finished showing in Kinshasa and Nairobi and provides the artist with an opportunity to bring a collection of his work over the scope of his career to African audiences. It’s a big deal not just for the city but for the continent as a whole, a rare chance to enjoy on home ground an expansive show by a living contemporary artist.
Tillmans is known for the way in which he exhibits his work — challenging traditional ideas of presentation and dismantling hierarchies between different elements of his work. He laughs as he admits: “It sounds a bit lame to say, but that is really what I do; exhibition-making. People think that it is picture-making but ultimately they are building blocks to make the larger project, which happens maybe four or five times a year, where I spend an extensive amount of time — days and nights — in a gallery space and engage with every square metre of the wall.”
This doesn’t mean that he covers every available space with work. “There’s also empty space, which is also considered. This ability to move across a room and draw somebody into a corner and then as one turns, one sees a gaze into the neighbouring room and there’s some contact between the picture in the neighbouring room and the wall adjacent to the doorway — these are visual sensations that tickle the imagination of the viewer.”
Walking around the exhibition, even in its work-in-progress state, you realise that to truly appreciate Tillmans’s artistic project you have to see the work in front of you, as opposed to in one of his many carefully created books.
The scale of the large works is impossible to truly grasp unless you’re standing in front of one of his 6mhigh prints, the lack of framing or glass allowing you to really get close and engage with the levels of detail that the images produce upon careful examination.
Tillmans says that he likes to question “gestures of authority” in art. “It doesn’t mean that I don’t use them myself, but I don’t want to blindly accept them
. . . I find it is more interesting if a picture battles it out for itself and somehow comes out strong and recognisable and memorable in a network of many pictures.”
He approaches every space in which he exhibits on its own architectural and spatial terms, and sees it as a laboratory “where I can test things out in a spatial, clean way that isn’t normally available. So it is a special place and I don’t want to downplay it — when I tape pictures with Scotch tape to the wall, that’s not a gesture of cheapening, for me it’s a gesture of purity.”
I ask if his anti-authoritarian attitude to the gallery is an extension of a personal sentiment that’s shaped his art since the beginning of his career.
“Language is everything in politics as well as in art and life,” he replies. “How we say it is the meaning — the choice of words, my choice of photography over sculpture, or that I chose the simplicity of the sheet of paper as the thing I wanted to make strong, was a conscious decision that runs according to my beliefs in the world that I found growing up.
“I found that things were not always as they seemed at first glance and that securities often turned out to be false securities and beliefs turned out to be not so single-sided. Looking at things from different angles has been my political take on things as well as in art.”
In 2016 Tillmans produced a series of posters, which appeared in London, provoking questions around the Brexit debate from his perspective as a European-Londoner. He says that at the time, he felt that he did not want to wake up on the morning after the June 23 referendum and feel that he hadn’t done enough. “I didn’t even care if it was art or not because at the time it was self-defence. Even the Remain camp weren’t saying the EU was a good idea, and I think it is a good idea, it’s not perfect but it is, and I’ve seen the richness of different but also incredibly similar cultures and I find that is so exciting.”
While he’s chronicled several causes close to his heart such as the struggle of South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign to gain access to HIV prevention treatment during the Thabo Mbeki era (Tillmans is HIV positive), and the struggles of LGBT people, he doesn’t see himself as an artist who produces work to affect social change. Rather, he tries to raise awareness of the issues.
“[Perhaps] art is so powerful exactly because it is ‘useless’,” he suggests.
“It allows us to express things that are beyond words and that address the contradictions of life that cannot be discussed or explained away and yet are always there. There is a spiritual dimension in art that I fear naming, even right now, because the moment you name it, it vanishes.”
It’s that moment between the search for something unknown and its discovery that much of Tillmans’s imagery seems to capture through its seemingly banal, everyday nature. Upon closer inspection and in the context of his exhibitions and books, it reveals itself to be anything but ordinary.
It’s a hard-to-pin-down quality that’s seen Tillmans develop a loyal following of admirers and collectors who have provided him with the wherewithal to keep working consistently over the decades.
His work fetches high prices, but he says: “I genuinely like art and I believe in the art object as something special and worthwhile and I guess that’s why I also sell them. I don’t sell them just because I think it’s a way to make a living, but I’ve been incredibly fortunate in that people have bought them and continue to buy them, and it seems a lot of them do it because they like them and not because they’re an investment.”
The title of the show is meant to reflect Tillmans’s interest in “acknowledging the fragility of ourselves, of myself, of the connections between things and the material itself”.
He is looking forward to learning more about the South African art scene. “I’m equally interested in social inquiry, as well as this sort of pure inquiry and exploration of the formal aspects of the medium and its potential in picture-making, or conceptual questions of material and representation in space.”
As he prepares to resume the job of installing the show, he wonders if an artist can predict what the audience is seeing.
“I think if I can make contact with a visitor in 5% of the works then that’s a success already. If he or she feels — ‘Oh, I know how that smells’, or ‘I know how that feels when I touch it’, or ‘I’ve felt like this picture before’, or ‘I’ve seen this colour and I see how he translated the colour of the plant onto paper’ — then that’s a moment of connection between the viewer and myself and that’s a moment of solidarity and shared humanness that I cannot ask to happen 100% of the time. But if there is that happening occasionally then that makes me really happy.”
‘Fragile’ opens at the Johannesburg Art Gallery today at 4pm and runs until September 30.