"Wolfgang Tillmans: Still Life"
at the Busch-Reisinger Museum,
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
October 25, 2002-February 23, 2003

Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) proves that for every ying there is a yang. Remember Tillmans? The year 2000 was that halcyon year in which this artist won the Tate’s Turner Prize, Britain’s postmodern spectacle of diminished expectations. The prize judges at the time praised the German-born, London-based photographer for his depictions of “constraint-free lifestyles of youth cultures and alternative concepts of beauty, sexuality, and politics,” as well as his “ability to present sensitive subject matter, such as gay sex and a man urinating on a chair, in ways that challenge conventional definitions of art.”

To his supporters, Tillmans combined the progressivism of Cool Britannia with the benighted folksiness of the jet-set. Here was a new chronicler of a new modern life. Tillmans’s most successful series of photographs concerned the Concorde—the jet of the jet-set, the icon of intercontinental good living, packaged into a snapshot-like flip-book of Concorde taking off, Concorde above a barn, Concorde in the clouds, Concorde far away, Concorde up close, Concorde in the morning, Concorde at night. Tillmans mixed in a few potted sentences about socioeconomic juxtapositions and space-age dreams. Sometime after the prize was announced, a friend bought me this book in Germany. He said it made him laugh. It made me laugh too.

Before Tillmans began dabbling in not-so-serious art in the early 1990s, he lived as a successful fashion photographer working for publications like the British lifestyle magazine i-D. Turn this logo ninety degrees clockwise and you may notice a typographical wink. Get it? True to this design, the success of Tillmans’s genre of contemporary art, more like a sociological phenomenon, rested in contradictory sensibilities: to scandalize and to secure profit, to work hard in appearing feckless, to butter-up formal concerns with a feel-good sentimentality. We have seen this for a generation.

Yet in his mumbo-jumbo pretensions and high-gloss shine, Tillmans for me came to represent the worst kind of safe artist. In the exhibition catalogue, Nathan Kerman calls Tillmans’s compositions “a metaphoric social utopia.” It speaks to the downtrodden state of the human spirit, in our conceptions of Thomas More’s famous island, that we now aim so low. Just down the hall from the Fogg’s sublime David Smith exhibition, Tillmans’s series at Busch-Reisinger depicts household leftovers and dirty tupperware (Kitchen Still Life, 1995), an image of the gamine model Kate Moss (Kate McQueen, 1996), a cross-dresser named Christian (Christian, Hamburg, 1991), some crusty gym shorts (Turnhose [Sandalen], 1992), a frequent-flyer exposing his genitalia beneath a seat-back tray (AA Breakfast, 1995), and a piece called Sportflecken (1996)—a closeup of a stained white T-shirt. A Harvard graduate student named Benjamin Paul, who curated this show with the Fogg’s Linda Norden, writes in the catalogue, “in the ivory stains that fleck the monumental white T-Shirt of Sportflecken, we see the traces of what may be the outcome of … delirious undressing.”

If an exhibition of this kind is to succeed, curators should approach it with skepticism. The Harvard curators rightly spilled some wind from Tillmans’s sails by departing from the artist’s usual dorm-room paste-up style of gallery presentation—the prints are now mounted in evenly spaced museum frames. Yet I couldn’t quite determine whether this rehanging was meant to tap Tillmans with academic honors (beauty in the banal) or to cast in doubt the aesthetic criteria of his project. My guess is that it was the former—but it feels more like the latter.

Benjamin Paul’s catalogue essay went further in confirming these suspicions. You might question the need for the world’s premier graduate school to train students in contemporary art history (a bit of an oxymoron, yes?). Without a critical archive from which to draw, the depth of inquiry into contemporary art is invariably shallow. Writing on Tillmans, Paul praises his images of “individuality as a meaningful way to achieve emancipation from the commodity culture of advanced capitalism.” We learn that “Still Life,” by way of a Mellon grant and a Theodore Rousseau Graduate Student internship, grew out of a research paper Paul wrote for a seminar on “Queer Theory” that compared Tillmans to (who else?) Nan Goldin, the Old Master of glossy alternative-lifestyle photography.

In June 1986, Jed Perl asked in these pages, “why is there this haste to transform the contemporary into the historical?”—something museums and academic institutions do by their very nature. Critics of the academy cite its removal from contemporary life as a cause for alarm, which is often true. Yet there are times when the model of the ivory tower works best, as in confronting a contemporary-art figure like Wolfgang Tillmans.