The Brooklyn Rail

For me, Wolfgang Tillmans’s 2022 MoMA retrospective Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear was unexpectedly profound, not only in the return of the post-pandemic museum extravaganza but in the palpable sense of loss that threaded through MoMA’s sixth floor. We know that absence, “what has been,” is the mantra the photograph revolves around yet, even as an outsider to his world, I felt unexpectedly moved as lovers, friends, and social spaces were memorialized in statements both grand and intimate. The eye Tillmans casts upon his milieu, which expanded along with the possibilities afforded by his deserved career, is a cool, precise one and only occasionally romantic. Had his earliest images leaned towards the sentimental, would it have lessened the accumulating impact made by club detritus, pulsing strobes and cherished friends, all gone?

Tillmans followed this critical success sooner rather than later with Fold Me at David Zwirner’s Chelsea location, no stranger to the immersive experience. Parallel to his stature Tillmans remains in close proximity to his subcultural origins and his influence in attitude alone is so prevalent in our saturated image world that it may go unrecognized. The artist is strongly identified with the deceptively casual ‘point and shoot’ methodology and originating the style of affixing unframed inkjet prints to the wall with discreet clips in tiered compositions. Although employed less in Fold Me (a number of smaller works are framed) this prismatic display strategy requires the viewer to continually reset their gaze accustomed to a horizontal sequential reading that encourages narrative. Tillmans is famously hyper-attentive to his installations, at his first exhibition at Andrea Rosen in 1994 I marveled at the minimum requirements of hosting the young artist, basically a plane ticket with the entire show arriving rolled up under his arm. Tillmans personifies the impossibly socially engaged global citizen where travel and encounters both professional and personal generate pictures fed into a loop of continuous production, an enviable, if pressurized role that only an artist of his absorptive constitution could occupy.

To paraphrase the photographer Gerard Malanga, Tillmans’s portraits are “given” (not “taken”) honoring his subjects, his people occupy spaces where we would expect to meet them. There are no grand lyrical chemical abstractions. There are a number of smallish folded pieces of exposed, processed paper enclosed within plexiglass boxes recalling Zwirner’s reintroduction of California’s ‘Light and Space’ artists in 2010 at this same address. In direct opposition to this a very dark room housed Seeing the Scintillation of Sirius Through a Defocused Telescope (2023), a brief video taken by the stargazing artist in Jack Goldstein’s “spectacular instant” territory. The spectral pinpoint was beautiful in a Scientific American way and I’m surprised Tillmans resisted adding a soundtrack of his own composition.

Even when adopted in one’s own clinical work space, touristic documentation remains the engine that drives Fold Me. I recognized Manhattan from taking off out of Newark or in the distance from an idyllic beach which I assume is Fire Island. What is he doing behind that bleak low residential building or literally shoe-gazing with a couple of chums? Are dystopian anxieties embedded among the litter, invasive species and sagging pile of cast off clothing? Tillmans pauses over the entropic peripheries wherever he is-mushrooms bound by twine, a constellation of bottle caps, a vacant factory washroom, mounting recycling and networks of roads over freeze dried Utah-another judgement made from high above. I almost wished I was still teaching, Fold Me would have made for a class outing providing a myriad of challenging talking points.

Our iPhones grant us the same permissions granted to Tillmans. Who wouldn't attempt to photograph the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? The view out my window is always a picture. I exchanged images with friends last June of the sun choking in Canadian wildfire smoke. Yet, I stood transfixed before the centrally situated Lagos still life II (2022) . These humble local fruits, (attracting a winged insect), little knick-knack and plastic bags on a table in Nigeria comport themselves like lusty produce in a Dutch still life. Along with other photographs in Fold Me, this print’s scale indicates its destination, an important museum or mega residence.

Even as the wall fell, Tillmans’s generation was not immune to the undertow of collective memory specific to Germany. This burden of history, when mythified and exploited, provided a backdrop to romantic Berlin-era Bowie and the rise of irresponsible neo-expressionist kitsch. Our party’s-over moment collapse may be imminent (NFTs, our government, the planet, your health) but Wolfgang Tillmans’s thrilling art only gains in momentum and personal urgency.