Mind-boggling banality
Andrew Lambirth
Wolfgang Tillmans: if one thing matters, everything matters Tate Britain until 14 September
Wolfgang Tillmans won the Turner Prize in 2000. He takes photographs. He is widely acclaimed as a chronicler of his generation, and has been called 'one of Britain's most creative artists'. His current retrospective in the Tate's Linbury Galleries — his first major museum exhibition in Britain — is part of a summer of discontent in the art world, a summer dedicated to photography (at the V&A, NPG, Serpentine et al), that most popular of media among contemporary artists. This extensive show is accompanied by a sumptuous paperback picture book (£29.99, with special exhibition discount), which reproduces 2,400 of Tillmans's images selected by the artist over an eight-month period, and called by him 'a personal stocktaking'. For someone born as recently as 1968, this tribute seems excessive. But then photography, accessible and largely undemanding as it is, is known to be both sexy and saleable.
Tillmans is famous for what is called a 'non-hierarchical' hang, assembling his photos in collage style on the gallery walls, magazine pages juxtaposed with original prints, postcard-sized images next to vast ink-jet confections, and all of them unframed, some simply fixed in place with tape. This makes for a lively and stimulat ing installation, black and white alternating with colour, subjects ranging from people to landscape to city to still-life. Apparently Tillmans doesn't like this traditional categorisation into subject, yet this is disingenuous. Not only is such categorisation invaluable to the critic who needs to give a quick thumbnail sketch of the range of imagery on view. but Tillmans himself admits to thinking about his work in just such terms. It's as if, therefore, he simply doesn't trust the public to have access to these terms. Why? Might they compare his work with other artists who have ventured to depict still-life or people, perhaps through the medium of paint? And might not Tillmans's efforts be found wanting in comparison? For however amusing this show might superficially be, its appeal remains resolutely skin-deep.
Photography is intended as a record of appearances, perhaps inflected by the personality of the photographer but, in the case of Tillmans, given a deliberately commonplace perspective. As a result, these are not 'telling' images, they are disappointingly and numbingly inarticulate. A couple of the still-lifes of objects and a landscape or two have an intensity which arrests the viewer for a beat. Otherwise, this collection of pictures has all the differentiation of wallpaper. It's not enough to photograph an ant and its shadow, or snap Concorde in the sky, or people snogging. We deserve a bit more from 'one of Britain's most creative artists', not this mind-boggling banality of clubbing and posing. This may indeed be a record of Tillmans's life, but it has very little art about it. Obviously Tillmans has his moments, but sadly they are rarely of more than personal significance. As with so much contemporary endeavour that aspires to art, this is largely unmediated autobiography and, as such, of limited interest.
This vast self-indulgent exhibition (which also contains a pumping thumping soundtrack to another mindless video, Tillmans's first such installation) desperately needs editing. It has all the subtlety and sophistication of a fresher's pin-board, but without a compensating rawness. It also has the flavour of a school project — 'what I did in the holidays'. Although so much of this show aches after meaning, yet remains so thin in content as to be almost transparent, the more abstract images — which seek out no such significance — are among the most successful. Here is evidence of a real interest in colour and texture and scribbly line. Formally, Tillmans is not devoid of skill: occasionally his framing of an image is satisfying, and he does have a certain feeling for composition. (Perhaps he'd prefer an uncertain feeling — it might make his work more original.) And there is a degree of poignancy to be detected in his pictures of interiors, of windows and staircases, or a pile of balled socks on a sofa. But too often these frail little snips of snaps cannot stand being enlarged out of all proportion, and end up as flaccid as a popped condom.
One of the wall notes so beloved of curators these days claims that Tillmans 'explores and expands the possibilities for photography'. I wish I could agree. The title of the show is revealing: if [my italics] one thing matters, everything matters'. The implication is that nothing matters, and that the artist is incapable of discrimination. Which means that he's not an artist, just a documenting camera. Perhaps he should go away and train as a painter for a few years. The discipline might do him good. At the moment all we can witness is a depressing and debilitating visual diarrhoea, the inability to discern the lasting in the flux.
Previous page
