A retrospective exhibition of German artist Wolfgang Tillmans, Wolfgang Tillmans: To Look Without Fear, recently opened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, containing some 350 photographs, videos and multimedia installations from his 35-year career, covering the artist's work from the 1980s to the present.
> Wolfgang Tillmans
For many years, Tillmans has been exploring the meaning of the world through photography, experimenting with it and extending an invitation to viewers to "see together. He has experimented with almost every genre of photography, while at the same time, Tillmans has rejected the mainstream conventions that photography might present and continues to develop a connection between photography and social space, saying, "I see my installations as my way of seeing and perceiving my environment, and they are always the world I want to live in."
> Exhibition view
A Reader, a publication accompanying the exhibition, features a 2018 interview with Tillmans by writer Aimee Lin, in which Tillmans says, "It is a profound philosophy that we must learn to sift through information. In the information age, we learn to let go but value the challenge of things on the one hand ...... Once I accept that things are infinite, I choose to value certain things, but also understand that things are equal in nature. It's really a strange paradox." As photography transforms from a print of the past to a database of today, in this endless flood of information, digital photos turn into the nothingness of the Cyber universe while becoming a window into the world of the individual, and Tillmans chooses to use this window to connect to the people outside. As a keen observer, he creates numerous peculiar images: wild nightlife, astronomical almanacs, abstract images, portraits of people, architectural slide projections, still life, intimate bodies, image files of social movements ...... What he sees seems to disillusion the idealized images of consumerist culture, while at the same time his images and pictures Beyond the amount of information that words can carry, his images and images engage the viewer in their own unique reconstruction of experience. In this age of image-rich social media, Tillmans uses his personal visual language to establish a perceptual channel of communication with his viewers, and photography acts as a sieve to filter out his "kind," as he once put it: "I want to connect with people who recognize the same feelings in the texture, mood, or feeling of a photograph. I want to connect with people who recognize the same feeling in the texture, mood or sensation of a photograph."
> Wolfgang Tillmans, "blue self-portrait shadow 2020
Born in Remscheid, Germany in 1968, Tillmans' interest in art and photography began at the age of 14, and he became involved with England at the age of 15 when he went there on a study exchange. Tillmans has been composing, recording, singing and taking pictures of musicians in between jobs since 1986. His initial work was published in magazines such as i-D, Spex, and BUTT, and these photographs documented his view of the times. In line with the curatorial strategy of chronology, the magazine element is also present in this exhibition, which, in addition to the intertextual effect of his own experience and photographic exploration, also reflects an artist's unique attention to media communication, i.e. the role of media platforms in amplifying image information in communication. In the virtual social space, how can images be properly interpreted? This may be one of the questions buried by the artist in the exhibition.
> Wolfgang Tillmans, Icestorm, 2001
Tillmans moved to England in 1990 and studied art at Bournemouth University of the Arts and Poole College of Art and Design. 10 years later, at the age of 32, Tillmans became the first non-British recipient of the Turner Prize for British contemporary art. During that time, Tillmans experienced Rave culture in England, which was also the hidden utopia of his spiritual practice. Tillmans did much of his shooting from the perspective of an immersed participant. The early works collected for this exhibition began in 1986, with a number of sneak peeks and archival photographs depicting the youth subculture of the late 1980s and early 1990s, such as the work Chemistry Squares (1992), a visual documentation of a London nightclub called Soundshaft.
In 1994, Tillmans decided to move to New York, where he subsequently made a name for himself with his casual, snapshot-style photography. In 1997, Klein died of AIDS-related complications, and there was a faint turn in Tillmans' work, as he took a series of photographs documenting the last days of Klein's life, such as food on his deathbed and a view from a hospital window, in which These ordinary, everyday details often contain a sense of fragility in the lives of individuals. In 1998, Tillmans experimented with abstract art style in his photography. The abstract series in this exhibition contains 60 images made from the early 1990s, which are reminiscent of the artist's experience, as if there is a lingering emotional memory in the blurred colors.
> Wolfgang Tillmans, Venus transit, 2004
The retrospective also features Tillmans' first immersive listening room, presenting his visual album Moon in Earthlight (2021). He once said that "sound is liquid," and together with his own music, Tillmans creates a singular and complete sensory experience in the exhibition space. In fact, Tillmans began experimenting with video works as early as 1987, but his video works are less well known than his photographic works. In Lights (Body), which appears in this exhibition and was photographed between 2000 and 2002, Tillmans focuses on the flickering lights of a vacant dance club, showing the dust particles rising from the dance orgy. existence.
Tillmans' art evolves into a style where personal aesthetics and political connotations go hand in hand, and in his continued questioning of materialist values, he uses his most peculiar visual language to discuss "seeing" itself, as subtly as the private discourse that takes place between laughter and its abrupt ending moment. Tillmans refuses to explain the visual, a certain type of visual intent prevalent in his work is that he never assigns any preconceptions to the image, he places the personal vision in an open context where the viewer's sense of subjectivity is awakened through "looking", as Tillmans says: " We have an encyclopedia of description in our heads, which has existed almost since the day we were born."
Article Source:艺术与设计
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