Michael Weinstein

Although he's been spending several eighteen hour days installing his first American retrospective exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art's east and west galleries, Wolfgang Tillmans--a youthful 38 year old--is full of vitality and excitement, and brimming with thoughts on life, politics and art. At the pinnacle of the world of art photography, the German-born and British-based Tillmans wears his fame lightly, less concerned with his success and its rewards than with using them to stoke his unique lifestyle combining "hedonism and spirituality," and to do his part in battling against the absolutist religious movements in Christianity and Islam that he considers the most dangerous forces in today's world. With a hearty and engaging laugh, Tillmans confesses that when he is "drunk at a nightclub," he often has experiences of "spiritual ecstasy," and that when he is in religious settings, he frequently "thinks of sex." Turning more pensive, Tillmans says that he has become increasingly concerned with the fanaticism that racks the current public situation and sees every reason why experimental photographic art should be infused with moral conscience.

Tillmans' dense and massive show, which covers the MCA's first floor and contains more than 300 images, has already run at Washington's Hirschhorn Museum and will move on to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles after its stint at the MCA. The artist curates his exhibit anew at each venue, remixing images and installations in accordance with his grasp of the space's possibilities and his present sense of relevance. At the MCA, he has partitioned the main galleries into nine rooms, in addition to alcoves and passageways. Working like a DJ at the dance clubs he loves to frequent, Tillmans does not group his images by the many genres that he plies--ambient social photography, street shooting, portraiture, still life, cityscape and abstract light painting--but arranges works of diverse form and content into groupings with conceptual significance. The effect on viewers is that of a dizzying maze with no central orienting points; in order to appreciate the visual insight and intelligence that the show offers, it is necessary to take it bit by bit and to explore each segment intensely.

Tillmans' vibrant intelligence, good humor and thoughtfulness, all of which are reflected in his art, stand in sharp contrast to the misdirected critical consensus on his work that--whether favorable or not--sees him as deploying an informal snapshooting approach to make points about photography. Troubled by that judgment, Tillmans insists that he cultivates an "artful language of looking unartful" so that viewers "will not see the photograph first, but will see what is in it." A close look at his images validates Tillmans' point; they initially appear to be informal and even random, but deeper viewing shows that they are carefully composed and pack a studied visual punch.

Nowhere is Tillmans' passion for substance over form and his guiding moral conscience more evident than in the high point of the show--a remarkable installation of twenty tables on which he has placed his photographs interspersed with newspaper articles, opinion columns and texts that he has written to present his stances on political and social issues. The installation reveals the complexities of the self-described "creative liberal's" response to the contemporary culture wars between left and right. Admitting that "every day for the last five years, I have thought about America and the problems that it causes in the world," Tillmans "gave voice" to his sense of "urgency" in a suite of four color photographs accompanied by text that he placed on one of the tables. Two of the images document gay rights demonstrations and the other two feature cars bedecked with American flags, one of which is a Nissan Pathfinder sporting a bumper sticker reading "Real Men Love Jesus." The text slams the "madness cooked up in think tanks in Washington, the mosque near my [London] studio and the reactionary thinkers of old Europe." The little suite on the post-9/11 world is characteristic of Tillmans' approach to life, politics and art; it is understated, ironic, yet pointed. Far from ennobling banality--as his critics charge he does--Tillmans is committed to keeping the ideological bludgeon under wraps so that viewers are free to make their "own connections." The "artful language of looking unartful" is Tillmans' way of redeeming the courage of his liberal convictions.

Wolfgang Tillmans shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago, (312)280-2660, through August 13.

(2006-05-23)

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