{"id":182568,"date":"2023-01-01T16:05:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-01T21:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/compte-rendu\/wolfgang-tillmansto-look-without-fear\/"},"modified":"2023-01-31T11:37:58","modified_gmt":"2023-01-31T16:37:58","slug":"wolfgang-tillmansto-look-without-fear","status":"publish","type":"compte-rendu","link":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/reviews\/wolfgang-tillmansto-look-without-fear\/","title":{"rendered":"Wolfgang Tillmans To look without fear<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Bjork\u2019s \u201cIt\u2019s Oh So Quiet\u201d and Coolio\u2019s \u201cGangsta\u2019s Paradise\u201d were playing back to back on the radio. The first season of Friend<\/em>s was on TV. O. J. Simpson was declared \u201cnot guilty.\u201d It was 1995, the year Wolfgang Tillmans\u2019s first photobook (published by Taschen) hit the shelves. It caught my attention as I was browsing in a bookshop in Milan; the front cover featuring the now-iconic Suzanne & Lutz, white dress, army skirt<\/em> (1993) was intriguing.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
The image was so fresh, and different\u200a\u2014\u200aa boy wearing a skirt! A closeted gay boy with no gay friends, terrified by the homophobic climate that dominated Italy, I reached for the book with trepidation. I flicked through the first few pages and was instantly captivated: image after image, Tillmans\u2019s photographic eye spoke of the present like nothing I had seen before. It wasn\u2019t just the occasional shot of a naked hot boy that piqued my interest, although I appreciated the inclusion. The composition, colours, cropping, characters, the still lifes: every genre I had studied in mostly tedious art history classes was effortlessly stripped of its conventional mystique and reinvented for the 1990s. The energy, irreverence, and optimism. It was the perfect mix of classical and punk. Page after page, the book revealed the existence of a youth culture that I dreamed of but never knew really existed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I bought it right way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I walked back home, in the pouring rain, feeling equally giddy and apprehensive. A door had been opened. For months, as I was in search of my adult self, Tillmans\u2019s images gave me strength and courage. Through my darkest days of late-adolescent uncertainty, his photographs reminded me that somewhere, certainly elsewhere, a freer life could be possible. His photographs saved me. Not long after, I left for London, searching for freedom and finding a life that often, especially late at night or in the hangover mornings after non-stop clubbing, roughly resembled the photographs in Tillmans\u2019s book. But more importantly, I also met many friends who, like me, knew the book inside out and for whom it had been just as life-defining.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Given the importance Tillmans\u2019s work has played in my life, this is perhaps the hardest review I have ever had to write. The vast majority of the photographs on show at MoMA are like old friends. Seeing them blown up large stirs memories and emotions that go well beyond the appreciation of photographs in an artistic context\u2026 or does it? As I wander through the galleries, I think of Roland Barthes\u2019s Camera Lucida<\/em>, and especially the moment when he discusses the image of his mother, Henriette, aged five\u200a\u2014\u200aa photograph that, unlike the others he examined, is deliberately not shown in the book. Barthes\u2019s analytical pragmatism crumbles in front of the undeniable emotional stirrings that only this one photograph could trigger. A stranger would see simply a picture of a five-year-old girl. Cute, perhaps. Maybe even endearing\u200a\u2014\u200aa period piece\u200a\u2014\u200abut nothing more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\nWolfgang Tillmans<\/strong> The Cock Kiss<\/em>, 2002. Photo: courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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To a certain degree, Tillmans\u2019s images are charged with a similar kind of potency, at least for me. What do they say to a contemporary audience that didn\u2019t cling to them for dear life as my LGBTQA+ (when LGB was all we had) generation had done? Gallery after gallery, all the ingredients that made Tillmans\u2019s work so original back in the 1990s are there. The images still look fresh despite the many copycats. His determination not to fetishize the photograph as a precious art object, which was manifested in the missing frames and the bedroom-style pinning of images straight to the wall, is still effective today. The overriding irreverence for the establishment, etiquette, and dogmatic convention, the rejection of decorum\u200a\u2014\u200aTillmans queered the gallery space just as much as he queered photography. He realized that treating photography as one does painting constitutes an ontological crime and totalization of the medium\u2019s true idiom. In this greatest-hits exhibition titled To look without fear<\/em>, he even brought photographs into dialogue with the gallery signage, doors, and safety equipment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\nWolfgang Tillmans<\/strong> To look without fear<\/em>, exhibition view, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2022. Photo: Emile Askey, courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
In Tillmans\u2019s work nothing is sacred, because sacrality today essentially is a bourgeois construct that, with its rules, hierarchies, and prescriptions, prevents us from living our lives to the fullest. It prevents us from seeing the world past the cultural inscription that we have inherited from our parents and teachers and from the institutions that have moulded our thinking. When Tillmans scatters his photographs across the gallery walls, it is not a reference to the nineteenth-century Parisian Salon but an allusion to the ontological collapse that defines our lives today. And yet this is more than a clich\u00e9, a pop-art-derived collapse of high and low culture. It is no coincidence that his Tate retrospective (2003), held almost twenty years ago, was titled If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters<\/em>. In this simple and yet powerful philosophical acknowledgment lies his conceptual mould. Those of us who, in life, cannot easily subscribe to the conventions of what\u2019s deemed normal by the majority have to build their world from scratch, reassessing the importance of everything and everyone from completely different standpoints.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\nWolfgang Tillmans<\/strong> Smokin Jo<\/em>, 1995. Photo: courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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This is a process that those comfortable with inhabiting pre-encoded cultural and gender norms might never have to navigate\u200a\u2014\u200ait\u2019s a tough journey; to some of us, it\u2019s a matter of life or death. To me, this is where the invaluable importance of Tillmans\u2019s work truly lies\u200a\u2014\u200ain the empowerment and legitimization of this photographic, self-finding process\u200a\u2014\u200aa constant rearrangement of life fragments\u200a\u2014\u200athat for decades has been central to his art practice. In this way, he has offered us a blueprint and an opportunity to find our way through a world that still today, more often than not, rejects or prosecutes LGBTQA+ communities. To look without fear<\/em> is a wonderful opportunity to reappraise the body of work of an artist who has made photography political in new, subtle, and yet radically life-changing ways. Look without fear and you might just end up finding yourself.<\/p>\n
Giovanni Aloi, Wolfgang Tillmans<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Museum of Modern Art,<\/strong> New York September 12, 2022\u2013January 1, 2023<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":182563,"template":"","categories":[884],"numeros":[5499],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[932],"artistes":[3678],"type_compte-rendu":[],"yoast_head":"\nWolfgang TillmansTo look without fear – Esse<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/reviews\/wolfgang-tillmansto-look-without-fear\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Wolfgang TillmansTo look without fear\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Museum of Modern Art, New YorkSeptember 12, 2022\u2013January 1, 2023\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/reviews\/wolfgang-tillmansto-look-without-fear\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Esse\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/fr-ca.facebook.com\/revue.esse\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2023-01-31T16:37:58+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_CR12_Aloi_Wolfgang-Tillmann_Tolookwithoutfear_10.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1500\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"844\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@revue_esse\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO Premium plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Wolfgang TillmansTo look without fear – Esse","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/reviews\/wolfgang-tillmansto-look-without-fear\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Wolfgang TillmansTo look without fear","og_description":"The Museum of Modern Art, New YorkSeptember 12, 2022\u2013January 1, 2023","og_url":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/reviews\/wolfgang-tillmansto-look-without-fear\/","og_site_name":"Esse","article_publisher":"https:\/\/fr-ca.facebook.com\/revue.esse","article_modified_time":"2023-01-31T16:37:58+00:00","og_image":[{"width":1500,"height":844,"url":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_CR12_Aloi_Wolfgang-Tillmann_Tolookwithoutfear_10.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_site":"@revue_esse","twitter_misc":{"Est. reading time":"5 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/reviews\/wolfgang-tillmansto-look-without-fear\/","url":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/reviews\/wolfgang-tillmansto-look-without-fear\/","name":"Wolfgang Tillmans To look without fear – Esse","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/reviews\/wolfgang-tillmansto-look-without-fear\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/reviews\/wolfgang-tillmansto-look-without-fear\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_CR12_Aloi_Wolfgang-Tillmann_Tolookwithoutfear_10.jpg","datePublished":"2023-01-01T21:05:00+00:00","dateModified":"2023-01-31T16:37:58+00:00","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/reviews\/wolfgang-tillmansto-look-without-fear\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/reviews\/wolfgang-tillmansto-look-without-fear\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/reviews\/wolfgang-tillmansto-look-without-fear\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_CR12_Aloi_Wolfgang-Tillmann_Tolookwithoutfear_10.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_CR12_Aloi_Wolfgang-Tillmann_Tolookwithoutfear_10.jpg","width":1500,"height":844,"caption":"Wolfgang TillmansTo look without fear, exhibition view, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2022. 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