Recently I have been feeling particularly European…perhaps in anticipation of my forthcoming and unwanted excommunication from that Community. Comme d’habitude, I found myself at the Tate Modern to consume Elton John’s largely euro-centric collection of photography…entitled The Radical Eye. A continuous tone of black and white modernism which fetishised both the 20th century and the virtues of experimentation. Hugely satisfying, it was akin to imbibing the best part of a bottle of port attended by a sharp Manchego and a touch of sweet Membrillo. Unusually, I then found myself tempted, rather greedily, to sample another of the Tate’s exhibitions…in the way that one might finish off the evening with a gratuitous cocktail. That’s how I came to be intoxicated for the second time that day by the freshness and carnival spirit that was the Wolfgang Tillman’s display.
On entering the first room, my senses were assailed by both the scent of printer ink and an almost psychedelic colour palette. Acid lemons, limes and orange alongside deep blood reds and blue-blacks swirled around me like Athena’s Euminides. It was a diametric contrast and antidote to the chiaroscuro of Elton’s Radical Eye. Wolfgang is a long established figure in the Art World, recognised for his diverse practice exploring contemporary culture. He is celebrated, amongst other things, for his mantra…’if one thing matters everything matters’. His work is an exposition of visual democracy…there is no hierarchy among his subjects…and represents a voyage of discovery, aligned to a commitment to using photography as an armature on which to hang his own interests. Which include his politics. For Wolfgang, aesthetics and issues share the same space.
It probably isn’t useful for me to spend a lot of time analysing Wolfgang’s entire catalogue of work…there is plenty of speculation and deduction already out there when it comes to that…but I am interested in a statement that he made in an interview recently. He said something along the lines of ‘the defining quality of art is that it is useless…so it can be free to be just whatever it wants to be’. I like this idea. That Art doesn’t necessarily have an obvious function. I think it’s true. By the way…I don’t think that useless is the same thing as unimportant or without purpose. Art definitely has a purpose. That may be a discussion for another day. But it may be true that all Art and it's analogue, Culture, at it's best, is use-less. I’m inclined to quote Brian Eno, whose definition of Culture is ‘everything we don’t HAVE to do’. So…we do need to eat... but we don’t need to create Teppanyaki. We need to be clothed... but we don’t need Haute Couture. We need to communicate but we don’t need...Love Island. For instance. Of course, Eno has far more sophisticated examples than I do to back his theories up… which I won’t develop here… but you get my drift. It is my contention however that both Tillmans and Eno are on to a similar thing. Being useless, and perhaps unnecessary is great because it leaves us, the spectator, free to bring something of our own to the artwork when we observe it. A grace note or a logical non sequitur. Consequently the artwork itself is free to fly in any direction...like a kite at the mercy of the wind. It may even be that the artwork doesn’t exist until we engage with it. This reminds me of the old philosophical conjecture about the tree that falls in the forest. Does it make a sound if nobody hears it? Can it be proved or disproved? That’s the problem with Art…it needs a witness before it is complete. And then the witness comes with their own individual circumstance, preconceptions, prejudices and experiences. Quite unlike anyone else’s. So I believe that there is no such thing as a single reading of a piece of Art. Only multiple readings. Jacques Derrida proseytized for this. Marcel Duchamp knew this. David Bowie also knew this and exploited it brilliantly in his lyrics, which frequently floated between meaning and non-meaning, often by using William Burrough’s cut-up techniques, or by deliberate obscurantism. Anish Kapoor is another artist who makes Artwork that at first glance doesn’t have too much to say. It leaves space for the spectator to make of it what they will…and that may be nebulous…or ineffable. Good art, in my opinion is not result orientated. It may act on the viewer’s limbic system, or frontal cortex, or both at the same time .Those Foxes that practice associative thinking may have a more satisfying experience than the slightly banal counterpoint of the Hedgehogs that demand certainty and closure over the balance of probability or the unexplained. Art is not best experienced in the context of binding verdicts or the peer evaluated environment. I myself am trying, through my own work, to make photographs, and more accurately, series of photographs, that are elliptical propositions, open to interpretation. This I think reflects both my Socratic disposition and my own struggle to hang on to the mysterious and poetic in our existence, in the face of Science’s incontrovertible, dominant, and irresistible primacy over the fields of knowledge, explanation and solution. I frequently feel torn between my desire to understand the world and a corresponding inability to know anything with any certainty. My challenge to myself is to make work that reflects that tension.
Francis Hodgson is a photographic educator, writer and critic who appears to be far less conflicted about these things than I am. Perhaps he is a little better informed l than I am. I think it may be possible that he has acquired a superior appreciation of Art than I have. He has recently written a critique of the Tillmans exhibition at the Tate. Here it is ;
https://francishodgson.com/tag/wolfgang-tillmans/
He seems to be unhappy with both Wolfgang and The Tate, and has taken issue with the stochastic style, form and content of the display. He has written of his concern at the scale, the variety of pictographic language, it’s political content, and it’s apparent lack of a coherent message or obvious conclusions. He accuses Tillman’s of incontinence. And triviality. Well, I think that he is wrong. In my opinion, Hodgson is a Hedgehog. Perhaps his scorn is a symptom of generational dissatisfaction. He does, after all, rather patronisingly also accuse Tillmans of teenage sentiment. Or perhaps it is rooted in something that we can only speculate about. My feeling is that in an emerging post photography age, a Quantum age, where, in fact, a particle may be in two places at once, that reality itself is essentially indeterminate. That nothing is fixed despite our desire for reassurance. Photography is just one way that we have tried to freeze probability into solidity. I give you The Decisive Moment. But it isn’t so. Reality itself remains open to multiple overlapping and complex possibilities. Bowie’s lyrics reflect just this. Attacking Tillmans for not coming to conclusions is missing the point. For me, Tillmans is in the Avant Garde. In the future ‘photography’ may no longer be valued as a document at all…rather as a type of flow chart for ambiguity.
I think it is a shame that Hodgson has felt the need to be so negative about this exhibition. Not just because he obviously experienced it in a different way to myself. For me it was a refreshing and inspirational moment. But it’s much more that I feel there is no need to pin the butterfly down. The artists responsibility is firstly only to himself and secondly to make other people care about his or her obsessions…and then for those people to experience and process them as their own . It’s actually the Incomplete Principle that fascinates us and draws us back to the Art, time and time again.
Perhaps it’s even the case that the only way to defeat mortality is to transform all that precedes it into a search for answers. That’s for the Scientists to deal with. The Artists need only point at the questions.
I have posted some of my own images from the Tillmans show…in the hope that they will suggest the joy that I experienced as I navigated a couple of hours one May afternoon in London.
