Wolfgang Tillmans on his MoMA retrospective | Under the Cover

the best portraits have us have an intense balance of Swords no it's not always a balance but of vulnerability from both sides sitter and and portrait just and yeah anyway and and you know this the great thing is is that you can never Master this I I can never Master this one because the moment I think I master it I've lost it foreign [Music] I'm David Velasco I'm the editor-in-chief of art form magazine and I'm here today with Wolfgang Tillmans who is the artist on our October cover thank you for being with us hi thanks for having me you've just opened an incredibly successful show at MoMA it's you know I think it's everyone that I've spoken with loves it I love it I think it's a real Triumph what's been the effect of that have you have you felt that in your own life even building up to this moment for a long time and now there's a lot of recognition do you feel like anything's shifted for you I mean it's it's uh it's early days I think it's three is it three weeks now or so since the opening um and uh it certainly um has an and had an impact that um goes beyond a normal exhibition opening uh fortunately the happiness about it also is longer you know that often an exhibition the happiness about it lasts kind of like a day or two and then you're kind of back to okay next or what you know what do you do um how do you face um the the everyday and so you have this problem too it was terrible yeah I wonder exactly the same I guess you the day you get the magazine is super exciting great the next day is still good but after two days I've forgotten about it yeah you know it's um and uh and this one well it's it's special it's it's alive and that's what I also wanted to stay for a few weeks after um Moma show will be installed uh reinstalled in uh Toronto in April and in San Francisco in November but this um was it had had quite an impact it was uh a little bit like a wedding the celebrations like were the only difference that the people only the people that um I liked were there and it's the best kind of party I'm actually I wondered if if we could talk a little bit about the photo on the cover which is an interesting photograph for you it feels unusual in the sense that it actually has uh it has like a place where it directs your attention and it's you know an engagement between two beings it's their proportions and everything are actually very conventional but it still has this Tillman's magic and I'm I'm curious actually if you could just tell me a little bit about this photo like what was happening when it came about it was 1995. at the time there was a lot of talk about authenticity and uh and um and I I was um I was a little bit like um anxious that people didn't realize that that I don't work in one mode of um of representation and um and staging on non-staging documentary or mistake um set up way because most photographers work in one way and in my case I have made photographs that are meticulously staged that then have been seen as documentary and other pictures that like Deer Hills which looks set up which is actually only freezing time for a few seconds so I did intervene in it but in in the way that I told stop don't move when I saw the analogy between the hands and the antlers yes so this happened um when Johan Johan Klein and me visited Cherry Grove for the first time and were surprised to like every first time visitor to Fire Island by the wild deer and and we fed whatever food we had somehow to this deer and Johan wanted to show that at the end there's nothing left so he wanted he showed empty hands and and I saw that and said stop hold it and uh and and took took the photograph when we think about photography you know I mean I often I mean it's traditionally thought of as an indexical practice which means that it's you know in a very conceptual straightforward manner that uh what's on the paper is an actual reflection of something that of the environment like the light on the paper so you know it's directly registers its environment and there's this other way in which your work is indexical just because of you and how you are uh adapting and adjusting to your environment your social environment your political environment so it's both indexical like in this one Sense on the page but it's also also like and index of your uh navigation of the world well and my navigation of the medium right because um you know many many uh Works actually uh take the photographic paper as the subject of the photograph and and others take the chemical process as as the the image giving Source like the silver Works uh actually uh traces of residue from the processing chemicals and the French women are looking as if they are indexical they look like evidence but they are actually entirely um not representational how do you make them actually let's does this um they're such beautiful works like they come at a very interesting moment in your career can you tell me when you started doing them and yeah um they started in 2000 first called blushes and they are made with light light sources that I made for myself and that I manipulate with my hands where I can choose colors in the negative process so there's no chemicals no liquidity all of that is in in in the viewer's mind later on but the pictures happen completely dry and then the exposed paper is fed through the processing machine as as any other photograph that's been exposed by a negative and I explain them at this detail but no further because people assume that they know that a portrait is done in such in such a way but the qualities that make that portrait you know the the parameters that were really at play you don't know people just think they know it's a cam camera and so I kind of deliver an equal amount of information and say what it is yeah you want to preserve some mystery there also in the same way that you want to preserve some mystery I suppose for I guess that's that's interesting with with photography you know that I mean more so today today that everybody is a photographer but but um throughout you know people think they know what photography does and from the side of the maker I know so much um how what makes a good work really work is is is so subtle if you approach it and try to explain it via um what's in it um you know then actually those two lions description would hardly distinguish that picture of um a human figure sitting with an arm on a table or that a dancing body uh in a black backdrop that doesn't really describe it you know but that's what Roland Bart when he started writing about photography he invented this idea of the punctum I think that was his sort of like way of being like a genese aqua about oh this is there's this thing it's this magical thing that is a little Indescribable or a little untraceable that is what gives particular photographs there makes them convincing in a different way um but it's you know it's true that when you get into the deep rich specificity about why like what makes a Wolfgang Tillman's photograph a Wolfgang Tillman's photograph why is it special people tend to sputter they don't really it's it's hard to get a grasp of that and yet so many know and feel it I mean I like to say it's it's uh like the medium is psychological like when I when I edit and visit pictures after a week or after a year um often the best way to to really get to understand them and assess them is to ask myself what did I think at the time you know what were my feelings but um for example if it if it say that like a still life no would is it because I want to make another still life because if that is the reason then the want is in the picture and uh and um and so I I observed that early on and realized that the moment you see the wanting uh that is not very attractive it's not very interesting and so um even even when there are works that are very popular I actually can't make more of them because um there has to be an some urgency that that allows me to see the subject afresh and then there is a real curiosity and when there is visual curious curiosity um that is then in the picture also and so when I'm bored I um it's very hard to make good art yes there's something I've been thinking about this a lot just you know as an editor I work with writers a lot and I think often about what makes a good writer how you actually become a good writer and more and more I've actually moved away from thinking that there's actually some sort of uh I mean there's a lot of technical skill there's a lot of um uh you know there's a lot of knowledge you can bring to it but there's something that I think that gets left out and that's kind of an attitude toward writing like what you're trying like it's literally just you you could say like who is your audience for it but it's more it's it's literally just like how do you feel as you're approaching the the page and that is something that you can't translate that's something that's very hard to teach that's something fair to convey but you know more and more I guess I just think that that's the most critical if not the most critical one of the most critical facets of being a good writer probably being a good artist in general um is attitude interesting that um you we end up there and and you know like the importance of observation I find is just so um never to be underestimated um and to observe again as a writer just as much as as a maker of visual work is to understand um why are you doing this from what perspective and and why do I observe the way I observe and always understand that we are selective in what we notice and so I'm always trying to notice what I didn't see and question no what I didn't see at a certain point I mean you mentioned music videos you started making music maybe five years ago or five years ago and but you waited a while to do that there was a moment what happened that prompted you to feel like that was you wanted to actually try your hand to music it was actually the sabbatical of 14 around that time after I concluded work on neuerveld the project that I worked on roughly 2009 10 11 12 and traveled to 37 countries on five continents and um and kind of learned a new language how to speak with a digital camera that is much sharper than what my eye can see something that I was never interested in the past and and that was like a whole self invent reinvention that process then I I had a sense of wanting to to be more present in a performative way and one morning I um somehow saw a little bit of daylight which fell through a crack in the curtain onto the opposite wall and I started to play with this Shadow and and I started to dance and created the Rhythm with my feet and somehow I was dancing to that Rhythm at the same time I was making that Rhythm and I was playing with the Shadow and and I filmed it and you know that's important that you take such a little thing to Serious enough to actually put the camera on a tripod and and film it I love the idea that actually it started with dancing that the dancing created the Rhythm but I mean it's it's such a great reversal of how you think that uh the music would work um the dancing creates the Rhythm that this image and this filming then creates the you know the the larger apparatus I then um Revisited an audio recording I made of a printing press because I sometimes go to the printings of my books and I've always loved the rhythm of the machines and uh and um and so I made a first track which is based on the um rhythms of a Heidelberg Speedmaster press and which is what's called make it up as you go along um came out in 2016 um together with three songs from 1986 which I did as a teenager together with a friend and uh and I had cassette recordings of them and and at trick studio uh Klaus and Tim Knapp restored them and then sort of listened in very carefully like what instruments there were and replayed some of them and laid them under the restored recording and and so they um there is the first record spans 30 years one side is 86 the other is 2016. as you go along as you go along and last year I released the first full-length album after several EPS got Moon and Earth Light and I've been hesitant but but um yeah it's now I guess part of what I do definitely no it's a great part of what you do and it's also I love it's something you speak so passionately about is clearly something that very much interests you yes so it somehow happened organically but reconnecting to um really the second passion in my life from the teenage days [Music] you are insanely alive [Music] I would be curious you mentioned earlier uh your passion but also your ambivalence around newspapers and reportage and I was curious what you think critics get most wrong about your work I think the um people are and very um focusing on the 90s on the narrative and that that somehow comes from that with and and uh and somehow think that it's clear what that was and as if it was one thing and and you know what it was it was a 10 long years that um that completely shifted and shaped and changed um in the course of those 10 years and that were very much self-reflective and media reflective in The Wider world but uh strongly within me what then happened in the 2000 decade was um you know like a complete different reaction to um the huge proliferation of Photography in the late 90s and and almost a withdrawal and the Turning towards photographs without camera you know this is all thinking about photography and about the meaning of and then why take pictures and and then that led to this um desire to face the world again the outside world after this 2 000 years of maybe a more inward art and then you know how do you talk I mean nobody has talked about science fiction here and yet to be content in the here now um the collaboration with is against myself which is this huge sculptural work we did in the atrium of Moma 20 years ago it is always of course yeah I think it's It's Tricky when you're working with somebody who uh has worked so richly and deeply for so long and whose work is so built into the fabric of their life um to actually tell that story in any sort of way that's not going to reduce it or focus on something that's a little easy I think it's it's interesting to me that a lot of the reviews is yeah you're right that nobody mentioned the collaboration with Issa um which is because it's interesting because it's huge yes it's hard to miss but people have really gravitated towards the work in the 90s and I wonder article in art form exactly and I wonder if it's partly I wonder if it would have been the same 15 20 years ago or if there's something very specific some kind of nostalgia some kind of like capacity to even see what was happening in the 90s yes that's now emerged for certain writers that that's the story that they want to tell or that's the story they feel like they can tell best because it's of course about their own life no and and their own moment um and how that intersects and um and no it was completely different uh um the reception and the writing um in 2017 on the Tate exhibition and Foundation I think there is a sense of distinct change no the the the optimism and the 90s were actually not all optimistic um but there was a positive outlook that things would get better and um and obviously you know like um let's not go into that too deep but uh um [Music] yeah I mean this time is over yeah and we are in a new period and of course more so since this year than ever in the last six years

Channel: Artforum

Views: 29,536

Keywords: Wolfgang Tillmans, MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, Artforum, Magizine, Under the Cover, Wolfgang, Tillmans, Photography, Exhibitioon, Current Exhibition, Art, Art show, David Velasco, Brian J. Green, German Photographer, New York, Museum, Isa Genzken, Frank Ocean, Kate Moss

Id: Dj5xZKTkyzE

Length: 22min 44sec (1364 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 19 2022