Truth Study? Interview with Wolfgang Tillmans
This interview was published on the 10th of November 2010 in the issue # 6 of THE LAST OBSERVER, the free weekly newspaper and incremental catalogue of The Last Newspaper exhibition at the New Museum, New York.
IS THIS TRUE OR NOT?
‘The Last Observer’ London correspondent Lorena Muñoz-Alonso meets Wolfgang Tillmans, whose table top installation ‘Truth Study center’ is featured in ‘The Last Newspaper’.
A door buzzer is activated on a busy street of East London on a rainy Saturday evening; I push and find myself in Between Bridges, the non-profit gallery space Wolfgang Tillmans opened in 2006 to show artists that “are overlooked in the London scene”. (The current exhibition is by Gerd Arntz, a fairly unknown German artist and activist of the Weimar era.) I climb the spiral staircase to the studio and Tillmans welcomes me upstairs and offers me tea. He is tired but talkative, having just returned from Nottingham, where he has been installing his works for the British Art Show 7. His studio is a huge open space, full of desks and wooden tables, where newspapers and magazines pile under the neon lights. “Last year at the Venice Biennale I had four table works. And I had a whole room table installation (Space, Food, Religion, 2010) at the Serpentine Gallery show. But having The Last Newspaper and the Nottingham show opening in the space of three weeks has reactivated the Truth Study center project in a very significant way”, he says while pointing to the build up of world-wide printed media that towers on every surface of the studio.
What is or are the origins of your Truth Study Center works?
The project started in 2005 with a show in London at Maureen Paley which coincided with the publication of my third book for Taschen, also titled Truth Study center. It was a contradiction, somehow, because the contents of the book had nothing to do with the tables. That first show included sixteen tables. Then, in 2006, I had a big mid–career survey in the U.S., a show that toured between Chicago, Los Angeles and Mexico City which included a twenty-four-table installation. In 2007 I had a show at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hannover where I showed thirty tables, which then become part of the exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. So there have been two very big installations so far. The U.S. installation was altered from city to city; I was adding and adapting the contents depending on the context.
So the way you can work on the tables is quite quick and reactive?
Yes, pretty much. The tour was a year and a half long, and they were heady times in the American political arena, so it was interesting being able to incorporate all that to the work. There was a particular piece that was then published in The Guardian called ‘Ten easy steps for a fascist America’ by Naomi Wolf – a very heavy statement indeed. It was very striking and beautifully illustrated, so I made a table incorporating that on the spot. That table piece is again in The Last Newspaper exhibition. Americans don’t really like foreigners to criticise them. They are good at self-criticism, but the moment it’s a foreigner who does it, they can get defensive. But Wolf is American, so that couldn’t be accused of coming from European prejudices.
Installation view of Wolfgang Tillmans’, Truth Study Center (NY), 2010. Wood, glass, and mixed media. Courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, © Wolfgang Tillmans. Photo: Benoit Pailley. Courtesy New Museum.
How did you begin the process of incorporating the table as a new element in the vocabulary of your practice?
It actually started in 1995 with a show at Portikus in Frankfurt where I used five flat cabinets to show images I had published in magazines. Also in the Turner Prize show in 2000 I used the same idea of laying out elements on a flat horizontal surface, so it was already settling within my practice then. While I was editing the Truth Study center book I came to this really obvious realisation that all my work happens on a table. A table provides a space for a loose arrangement, where things are laid out in a certain way, but can be easily rearranged. On a wall you have to pin or tape the stuff, but a table is more fluid. There is clarity and complete contingency at the same time.
And why did you start using newspapers as raw material in your work?
I had worked with found newspapers before, in the ‘Soldiers’ series (1999). I have to confess I am a bit of a newspaper junkie and have collected them since childhood. I often think that a day’s newspaper contains the essence of the whole world. But I guess that around 2002–2004, the years post 9/11, a clearer picture of the world we live in emerged – all the insanity that surrounded us – after what had seemed like the less politically charged 1990s. I was enraged and concerned and spending a lot of time reading media and thinking about all these different claims to the truth, ‘the big truth’ which was the ultimate justification behind all that violence and those wars. I realised that all the problems that the world faces right now arise from men claiming to possess absolute truths.
So hence the name…
Of course it would be very desirable to have a completely neutral ‘Truth Study center’, but that will never be possible. So even though it has this big title, it is not claiming to be delivering truth, but rather looking at all these different, opposed truths. But it is not at all saying that everything is relative or subjective. I do think there are certain truths that are not negotiable, that some events and attitudes are wrong, and I am straightforward about in the work, which I think is precisely what makes it interesting. It takes a moral stand on the one hand, but on the other is always aware of its absurdity and of its extreme limitations. So it presents all these issues, like the impact of AIDS denial in Africa or the question of the existence or not of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – the whole war came about from a single question: is this true or not?
Are the tables fixed in their arrangements and subjects?
The tables are, or can be, pieces in their own right. They do not always have to come in the same installations. But it’s the same as with a wall installation, when I think a grouping really works, I try to maintain it. But the working process is quite flexible and not set in stone.
Detail of Truth Study Center (NY), 2010. Wood, glass, and mixed media. Courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, © Wolfgang Tillmans. Photo: Latitudes.
So you color–photocopy all the newspaper that are on the tables, which is already a process of translation in itself…
Very much so. That is the essential part of the visual composition, because we have been talking a lot about content but of course if the table works were not interesting to look at, they wouldn’t have an artistic justification. I use the color photocopy because of aesthetic reasons, but also because the color copy is amazingly permanent, as opposed to newspaper. I couldn’t use the original newspaper cause it wouldn’t look good after a year. But media-wise there are also real things, like a lottery ticket, a bus ticket, a vegetable wrapper…
You have a very strong relationship to printed matter. You have even said: “Everything I do happens on paper”, which I think is a simple but very meaningful realisation, with a lot of implications…
I have a double interest in The Last Newspaper show. Not only do I use newspapers and magazines as material, but also my work is heavily featured in printed media and I use media as both generator and distributor of my work.
What are the main subjects of your tables in The Last Newspaper?
There is one table about soldiers and war, one about religion, another about the depiction of war, games and violence on the internet. I also have some images of airlines and the experience of flying and there is one about Americans’ attitudes to food. There are a lot of critical messages there, but you could find all of them in very mainstream publications. Information and criticality is there for everyone, which is also one of issues I want to highlight in this work.
Detail of Truth Study Center (NY), 2010. Wood, glass, and mixed media. Courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, © Wolfgang Tillmans. Photo: Latitudes.
Is this series your outlet for political expression?
There is definitely a bit of that. I use these works to make statements on subjects that I feel very strongly about but that I can’t or don’t want to tackle in my photographs. At the same time, though, the reason why I started to work with images from the very beginning was because I wanted to be involved with what was going on the world. Questions of taste or of beauty have always been politically charged for me. Do you find two men kissing disgusting or beautiful? That is a question of aesthetics but also of politics. I’ve always had this very strong awareness that every freedom that I enjoy as a gay person has been hard fought for by many people before me, and that gave me a great sense of public responsibility. I think every person counts. I might be very traditional in that sense, but I really think it does matter.
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The Last Newspaper is on view from the 6th of October 2010 till the 9th of January 2011 at at the New Museum, New York.
THE LAST OBSERVER is edited by Latitudes
Wolfgang Tillmans’ work is currently part of The British Art Show 7, touring throughout 2011 across the UK:
Nottingham Contemporary 23 October 2010 – 9 January 2011
Hayward Gallery 16 February – 17 April
Glasgow 28 May – 21 August
Plymouth Arts Centre 17 September – 4 December
The Ghost of Francesca Woodman
For a brief period –unfortunately too short– there was a promising and shining female photographer making her way through the exciting New York art scene of the last years of 70′s turning into the early 80′s. She was called Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) and since her early death she has been one cult figure for photography lovers all over the world.
Her body of work has been subject of some exhibitions during the last couple of decades, like the one at the Fondation Cartier that took place in 1998, but hopefully the beautiful monography recently published by Phaidon will succed in task of bringing her closer to the audience.
The power of the images created by Francesca is definitely to be experienced and not be put into words, because their overwhelming magic would get lost in the process, but one could say few photographs can move the inner self in such a beautiful and, at the same time, uncanny manner. Francesca was young and full of ideas, influenced both by Gothic and Surrealist aesthetics and by the role of the body in space. Her work is very often haunting, as if inhabited by ghosts. One could think that her favourite subject was a romantic idealization of the girl turning into woman, but when reading her own words, one discovers that she was much more intrigued by the representation of the persons and objects in the space and the nature – the possibilities and limitations– of Photography itself.
As much young as she was (she has been defined as the first child prodigy of Photography), her work didnt come out of the blue. She was absorbing and learning from contemporary photographers such as Duane Michaels –with whow she shared the love for bluring bodies in movement, surrealist twists and the use of ambiguous sentences to complete the pieces–, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Ralph Gibbons and Deborah Turbeville, whose ambivalent career, both commercially succesful in the Fashion field and respected in the art scene, was a deep inspiration for Francesca.
“Am I in the picture? Am I getting in or out of it? I could be ghost, an animal or a dead body, not just this girl standing on the corner…” Those seems to be questions and reflexions Francesca asked herself as she was creating and finding her own identity. Born to a family of artists (a painter father, a ceramist-sculptor mother and even a video-artist brother), she was raised in the perfect enviroment to start experimenting soon. And she did. She was given a camera at the age of 13 and right then she started to take pictures. Her Self-Portrait at thirteen, probably her first intentional “art” picture, is already interesting, misterious and shows much of what she would deliver in the next ten years.
Yes, most of Francesca’s pictures are, well, Francesca. And mostly naked. She has been criticised by some as some egocentrical teenager wanting to show off, which is surely not the case. Self-portrait is a very respected art genre, and a few years later the hundreds of self-representations by Cindy Sherman would be the “crème de la crème” of the avantgarde. And as Francesca herself used to say: “It is a matter of convenience, Im always available”, which is a fairly good reason for a starting photographer than wouldnt always find models when needed. Besides, that uninhibited use of her own body, not always well received at the time, was groundbreaking and opened a road also travelled by others like the before mentioned Cindy Sherman, Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke or Marina Abramovic amongst others.
Born in Denver, Colorado, and later moved to New York to study Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), one of her biggest influences was Italy indeed. Her family was infatuated by that country (hence her very Italian first name) and took her there to summer trips every year, becoming fluent in that language. Later, she won a scholarship and spent a year in Rome continuing her education. There, not only she took some of her most famous photographs but also got in touch with a group of local artists, gathered at the Libreria Maldoror that encouraged, stimulated her and gave her the chance to have one of first exhibitions (in March 1978). There, at old bookstore, she found the old maths book that became Some Disordered Interior Geometries, her first (and last) book she made herself to be published. Her method was based on pasting her pictures scattered through the pages of the book, building an interesting contrast-relationship between the geometrical theories and diagrams contained in the book and her erotic, self-questioning body of work.
After her return of Rome she settled back in New York, and after just a week of the publication of her book, Francesca Woodman killed herself jumping out of the window of her loft in the Lower East Side. She was 22 years-old. Her death seems difficult to understand, given her youth, her talent, her good prospects for the future and the support of both her family and friends. But who could really know what was going on in her mind?
Her art was indeed truly coherent and almost too mature for a girl her age. Her sensitivity and intelligence are obvious and we all know that kind of thing is sometimes hard to handle. In the brief stracts of her diaries published at the Phaidon book she seems a bright, creative young girl infatuated by Gertrude Stein and by culture in general, but never she seems depressed or going through a self-destructive delirium. However, in a letter to a friend, sent in 1980, she wrote: “My life at this point is like very old coffee-cup sediment and I would rather die young leaving various accomplishments . . . instead of pell-mell erasing all of these delicate things…”.
Thus, we could interpret some of her pictures as desire to die young, meant as a positive thing (as in the Gothic tradition), or maybe as a wish to just dissapear from this world. She was obsessed by angels (one of her most famous series being called On being an angel), and maybe she wanted to become one. Or a ghost. But we will never know what made her give up on life and her fascinating art. Her hallucinating body of work, that shows her dissolving, jumping, exploring life and death, and her early suicide are the perfect ingredients to build a cultural myth. The legend is already sorrounding her ghost, as it does with Sylvia Plath or Diane Arbus, other female geniuses that chose to die in the climax of their creativity.
Legend or not, there are much of us who grief everyday for the amazing and moving images and moments she deprived us from.
Bibliography: Francesca Woodman by Chris Townsend. Phaidon (2006).
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