THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY WOLFGANG TILLMANS: WORLD-MAKING YIZHOU ZHANG SPRING 2020 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a baccalaureate degree in Art History with honors in Art History Reviewed and approved* by the following: Sarah K. Rich Associate Professor of Art History Thesis Supervisor Sarah K. Rich Associate Professor of Art History Honors Adviser Nancy E. Locke Associate Professor of Art History Faculty Reader * Electronic approvals are on file. i ABSTRACT This thesis looks into the body of art works created by Wolfgang Tillmans from the early 1980s to the present, with a focus on the transforming quality of the photographic medium. The essay first investigates the early clashing of mediums in the artist’s work: the photo printer, digital camera, and film in the photograph surface. Then, the essay delves into a longer history of abstract photography that relates to modernist notions of medium specificity. The third chapter deals with the issue of body in a double fold: the body of the art work, and the body of the artist. The fourth chapter introduces a systematic view on Tillmans’ thirty-years-long oeuvre, connecting the motif of astronomy with a distinct world view hidden behind Tillmans photographs. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements....................................................................................................................... iii List of Figures............................................................................................................................... iv Introduction................................................................................................................................... vi Chapter 1 Technological Utopia …................................................................................................1 Chapter 2 Photographic Abstraction and Medium Specificity .....................................................14 Chapter 3 If one body matters, everybody matters....................................................................... 28 Chapter 4 Astronomy and World-Making ................................................................................... 41 Bibliography................................................................................................................................. 47 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This paper has been a result of a three years of journey into the investigation of Wolfgang Tillmans’ work and nature of photographic medium. I would like to give my first and foremost thanks to Sarah Rich, who has been there to guide me into the discipline of Art History and my intellectual aspirations on this project from the very beginning. I would also to give thanks to Nancy Locke, to whom I own my knowledge in French impressionism and social history. I’m indebted to the St. Catherine’s College at Oxford University which provided me the chance to study in UK. I am especially grateful to Naomi Freud and Helen Alexander at office of visiting students in Catz. I own my thanks to Andre Nilsen at Hertford College for enlighten me to 20th century philosophy, and Emilia Terracciano, at the Ruskin School of Art, who provided invaluable comments on my writings and research. I would like to thank Maureen Paley Gallery at London, Galerie Buchholz at Berlin, and Tate Modern Archive for all the assistance and research material. Last, a brief set of thank you goes out to Leonard Schneider, Catherine Pavel, Mihaela Man, Daniel Purdy, David Tolley, Gervase Rosser, and last but not least Julia Woelfel. iv List of Figures 1. Figure 1: Wolfgang Tillmans, left Edinburgh Builders, A, right Edinburgh Builder B, 1987 2. Figure 2: Richard Prince, Untitled(Cowboy), 1989, Ektacolor photograph, 50x70 inches. 3. Figure 3. Wolfgang Tillmans, Concord Grid, 1997, 56 C-print photographs 4. Figure 4. Édouard Manet, Old Musician, 1862, Oil on Canvas, 73.8 in x 97.8 in. 5. Figure 5. Wolfgang Tillmans, Concorde L449-11, C-print, 320 x217 mm 6. Figure 6: Wolfgang Tillmans, Concorde, artist book 7. Figure 7: Wolfgang Tillmans, Installation view at ars Futura Galerie, Zurich, 1993 8. Figure 8. Wolfgang Tillmans, Installation view at Maureen Paley, 1994 9. Figure 9. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, self-portrait, photogram, 1926, 10. Figure 10: Wolfgang Tillmans, JAL, 1997, C-print, Tate 11. Figure 11: Wolfgang Tillmans, Parkett Edition, #55 12. Figure 12: Wolfgang Tillmans, Alex, 1997, 51x60 cm, Tate 13. Figure 13: Wolfgang Tillmans, Parkett Edition #4, 14. Figure 14. Wolfgang Tillmans, Freischwimmer 151, 3.78 x 5.08m, 2010, Installation view at Walkers Gallery of Art 15. Figure 15. Jackson Pollock, Number 31, 2.7 x 5.31m, 1950, Installation view at MoMA 16. Figure 16. Wolfgang Tillmans, Installation view at Interim Art, 1993 17. Figure 17. Wolfgang Tillmans, Installation view at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, 1994 18. Figure 18. Wolfgang Tillmans, Indian Corn & Pomegranate, C-Print, 1994, 11 1/2 x 16 inches (29.2 x 40.6 cm), Guggenheim Museum. 19. Figure 19. Wolfgang Tillmans, Für Immer Burgen, C-Print, 1997 v 20. Figure 20. Nobuyoshi Araki, Untitled, from artist book Winter Journey, 1991 21. Figure 21. Wolfgang Tillmans, Detail of Tillmans’ paper clip technique, 2019 22. Figure 22. Zoe Leonard, Strange Fruit, 1992-1997, Philadelphia Museum of Art. 23. Figure 23. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Toronto), 1992, MoMA 24. Figure 24. Wolfgang Tillmans, Untitled, drawing, 2003 25. Figure 25. Wolfgang Tillmans, Totale Sonnenfinsternis / Total Solar Eclipse, Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne, 1999. 26. Figure 26. Wolfgang Tillmans, Totale Sonnenfinsternis / Total Solar Eclipse, Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne, 1999. vi Introduction Art historian Heinrich Wölfflin once remarked that, “not everything is possible in every period.”1 In some respects this has been true of Tillmans’ work, as his practice has progressed along with shifts in technology, and only certain images became possible under certain technological (and therefore cultural) conditions. For example, works by Tillmans from 1980 to about 2005 were mostly C-prints, however, but afterwards, as ink-jet technology flourished, he increasingly turned to that medium. Similarly, Tillmans used a 35mm film camera for most of his career until 2007, when he begin to work with a digital camera. By 2012 digital files has completely replaced film in his studio. At the same time, however, Tillmans has never relinquished obsolete technologies: the Xerox print appeared in his oeuvre in 1988, for example, and it continues to play a major role in his works today. The technological condition, it turns out, is not an absolute cause nor is it the base structure of artistic change, but, rather, it is a gathering effect of technology upon ways of knowing—for Michel Foucault, the episteme. Such ways of knowing do not progress teleologically, but rather accumulate, as well as compete. This essay explores Tillmans’ work and its attention to the relationship between changing epistemes of technology and changing notions of photography as a medium. To that end, I separate Tillmans’ work into four distinct themes. The first chapter looks at Tillmans’ concern 1 Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, forward to the 7th German edition. Quoted by Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problem of Modern Philosophy,” Aesthetics: a comprehensive anthology, (Oxford, Blackwell, 2008), 396. vii with xerox technology and the class identities that it presumes. The second chapter investigates Tillman’s attention to photography as a medium—technology turned inward. Here, I shall give an overview of Tillmans’ early medium-reflective work in the 1990s using Xerox copies, then relate those works to his later abstract prints, the paper drop series, attending in all cases to the ways in which Tillmans uses margins and framing to reinforce notions of medium specificity. The third chapter addresses Tillmans’ recurring attention to the human body, and the ways in which he conveys its sensuality and pictorial complexity even when he works within genres such as still life. The last chapter concerns itself with Tillmans’ work regarding astronomy and his approach to cosmology. 1 Chapter 1 Technological Utopia Photography, n. The process, practice, or art of taking photographs; the business of producing and printing photographs. -Oxford English Dictionary Photograph, n. A picture or image obtained by photography; (originally) a picture made using a camera in which an image is focused on too sensitive material and then made visible and permanent by chemical treatment; (later also) a picture made by focusing an image and then storing it digitally. – Oxford English Dictionary From the start of Tillmans career, technology has been a central concern, both in terms of the mediums he uses and the subject matter he addresses. A key feature of photography for Tillmans has been the competing between forms of the medium and the ways in which they affect the photograph as both image and object. In On Photography, Susan Sontag once described the heterogenous nature of photographs and the reception of photographic images under the modern technological condition: “Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out.”2 Sontag came to perceive photography not only as images, but also as physical objects too— technological objects—and it is the industrial/chemical nature of those objects that can 2 Susan Sontag, On Photography, (New