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 , and film in the surface. Then, the essay delves into a longer history of abstract 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 .

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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

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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 Gallery at , Galerie Buchholz at , 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.

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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, , 1926,

10. Figure 10: Wolfgang Tillmans, JAL, 1997, C-print,

11. Figure 11: Wolfgang Tillmans, 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.

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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 . 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 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 York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 2. 2

distinguish photography from older mediums. Indeed, photography came into the world often

being perceived as mere technological reproduction—an unsatisfying substitute for more poetic imagery of painting.3

Some of Tillmans’ earliest efforts reveal a similar sensitivity to this photographic

condition. From the 1980s to the early 1990s, Tillmans’ early forays into mechanical

reproduction were not by way of traditional photography and its modernist canon of artists and

images, but rather by way of office technology—the Xerox machine. In an interview with Peter

Halley, Tillmans recalled, “in my last year in high school I discovered a Canon laser photocopier

in my local copy shop, which was the first digital photocopier that could really

reproduce quality photographs at the time. You could enlarge them up to 400%.” 4 In Tillmans’

Edinburgh Builders series (1987), the artist put this new technology to work. They are a series of

several black and white laser photocopies, each 42cm by 30cm (the dimensions of letter paper

for a copier). [Fig 1] All seem to derive from a single image—a photograph that Tillmans took of

a construction worker using his mother’s .5 The subject matter immediately

establishes a dissonance with the medium, as the muscular labor of construction work contrasts

with the clerical connotations of the copier. The source photograph lies between them as a sort of

missing link.

All the xeroxed copies in the series are scored with vertical and horizontal scan patterns

that are characteristic of the xerox technology. All the copies also take advantage of the easy

enlargement features of the xerox machine: Builder B and Builder C, for example, have each

3 See, for example, Charles Baudelaire’s comments on “The Modern Public and Photography,” in his Salon of 1859. 4 , “Interview”, Wolfgang Tillmans (London: Phaidon, 2014), p. 10. 5 Martin Herbert, “Interview with Wolfgang Tillmans: The World Through My Lens,” ArtReview, Issue 67 (April 2013), p. 63. 3

been enlarged to 400% of the previous image. As a result, over the progression of the series, the

subject matter of the photograph becomes more elusive, as the photocopy loses resolution through the enlargement process; the final image pictures the builder as if he were just a blur. At the same time, the laser printer’s scan patterns remain distinct and become visually more intrusive in the absence of recognizable subject matter. Medium increasingly competes with image. Object becomes visible where the picture recedes.

In other words, Tillmans’ first forays into photography’s objecthood and imagery came not by way of traditional photo-chemical processes or the “aura of modernist authenticities” that surround the medium, but rather by way of office technology and its expedient economy. 6 In so

doing, Tillmans lodged himself squarely within debates of the 1980s surrounding the status of

the photograph as an art object.

For example, the Builders series joins other works of the period in asking “what constitutes an artwork of photography?” One might compare the Builders to a contemporary work such as Richard Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy), 1989, which similarly tests competing registers of photographic practice against each other, though it reaches a very different kind of conclusion. Making a photographic reproduction of a Marlboro advertisement in a magazine,

Richard Prince transferred images from a printed-based medium (since magazines are produced with screens of colored-ink) back to a photo-sensitive medium—specifically film, often referred to as a C- or Chromogenic print.7 Prince’s emphasis on a photographic medium

recuperates, even generates, the images’ artistic value, detaching the image from the worldliness

6 The term of “aura of modernist authenticities” was first coined by Rosalind Krauss, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986). 7 Ektachrome is a type of transparent (positive) that was produced by . It is known for its rendering of high saturated . 4

of mass prints and returning it to a more conventional arena. The enlargement is a recuperation

too, since the size of Prince’s image has been blown up to a scale usually associated with

painting. By contrast, for Tillmans the size of the object remained the same, but the image was

enlarged to the point of its dissolution.

Tillman’s Builders series disentangled a two-fold concept of photography: the image and the technological object. The idea of the photograph as pure image perhaps dominates human understanding of photography more than the concept of its technological objecthood. For example, a C-print of and a paper-based photo-postcard would be regarded by many viewers as the same photograph if they depicted the same image. However, from a technological perspective, a C-print would be regarded as photograph whereas a postcard would be regarded more as print. Historically, the parameters of the differences between using photo-sensitive material and printing processes have also seemed to be a chief criterion for determining the

cultural status of the image, with the photosensitive print qualifying as more “artistic” than a ink- screen-print of the same image, which occupies more the realm of mass culture.

With Concorde, 1997, Tillmans continued his fascination with photography’s purchase on notions of technology, this time depicting not the menial labor of construction work, but

rather depicting a distant view of luxury. The Concorde—a British jet that few people would ever

be able to access directly—was the first commercial civilian aircraft that could break the sound

barrier in the western world, flying at the speed of 2 Mach, or twice the speed of sound (1354

mph, 2180km/h). While the Concord was still operating, it flew from London to New York in

just under three and half hours. For viewers like Tillmans, the Concorde was both an object of

spectacle and a commodity enjoyed by upper-class business travelers. Tillmans wrote in the front flap of the artist book Concorde, “its futuristic shape, speed and ear numbing thunder grabs 5

people’s imagination today as much as it did when it first took off in 1969… For the chosen few,

flying Concorde is apparently a glamorous but cramped and slightly boring routine whilst to

watch it in air, landing or taking-off is a strange and free spectacle, a super modern anachronism

and an image of the desire to overcome time and distance through technology.” 8

Tillmans took numerous photographs of the supersonic commercial airplane taking off

and landing where its low flight passed the suburbs of London and subjected them to sonic

booms. One might say that the Concorde airplane bore a resemblance to the laser photo-copier in

its novelty: both offered radical changes to the usual way of doing things, particularly on the

level of speed. But where one democratized access to speedy images, the other was restrictive,

making speed something directly enjoyed by few who vicariously enjoyed it from a distance.

Indeed, the Concorde seems to be a sort of airplane that distanced itself from mundane understandings of airplane in general, not only because of its ability to travel at more than twice

the speed, but because of its unique design, its elongated body, delta wing design, and its slightly downward pointy head when taking off. All those physical qualities put Concorde out of the class of mundane objects, to make it became an object of technological fetishism.

Tillman’s efforts for the Concorde series resulted in three different forms of artistic output: a wall installation, individual prints, and an artist’s book. All three offer a slightly different narrative while using the same set of images. The installation, Concorde Grid (Grid),

1997, is perhaps the most ambitious among the three. The Grid presents a matrix of fifty-six C- print photographs of the airplane taking off and landing, in the format of 4 by 14 grid. Each C- print photograph is sized 32 to 22cm (12.6 inches to 8.7 inches). Each C-print photograph is

8 Wolfgang Tillmans, Concorde (Köln: Walther König, 1997), np. 6

taped onto the wall with transparent tape on four corners. The whole grid sized about 445 cm in

width and 161 cm in length.

The first observation one is likely to make in front of the Concorde grid is that it defies

the coherent sequence that one might expect from documents of transportation: the starting

images do depict a take-off, the ending images do not document landings. Instead, a few

localized images present small narratives throughout the matrix. For example, three photographs in the top row (starting from the left side, the 3rd 4th and 5th images) seem to capture sequential

movement of the plane, and in fact they were actually taken in the order in which they are shown

(they were snapped 3rd, 4th and 5th). This kind of local narrative is repeated throughout the installation. Such local narratives break into the mythology of the Concorde’s technological achievement. There is no great overarching epic flight. Just fits and starts.

At the same time, Tillmans’ Concorde Grid, 1997, sometimes operates as a typology, photographing the airplane’s many stages of taking off and landing under different weather conditions and forms of light. Owing its inspiration in part to Bernd and Hila Becher, who investigated the typology of vernacular architecture (see their photographs of water towers from the late 1980s, for example), Concorde Grid is like a taxonomy of technology in motion, where the vernacular identity appears not through its subject, but rather its viewpoint. Mostly taken from the ground in working class suburbs, the photographs of Concorde Grid echo (not in form but in spirit) Manet’s The Old Musician, 1862, which depicts a rag tag group of figures in the environs of Paris.9 There are times when this suburban space is rendered conspicuous in the photograph. In some prints in the series, a streetlight might intrude in the image. In others, the

9 Dominic Molon discusses details of Concorde in “A Pulse within the System: Wolfgang Tillmans and Photoconceptualism,” in Wolfgang Tillmans, ex. cat. of Art and Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 35-64. 7 view is partially obstructed by an anemic tree. Fencing, electrical wires, phone booths and sometimes building eaves occupy the photograph along with the airplane. In such images, the suburban landscape becomes both cultural backdrop and pictorial foreground (since the suburban structures are closer to the viewer). In other words, Concorde grid is both a typology of the airplane concord, and a typology of working-class viewership of the Concorde in suburban

London.

The artist book, Concorde 1997, with 63 images of Concord, was organized in a more linear, playful narrative compared to Concorde Grid. The book includes all 54 images from

Concord Grid with an additional 9 images previously not included. In the book, the images appear to be sequenced chronologically, according to the specific time each image was taken.

For example, the last 18 pages of the artist book seem to document a specific episode of flight and photography, appearing in order of their production from when the plane first appeared on the camera until it disappears into the purple-hued sky. The arrangement of the images in a book encourages their reading as a narrative, especially since almost all the images have been placed on the right side of the spread, with the left one blank, encouraging one to turn the pages. With this form of design, a form of playfulness becomes apparent; as one flips through it, the sequence seems almost to produce a continuous moving montage. The Concord manifests and then vanishes into the distance.

8

Figure 1: Wolfgang Tillmans, left Edinburgh Builders, A, right Edinburgh Builder B, 1987

9

Figure 2: Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy), 1989, Ektacolor photograph, 50x70 inches.

10

Figure 3. Wolfgang Tillmans, Concord Grid, 1997, 56 C-print photographs

11

Figure 4. Édouard Manet, Old Musician, 1862, Oil on Canvas, 73.8 in x 97.8 in.

12

Figure 5. Wolfgang Tillmans, Concorde L449-11, C-print, 320 x217 mm

13

Figure 6: Wolfgang Tillman, Concorde, artist book

14

Chapter 2

Photographic Abstraction and Medium Specificity

It seems almost impossible to dissociate Tillmans from his signature large abstract photographs. This chapter will explore such images in terms of the technological arguments they make, and their concern with ways in which technology affects representation and the concepts of medium specificity.

Tillman’s abstract output has been both formidable and enduring. According to the Tate’s exhibition catalogue, if one thing matters, everything matters, Tillmans’ first abstract work was produced in the late 1990s with the Sliver series.10 From the very beginning, Tillmans has, with

such works, always been a technical artist, not in the modernist sense where figures like Ansel

Adams produced a flawless sliver print, but with his interest and knowledge in the changing nature of photography and prints, and their consequent objecthood.

Tillmans’ approach to abstract imagery coincided with a significant shift in his approach

to the display of photographic objects. From 1993 to 1996 (for example, in the exhibition at ars

Futura Galerie, Zurich, 1993), as he began to release abstract works, he printed photographs onto large canvases, with a fair amount of space between the works. In the same year Tillmans

10 The catalogue, if one thing matters, everything matters, documented some two thousand photographs from Tillmans’ early career to 2003 in chronological order. It provides an excellent reference point and works as a dictionary for Tillmans’ long and massive oeuvre. Nevertheless, there is still disagreement among different sources regarding the timing of Tillmans first abstract work. Mark Godfrey remarked in Tate Exhibition catalogue, Wolfgang Tillmans (2017), that, “The largest body of Tillman’s abstract works is called the Sliver, which dates from 1992.” P. 54. However, according to if one thing matters, everything matters, 2003, (p.166), the first work from Silver series was first appeared in 1998. Similar discrepancies proliferate throughout the literature. 15

became even more experimental at his exhibition at Maureen Paley, where he displayed three

prints of the same blue abstraction on the gallery’s floor (the piece was named

Floorpiece,1993).11 Those earlier strategies were then abandoned, giving way to his later custom

of taping photographs on the wall, or hanging them with clips. In most instances, Tillman’s

avoids the customary horizontal queueing of objects along the wall, and instead arranges them in

a patchwork fashion, sometimes vertically stacking them, often occupying broader districts of the wall, and combining objects of radically different sizes and character. In all cases, Tillmans makes refuses to let the objectness of the images remain neutral, and he renders the means of the

work’s suspension or installation fragile, conspicuous, and humble. Such display techniques are

especially visible in the context of abstract art, in which internal incidents (which are reduced in

a single image) can become secondary to relationships among works.

Most of Tillmans’ abstract works use methods of cameraless photography that were

developed over the course of the 20th century: (in which objects are placed directly

on a photosensitive surface), luminograms (in which photosensitive surfaces are exposed to light

without intervening objects), and chemigrams (in which different chemical substances are

washed over a reactive surface to produce effects).12 The first well-known luminograms were conceived in the first two decades of the 20th century by avant-grade artists such as Pierre

Dubreuil, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Man Ray, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Most such luminograms

were produced mirrors, prisms, and other objects to direct the light across photosensitive

surfaces. The history of the chemigram process is much more recent, as it was invented by Pierre

11 If one thing matters, everything matters (2003), p. 77. 12 For thorough descriptions of these different processes of , see Simon Baker, Emmanuelle de l’Ecotais, et al., Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art, ex. cat., Tate Museum of Modern Art (London: D.A.P., 2018). 16

Cordier in the 1960s. In such chemigrams, one could use the developer, and skip the fixer all

together to achieve certain defects from a standard black and white process. Tillmans’ abstract

work tends mostly to use the luminogram and chemigram processes, not so much in order to

locate his work on a trajectory of modernist achievement, but rather to find and elaborate on the

flaws of industrially reproduced imagery—or even the very destruction of an image.

The Parkett Edition is a series of photographs that reflects Tillmans’ turning toward

abstraction through such attention to direct-process, photographic error. What is now called the

Parkett Edition is a collection of photographs that Tillmans produced between 1990-98 and

contributed as sixty unique objects to sixty copies of Parkett magazine in 1998 (they are

typically numbered as Parkett Edition #1-#60).13 They are a collection of works that has

undergone some series of “mistreatment,” ranging from accidental light-exposed parts of a print

to double . For example, Parkett Edition #55, features an early image from Tillman’s

early work, JAL, 1997, which features image that was taken from the window of the flight, framing two large jet engines juxtaposed alongside the wing of airplane. Both image, JAL, 1997

and Parkett Edition #55, 1998, were likely made from same type of paper, since both were sized

40.6 x 30.5 cm. Both images have left adequate amount of margin. Unlike JAL, however, the

Parkett Edition #55’s lower half has been overexposed during the printing process, when the

image was transferred from the to surface of print, which turned most of the image to a

startling hue of pink. This overexposed area turns into yet another episode in which Tillmans

conflates photography and laser printing processes. The warm color of the overexposed area

suggests an effect or a force for the destruction of the image, as if the print has been jammed in

an overheated laser printer, thus lower part of the image was burned. In other words, Tillmans

13 Parkett, Number 53, (1998), nonpaginated edition. See also If one thing matters, everything matters, p. 149-156, and Abstract pictures, p. 21-42. 17

discovered a moment when a camera-less manipulation could imitate, the new, upcoming

successor, laser, and ink-jet printer.

Similar effects of could be discerned in Parkett Edition #26, which features a double

exposed image of Alex, 1997, a portraiture work that was produced a year before Parkett Edition.

For Parkett Edition #26, the double exposure of the print has been superimposed on top of the

other vertically. This form of juxtaposition on top of the other is reminiscent of the vertical

process of laser printers. In other words, Parkett #26 imitates the indexicality of modern printing

technology with an archaic form of technology that is in the process of being replaced. The

production of series Parkett Edition was the result of Tillmans’ understanding of both traditional

technology and the emergence of a more competing, non-photo-sensitive ways of

producing prints. Tillmans’ abstraction thus owes its inspiration more to the transgressive nature

of modern print medium than toward traditional standard of art-photography forms.

The Luminograms and Chemigrams were the first works by Tillmans in which he was

capable of producing a print large enough to occupy most of a gallery wall. This is primarily a

result of a change in Tillmans’ working method. Before 2007, almost all of Tillmans’ images that involves a camera were taken from a 135mm film camera.14 The small photo-sensitive area

limited the definition of the negative, therefore posing a limit to the print. One of the ways to

overcome the aspect of limitation is to use camera. For example, , Andrea

Gursky both used large format to produce large prints. One of the prominent narratives

on the generation of photography before Tillmans was the return of pictorial photography. In the

14 There were a few exceptions that Tillmans used 120 format cameras in early 90s. 18

case of Jeff Wall, it was the return of the historical narrative of a large image. In other words, a

Wall’s tableau work might demand as much gallery space as a history painting does.15

Though Tillmans has mostly resisted the pictorial narratives that were so attractive to the

previous generation, he has still gravitated toward the large scale objects that big narratives had demanded of previous artists. The means of achieving the large scale is different though. Wall uses 8x10 inch negatives, which he photographically prints onto large photosensitive paper.

Tillmans, by contrast, uses larger print as the initial surface to create unique

darkroom Luminograms and Chemigrams; he then scans the resulting images into a digital file,

and then enlarges to the desired size for the print. 16 For example, Freischwimmer 151, 2009 was

sized 3.79 x 5.08 m, and was displaced in Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool in 2010. According

the installation view, not only did the size of Freischwimmer 151 trump the size of its pictorial

predecessor (i.e. Andrea Gursky’s Rhein II, 1999, sized 1.56x 3.08 m, and Jeff Wall’s Storyteller,

2.29 x 4.37 m), it seems to occupy an entirety the gallery wall, which is often traditionally

reserved for history painting, or in a modernist sense, a large abstract painting, (i.e. Jackson

Pollock’s Number 31, 1950).

15 Michael Newman, “Towards the Reinvigoration of the ‘Western Tableau’: Some Notes on Jeff Wall and Duchamp,” Oxford Art Journal, Vol 30, no. 1 (2007): pp. 81-100. 16 See note 3. p.10 19

Figure 7: Wolfgang Tillmans, Installation view at ars Futura Galerie, Zurich, 1993

20

Figure 8. Wolfgang Tillmans, Installation view at Maureen Paley, 1994

21

Figure 9. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Self-Portrait, photogram, 1926

22

Figure 10: Wolfgang Tillmans, JAL, 1997, C-print, Tate

23

Figure 11: Wolfgang Tillmans, Parkett Edition, #55

24

Figure 12: Wolfgang Tillmans, Alex, 1997, 51x60 cm, Tate

25

Figure 13: Wolfgang Tillmans, Parkett Edition #4,

26

Figure 14. Wolfgang Tillmans, Freischwimmer 151, 3.78 x 5.08m, 2010, Installation view at

Walkers Gallery of Art

27

Figure 15. Jackson Pollock, Number 31, 2.7 x 5.31m, 1950, Installation view at MoMA

28

Chapter 3

If One Body Matters, Everybody Matters

“Because that’s (the edge of a photograph) where the picture begins and ends, where it meets

the real world around it. It is a crucial point- where the reality or the body of the work, so to

speak, manifest itself” -Wolfgang Tillmans17

The concept of the body is one of the of the most long-lasting, enduring themes that have

run through Tillmans’ career, and provides a pivotal point in understanding Tillmans’ artistic

trajectory. The concept of the body is being considered here in a wider sense, that is: the human

body, the body of the artist, the body of a still life fruit, the form of body-less cloth as a body, the

material presence of photographic prints as body, the body of images, etc. In this chapter, I will

shed light onto Tillmans’ play of the idea of body throughout his career, from his works of pre-

1997 that focused on nudity, to the early 2000’s onwards of understanding print as a form of body, and later body as beings.

Before 1997, the idea of the body mostly appears as human body, often reflected in carnal pleasures. In the early works, there is a strong biographical element to it. However, the early works should not be perceived as purely biographical. The works of the pre-1997 period consisted mostly of intimate portraits of close friends, still-life of a fruit, and almost snap-shot- like photographs of an underground gay party. This was evident from the existing record of

17 Wolfgang Tillmans in interview with Michelle Kuo, “STEP INTO LIQUID: THE ASCENDANCY OF INK-JET PRINTING,” Artforum, (September 2012). 29

Tillmans’ installation view from 1993 to 1995.18 A note that is worth pointing out that mostly

recent exhibition the presents Tillmans as prolific artistic with works across many different

genres, however before 1997, Tillmans’ work remained mostly, almost exclusively about

portraitures. 19

Before 1997, Tillmans’ works on the human bodies were often taken in a style of direct,

straight forward photography: seeming snapshots from a from an underground party, glimpses of

a moment of intimacy between a couple, or more conventional portraiture in which the figure is

looking toward the camera. These photographs owe much to a generation of photographers for

whom personal narrative is integral to their work, namely, and Nobuyoshi Araki.

Tillmans’ early work shared a documentary and journalistic quality of Nan Goldin’s work,

particularly in that the photograph often seems to give an “insider look” to the LGBT community,

often with photographs presented in a family album manner. While Nan Goldin’s work shed

light in the inner life of being a member of LGBT communities in New York, Tillmans’ early

work tempers this documentary quality with an investigations of the ways in which photographs

achieve meaning. His images draw upon on and establish smart, witty, erotic metaphors between

the body and its sexualities throughout conventions of photographs. Distinctions between genres

of representation (between still life and portraiture) seem to collapse. In many instances, this

18 Wolfgang Tillmans, Webb Liebe wagt lebt morgen, ex cat. , (Hatjie Cantz, 1995) pp.137-155. 19 Almost all the photographs were included in the exhibition from 1993 to 1994 period were of human bodies and portrait, and for exhibition from 1995 to 1996, new elements were being added by Tillmans, yet portrait reminded a large portion of display. However, the Tate Catalogue from 2003, if one thing matter, everything matters, presents Tillmans’ photographs toward human body in a chronical matter. In general, the Tate 2003 catalog is a chronical read of an artist’s work, presenting the artist’s work in a biographical narrative. However, this is becoming especially relevant for Tillmans work from 1983 to 1997 period. Wolfgang Tillmans, If one thing matters, everything matters (London: Tate, 2003). 30

form of photography constituted a key metaphor of early Tillmans, that is, photograph as

analogue not just of a generic sexual gaze, but of a homosexual gaze toward the body. Therefore

taking photographs is not only a process of collecting images, rather a lexicon of homosexual

metaphors.

Tillmans’ course of early life events shares many similarities with his peers, Nobuyoshi

Araki from the photographer side and Felix Gonzalez-Torres as first generation of publicly gay

artist, particularly in the 1990s when homosexuality was inflected by the poignancy and trauma

of loss from the AIDs epidemic. Indeed, like Araki and Torres, Tillmans had suffered loss in this

period, as his partner, Jochen Klein, a young German painter, died from AIDs in 1997 at age of

26. Remarkably, Tillmans’ recent exhibition selectively neglected this part of his career and the

biographical narrative. Nevertheless, it had a large impact on Tillman life as well as his works.

Tillmans reflected the period of his personal tragedy in the interview with Peter Halley,

“That’s the darkest period in my life, when Jochen died in the summer of 1997,

practically out of the blue with one month’s warning. The picture from that time, I never

explicitly said what they were about… It completely took the steam out of me. I

cancelled everything and I wasn’t really functioning.” 20

After this period, Tillmans’ trajectory of his photographs shifted. After 1997, there is less nudity

overall, and the idea of photograph as erotic metaphor seems to play a less importance. Instead, during the period of 1997 to 2005, different projects begin to develop and mature. The new

projects include: the concord in 1997, abstract pictures in early 2000s, and lighter series, begun

in 2002. That said, the theme of homo-erotic metaphors never went away. Rather, I would argue

20 Wolfgang Tillmans and Peter Halley, “Interview,” pp. 22-27. 31

that the metaphor of the body went from the image to the material of the photograph itself after

1997.

Before 1997, references to sexualized bodies in Tillmans’ work existed in the realm of

representation, as the viewer was drawn into the witty play of a daily, often sexy, . After

1997, the metaphor shifts to sculptural quality of the photograph. Tillmans seems to be more

aware of the physical existence of the photograph (the material) as a body itself, with sensuous

curves and inviting surfaces. In Tillmans’ lighter series, the image of the photograph is the physical presence of the photographic paper folded onto itself, in a teardrop shape, evoking an intimate episode of touching. Tillman achieves a double play, that the photograph is about the material presence of the photograph, and is the embodiment of the material as well.

The awareness of photographic presence as a body is also reflected in Tillmans’ presentation of his photograph. Tillmans’ photograph is often frameless. The paper of the photograph is simply hung by a set of paper clips.21 The usage of paper clip technique offers a

set of unique advantages compared to traditions of framed display. First, unlike the traditional framing that makes a work adhere to the wall, the paper clip technique suspends the photographic paper one to two inches away from the wall, letting the work cast a more dramatic shadow, and allowing the air currents in the room to gently waft the paper. Second, because of the lack of frame, the photograph has a natural bend—the curvature of the paper itself. This unique technique draws viewer’s attention toward the material and the body of the photograph.

21 This technique first appeared in Tillmans’ work in 1992, however it did not become signature or a fix style until 1994. 32

For Tillmans, the analogy of the body and photography relies upon the shared condition

of fragility. For Tillmans, photographs are, like the human body, ephemeral beings. They are

susceptible to the environment and passage of time. For the majority of photographic history,

technological advancement was meant to preserve the photograph as long as possible. For

example, the invention of platinum print was meant that image could last for 500 to 1000 years

on paper, therefore outlast the beholder and the photographer. Another example is Kodachrome; one of the key selling features of Kodachrome was its vivid color and its property of keeping color accurate for over 100 years.

By contrast, Tillmans’ preferred choice of medium consistently subverts the historical

expectation of the archival quality of the photograph. From the very beginning, Tillmans has

experimented with xerox-copying machines, C-prints with , sometimes directly

putting a piece of newspaper article on exhibition view, and large ink-jet prints—a mediums that

are famously vulnerable to decay and environmental deterioration. Indeed, one of most

commonly preferred mediums from Tillmans in the last ten years works is the ink jet print.

However, one of the key weaknesses of the ink jet print is that image will begin to fade after 50

years.

One might say that Tillmans confronts the mortality of his own work in the same way as

he confronts the historical trauma of the mortal LGBT body, that nothing is given for granted,

with the certain vulnerability of the body from the possibility death from the AIDs. In this

respect, Tillmans’ photographs find artistic companionship among other monuments to the

vulnerable gay body that incorporate ephemerality, such as Zoe Leonard’s Strange Fruit and

Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Light bulb piece). The commonality of those works is that the

objects themselves are designed to fail after certain period of time. Tillmans’ solution of this 33

problem is to give license to the owner or museum to reprint the work after it has expired, much

like the way in which Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ solution to replenish the candy after it has been taken by the viewer or lightbulbs after they have burned out.

Overall, Tillmans has chased photography out off its 20th century modernist habitat, that of museum wall as an archive of images set to resist the passage of time. Rather, Tillmans sees photographs as living entities, as analogue of human bodies, and as objects that is interwoven with forms of life.

34

Figure 16. Wolfgang Tillmans, Installation view at Interim Art, 1993

35

Figure 17. Wolfgang Tillmans, Installation view at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York,

1994

36

Figure 18. Wolfgang Tillmans, Indian Corn & Pomegranate, C-Print, 1994, 11 1/2 x 16 inches

(29.2 x 40.6 cm), Guggenheim Museum.

37

Figure 19. Wolfgang Tillmans, Für Immer Burgen, C-Print, 1997

38

Figure 20. Nobuyoshi Araki, Untitled, from artist book Winter Journey, 1991

39

Figure 20. Wolfgang Tillmans, Detail of Tillmans’ paper clip technique, 2019

Figure 21. Zoe Leonard, Strange Fruit, 1992-1997, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

40

Figure 22. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Toronto), 1992, MoMA

41

Chapter 4

Astronomy and World-Making

“To collect photographs is to collect the world” – Susan Sontag, On Photography22

“I see and photograph the world in the same way I otherwise react toward it. Essentially, this is

about humanitarianism” - Wolfgang Tillmans23

To make a collection of photographs is to make a new world. Everything we see is to

make a visual world that we all inhabit. The history of optics extends long before the history of

photography itself. Before photographs, Galileo has made a telescope to view the four moons of

Jupiter. In return, the world of images and knowledges has expanded. The advancement of optics has become the extension of the eyes, to give its capacity of seeming more. On the other hand, the technology of photography has given its human compacity to immobilize our vision, transforming it into images, objects.

In the introduction I theorized that Tillmans’ body of work could be considered as a constellation of interconnected projects, investigations. In a broader sense, Tillmans’ could have been considered a world of images. This idea of building a collection of images of the world is perhaps a product of the enlightenment, with birth of natural science museums, with the invention of Lyellian taxonomy, that puts every species into a system of orders.

In 2003, on back of Tillmans’ Tate exhibition catalogue, if one thing matters, everything matters, Tillmans offered a diagram that sketches his view of how his different projects connect

22 Susan Sontag, In Plato’s Cave, On Photography, (New York: Picador, 1973) p.3. 23 Wolfgang Tillmans, Neue Welt (London: , 2012), p.7. 42

to one another. The sketch puts his work in four general categories: People, Still lives, Struktor

(Structure), Photographic. This is the only time that Tillmans offered any gesture of a systematic

understanding of his work. After 2003, Tillmans has largely refrained from speaking of a

systematic understanding or his archive of images. However, this offers an important insight that at one point of time, a system, a world of images. And it is possible that Tillmans still considers his work to be a world of images, even an archives. For Tillmans, the world of images is never static, rather it is a process of becoming. As long as Tillmans continues to photograph and the world keep changing, Tillmans’ world of images, would keep evolving.

The structure of Tillmans’ world of images is “rhizomatic,” in that every topic, every photograph seems to have an equal importance within the Tillmans’ world of images. This non- hierarchical structure does not mean it lacks a thesis, or a focal point. Rather it could be said that

every image has the potential become the thesis, becoming the center of the collection. The

structures of astronomy bear some relation to that of the rhizomatic, primarily in the notion of a

dispersal of points, a spread of nodal points (some bigger, some smaller) whose connections can

be redrawn into various constellations.

Astronomy has fascinated Tillmans from the very beginning. At age of 10 Tillmans has

already started making photographs of the moon, star clusters, and sun spots. The young

astronomy study project extended into Tillmans’ mature career. In 1999, Tillmans exhibited the

show “Totale Sonnenfinsternis/ Total Solar Eclipse” at Galerie Daniel Buchholz at Cologne. It

composed photographs and drawing of solar eclipse that were made from 1979 to 1982 and from

1994 to 1998. In the exhibition catalogue, Tillmans presented various studies of astronomical

phenomena (sun spots, solar eclipse, moon phase, star clusters) in photographs, charts, technical

descriptions, and correspondence. All of those images were some form of representation of the 43

astronomical phenomena, whether it is a straight image of a solar eclipse, or indexical signs, or a

systematic chart of the change of sun spot over time. The juxtaposition of all the different

method reflected ceratin openness toward the ways of seeing and perceiving the world. Tillmans

conclude on his book New Welt, 2012, “We might possess more absolute knowledge than ever before but everything is fragmented- the same way hard drives save “fragmented files. There is no longer a view of the totality, of the whole.” In other words, the totality of the world could not have been perceived, however it is only by a constellation of fragments of the world

(photographs and images) that we may reach affinity to the world.

44

Figure 24. Wolfgang Tillmans, Untitled, drawing, 2003

45

Figure 25. Wolfgang Tillmans, Totale Sonnenfinsternis / Total Solar Eclipse, Galerie Daniel

Buchholz, Cologne, 1999.

46

Figure 26. Wolfgang Tillmans, Totale Sonnenfinsternis / Total Solar Eclipse, Galerie Daniel

Buchholz, Cologne, 1999.

47

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baker, George. “The Other Side of the Wall.” October, vol. 120, 2007, pp. 106–137.

Baker, Simon. Et al., Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art. exh. cat. Tate Museum of Modern Art. London: D.A.P., 2018. Genzken Isa, “Interview with Wolfgang Tillmans.” : 1992-2003, exh. cat. .Cologne:

Walther Konig, 2003.

Herbert, Martin. “Interview with Wolfgang Tillmans: The World Through My Lens,” ArtReview,

Issue 67 (April 2013), pp. 62-71.

Kuo, Michelle. “Step into Liquid: Michelle Kuo Talks with Wolfgang Tillmans about the

Ascendancy of Ink-Jet Printing, Artforum. September 2012. Pp. 420-429.

Godfrey, Mark. “Worldview.” Wolfgang Tillmans 2017. Tate Publishing, London, 2017.

Naef, Maja. “Wolfgang Tillmans.” Artforum International, vol. 56, no. 2, 2017, pp. 237–238.

“New Photography 12.” MoMA, no. 23, 1996, pp. 20–23.

Newman, Michael. “Towards the Reinvigoration of the ‘Western Tableau’: Some Notes on

Jeff Wall and Duchamp.” Oxford Art Journal 30.1 (2007): 81-100.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.

Stallabrass, Julian. “What’s in a Face? Blankness and Significance in Contemporary Art

Photography.” October, vol. 122. 2007. pp. 71–90.

Tillmans Wolfgang. Concorde. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 1997

Tillmans, Wolfgang. The Cars. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2015. 48

Tillmans, Wolfgang. Fespa Digital/Fruit Logistica. Walther König, London;Köln;, 2012.

Tillmans, Wolfgang. Frankfurt am Main: Portikus, 1995.

Tillmans, Wolfgang, and (Gallery). If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters. Tate

Publishing, London, 2003.

Tillmans, Wolfgang, “Lecture: First Hugh Edwards Lecture in Photography”, The Art Institute

of Chicago, Youtube, Video. 26 June 2015.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFEecCWxd7M&t=3961s

Tillmans, Wolfgang. Neue Welt. Taschen, Cologne, 2012.

Tillmans Wolfgang. Totale Sonnenfinsternis. Cologne: Galerie Daniel Buchholz, 1999.

Tillmans Wolfgang. truth study center. Cologne: Taschen, 2005.

Tillmans, Wolfgang. Wer Liebe Wagt Lebt Morgen. Ostfildern-Ruit: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg,

1996.

Tillmans, Wolfgang. Wolfgang Tillmans: Lighter. Hatje Cantz, Berlin; Ostfidern, 2008.

Tillmans, Wolfgang. Wolfgang Tillmans: What’s Wrong with Redistribution? Hasselblad

Foundation, Göteborg, Köln. 2015.

Wolfgang Tillmans and . The Conversation Series, Vol. 6. Cologne: Verlag

der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007

Verwoert, Jan, et al. Wolfgang Tillmans (London: Phaidon, 2014).

Vischer, Theodora, et al. Wolfgang Tillmans. Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland;Berlin,

Germany, 2017. 49

ACADEMIC VITA

(Joey) Yizhou Zhang 11538 Woodcliff Drive, Knoxville, TN 37934 [email protected]

Education

B.A. Art History, 2020, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

B.A. Philosophy, 2020, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

Visiting Student, 2018-2019, St.Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, England, UK.

Honors and Awards

Dean’s List, The Pennsylvania State University, PA, 2016-2020.

Schreyer Honors College, The Pennsylvania State University, PA, 2016-2020.

Presidents’ Award, The Pennsylvania State University, PA, 2016.

St. Catherine’s College Book Prize, University of Oxford, UK, 2019.

Work Experience

Student Mentor for LEAP Program, The Pennsylvania State University, PA, 2018

Research

Wolfgang Tillmans: World-Making, Undergraduate Thesis, 2020

The Survival of the Image: Photographs form Auschwitz, 2019

A Brief History of Plastic Photography, 2018