"Wolfgang Tillmans: Still Life". (Exhibition notes).

at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts. October 25, 2002-February 23, 2003

Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) proves that for every ying there is a yang. Remember Tillmans? The year 2000 was that halcyon year in which this artist won the Tate's Turner Prize, Britain's postmodern spectacle of diminished expectations. The prize judges at the time praised the German-born, London-based photographer for his depictions of "constraint-free lifestyles of youth cultures and alternative concepts of beauty, sexuality, and politics," as well as his "ability to present sensitive subject matter, such as gay sex and a man urinating on a chair, in ways that challenge conventional definitions of art."

To his supporters, Tillmans combined the progressivism of Cool Britannia with the benighted folksiness of the jet-set. Here was a new chronicler of a new modern life. Tillmans's most successful series of photographs concerned the Concorde--the jet of the jet-set, the icon of intercontinental good living, packaged into a snapshot-like flip-book of Concorde taking off, Concorde above a barn, Concorde in the clouds, Concorde far away, Concorde up close, Concorde in the morning, Concorde at night. Tillmans mixed in a few potted sentences about socioeconomic juxtapositions and space-age dreams. Sometime after the prize was announced, a friend bought me this book in Germany. He said it made him laugh. It made me laugh too.

Before Tillmans began dabbling in not-so-serious art in the early 1990s, he lived as a successful fashion photographer working for publications like the British lifestyle magazine i-D. Turn this logo ninety degrees clockwise and you may notice a typographical wink. Get it? True to this design, the success of Tillmans's genre of contemporary art, more like a sociological phenomenon, rested in contradictory sensibilities: to scandalize and to secure profit, to work hard in appearing feckless, to butter-up formal concerns with a feel-good sentimentality. We have seen this for a generation.

Yet in his mumbo-jumbo pretensions and high-gloss shine, Tillmans for me came to represent the worst kind of safe artist. In the exhibition catalogue, Nathan Kerman calls Tillmans's compositions "a metaphoric social utopia." It speaks to the downtrodden state of the human spirit, in our conceptions of Thomas More's famous island, that we now aim so low. Just down the hall from the Fogg's sublime David Smith exhibition, Tillmans's series at Busch-Reisinger depicts ...