Many photo artists present their works like old master paintings - framed, behind glass, precisely lit. When Wolfgang Tillmans displays his images - and he's doing so this year in four different exhibitions - he tapes them to walls with adhesive tape or hangs them with binder clips that cost $7.95 for a pack of 100. Yet because he too mostly shows his works in museums or galleries, even he finds it difficult to shake off the auratic and artistic quality that automatically establishes itself in such spaces.
At the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where Tillmans has set up the largest exhibition of his life across 6,000 square meters, he doesn't have this problem. In September, the nearly 50-year-old cultural machine, which still appears more modern than all the art buildings that came after it, will close for a multi-year renovation. Already cleared out is the expansive floor of the former Bibliothèque Publique d'Information (BPI), an institution that was hypermodern and superdemocratic when it opened. The Pompidou has now completely handed this space over to Tillmans to play and improvise with his life's work like never before. The title is "Nothing could have prepared us / Everything could have prepared us."
When you enter the hall - a single room structured only by a few walls, platforms, and niches - you might give the endeavor little chance of success. Tillmans is not Andreas Gursky. How can his small still lifes, his unspectacular portraits, his anti-monumentalism survive in the massive dimensions that architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers intended for this floor dedicated to "autoformation" - self-education?
But it soon becomes clear: Tillmans has found his ideal echo chamber here. The abundance of space surrounding the images benefits them. And visitors feel more comfortable than in any museum. Instead of being guided and impressed by clever "hanging" as in well-made exhibitions, they must find their own way across wide paths over the polyamide carpet through the expansive landscape of Tillmans' life work spread out here - an enormous intellectual pleasure.
So much happens simultaneously. Of course, there are the photos themselves. Many familiar, many unknown, and as always with him, arranged in unpredictable, sometimes puzzling clusters. Tillmans, as a reminder, became famous in the 1990s with his euphoric and intimate images of a young, queer, and party-loving bohemia in London. Since then, he has traveled in many different directions, both metaphorically and literally, touring the world, engaging not only with myriads of objects but also repeatedly with his own medium. Perhaps the most productive period was the longer phase in the late 2000s, when Tillmans combined his switch to digital cameras with an ambitious assessment of the "New World" (the title of this body of work) after the Cold War, completed globalization, and digitization.
Tillmans photographs fruit with the same attention as car headlights, cities as well as stars. He is both participant and observer, chronicist of his private life and of geopolitics. He shakes up hierarchies and size relationships once more in his exhibitions. Here he shows a shyly smiling steelworker from his hometown of Remscheid in five-by-four-meter size, while he has printed portraits of celebrities like Rem Koolhaas or Renzo Piano in drugstore format.
Tillmans often works like a documentarian of political change, seeking out places where history happens like a reporter: He photographs Russian soldiers in front of a Dior boutique in Moscow, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, the American-Mexican border. But as soon as the important is recorded, he sometimes counteracts its significance again: perhaps with a photo of a bird, two eggs on a plate, or a group of domestic workers playing cards in Hong Kong. And why does Tillmans hang the agave that he placed on one side of the SZ feuilleton with an article about ISIS multiple times in the exhibition? Does he thereby assign it a specific meaning - or does he empty it of meaning through repetition? The private is political, the social is political, but above all: The visual is political, Tillmans repeatedly emphasizes in his photos. For Tillmans, the question "How does the world work?" cannot be separated from another: How does the world look?
Tillmans has developed an enormous repertoire of techniques to create these puzzle effects between content-related and visual statements. Also within the images themselves: Is this man a private friend, a celebrity, or a passerby who fascinated Tillmans because of his shoes, his car, or his expression? Is this Hollywood star Jodie Foster or just some nice-looking woman cutting a yellow melon while wearing a yellow T-shirt?
Even more clearly, he pries apart the levels with his experiments at the edges of photography: The misprints of his images that he shows here still allow the motif to be recognized but simultaneously erase it through new, abstract content. Do the photos that Tillmans made without a camera depict something, or are they just results of physical processes? And what distinguishes them from the grid of blue-black prints he shows in a corner as a "monument to the victims of organized religion"?
But the images make up only part of this exhibition. Hours quickly pass before you've discovered everything else. The flat glass vitrines called "Truth Study Centres" are already familiar from his work. There he spreads out - as in many of his exhibitions - newspaper articles, internet printouts, and other material about the many, many things that occupy him and whose reading he also encourages visitors to undertake: from right-wing extremism to refugee policy to AIDS and astronomy. Some of these documents are now historical, others are current: like the printouts of "not found" messages from defunct websites of American equal rights and anti-discrimination institutions that were dissolved by the Trump administration.
Many more boxes stand in the Centre Pompidou, some from the library itself. They contain - decade by decade - a retrospective of Tillmans' coming of age in his own works, archival materials, memorabilia, and flyers. Tillmans keeps every piece of paper that appears in his Berlin studio. Also visible are his works for magazines, his record and book covers, catalogs, monographs. And the poster campaign against Brexit with which he caused a sensation during his London period, and his calls to participate in EU elections are also documented here.
Several images in the exhibition show the space itself, its industrial ceiling, the bold colors. But Tillmans is also interested in the institution of the library, perhaps because its method of accumulating knowledge and material also has something to do with Tillmans' work. In some of the bookshelves that remained, he has added an obscure mix of private odds and ends to travel guides, encyclopedias, and novels: some camo pants, "Introducing Lacan," works of queer cultural history, a first-generation iPhone, dtv-junior editions from Tillmans' youth, with more photos in between and, as a subtle leitmotif: Euro coins. He simply left the signage ("Geography of Nutrition," "Urbanism: Congo and East Africa") hanging: The more references, the better! In the copy room, visitors can copy articles from three daily newspapers that Tillmans subscribed to for the exhibition.
Instead of just using the library temporarily, Tillmans has made it his own, transforming it into his personal truth study center. Even his voice accompanies you incessantly: Shyly, he tries his hand as a singer in his videos, almost touchingly struggling through a French text. But as hyperpresent as Tillmans is here, as intimate as the insights he grants, he ultimately reveals so little. He tells no stories, he doesn't provide legends for his images, he shows everything and hides behind it. Only this way can he continue to rearrange the world on the walls anew. And preserve his perspective: participating and distanced, serious but optimistic, absolutely open.
Wolfgang Tillmans: Nothing could have prepared us / Everything could have prepared us. Centre Pompidou, Paris. Until September 22.
