- Dan Koh
- Jul 22
- 3 min read
non, je ne regrette going to Paris just to visit—well, my family and friends, of course—the Wolfgang Tillmans retrospective at the Centre Pompidou (until 22 September), before the building by Renzo Piano (whose portrait is featured) and Richard Rogers is closed for five whole years (oh France!) to clear it of asbestos (!!).
having grown up on the West German photographer's anti-fashion fotos in magazines like i-D, where his oh-so casual snaps of friends and lovers hanging out or raving preceded and bested the selfie era in their ostensible immediacy and honesty, it's been heartening to follow Tillmans's ever-curious growth from forthright queerness and subjects like free-body and other subcultures to astronomy, ecology, technology, and sheer abstraction (the highlight being his Freischwimmer series of exposed photo paper), as well as his broadening activism-as-art (anti-Brexit; immigrant, PLHIV & LGBT rights; Berghain), "blurring the line between party and protest", as Matthew Anderson frames it.
in retrospect, over four decades, this evolution was always there: “Growing up in the ’80s,” Tillmans shares, “questions of style and music and youth culture all seemed inherently political. . . . I was so excited about the connection between our private lives and politics.” this intersectionality—which Nan Goldin, Tracey Emin, et al broke ground of—informs part of the retrospective's title, Nothing could have prepared us — Everything could have prepared us, reading variously as a epistemological conundrum, Instagram inspo-caption, rebuke, spur, dirge.
like a last party/funeral, Tillmans transforms the museum's public library (BPI–Bibliothèque publique d’information) into a staging ground of discovery, keeping a few shelves of books (Psychology, Religion), video booths, study tables, and the photocopy room while inserting a lot of his own inspirations, paraphernalia, and of course works. in keeping with Piano & Rogers's philosophy, he turns things inside out: the library's older, purple carpet was cut to lay the grey one around bookshelves, and now that it's all exposed, he hangs his work in funny correspondence with this palimpsest/shadow negatives.
coming face-to-face with his works in full print, it's fun to spot details like the Christian Dior boutique Russian soldiers march by way back in 2005 ["Army (Moscow 2005)," 2008] or, in "Frank, in the shower" (2015), the ring that Frank Ocean was wearing (reading "Oxford 2007") before it was photoshopped out of his Blond/e album cover. it also felt like i was seeing a formative version of myself, when i came across those fotos in magazine/catalogue pages or screens, or in his inspirations like Dennis Cooper's novel The Sluts (2004), which i smuggled in from some smutty Paris bookstore back in the day.
while the retrospective takes in Tillmans's video and sound installations, i'm by far more drawn to his fotos. somehow in their pointed conceptualism, his vast and epic landscapes videos and aural pieces like "I want to make a film" (2018), a room in which he tells you how he wants to go about doing just that, lose his original edge, making him seem like just another contemporary artist.
this distinction was made clearest to me when i went to the toilet and took a pic of one of the Pompidou's beautiful bowls, which i will miss, and emerged to be happily bested by Tillmans's "33 1/3 years later (Stinson Beach)" [2023], a throwback foto if any of the tip of a urinal, with the tips its sodden-purple urinal pad waving like a live organism. its title references his previous trip to the San Franciscan beach, where he picked up a flyer splicing together a Bruce Conner image with text. Tillmans made this collage into a T-shirt and featured it in the Lutz & Alex spread in i-D, his 1992 breakthrough. "they don't destroy their selves [sic]," the flyer's text reads, "they aim to destroy me and you...the freedom we seek to live / to love / to do / FUCK MEN! / FUCK MALE DOMINATION".
while, in the preceding time of iPhones, the “distinctiveness of Tillmans’ medium itself” has been lost, as Jackie Wullschläger puts it in the FT, his explosion of banal-as-grand imagery was always, “in fact meticulously choreographed”, separated by quality, not quantity; the lens, not views. if one thing matters, everything matters, the title of his Tate retrospective went. here, as a last if temporary hurrah of the Pompidou (or humanities? humanity?)—after all that destruction in just four decades—i guess we can only resign and anger ourselves to the impossibility of Nothing could have prepared us — Everything could have prepared us.
