Art review: One Man's Trash
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Wolfgang Tillmans
“In Dialogue: Wolfgang Tillmans” might introduce many Philadelphians to the work of the first photographer (and non-English person) to be awarded the annual Turner Prize, a contemporary art award for artists under 50 years old presented by the Tate Britain gallery.
Tillmans, who is German, first emerged in the 1990s as a photographer of European club and gay culture, and “In Dialogue” gives us a few peeks at his oeuvre.
The museum recently acquired Nachtstilleben (Night Still Life), Tillmans’ photo of a curious mix of what might be trash on a white plaster window sill, above the type of radiator found in a cheap apartment.
The various debris (batteries, a scale, potting soil, a used candle, a plastic bag) present a puzzle made more mysterious by its mundaneness. Up close, the photograph is blurry in that way that comes from blowing up an image that wasn’t large enough to go so big. What might have been boring is somehow instead very seductive.
“In Dialogue” offers little conversation with Tillmans’ contemporaries, and is a bit heavy on Andy Warhol (three counts), with the suspicious addition of a Marcel Duchamp: Must every artist that pokes at the definition of art be dragged into comparisons with Duchamp?
Regardless, the colloquy not only spans the photographic process, but highlights the materiality of the image and its subtle variations between surface and sculpture.
“In Dialogue: Wolfgang Tillmans,” free with museum admission of $20, through Oct. 26, Perelman Building, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2525 Pennsylvania Ave., 215-763-8100, philamuseum.org.
