Last week on Gather.com, I published and then unpublished (damn, I could have gotten paid for these two too) an article about an artist from the UK known as Wolfgang Tillmans with a nearly nude photo of a boy which came from a series of Wolfgangs older works. It created a little stir, needless to say, so I wrote another piece titled "Art vs. Porn" about how ultimately the debate between art being porn or art is you. Well, as I surfed the web today I found two exciting things. Two exciting things that not only show that Wolfgang has a serious career (as much so as Gerhard Richter) but also one in which he has gotten into a wee bit of trouble with. First, Wolfgang has a new show in a British art gallery after publishing a new book titled Truth Study Center that has gotten rave reviews. His photographs per typical are supposed to be fantastic.
From the Guardian: Today we have grown accustomed to the way Tillmans sees the world: we have visited or read about his 300-picture exhibition at Tate Britain, seen his snatched style echoed everywhere from magazine shoots to pop videos, films to advertising campaigns. But in 2000, when he became the youngest person and first photographer to win the Turner Prize, with a collection that featured socks drying on radiators and portraits of Concorde, the world did not see photography as art, nor Tillmans as an artist. "I have no idea why Tillmans is supposed to be an artist," Matthew Collings snorted in the Observer, shortly before the prize was announced. "If he wins, the message will be that the Tate ... wants to get down and boogie in an embarrassing way with the youthful airheads who read the Face."
Nevertheless, ever since his Turner triumph, Tillmans has been variously miscast as a trumped-up fashion photographer, celebrity panderer, and semi-pornographer. Mountains have been made out of the fact that he is gay, that many of his subjects are young and semi-clad, and that he does not flinch from photographing genitalia as steadily as he would capture a bulb of garlic or a vase of anemones. And so, by reputation at least, everything he photographs seems to have acquired a thin film of sexuality: those are not merely socks drying on the radiator, they are sexy socks; they are homosexual socks; they are naked socks.
"It's not really an issue except for the Anglo-Saxon world," he says, with bafflement. "It's funny that it only comes up in an English show." Take his huge solo exhibition at Tate Britain in 2003. "There were two penises in the entire show, and yet there was a small quota of newspapers writing how 'I couldn't look anywhere else for cock.' It's so absurd, the whole thing. But then again, even by talking about it one reinforces it."
His art is perhaps best encapsulated in the title of his Tate show: If One Thing is Important, Everything is Important. It is this approach that has made his work indigestible to many. How, they ask, are these pictures any different from those in our own family albums? "In the past," he says with a sigh, "there have been all sorts of accusations of not-seriousness, or snapshotness, but that's because a lot of people don't want to respond to this lack of rhetoric of importance."
Second, I stumbled across an interview/article about him where he says some interesting things about coming under fire for the "Art vs Porn" debate that as I said I wrote about last week. I wish I found these snippits though. Wolfgang has come under fire many times which he thinks of as free press. Granted, he is in a much more liberal better country but we will leave that up for your decision.
From the Guardian: I first started thinking about playing with the idea of male and female nudity in the early 1990s. The fact is, toplessness in a man is not equal to toplessness in a woman. For a man to experience the same level of exposure and commitment to the image as a woman posing topless, he must appear bottomless. Two years later, I photographed another set of nudes for a Japanese magazine. My G2 page three - John and Paula, Sitting Bottomless - comes from that series. The magazine published John and Paula, Sitting Bottomless, but couldn't do so without it being censored. And so John appeared with a big orange dot covering his penis.
It's important to show acts of censorship in this way - because otherwise no one notices that it is actually happening.
Censorship varies so much geographically. On the continent most publications will depict a naked man or woman. America, though, is completely different. Since the Mapplethorpe scandal in 1989 (his male nude photographs caused such a furore that rightwing politicians voted to ban government funding for "obscene or indecent" art), galleries can't afford to take any risks. In 1996, I made an installation for a group show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. All the work had to be screened by the curator. He waved through every female nude - but every male nude became the subject of discussion, and several were vetoed.
It's ridiculous that supposedly rational people can be so blind to this inequality. And it's not just an inequality between men and women. It is still considered more obscene to show two men kissing before the watershed on TV than it is to show two men kill each other. How can something as atrocious as the destruction of two men be acceptable, and the sight of men kissing scandalous? This isn't just upsetting. It's obscene. Essentially, ideas of obscenity are defined by powerful political interests. Sexuality is one of the few things that is absolutely free - sex can sell, but sex between two people isn't marketable. It's the one thing that people can do for fun for free. A lot of people have a problem with this - they think sexuality needs to be controlled. When people deem an image obscene, often it's not just because it shows someone naked, but because it shows someone who is empowered. Since the mid-90s youth magazines, such as the Face, have prided themselves on pushing the boundaries with their fashion stories. There was a lot of very crass sexual photography used at that time. But the models were always tools of a male fantasy - they were never empowered beings. Such images may have shouted, "Hey, I'm shocking", but their risque wildness was just self-congratulatory. This style of fashion photography shared all the faults of an ordinary tabloid page three. If sex and violence are used to entertain people or to market something, they are acceptable. It's aimless, directionless sex that shocks and scares people most. Normally when women are photographed they are offering themselves in some way. People don't mind that - it's when self-affirmed, powerful women are shown to be in control of their sexuality that people feel threatened. And yet to me such images are harmless - innocent, even. How odd, that the most innocent image should seem the most obscene. Nudity is such a powerful thing that I try to avoid using it gratuitously in my photography. And when I do use it, I want to do so only in a disarming - and so shocking - way. I want to show human beings who are at once vulnerable and confident about who they are, about themselves inside their bodies. This is such a fragile thing to represent that I don't want to overdo it - which is why I have taken perhaps just three dozen images involving nudity.
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