Shortly, the old man received this telegram: "For Heaven's sake, Dad, don't dig up the garden!! That's where I buried the GUNS!!"Īt 4 a.m. I know you would dig the plot for me, if you weren't in prison. If you were here, all my troubles would be over. I'm just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. I hate to miss doing the garden, because your mother always loved ! planting time. I am feeling pretty bad because it looks like I won't be able to plant my potato garden this year. The old man wrote a letter to his son and mentioned his situation:
His only son, who would have helped him, was in prison. He wanted to spade his potato garden, but it was very hard work. Called Stedelijk Room, it combines abstract images with portraits, landscapes, still lifes and townscapes.I would like to share you all a story which you all may like it and could be used in training programmes as deemed fit.Īn old man lived alone in Minnesota. In the forthcoming exhibition at the Stedelijk, Tillmans reveals the connections between his own work and that of a number of kindred spirits in the art world.Ī particularly interesting element in the exhibition is an installation created by Tillmans especially for the Stedelijk and now acquired by the museum for its collection. More recently still, he has started producing entirely abstract and often largely accidental compositions, created in the darkroom through the direct manipulation of light on paper. The abstract qualities of his work have also become ever more prominent since he started to unleash processes of abstraction by passing photographic images repeatedly through the photocopier, scanning them in high resolution and then enlarging the results to produce large C-prints. Especially over the last few years, the relationship between his work and a specific spatial situation has become a key preoccupation. For him, they are inseparable means of expression. Photography and installation go hand in hand in Tillmans’ work. Emphasizing both their pictorial and material qualities, he reprints his images, changes their scale and colour range and even brings them into a three-dimensional realm. Recently, he has started experimenting in an unorthodox way with his own material.
Each of his exhibitions uses new combinations of these images. Tillmans’ aim is, as it were, to construct a visual catalogue in which every image can stand alone but also be part of a continuous whole.
#Presence of mind free#
In his installations he employs a free mix of images from widely divergent visual categories. His distinctive style of image-making encompasses a broad range of subjects and now shifts between his immediate surroundings, nature, politics, religion, global issues like the AIDS crisis and even the purely abstract qualities of the image. In the last decade it has become clear that Tillman's perception of the world has been steadily widening. His early pictures of friends, clubbers, activists and artists are regarded as challenging, raw, romantic and erotic. The dividing lines between ‘queer’ and ‘straight’ or between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture seem to him entirely irrelevant. Wolfgang Tillmans is known to the general public as a photographer whose work reflects a contemporary way of life which revolves around music and youth culture, but also encompasses a sense of social and political commitment.
0 kommentar(er)
