Wolfgang Tillmans’s Abstract Mediations and Other Ecologies

Abstract

In 2003 the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans installed a selection of his Silver works—a body of abstract, nuanced, monochromic surfaces—together with ten almost identical editions of his Arctic works, images depicting the Arctic landscapes photographed from above. The result was a grid of unframed works appearing as mundane, monochromic yet meditative surfaces that changed and moved. The reflective play between the abstract and the representational, between media, matter, and nature, suggests that Tillmans’s abstractions take photography into a lively dialogue with the affective and diagrammatic means of image production and constellating. This essay takes Silver and the way in which those pieces were installed together with the Arctic works in the paradigmatic exhibition if one thing matters, everything matters at Tate Britain in 2003, as the place of departure for a closer inspection of Tillmans’s abstract work, connecting the history of photography with artistic practices of the historical avant-garde inevitably concerned with the formal forces of colors, light, and other matter. My inquiry revolves around questions of processes and relations, or, to be more precise, how the abstract and representational images at Tate Britain were less concerned with representation or the familiar 1990s concept of indexicality, than with processes of mediations evolving between matter, bodies, technologies, and the natural world. My assertion is that the Silver and Arctic works as constellated in one of seven rooms at Tate Britain in 2003 attest to how photography provoked new understandings of materiality and ecology in the late 1990s and early 2000s, while gesturing toward a politicization of “nature” and challenges to the anthropocentric worldview.