Last week, I finally got to see the much talked-about art show of the year: “To Look Without Fear”, a retrospective of Wolfgang Tillmans’ work at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in NYC. The show closes at the end of this month and, despite hours of delays on Amtrak and very cold weather, those old wild horses couldn’t keep me away. They tried. (Keep reading.)

Before making the arrangements for the one night stay in NYC and the various tickets to various things, I went through the usual inner monologue, aka The Saboteur’s Aria. If you don’t know this one, it goes like this: This is a terrible time of the year for travel/You need to save your money/So you miss one show, what’s the big deal/It’s not as if you need to see this. 

I answered the Aria with this: I am going. STFU, you. 

And I am so glad I did. 

This exhibit felt like it was speaking to me. It was saying, Just do it the way you want. Stop worrying about whether this is “right” or “wrong” or whether this is the way a “real artist” would do things. 

My five key reflection points: 

  1. Tillmans’ placement of the work is so completely different from just about anything and everything  I’ve seen. He and his team hang the unframed prints from binder clips, or tape them to the walls, clustering them in groups, or spreading them out in breezy arrangements that are, in fact, controlled to the millimeter. The net result is that it feels like a cumulative experience rather than room after room of interesting but singular works. There’s a freedom in this. And an accessibility. Tillmans’ London gallerist says,

    His work is the installation of the work. He is not someone that you could just define by a single image.”

  2.  Tillmans is a polymath. A photographer, of course, but also a musician, DJ, singer, and architect. In the first semester of my MFA, I consciously (and conscientiously) avoided using text. It had to be all visual. I did this because I’ve been a writer all my life and did not want to fall into the trap of explaining my work and committing the crime of “aboutness” (e.g., “This photograph of a dried nigella pod is about the loneliness of aging and our struggle to remain connected…” NO. N.O.) But now I am feeling excited about bringing in text, words, sound, music, dance steps, and doing it the way I want to do it.

  3. A big message: create work that is an open book of my life. Hold nothing back. From a NYT review of a different Tillmans show: “While his previous exhibitions have tended to feel like walk-in magazines, this one feels like an open book of his life during the last few years. Basically, if we walk in knowing nothing about the artist, we learn from looking that he has many friends and special relationships, travels widely, is openly gay and actively political on several fronts.” Without any “aboutness”.

  4. The entire show was hung with Scotch tape and clips. Barely a frame in sight (there were a few, but they seemed quaint rather than prominent). And this brought me to further embrace what I realize I am starting to talk about a lot: I do not want to make precious work. Work so perfect and so precious that it cannot be touched or interacted with in any way. Not belittling that. I get it that we are not meant to put our greasy mitts on Caravaggios. Yup. I’m with the museums on that one. But what excites me is accessibility. And, even more, interactivity. 

  5. And finally, the work can engage in both the playful and the political. We don’t necessarily need to choose. I have a sense of humor; AND, my hair is regularly on fire from the extremes of wokeism and right-wing madness. These two things can, and should, be in the work. In other words, I do not have to choose. The more I make my work an open book of my life, the more both of these things will come forward: humor and calling out shit where shit truly exists. 

I forgot to mention something: I had the entire sixth floor of MoMA to myself for about 15 minutes.

It was incredible. I don’t know why or how this happened. But it means that I experienced the initial WHAM of Tillmans’ show all by myself. It was more than a little extraordinary.