from ART NEW ENGLAND, Feb/Mar 2003

Wolfgang Tillmans: Still Life
October 25-February 23, 2002
The Busch-Reisinger Museum

Dirty dishes, decaying fruit, damp socks, and the skin on yesterday’s coffee dregs fill this exhibition of still life photographs by one of the trendiest young photographers around. Celebrated for his hip fashion influenced imagery, Tillman’s aesthetic is casual, his compositions seemingly artless, his prints bland, his exhibitions stuffed with taped and tacked salon hung groupings. Curator Benjamin Paul’s exhibition completely breaks with this exhibition format. Instead he chose and sequenced the images himself and, even more surprisingly, the images are framed in tidy white museum frames and hung in a more or less straight line along the gallery. Finally all the images insistently return to one concern with still life imagery. What works about this curatorial vision is that we really are allowed to explore in much more depth Tillman’s canny and carefully constructed engagement with classical painterly influences, capitalism, and sexual politics. Paul’s catalog essay thoughtfully articulates an approach that ever so charmingly resists consumer culture through a sexy offering of its unraveling. Yet I still have to throw my bet in for Tillman’s own installations. His greatest genius lies in the odd, jumbled puzzle stories he creates in his sequences; no one can ever figure out why a pair of jeans thrown over a banister sits next to a fuzzy sky shot out a plane window, but somehow these kind of jarring and unexpected juxtapositions create fragmented stories that speak to a fashionable, delirious, erotic, and slightly drunk spirit, one enviably not hampered by the ordinary vicissitudes of everyday routines.

Jane D. Marsching