- Wolfgang Tillmans, 2017 (catalogue, 2 texts)

Wolfgang Tillmanns 2017 summary/notes (under construction)

Wolfgang Tillmans is one of my favorite artists. In several ways he has influenced my practice. In the catalogue of the Tate Modern exhibit 2017, Marc Godfrey describes the different aspects of Tillmans work. For example the way Tillmans deals with materiality in his work, the way he shows people and how Tillman’s language shows that he thinks through analogies.

Analogies:
For Tillmans one thing is like another and the photograph is like a body.

He made an exhibition and accompanying book "If one thing matters, everything mattters", this title sums up the way Tillmans works and thinks. There is no hierarchy in his work.

“An analogy is a relationship of greater or lesser similarity between two more ontologically equal terms – a corresponding with, rather than a corresponding to. Everything relates to everything else in this way, because analogy is the structure of Being… Because we are constantly refusing to acknowledge the resemblances that connect us to certain people or groups of people, we are almost aways physically estranged from the totality to which we belong. This refusal has disastrous consequences for them and for us.” (Kaja Silverman, 'Primal Sibling: George Baker in conversation with Kaja Silverman’, Artforum, february 2010. p.179.)

Kaja Silverman has recently argued that creating analogies, rather than understanding the world through identity or antithesis, can be the beginning for a progressive ethics and politics. “An analogy is a relationship of greater or lesser similarity between two more ontologically equal terms – a corresponding with, rather than a corresponding to. Everything relates to everything else in this way, because analogy is the structure of Being… Because we are constantly refusing to acknowledge the resemblances that connect us to certain people or groups of people, we are almost aways physically estranged from the totality to which we belong. This refusal has disastrous consequences for them and for us.”(Kaja Silverman, 'Primal Sibling: George Baker in conversation with Kaja Silverman’, Artforum, february 2010. p.179.)
Elsewhere she clarifies that 'An analogy is a very different thing from a metaphor. A metaphor entails the substitution of one thing for another. This is a profoundly undemocratic relationship, because the former is a temporary stand-in for the latter and it has only a provisional reality. In an analogy, on the other hand, both terms are on an equal footing, ontologically and semiotically.” 
(Kaja Silverman, Flesh of my Flesh, Stanford 2009, p. 173).
(Endnotes of Wolfgang Tillmans 2017, Mark Godfrey, page 306).