Nothing could have prepared us…

Wolfgang Tilmans' postmodern elegy at the Pompidou

Yesterday I visited photographer Wolfgang Tilmans’ exhibit at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France’s national museum of modern and contemporary art, which has closed for renovation. Tillmans is considered one of the most influential artists of our time, known for dissolving the boundaries between the personal and the political, the monumental and the everyday. Titled Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us, the exhibit brings together nearly forty years of his work in an unusual setting: the Pompidou’s public library, emptied to prepare for a five-year hiatus. In this vacant civic space—once a symbol of open knowledge and democratic culture—Tillmans arranges images, abstractions, and documents into a vast, non-hierarchical environment that feels both retrospective and prophetic, an elegy for the liberal order that shaped his career and a reflection on the uncertainties that now confront us.

I never followed Tilmans closely, even though I used to write regularly on contemporary art. I enjoyed this exhibit, which was the first time I gave serious thought to his work. What occurred to me during my time there was that Tilmans serves a similar social function as the painter Eduard Manet did 150 years ago, as an astute chronicler of modernity, a “painter of modern life.” I felt compelled to take photographs while in the exhibit as another meta-layer of reflection on his omnivorous aesthetic exploration.

Tilmans was born in 1968 in Remscheid, a small industrial town in West Germany. He became known in the late 1980s and early 1990s for raw, intimate photographs of friends, lovers, and club culture, initially publishing in youth and style magazines such as i-D. Largely self-taught—apart from a brief period at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design in England—he built an international reputation for dissolving distinctions between documentary, portraiture, abstraction, and still life. He combines experimental approaches to photography with an insistence on revealing political, social, post-industrial and emotional textures of contemporary life.

In 1863, the poet Charles Baudelaire called for a “painter of modern life,” inviting contemporary artists to seize “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”

Tilman’s constant fugitive flitting across continents and subjects recalls Baudelaire’s figure of the flâneur—“The crowd is his domain, as the air is that of the bird, or the sea that of the fish.” The flâneur drifts through the urban and industrial wastelands, intoxicated by its surfaces, incorporating everything. Warhol provides another example of the urban flaneur archetype, where the camera serves as the ultimate democratizing instrument, annihilating hierarchies of value while ironically making commercial productions out of them.

While Baudelaire wrote The Painter of Modern Life about another artist, it was Manet who best answered this call. In works that initially shocked his Parisian audience, such as Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Manet depicted the everyday—sexual commerce, casual leisure—without allegory or disguise. His paintings mocked mythological and traditional sources to focus on the here and now, revealing his current moment as shot through with the contradictions and anxieties of modernity.

Tillmans is often described in similar terms. He is a chronicler of contemporary life: its fleeting pleasures, its political fault-lines, its intimate vulnerabilities. Like Manet, he insists on the beauty and strangeness of the ordinary, designing exhibits to refute elitism and hierarchy. His work uses a collage or cinematic montage aesthetic that is implicitly surreal or even DaDa-ist. A massive, scrabbly abstraction might hang next to a snapshot of laundry drying on a radiator. A candid portrait of a friend hangs next to an image of a protest march or wilderness preserve. In this way, distinctions between the everyday and the exceptional, the micro and monumental, are obliterated.

To be honest, I think this is why I was never very interested in Tilman’s work in the past — apparently I can only appreciate it now, when the work seems a memorial to the suddenly shuttered epoch of secular post-modernity; a time when we decoded all values while negating all hierarchies of value or aesthetics. Whatever that period was, it doesn’t seem like the culture we built around it could offer enough resistance to Fascist or authoritarian impulses, linked to religious Christian and even occult or esoteric ideals, as today’s Neo-reactionaries draw energy from traditionalists like René Guenon and Julius Evola. I suppose what I have been seeking to suggest since Breaking Open the Head (2002) is the necessity of defining a new sacred dimension, not as a regression into old modes of religion or an embrace of an exotic mysticism, but as a step forward into a different structure of consciousness, requiring new kinds of aesthetic and cultural practice.

I want to draw out the comparison between Tilmans and Manet a bit to help us understand the social function of his work. In The Painting of Modern Life (1984), art historian T. J. Clark explored how Manet’s paintings did not only break academic rules but did so as a technique for capturing the contradictions of capitalism and the social upheavals of Paris under Napoleon III. “Modernity, I shall argue, was a matter of the surface,” Clark wrote. “It meant the everyday, the ephemeral, the half noticed, the seemingly insignificant.” Manet was its chronicler because he insisted on rendering those surfaces directly, without resort to the consolations of tradition or cloaked allegory.

Manet’s Olympia — a depiction of a sex worker — was shocking as an image revealing the conditions of its making: prostitution, money, power, and the commodity form. The picture did not try to hide or soften the bare facts. Clark writes: “Olympia is the nude stripped of its myth; it is the prostitute as the inescapable fact of modern life. The picture insists that sexuality, in the new society, is organized and sold as a commodity.” The work revealed plainly how female sexuality is commodified in capitalist society. It was scandalous because Manet treated all of this as a plain fact of modern life, punctuating this with his model’s piercing, shameless gaze that also humanized her.

Manet’s radicalism was stylistic as well as social. His brushwork was abrupt, his surfaces flat, his figures inserted into space without the comfort of academic illusionism. He forced viewers to see painting as painting — a forerunner to Cezanne, Picasso, and Mondrian in that sense. This was what modernism meant at its inception: not only to confront new social and psychological realities, but to expose the art medium itself, causing a kind of shock effect which, by this point, art audiences have assimilated as second nature.

Tillmans, too, is an artist of surfaces. His early photographs of Berlin nightclubs, friends, and lovers in the 1990s were not anthropological documents but images suffused with closeness, immediacy, and fragility. His pictures captured queer culture as it emerged into visibility after the AIDS crisis, mixing joy with grief. They feel at once casual and intentional: the texture of skin, the pulse of strobe lights at a night club, gently rotting fruit on a table. Like Manet, he insists that art need not seek grandeur to be meaningful. A dangling sock, a broken Xerox machine, or a crowd in motion all carry significance — in a sense, the same significance. Tilmans defines a kind of absent presence, a no-place-less-ness we all feel haunted by all of the time in a culture that reduces everything to sameness (which Guenon aptly named “the reign of quantity”), imparting a ubiquitous ambience of insufficiency

Some of Tilman’s best works are totally abstract—camera-less works made by manipulating light and chemicals on paper—which he hangs almost haphazardly next to his portraits and documentary images. Adrian Searle observed in The Guardian: “Tillmans asks us to make connections of all kinds… There are questions here about time, place, belonging, voyeurism, affection, sex.” Hervé Lancelin remarked on how his method “literally democratizes the way we interact with art,” where the most minor snapshot coexists with expansive abstractions. The refusal of hierarchy mirrors Manet’s refusal to cloak his nudes in mythology while revealing the reality of the canvas and the picture plane, breaking the illusion.

Walter Benjamin followed Baudelaire as a philosopher / poet interpreting the aesthetics of modern capitalism. In Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, Benjamin argued that Baudelaire registered the shocks of industrial modernity in the rhythms of his verse. “Baudelaire portrays the man of the crowd. He becomes aware of himself as someone who is exposed to shocks. He seeks to numb them by getting drunk on hashish, on opium, on wine. The intoxication is not an escape but an attempt to survive modernity.” For Benjamin, allegory itself had migrated from religion to the commodity: “In Baudelaire, allegory breaks free from the theologians and the humanists and attaches itself to the commodity.” The fleeting images of fashion and the city became new emblems of modern existence.

Benjamin also wrote the famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” where he described how reproducible images stripped art of its traditional uniqueness, its ritual presence. Photography was the emblem of this shift. Yet Benjamin did not see this entirely negatively; the loss of aura also opened art to political use, freeing it from cult value. Tillmans inhabits this contradiction. His images, endlessly reproducible, nonetheless insist on a wispy presence when pinned directly to the wall or printed at monumental scale. His exhibitions re-stage the conditions of aura: the photograph becomes unique not in itself but in its arrangement, its context, its relation to others. In this sense, his work responds to Benjamin’s paradox.

Seen this way, Tillmans can be read as both Baudelairean and Benjaminian. Like Baudelaire’s flâneur, he drifts through modern life, seizing its contingencies and granting them poetic weight. He stages the shock of fragments and commodities, arranging them into transitory constellations. His art is about contingency, but also about a mode of attention that might still produce solidarity among what anthropologist Alphonse Lingis called “the community of those who have nothing in common.”

It is this political dimension that seems central at the Pompidou show. Tillmans explained the title: “…everything that’s happening politically, ecologically, economically, and culturally seems like a surprise, but on the other hand it’s far from it. There are a lot of things we could have seen coming.” Today, our liberal institutions appear exhausted, unable to defend themselves against authoritarian resurgence and fascist delusion. Critics caught his tinge of mourning: Louise Darblay described the show as “a kaleidoscopic view of nearly 40 years spent in pursuit of moments of beauty, coexistence and resistance in a neoliberal, technocapitalist world.” Ivar Hagendoorn wrote of nostalgia “as freedoms once taken for granted are now under threat… The empty library amplifies this mood.”

Baudelaire saw the painters of modern life, such as Manet, pursuing fugitive encounters. Tilmans, likewise, identifies the fleeting surface of appearances as his subject. But whereas Manet caught the birth of capitalist modernity, Tilmans appears to be chronicling its exhaustion and dissolution. His Pompidou exhibition is not only a retrospective but an elegy for a liberal optimism that has dissipated. “Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us” is both lament and warning, a recognition that the signs were always there. Tillmans remains a chronicler of modern and postmodern life, but the condition he portrays is already fading.

Where Manet painted under the contradictions of the Second Empire, Tillmans now images the twilight of the liberal, postmodern order. His works of protest, his Brexit campaign posters, his installations of newspaper fragments and abstractions, are not only aesthetic strategies but attempts to sustain meaning and solidarity in an time of disintegration. If Manet’s flatness revealed the commodity at the heart of nineteenth-century leisure, Tillmans’s democratic installations show us the fragility of a civilization that believed itself “the end of history,” immune to collapsing under its own weightlessness.