Relearning.

WOLFGANG TILLMANS

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART CHICAGO

CHICAGO

MAY 20-AUGUST 15, 2006

CATHERINE OPIE: CHICAGO (AMERICAN CITIES)

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART CHICAGO

CHICAGO

MAY 20-OCTOBER 15, 2006

The risk associated with photographing the banal and quotidian is that the resulting images may be so ordinary they reveal no insight at all. Without reflection the banal is always vaguely evil, so we feel helpless and trapped, especially if the message is that we are entrenched in the banal. Messages that the banal is now fashionable, or that the pictorial conventions of photography are exhausted, are no less enervating. Wolfgang Tillmans tackles the problems of selection from everyday life head on. Catherine Opie, whose small but powerful exhibition ran concurrently with Tillmans's sprawling installations last summer at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, is not afraid of the vernacular in architecture, but she photographs urban spaces with specific identities we may overlook as we pass through.

While much of Tillmans's style has the decentered compositions and anonymous lack of affect that characterize a lot of contemporary photography, the overriding focus of this exhibit is the selection and display of photographs. His subjects and themes--youth culture, portraits, landscapes, abstractions--are important. However, Tillmans goes farther than other photographers. He begins with the everyday act of taking or collecting images, but it is his complex installation that raises ontological and taxonomic questions: What is the nature of the photographic process and of photographic images? How do we classify and organize the knowledge produced through the process of selecting, taking, and arranging images in the new millennium? How can we redefine picture-making aesthetics in light of a complete rearrangement of our contemplation and consumption of images?

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Tillmans arranges photographs of every size, from snapshot size to 8 x 10 inch prints (including every size and format in between), stretched with clips over the walls of several galleries. The first time I walked through his recent exhibit in Chicago my attention was pulled in every direction--a liberating feeling--by the fluid and logical arrangement of the multi-room exhibit. The groupings of simply framed or unframed works is deliberate and graceful. Some rooms have obvious topics, others seem less clear, but likewise composed. Instead of walking soberly from one photograph to another, the viewer looks up, down, across, and all over, as if suddenly awakened to looking. Tillmans's points of view and subjects are likewise multiple, intensifying this liberatory effect. Each photograph appears to be chosen according to the relationships it might have with other pieces around it. It is normal to make such connections, but generally photographs tend to be grouped according to themes and variations, or subject-based series. Tillmans favors the kind of shock between images that Sergei Eisenstein wrote about in connection with montage, but of course, film is linear, and Tillmans's installations are spatial. Each image relates not only to the image on either side, but above, below, and on the diagonal, not to mention its function as part of the scheme of the wall and of the room. The resulting delirium is sensual and philosophical. When the constraints of display and the conventions governing the placement and distribution of images are lifted and modified, looking at photographs in a museum becomes something new.

Tillmans's questions even rise to the political: in the center of his exhibit of more than ten rooms of photographs is an installation consisting of a maze of door tables strewn with found images, titled the "Truth Study Center" (2005). Tillmans's reflexive questions are clear: How do we sort images? How do we arrange them? What are the parameters of chance? What is prohibited and what is the status of abstraction? This welter of questions eases the viewer into philosophical and rhetorical territory. Tillmans never abandons the erotic, the sensual (as in his sublime landscapes or abstractions that come like sorbet to clear the mind's palate of too much information), the technical, or the visual. On one of the tables in the "Truth Study Center" there is a photocopy that contains the found text "what is wrong with redistribution." One cannot help but expand the question, apt for his photographic installations, and the distribution of images, but also for wealth, as we live in an economy fueled by images carefully coded and distributed by class.

Catherine Opie's photographs, in direct contrast to those of Tillmans, demonstrate the durability and strength of the old model: perfectly selected, technically rigorous, and compositionally balanced black-and-white photographs in a row along the wall. Here the myriad grays of night and silver add up to a coherent subject and the trained eye will place this work in a decorum of picture-making that stretches back to the balanced compositions, pictorial death, and unitary, but richly connotative subjects of the Renaissance. Photography begins with the industrial revolution in the urban environment, and this work--part of a project on American cities including Los Angeles and Minneapolis--fits perfectly into the documentary tradition of cityscapes inaugurated by novelist Emile Zola and photographer Eugene Atget. Opie has said that she is interested in the way Chicago is lighted, (1) and her night vision is so strong and graceful that it revivifies the form and the formulas.

Unlike Tillmans, who plays with print size, Opie sets many constraints for herself: each photograph has the same dimensions (16 x 41 inches), she uses a specially constructed camera, and she shoots only at night. Fourteen black-and-white photographs circle the gallery and at the end are four color, vertical-format photographs of Lake Michigan, one for each season. They are simple horizon shots of water and sky, always beautiful, restful, and welcoming. The genius here is how Opie, a visitor to Chicago, captures the configuration of the artifact city whose densely populated and built environment is poised against the open ever-changing lake. She concentrates on the city's muscular infrastructure of bridges, its horizontality, and the regularity punctuated by the odd juxtaposition of a church, a housing project, or a spiraling garage. Favoring stable compositions with open, often empty, foregrounds, such as a classic view of the skyline, each image is an only slightly varied interpretation of Chicago's unyielding grid. Photographs of lower Wacker Drive, light from the buildings spilling into the river, or the ineluctable perspective of a night view down Jackson Street display all the precision and craft we connect with modernism, photography, and Chicago itself.

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Opie is known for her photographs of subcultures: large-format photographs of young people whose identities are forged by their connection to communities. Many of Opie's city photographs have open, empty foregrounds that emphasize her decision to take photographs at night when the people who inhabit the city are absent. The formality of her compositions evoke distance; the geometry of the architecture seems obdurate. Streets, doorways, windows, and other open spaces foreground a sense of absence compounded by our associations (a mainstay of American film noir) with the loneliness of wandering in the night. At the same time, cities are human artifacts, and have been consistently personified. City lights have always held the promise of human activity. British cultural critic Raymond Williams caught the connection between city lights and the optimism in the potential that cities embody:

The lights of the city. I go out in the dark, before bed, and look at

the glow in the sky ... the pulse of recognition is unmistakable, and

I know I have felt it again and again: the great buildings of

civilization. I find I do not say there is your city, your great

bourgeois monument, your towering structure of this still precarious

civilization or I do not say only that; I say also, this is what

(sic) have built ... and is not everything then possible? (2)

Opie identifies the same "pulse" in the body of the city and makes photographs that begin with architecture and end when the viewer inhabits them.

Although shown concurrently, Opie and Tillmans are the inverse of one another. Tillmans moves with youth and exuberance into the future by completely rearranging the experience of encountering photography in the museum and gallery setting. His installations feed off the cataclysms of information and technological change that are the condition of imagemaking in these times, completely reformulating subjectivity to reflect a new world. Opie's work looks back through Chicago whose built environment is like a model of the twentieth century itself, and beyond it to the pictorial and technical traditions from which photography arose, revitalizing humanistic formulas to reveal equally complex reflections of the human condition, embodied in its creations in the postmodern period. Where Tillmans is broad and almost dizzyingly inclusive, his depth comes from his superficiality and breadth; Opie narrows and restricts to expand.

NOTES (1.) Catherine Opie, gallery talk, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois, May 20, 2006.

(2.) Raymond Williams, The County and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 5-6.

JANINA A. CIEZADLO is a writer, artist, and educator in Chicago.