Transgressive Subjectivity

Relyea, Lane. “Photography’s Everyday Life and the Ends of Abstraction”. Wolfgang Tillmans. New Haven: Yale University. 2006. Ed. Amy Texchner and Kamilah Foreman.

Something that attracts me to Wolfgang Tillmans’s practice is the predominance of its scattershot (Michael Wilson http://tillmans.co.uk/images/stories/pdf/2010_Artforum.pdf) rationality. In Lane Realyea’s essay Photography’s Everyday Life and the Ends of Abstraction a particular aspect of this, which involves a deliberate relinquishing of authorship by the artist is discussed. Comparing Tillmans to Morris Louis in this approach to materials, Relyea asserts that

“There is a very non-elitist political ideal here, barely glimpsed, that a batch of supplies already possess their own vast potentials for creativity and beauty; and that genius, rather than a divine gift innate to those lucky enough to emerge from the womb as artists, instead wells up in this – in the historical, material, public gathering place of an art medium, a set of materials and techniques and their varied past precedents hypothetically available to all.” (Relyea, Lane. “Photography’s Everyday Life and the Ends of Abstraction”. Wolfgang Tillmans. New Haven: Yale University. 2006. Ed. Amy Teschner and Kamilah Foreman. P 98).

I think what emerges within this objective regard for materials, using found objects, and almost considering one’s own work and processes as such, is an open response to the world as one that is more a dynamic part of it than an elevated individual.

I found the way Paul Elliman’s text complimented Kate Newby’s current Hopkinson Cundy exhibition to be transgressive in a way that similarly opens up viewer’s relationships to objects with less importance placed on the artists’ determination. Upon first reading

“Leave the gallery at any time but don't miss the works on the way out and elsewhere. MetService couldn't promise there wouldn't be rain this month so puddle sites will be refreshed every few days or so, stones have been placed and left to glaciate along the curb side. Curtains, often hung in windows above ground floor and throughout the city, will be opened at dawn and drawn again each evening, with a few translucents screening sunrise and sunset, again depending on the weather.” (http://www.hopkinsoncundy.com/exhibitions/Ill-follow-you-down-the-road/press-release/)

in the context of a press release, it seemed a viable expectation to have, knowing Newby’s practice, that modified stones might be exhibited outside the gallery interior. Something involving puddles being topped up seemed to tie in with a certain image of the rising and falling of the tide of the Aare she threw painted rocks into in Berlin. I assumed that the curtains were things around the city that she may have arranged with neighbours of the gallery to facilitate. It was only when actually physically going to the exhibition that I had the thought to search out the neighbouring curtains, that it occurred to me that since there are already curtains around the city that would perform exactly the activity promised in the text, that the pointing out of those things (like an immaterial photograph) was what the work undertook. (I might have picked this up from the way the poetry extended to nightfall, but I like that I didn’t and the way it dawned in a moment that stymied a previous stream of expectation.) Here I recognise that there are playful ways in which the creative gesture can respond to the world in ways that situate the subject in a perhaps more apprehensive position.