A career retrospective becomes a cathedral of the mundane.
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Tillmans intuited that the sublime had shifted, had alighted on us.
The people we see are often Tillmanss friends: artists, musicians, designers, dancers.
But these arent the usual club-kid, gay-bar, grunge-life photos.
The rhapsodic rapport Tillmans has with his subjects gives his work a tenderness that seems almost sacred.
He shot thealbum coverforFrank OceansBlonde,contributes toi-Dmagazine, and makes music.
(His albumfrom last year is great!)
He has been a performer, a filmmaker, an activist, and a DJ.
It is no coincidence that the best photographer of his generation came out of such a varied background.
How to access that vision?
The way Tillmansinstalls his art changes the way audiences see it.
Often unframed and taped directly to walls, his pictures ripple or pucker from humidity.
Its refreshing to see photographs freed from their sepulchral air locks.
They are uncannily alive this way with life spans of their own.
I never thought of a picture as being bodiless, he has said.
The number of pictures in a Tillmans installation will vary.
Sometimes he fills whole rooms floor to ceiling with constellations of images.
We see the show one work at a time but also in a helixing whoosh.
At MoMA, the sizes go from billboard to small, from huge near monochromes to postcard-size pictures.
By displaying his work this way, Tillmans brings the photograph into real space.
Its very sensual, this dance of subject, artist, and viewer.
We do not just stand still and look forward when we look at a Tillmans.
We become the full-body sensing systems that we are.
The secondhowpertains to genre.
Tillmans doesnt just work in different genres; he crawls into them, inhabiting and expanding them.
He turns portraiture into a nearly mystical genre.
Everyone now is so adept at self-presentation in front of a camera that most portraits look similar.
Of course, the world never looks this way.
Its all projection and make-believe.
Tillmanss people are poised on an enticing edge.
He wants subjects confronting existence, caught in a moment in time that wont come back.
Theres no glamour here, no supersonic speed.
The wealth of the passengers disappears.
The fact that the concept was fundamentally flawed makes it very human, he added.
A Concorde crashed shortly after taking off from Charles de Gaulle Airport on July 25, 2000.
Hes great with abstraction.
Or maybe theyre chemical stains on the surface created as he processed the picture.
The granularity and saturation give the picture a handmade quality.
Part vision, part apocalypse, it is staggeringly beautiful.
There are darkroom accidents and cameraless pictures made by exposing paper to light.
His photos varied from high to low resolution and were focused and unfocused.
It shows an unopened clear bottle of water on what may be a hospital tray in a plain room.
We all know that impulse.
Heads and an arm are cropped.
Beyond these threehows,we must ask: Where do all these photos come from?
That feeling of progress may mark the difference between Tillmans and his great precursor Nan Goldin.
Both artists give us friends, family, and lovers.
Both give us pain, suffering, life, and death.
But this is only half of what propels Tillmanss art.
The rest is much darker.
And he made his money producing hate campaigns.
I felt all this and more in one picture at Tillmanss 2015 show at David Zwirner.
In 17 years supply,I saw a place in my own home.
In 2014, my wife was diagnosed with cancer.
She had an operation and radiation.
She had another operation and chemotherapy.
I know the life that follows the shock of a new ice age setting in.
I know diagnosis and the 10,000 decisions that follow.
I know the world of Tillmanss image is not hell, mourning, terror, or loss.
The picture has become neolithic stone, a talisman with the aura of the everyday.
Tillmans has never stopped working, and neither have we.
We have a closet in our apartment that is a towering, disheveled Babel of drugs she is using.
That is what I saw in17 years supply.
Our email exchanges unstitched me and made me see what I had missed.
Cancer is different from AIDS.
Cancer comes with support, acceptance, and an enormous medical apparatus to address it.
People with HIV were barred entry to the U.S. for decades.
Tillmanss response to all this has been to look deeply, steadily, and without fear.
To me, he wrote, its a hope, an encouragement, and a demand.
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