ESSAY BY ROSIE KANE

5.  Whilst every photograph involves a certain degree of abstraction from the three- dimensional fabric of the world, some images are clearly more abstract than others, and in different ways. Compare the use of abstraction by two photographers. Be sure to discuss the layers of meaning produced by the work as well as its formal properties.

The politics of emptiness: abstract photography, as abstract art, is independent of visual references and free from political noise.  An abstract image is a creation of the artist’s impression of the truth upon which the viewer can contemplate their own references; for its critics, it creates an emptiness and anxiety over a fear of the unknown and absence of political doctrine.

Just as an abstract painter takes the core elements of an image and redefines it as a collection of its essential shapes, so the abstract photographer eliminates many of the elements, which he or she believes to be external to the overall statement that they wish to make, and thus the politics of emptiness.  This reduction of effects and sensations delivers a freedom and changes the dynamics of the experience from reality to expression. This paper considers how two photographers found freedom through abstract photography, letting the ‘chemicals work to freeze that moment through their action’. 

Siskind, an American documentary photographer, became politically disengaged during World War II, and abandoned the idea that a photograph is a reflection of the world.  Wolfgang Tillmans’ abhorrence of American politics is reflected in his work for his first solo exhibition in America ‘Freedom from the Known’ at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York, in which he said he was ‘extremely removed from literal political content… in a country whose politics fill me with a great deal of fear and anger’.  Tillmans’ goes on to discuss how working with the abstract provides a deeper but more indirect commentary on the politics he finds frustrating:

“There is a glaring dichotomy of working with pure abstraction, which is extremely removed from literal political content, and the personal sense of urgency that dominates much of my waking hours. Yet I feel the purely abstract works and non-direct political content photographs are my freedom of expression, my resistance to feeling completely dominated by the fall-out of a world bent on reviving ideologies.” Wolfgang Tillmans

Wolfgang Tillmans, born in 1968, is a German fine-art photographer. In 2000, Tillmans was the first photographer - and also the first non-English person - to be awarded the Tate Annual Turner Prize. His work came to international prominence during the 1990s when he moved to the London; he has since divided his time between London and Berlin. His diverse body of work is characterized by observation of his surroundings and an on-going investigation of the photographic medium’s foundations.

Wolfgang Tillmans’ most basic leitmotif is to treat all pictures, including abstract ones, not as isolated phenomena but as always interrelated.  Tillmans is very much a generalist, with an encyclopedic array of subject matter, which can be seen in his works. Just looking at his sprawling installations [See: Image 1 - Museo del Banco de la Republica, Bogota, Columbia, Oct - Jan 2013] we are able to see this broad display of subject matter from still life, portraiture, landscape and beyond. But photography is in many ways only the beginning of Tillmans’ art. Indeed, over the last decade he has made an important body of abstract works that are ‘not made with camera’ (the artist’s phrase), yet are still directly related to the process of photography. In both a practical and philosophical sense, therefore, Tillmans engages and works with the photographic image on every conceivable level: as a consumer and reader of images, an editor of images, producer of images, as their printer, replicator, publisher, curator, installer, and also as their mechanic, anatomist, politician, sculptor, technician and connoisseur. Bracewell M, (2010). 'Everywhere, all the time and at once: the art of Wolfgang Tillmans' (In: Serpentine Gallery (ed), Wolfgang Tillmans. 1st ed. London: Koenig Books. pp.9-15). He is thus the creator and director of an extensive lexicon of images, examining every characteristic of their form, in both terms of medium and object. So to the question of what might be the meaning of abstraction for Tillman’s larger enterprise? What might Tillmans’ work mean for abstract art, one possible answer is: abstraction aids Tillman’s quest for generality, for a broadness of scope and vision.

We see this broad scope and vision in 2006 when Tillmans undertook his first exhibition for an American museum – MOMA. The exhibition was titled ‘Freedom from the Known’ and was unlike any he had done before as it focused primarily on the artist’s purely abstract photographs. It explored the presence abstraction has had within his figurative and representational work. Most of these works are camera-less pictures made by the direct manipulation of light on paper; to achieve them Tillmans manipulated huge sheets of chromogenic C print paper with light in the darkroom, rather than on a negative. Tillmans provides us with a selection of earlier photographs providing a context and passage-way from figurative to representation imagery to abstraction. (2006). Wolfgang Tillmans: Freedom from the Known. [ONLINE] Available at: http://momaps1.org/exhibitions/view/109. [Last Accessed 20.05.13]. One huge print entitled “It’s Only Love Give it Away” features crisp yet fluid lines suggestive of feathers swaying above soft purple hues or eyelashes, the picture conveys romance to me.

Tillmans large-scale abstractions, up to ten feet high, were presented in frames – a departure for an artist who pioneered a style of installation based on pinning and taping pictures directly to the wall. The elusive, transitory images in the abstraction, when framed can be seen as objects in space, displaying both buoyancy and weight. For Tillmans, photography has as many sculptural possibilities as it does representational, aesthetic or political. By using paperclips to hang them it highlights their bodily materiality and weight – thus appearing as visual events for the eyes to consume and as sculptural objects with a powerful physical appearance.

To me, one of the best things about Tillmans’ abstract pictures is that they are nearly impossible to talk about by themselves. In exhibitions they appear mingled with other photos in the branching sequences of his installations supported by the back and forth dialogue of perspectives. The abstractions help to generalize and broaden Tillmans overall artistic concerns of the capacity of his medium. Emphasized in the abstraction is the plasticity all of the works share, a compatibility that Tillmans brings out when reusing images in different formats and in shuffled situations. Is Tillmans asking us to step back, to find a new perspective on situations, or perhaps to find a freedom when tapping into the known and the unknown? I think Tillmans believes in the potentiality of the photographic image being intimately related between a level of understanding and awareness to the reality of being alive.

Many have argued that the defining preoccupation of modern art is mediating between the specific and the general. Tillmans has often been said to embody Charles Baudlaire’s ideal ‘painter of modern life’. ‘Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent,’ is how Baudelaire wrote out the ‘equation,’ ‘it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.’ Baudelaire C, (1964). The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. 1st ed. London: Phaidon Press. Tillmans has been recognised for his social documenting on gritty reality and providing essential facts, yet, will readily change his perspective on the perimeters for representational scenes by zooming in or out, locking subjects either too close or too far. Specifics begin dissolving into abstract formal arrangements.

The art of Tillmans is multi-allusive, so, it is of no coincidence that Tillman’s earliest works were made on a photocopier. Tillmans’ growing desire to engage with the photographic on every level is no different form the desire expressed by Andy Warhol only a few years earlier, when he said he wanted to a machine? Similarly to Tillmans, Warhol was a generalist who moved between the realms of art, commerce and subculture. Instead of photocopying, Warhol worked with screen-printing a developed a new use for photography. In many ways Warhol could be thought to represent Tillmans’ doppelganger, a dark counter-figure to the Baudelairian flaneur. Yet, according to Walter Benjamin’s famous description, isn’t capable of experiencing modernity on the same level as Tillmans’, he can only achieve modernitys standardised banalities – they don’t contain an unpredictable flux.

Looking back at the work of Aaron Siskind it is difficult to find a photographer who shifted the conceptual foundations of the medium of photography more than him.  Siskind, born in 1903, was an American documentary photographer who became politically disengaged during World War II, abandoning the idea that a photograph is a reflection of the world. Instead, he used the medium as modern artists used paint, as a malleable process that could be used to create entirely new things.

With a single glance at Siskind's photographs, it is easy to see his relationship with Abstract Expressionism. In his autobiography he describes when he received a camera as a wedding gift, and in a similar light to Tillmans, he quickly realized the artistic potential this offered. Siskind was close to several abstract painters and adopted a similar approach to symbol and form by isolating and thus ‘abstracting’ elements of visual reality. Energetic, gestural marks move across many of his images   [Image 3], just like the canvases of Franz Kline. But the similarities run deeper. Unlike any photographers before him, Siskind acknowledged the simple idea that the picture plane, like a canvas, is a flat rectangle. Accordingly, he sought out flat surfaces that he could photograph purely for the poetic implications of their details, using the elements of each image as a painter would use shapes. (Tranberg D (2009). Aaron Siskind: Abstract Expressionist Photographer. [ONLINE] Available at: http://voices.yahoo.com/aaron-siskind-abstract-expressionist-photographer-3893610.html. [Last Accessed 20.05.13].)        

In 1960, Siskind took part in an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York titled The Sense of Abstraction in Contemporary Photography, which staged the coming out party for abstract photography. The show contained work by a large number of artists, including the most prominent Americans, from Alfred Steiglitz to Ralph Eugene Meatyard fashioning images of subjects that could not be readily identified. Barbara Morgan described it as a photography that sought ‘common denominators’. She herself had moved towards an abstract photographic vocabulary, but meant that photography was a means of visual analogy, which doesn’t have to act a reality or instant, binding many phenomena together and establishing a relationship between the inner world of emotion and the outer world of materiality. (Rexer L, (2009). 'Stairways to Heaven'. In: e.g. Tolkien, J.R.R. (ed), The Edge of Vision: the rise of abstraction in photography. 1st ed. New York : Aperture. pp.99.)

By the time of The Sense of Abstraction two generations of American photographers put in place an ‘absolute tenet of faith’ that the meaning of the photograph was to be located in the photographer’s consciousness. Just before, during and after World War II, the United States took in refugees who transformed the culture of the country – an investigative spirit arrived amongst a number of photographers, whom sought to advocate innovation on every level: formal, technical and material – the effect being a host of the most experimental American artists including Aaron Siskind. His career is emblematic of this deeply American approach to image making, as well as its complex roots.

As a student of the Moholy-Nagy at the Institute of Design, Siskind held a membership in the Photo League, a group of left-leaning photo documentarists. Soon, the work became irrelevant to the group. In the words of the artist, “We came to see that the literal representation of a fact (or idea) can signify less than the fact of idea itself…, that a picture or a series of pictures must be informed which such things as order, rhythm, emphasis, etc, qualities which result from the perception and feeling of the photographer, and are not necessarily the property of subject.”

Siskind is often compared to Harry Callahan, also at the Institute of Design. Their differences are apparent as they spring from different sensibilities. Callahan, more a formalist led by the process of photography compares to the art-world of sophistication present in Siskind’s work. But, having worked so closely to one another, they both understood that one way to subvert the camera’s literalism – to intensify the image, was to press the formal composition for the image.

In some of his photographs, there is almost a literal analogy to painting; marks that appear to have been made with a paintbrush dominate, creating bold strokes across a surface. In others, Siskind obscured the context of recognizable forms (a weathered sheet of plywood, for instance) by focusing on the interaction of shapes, textures, and tones, and essentially ignoring the environment that surrounded them. In doing so, Siskind acted as a sort of found-object sculptor, harvesting from the world objects and surfaces that he reconfigured according to his own ideas. (Tranberg D (2009). Aaron Siskind: Abstract Expressionist Photographer. [ONLINE] Available at: http://voices.yahoo.com/aaron-siskind-abstract-expressionist-photographer-3893610.html. [Last Accessed 20.05.13].)           

In summary, perhaps the sense of the purpose of abstraction and the removal of all the unnecessary layers to reveal the skeleton behind the image is summed up by Siskind who stated:

"When I make a photograph I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order-unlike the world of events and actions whose permanent condition is change and disorder''.

In abstraction, there is a counterpoint to today’s surplus of visual information.  It is a metaphorical paradigm for saying nothing but everything at the same time; it is not simple or an indulgence but a response to the world today.  For example, when Tillmans created his photographic images without the use of the actual camera, he was removing another manmade barrier.  Siskind’s approach was to photograph purely for the poetic implications of the details of the flat surfaces; he sought out using the elements of each image as a painter would use shapes.  Both artists were not seeking a literal representation of the image they saw but seeking the fundamental truth upon which others could imprint their own emotions.  As to whether this is elitist, the resultant images cut out those who prefer to have their experiences and emotions fed to them; but for those who have the freedom to explore their emotions, there is a wealth of excitement and a voyage of discovery in every abstract image created. 

There is, however, a journey that we embark on when looking at these pieces, a natural progression where Siskind uses the camera to capture elements of an image as a painter would shapes – just as the artists of the 1960s captured the immediacy of expression of an image by ‘one-take’ painting using buckets instead of brushes and employing a strict rule that no painting could be reworked.  Tillmans’ ink jet prints are an evolution from these 1960s paintings.  He used photocopiers to enlarge elements – size and quality – to create images with even photo sensitivity.  As such, Tillmans’ images create an impression of something caught in a camera flash – the immediate impression of the image it captured.

It is particularly interesting that both Tillmans and Siskind wanted their images to be free from political doctrine.  Under the Nazi regime in Germany, virtually all modern art was described as Degenerate art and was banned as was music that was not tonal.  The Nazis mounted an exhibition in Munich in 1937 called Degenerate Art which consisted of modernist artworks.  These were hung chaotically and accompanied by text labels which derided the art.  Perhaps this is reflected in the way in which Tillmans chose to display his art?  What is certain is that Tillmans and Siskind are perfect exponents of the fact that the essence of abstraction is freedom and all the rest is noise.