Part II: Wolfgang Tillmans at the Hirshhorn

Yesterday I wrote about how Wolfgang Tillmans' much-ballyhooed installations are a necessary crutch, a way of hiding dull, well-worn images behind a smart formal invention. A perfect example is in the last gallery of the Tillmans survey at the Hirshhorn.

Here, at the end of the show, Tillmans has put three images on three different walls, creating a triangular installation. (As usual, he has surrounded it with plenty of other stuff, some of it forgettable, some of it not, including two gripping portraits that deserve better.)

The first picture I saw was the image above, Gemini V. Tillmans shot it in DC, at the National Air and Space Museum. The image that most directly corresponds to it is Himmelbrau, and Sportflecken completes the trio.

Much of Tillmans' work focuses on gay life and gay subcultures. (Tillmans is also politically and socially active on gay equality issues in Europe.) Too often Tillmans includes tired, Picasso-like puns about sex in his work, and this installation is a particuilar eye-roller. Tillmans has shot the Gemini V capsule from behind, with the round, puckered heat shield facing the camera. The rest of the capsule, barely visible at the top of the photograph, emerges as an erect shaft. Tillmans has turned his childhood fascination with the space age into an homage to gay sex. (Revealingly: Tillmans originally mistitled this piece Apollo 11 re-entry capsule. Apollo 11 flew in mid-1969, just days after the Stonewall riots in New York became one of the two motivating events of the gay equality movement.)

Across the gallery, Himmelblau also engages in a cubist word game. Just like Gemini V, it is simultaneously a photograph of a shaft and an orifice. And just in case you thought all these shafts were ready to go but don't lift off, Sportflecken appears to be a semen-stained shirt.

Tillmans returns to these kinds of puns over and over again. In the show's fourth major gallery, another three-photograph installation refers to sexual practice. From left to right: A photograph shows golden light entering a building (presumably a church) through a window. The golden light seems to dance inside the space. Next is a photograph of a urinal trough, complete with urinal cakes and cigarette butts. And on the far right, the third and largest photograph shows off a huge stack of gold bars.

The arrangement seems to be a reference to the myth of Danae, given a slightly different sexual twist. In the myth, Danae's kingly father imprisons her in an effort to prevent her from fulfilling a prophesy by having a son who will overthrow him. The ever-lusty Zeus finds Danae anyway, is awed by her beauty, and naturally wishes to make love to her. Because Danae is imprisoned, the only way he can appear before her is through the bars of her prison cell. Zeus being Zeus, he turns himself into a shower of gold and impregnates her.

In Tillmans' version, the photograph on the left introduces the Danae myth and we're left to put together the rest of the kinky story with the help of the urinal trough and the gold. (And it's hardly the first time Tillmans has referenced this particular bit of sexplay into his work.)

Tillmans doesn't just mine cubist sex puns for content. A gallery of photographs of soldiers and photocopies of news photographs/stories about soldiers is predictably filled with Twombly-esque puns referring to the phallus as the root of war. (Among Tillmans' stand-ins for phalluses are the Washington Monument, shot from below and looking up, and a Roman helmet shaped like the head of a penis.) Just in case anyone misses Tillmans' point, he falls back on one of his favorite tropes in this gallery (and plenty of others in the show): Photographs of empty, discarded clothing, apparently intended to remind us that someone who isn't wearing clothes must be naked, there is a big photograph of two young men kissing, and with all these phallus references around... well, you figure it out. Again the content of Tillmans' images, and the connection between male aggression, sex, and war is old material gussied up by Tillmans' installations.

Next (on Monday): Tillmans at his best.