Wolfgang Tillmans at the Hirshhorn

Think of Wolfgang Tillmans as a poet whose vocabulary is made up of the photographs that he's taken over the last 20 years. And instead of composing his poems in orderly stanzas, he follows e.e. cummings' m.o.: send out the vocabulary in far-flung, apparently ungainly, but ultimately logical groupings.

A survey of Tillmans' work, organized by the UCLA Hammer Museum (curator Russell Ferguson) and the MCA Chicago (curator Dominic Molon), has touched down at the Hirshhorn. The exhibit shows off Tillmans' Cummings-like formal innovation to best advantage; His photography-based installations have never looked better than they look in the Hirshhorn's concrete donut. But beneath all the razzle-dazzle, many of Tillmans' images -- that is the actual photographs that make up his installations -- reveal him to be a recycler of well-worn art historical standards. He takes puns from Picasso, metaphor from Johns, and the frank sexuality of youth from Nan Goldin. One of Tillmans' installations, Memorials for the Victims of Organized Religions, is a photographic updating of Allan McCollum's Surrogates series.

No matter, the inventive installations are apparently enough to make Tillmans the contemporary art world darling-of-the-moment. The Chelsea Academy loves seeing familiar media used in new ways, and is often willing to overlook so-so content or coherence (see Barney, Matthew). So it is with Tillmans..

And there's no question: Tillmans' approach to installing photography is new and interesting. Call it 'post-curatorial.' What the canvas was to cubists, the white cube (or here: the curved donut) is to Tillmans. Cubist painters took people or objects and consolidated many different points of view on one canvas. Instead of an object, Tillmans takes a concept, then photographs many different takes on it. The complete 'image' only comes together as the viewer walks around the gallery, putting the threads of the ideas together.

But for Tillmans (and Barney) formal innovation is also a bit of a crutch because his installations are the one thing he does that builds on art history rather than mimics it. And, ironically, they're the least interesting presentations in the show: Tillmans' portraits are gripping and his photographed abstractions of photographs are drippingly beautiful, the highlight of the Hirshhorn installation.

Next: Examining several installations. Installation shots courtesy of the Hirshhorn. paper drop (star) courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.