Wolfgang Tillmans | Concord

Wolfgang Tillmans

Concord

Köln, Germany: Walther König, 1997

128 pp., 6.3 x 0.4 x 9.4", softcover

Edition size unknown

The first edition is often listed for hundreds of dollars, but Tillmans' Concord is still in print (it's fifth printing) and can be purchased here for $25. 

According to the photographer “for the chosen few, flying Concorde is apparently a glamorous but cramped and slightly boring routine while to watch it in air, landing or taking off is a strange and free spectacle, a super modern anachronism and an image of the desire to overcome time and distance through technology.” Other than this inner-front flap description, there is no text in Concord. It consists of 62 color photographs of the Concorde airplane―taking off, landing or in flight. 

"When I embarked on making these pictures, I didn't ask BA or Heathrow airport for special access because it was important to me that I maintain a democratic perspective about this super exclusive airliner. I was more interested in how it functioned for thousands of people, who were surprised by its presence in the sky (and its roar) every day, who could project their personal ideas and dreams of a better future, of technology overcoming time and space on to it.

Knowing its timetable, I waited for Concorde at different spots under its London flight path and around Heathrow. As the plane was my focus, this strategy created a randomness in choice of location and the cityscapes I caught on the pictures. I got off wherever I guessed a public transport route might cross the flight path. Even though it is a work mainly about the sky and the super-future plane in it, Concorde became also a land- and cityscape project. One element, the plane, constitutes a historical constant in all pictures, while on the ground fragments of different times creep into the frame: a pebble-dashed house from the 50s or 60s, a post-modern 80s housing development, the British motorway signage, a Victorian brick railway bridge, a 90s Audi car. Of course, the 60s futuristic design always wins out. Also, pure landscapes emerged: the camera pressed against the perimeter fence of Heathrow only saw grassland with a distant bird lifting off.

I experienced great personal happiness when I worked on these photographs, and I was subtly aware that what I had with my late partner, the painter Jochen Klein, was a great "concord" – "an agreement of feelings", "a harmony in music" as Wikipedia defines the word. The plane was a co-development and production of two European countries, France and the UK. It's curious that today there is talk of less agreement in Europe, even of burying the idea completely. The beauty of Concorde, though flawed by its disastrous environmental record, is a reminder of what is possible, when two come together to make something bigger than what each alone could achieve.

I released Concorde in 1997 almost simultaneously as a wall-based grid of modest-sized prints in an edition of 10, as well as a book, which is currently in its sold-out fourth print run. The bookwork plays with sequencing interrupted and reversed time; the wall-based version of the work is an important transitional moment between abstraction and figuration in my practice. From 1998 I began to display non-figurative photographs, showing gradations of colour, as well as shapes that are somewhat reminiscent of reality, but which are purely created by light in the darkroom, without the use of a camera. I felt this was a natural development in my work, but instead it was initially seen as a rupture.

Landscape paintings and photographs, which involve the sky, and to some extent the sea, are always close to abstraction. They are a framing of the unframable, of an infinite expanse, infinite until it hits the horizon. When depicted without horizon, a cloudless sky or an evenly clouded sky is an abstraction of itself, a colourfield on canvas or paper, which the eye reads as "sky". It is also realistic and concrete, because that is what the sky looks like sometimes – pure solid colour or a gradation of colours. We assume it is the sky we are looking at, but it is actually only colour on paper. It is an abstraction grounded in the real world."

- Wolfgang Tillmans

Wolfgang Tillmans | The W.C. #45: Sleaford Mods

Wolfgang Tillmans

The W.C. #45: Sleaford Mods

New York City, USA: White Columns, 2014

28 pp., 27.9 × 21.6 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 150 numbered copies

The Sleaford Mods are a post-punk duo from Nottingham, consisting of vocalist Jason Williamson and musician Andrew Fearn. They have described their sound as "electronic munt minimalist punk-hop rants for the working class." 

I saw them perform during the Toronto stop on the English Tapas tour. Williamson commanded the stage with a strut that veered into prance (and almost peacocking), while never seeming like an affectation. Fearn - rather than twiddling knobs in a way that falsely suggests a wrong move would topple the show - simply pressed play on his laptop and spent the rest of the song drinking beer, nodding his head to the track. 

The band's lyrics take a passionate, raw, no-holds-barred look at austerity-era Britain.

“B.H.S.”, for example, takes its title from the defunct department chain British Home Stores. When they shuttered their doors in 2016, 11,000 employees lost their jobs, and 22,000 former employees were without their retirement funds. Billionaire retail tycoon Sir Philip Green had absconded with £400 million in dividends and was seen sailing the Mediterranean on a newly-purchased super-yacht (his third) as the last stores closed.

"T.C.R." uses the name of a children's toy race game as a metaphor for the mindless endless loop many find their lives stuck in: 

The trappings of luxury can't save you from the nail-biting boredom of repetitive brain injury

The injury of your useless mind, stuck to the track

Clinging onto years of that's not yours that's mine, give me it

Total Control Racing, TCR

Going round and round, under the bridges

Slowing down, it's all about technique

Hand shandy chic, under five seconds flat

The tragedy of the male-less fucking man

Yesterday, the Sleaford Mods released their 12th LP, UK Grim. In a four-star review, the NME states "their dumpster fire melodrama remains vital". 

The W.C. is billed as White Columns' "in-house 'zine, which functions as codas to our exhibitions and public programs." Previous issues have been authored by Billy Childish, Simon Evans, Aubrey Mayer, Primary Information, etc.

Issue #45 features a text by Scott King, chronicling an obsession with the Sleaford Mods, alongside images of the duo by famed photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. The edition is numbered but not signed (the above copy was signed a year after publication, on 9/11). 

The issue sold out quickly. A second edition of 150 copies was later released, now selling for around $250. 

A third edition is available from the White Columns website, here, for $25 US. 

Derek Jarman's Home and Garden

“The word unique is overused, but this really is a unique environment, it’s a unique building,” said artist Jeremy Deller, speaking of filmmaker Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage. “Within it you can see his thought processes, you can see his work and it is all in such incredible condition . . . He deserves to have this kept as it was.”

Deller and fellow artists Tacita Dean and Wolfgang Tillmans have produced works available as incentives for the fundraising drive to help preserve the home and famous garden in Dungeness, a hamlet on the coast of Kent, England.

The National Heritage Memorial Fund has pledged $981,000 and there's another $654,000 from the Art Fund, and $327,000 from the Linbury Trust. This figure must be doubled to provide for the cottage’s long-term care, so that residencies and tours of the property can still take place.

Tillmans and Dean both provided prints and Deller produced a button based and sticker series, which are available for a donation of £25. Dean said Jarman was an artist who touched many, “whether we’re stone collectors or gardeners or gay activists or just activists, or film-makers or painters … he was remarkable.”

"Paradise haunts gardens, and some gardens are paradises. Mine is one of them,” said Jarman, who purchased the home in 1986. Following his death eight years later, it was maintained by his partner Keith Collins until his passing in 2018. The garden was made by arranging flotsam washed up nearby, interspersed with endemic salt-loving beach plants, both set against the bright shingle. Published posthumously, Derek Jarman's Garden features writing by the artist and photographs by Howard Sooley. It's available from Amazon, here.

“First and foremost, the cottage was always a living thing, a practical toolbox for his work,” said Swinton (pictured above) at the launch of the fundraising campaign. Jarman had given the actress her first role, in his acclaimed 1986 film based on the life of Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The film also provided the debut for actor Sean Bean.

Jarman's other films include Edward II, The Garden, Jubilee, and Wittgenstein. His final film, Blue, was produced after he was blinded from AIDs related complications. The seventy-nine minute film features a saturated blue still as it's only visual.

Jarman also produced music videos for Bryan Ferry, Marianne Faithful, Throbbing Gristle, Suede, The Pet Shop Boys and Patti Smith. His short film The Queen Is Dead, was later edited to provide The Smiths with videos for their songs "Panic", "Ask", "There is a Light that Never Goes Out" and the title track.

The fundraising drive will continue another 67 days. Pledge here:

https://www.artfund.org/get-involved/art-happens/prospect-cottage

ACBA: Colourbox by Wolfgang Tillmans

Colourbox
Music Of The Band (1982-1987)
London, UK: 4AD, 2014
Audio CD
Limited edition (Edition size unknown)

Compiled and designed by Wolfgang Tillmans, this CD accompanied an exhibition of the same name, at Between Bridges, Tillmans' Berlin non-profit gallery last year. The space was equipped with a high-end hi-fi sound system playing the same selection of 16 songs as the disk. The original master tapes and LPs (with artwork by Vaughan Oliver) were also on display, alongside a list of the original samples used by the band.

The cover art for the recording is from an unseen series of Tillmans' featuring the Canon Colour Laser Copier that he purchased with his Turner Prize winnings in 2000 (he was the first non-English artist to win the award). A decade later the machine was beyond repair so the photographer dismantled it as a 'deconstruction'.

"Brothers Martyn and Steven Young together with Ian Robbins, Lorita Grahame and Debian Curry were pioneers of experimental pop music. They created an eclectic sound drawing from reggae and soul influences, beat-box driven hip-hop rhythms, blue-eyed soul, as well as a fusion of far-ranging influences spanning from classic R&B, to dub and industrial. Using montages of analogue magnetic tape pieces and experimenting with tape machines, Colourbox were at the fore-front of sampling, which in it's digital form would become ubiquitous in the course of the 1980's. The band worked in a seeming contrast of pure artistic research in the studio and an anti-intellectual stance towards the outside world."

- Wolfgang Tillmans