Wolfgang Tillmans – Transcript of a Conversation with Sacha Craddock

Participants

WT: = Wolfgang Tillmans
SC: = Sacha Craddock

Recording starts

SC: My name is Sacha Craddock and I’m the Chair of New Contemporaries and obviously, you realise we are actually filming this in the top floor of Cornerhouse, at the beginning of the New Contemporaries exhibition; and I’m with Wolfgang Tillmans, who’s one of the selectors for this year. Before Wolfgang and I really enjoy ourselves talking about the exhibition and the trials and tribulations of selection and the intensity of it, I just would like to give a brief background to New Contemporaries and, in a way, to its relationship to Manchester, to Cornerhouse.

New Contemporaries has come to Manchester on and off for so long, and we have a very strong relationship with Cornerhouse. So, in a way, hanging a show here, you get a sort of sense of familiarity on the different floors. Later on, I think we’ll ask Wolfgang about characteristics of work at this moment, what we see, if there’s any sense of a trend but perhaps we should talk about who else you selected with. John Stezekar, who probably was in Young Contemporaries a long time ago. He’s a very, very good artist whose work, in a way, you’ll see reflections of his approach in the selection. And also, Saskia Olde Wolbers, who’s a filmmaker. Perhaps we could just describe a bit about what you went through?

WT: I’ve been on a number of juries over the years but I’ve never experienced anything like this. This was a proper five day week, from ten in the morning until seven in the evening, of non-stop viewing slides projected to us in a little viewing room. I think we had 1100 entrants. So each entrant had ten slides to represent their work with, plus like hundreds of video artists.

SC: Hundreds.

WT: So we were looking at at least 10,000 pictures and hundreds and hundreds of videos that we had to give some justice to. You can’t just throw them out after one second, so you have to look at them for one minute, two minutes, three minutes until everybody is satisfied that this is no good or that it can go into the next round. And there was a great sense of responsibility.

SC: Immense.

WT: Everybody wanted to really do everybody justice and even in the late afternoon when we got very tired, somehow ……

SC: Sometimes having to be on the floor!

WT: [laughs] but it was an incredible monitor of what goes on.

SC: And what we found from this show was actually, on the whole, people not wanting to be a particularly zany formulae, it’s a different approach at the moment.

WT: Well, I guess the whole story is hard to pin it down to any particular trend obviously when you have 1100 people, but I guess it’s what you said. It’s this trying to understand what you’re looking at but within that, and then over the course of the days, there were trends also emerging that probably the individual artists were not aware of but then by just the sheer numbers and coincidence, we would pick up on things that wouldn’t interest us. Like, for example, there was a number of leaning sticks or leaning planks of wood leaning on walls and that was one of the trends.

SC: It’s quite amusing the way…

WT: Dozens and dozens of just things leaning. That gesture of course is a great gesture but when you just suddenly see it being multiplied.

SC: A lot, over and over.

WT: So you try to reflect what is there. That’s important that one doesn’t fashion it after one’s own desires but, on the other hand…

SC: You can’t help it.

WT: You can’t help but think also that you want something that goes beyond what we know. It’s true, I mean formerly the work stays within the boundaries of the rectangle and within the boundaries of the pedestal and the video screen. In a way, it’s also well, if you want to knock this, then you can say, ‘yeah, it’s conservative’ but then again, what is conservative about a picture? A picture is a picture is a picture and if there is something interesting happening in the picture.

SC: It’s the picture not the form it…

WT: So the radical gesture is maybe not so overtly there but somehow it’s in the work.

SC: It does happen to feature quite a lot of photography. It isn’t merely because you take photographs necessarily, it just happened that there was a very, very strong application came from a lot of fantastic, rather, in a way, apparently straightforward photographs of places or of things.

WT: And also interesting that, initially, we thought that all video is bad and no interesting videos and then, in the end, we came through with a handful of fantastic ones.

SC: Thinking it was the strongest.

WT: Yes.

SC: The work here, the video in there which is Alexandra Handal’s one about Jerusalem, about a visit to Jerusalem, is very poetic and gentle and then there’s the exact opposite which is that mental Scottish one [laughs].

WT: Oh yeah.

SC: Where there’s pattern of Scottishness that’s gone completely mad. There’s a fantastic range of video presence and also, the music one is pretty …

WT: Yeah.

SC: In a way, I don’t know if it’s like going to a club or something but it’s terribly hard with New Contemporaries. Often one’s asked about some kind of conclusion and it’s false what comes first – the people who select select for their own reasons and a proper discussion, and then you can’t really draw a conclusion because it’s been cut down in terms of trends. But I do think the great thing about New Contemporaries is that it gives the public an amazing chance to just, in a way, have work done for them in terms of selection and thought.

WT: Yeah.

SC: So actually you get a ready-made experience.

WT: I can only stress the sense of duty that we had. I really felt that we did a great service.

SC: Public service.

WT: Really a public service of going through all this work because you just could not possibly do that yourself. It was super interesting to be allowed to do it but, in a way, I can only recommend this show because it is a genuine monitor, a reflection of what goes on right now, and it’s been selected by four plus you, visually highly literate people and very different people and everybody had their voice. So it is actually I think quite representative.

SC: Yes, it is.

WT: And just to come back to the medium one last time, with photography and this show being not about media. It’s not a painting prize, it’s not a photography award.

SC: Yes, that’s very important.

WT: And the way I look around this room, it’s just beautiful how the different media are hanging right next to each other. A painting that is taken from a photograph, photographs that feel painterly or a photocopy that has been meticulously drawn with pencil. All the different layers of representation are equally here side by side.

SC: That’s very true actually.

WT: And that’s a really amazing thing which in another world is so fragmented into this is video, this is photo and New Contemporaries have always been just very open, and for that it’s really worth seeing as well.

End 9:16