Tuesday, August 6, 2019

Wolfgang Tillmans at Maureen Paley


(link)

Perhaps what's at stake in the "blushes" is prettiness, an offhand nicety whose cheapness and disposability Tillmans weights against all the other offhand "cheap" snapshots of humans about their lives. Placing stake that you cannot dispose the saccharine abstraction without throwing out the people, humans. "If one thing matters, everything matters." And so they are like sunsets, both the near endless regurgitations of saccharine accident, cliche. Incidental returns of arbitrary conditions, completely unique and, like people, endlessly the same. A triple-point of beauty, arbitrariness, meaning. And perhaps meaning, our affection for the blushes, only appears as ward against inversion: If even one doesn't matter, nothing matters. Our fear.