Wolfgang Tillmanns “The Bell”, 2002

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Wolfgang Tillmans has had international success, but his center has always been elusive to me. He’s a little sexy, he’s a little outrageous, he seems unsettled even arbitrary then madly straight forward.

He likes mixing it up.

His 2003 exhibition at the Tate. Britain “if one thing matters, everything matters” was installed in his personal, appealing but almost scattershot fashion. It was as much about the experience of the event as the elements, as if to say, “make of it what you will”. What matters is what matters to you.

In the midst of it was “The Bell”, 2002, and it stopped me in my tracks. I think I gasped although I’m not quite sure why. It was big — life size — and it seemed shiny with some muted colors. It presented itself to me as an altar piece but in the same instant I recognized that it wasn’t that, it was something else. It was a urinal, a large stainless-steel trough gigged out with some small votive candles that had burned down.

I spent the longest time with it, dancing between the sacred and profane, and I so doubted my strong response to it that I went into the gift shop to see if they had used the image on a post card. They had. So I figured somebody else thought it was cool. — someone in marketing.

I think it’s very cool, and some of that has to do with my finding it so difficult to articulate why. But I thought “My god, this guy really looks, really sees and insists that we look with him.”

And that is cool.

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