{"id":31496,"date":"2013-07-10T12:18:43","date_gmt":"2013-07-10T11:18:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.influx.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=31496"},"modified":"2020-06-30T11:52:57","modified_gmt":"2020-06-30T10:52:57","slug":"headlight-by-wolfgng-tillmans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adrianflux.co.uk\/influx\/blog\/headlight-by-wolfgng-tillmans\/","title":{"rendered":"Headlight by Wolfgang Tillmans"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wolfgang Tillmans, Headlight (b), 2012. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz,
\nCologne\/Berlin<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n

If you’ve ever gazed deeply into the mystic lens of even your average contemporary runabout<\/strong>, you may well have been struck by the odd beauty of car headlamps. If so, you’re in lofty company. Turner Prize winning artist and photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has recently presented a full size, technically exact, mysteriously beautiful detail of a car headlight lens as part of his current crop of (quite amazing) images.<\/p>\n

For us, the image, presented here as a totem of high art despite its prosaic nature, whispers of a future that is actually here and being experienced now – on every street corner of the developed world. The fact that such an aesthetically pleasing, technically functional and near ubiquitous object is transformed into high art once you stick it in a gallery is nothing new.<\/p>\n

Ever since 1917, when French surrealist nutter Marcel Duchamp put a urinal in a gallery to a world-wide scandalous response – common objects have been given the high culture treatment by being paid overt, focused attention by the art world.<\/p>\n

This however, goes one step further. The image is completely and utterly realistic – and yet it has an amazing impact, apparently, on the viewer. We’re looking forward to seeing the picture up close and personal – but we love the irony of Tillmans’s focusing on something so utterly profane in the sacred space of an art gallery.<\/p>\n\n\t\t