Through the Lens of Humanity: Wolfgang Tillmans on Käthe Kollwitz

Arlette Hernandez: For people who may not be familiar with your work, how would you describe your artistic practice?

Wolfgang Tillmans: I come to my work from two sides. On the one hand, I want to speak directly about the time that I’m in, how it feels to be alive today—and that reaches into society, into the political, and into the intersection of the political and the private. On the other hand, the foundational motivation for what I do is wanting to speak without language, and say something about how I see the world. It’s maybe visual poetry that I’m doing. Because it’s photographs, we connect them so much to reality. But the conduit—why people even look at them—is the underlying poetry. After having tried a whole range of other media as a teenager, I found that this duality—being able to make poetry and speaking very concretely about things—is something that photography allows me to do.

Why do you feel that it’s important to make work that deals with things like society and politics and not just aesthetics?

Aesthetics are always charged with meaning, and therefore are connected to politics. Politics is always such a strong word. But when you look at it as the rules by which society lives—for example, who is allowed to love whom, who is allowed to live where—those become very personal questions that are organized by societies. If you want to be part of the conversation that shapes these decisions, then you are in a political sphere.

I found that what isn’t acceptable in a society says a lot about the politics of that society. For example, I’ve always been shocked by the fact that in most Western countries, you can show two men kill each other on afternoon television, but you cannot show two men kiss each other. In my work, I haven’t really pursued a clear agenda. For the first 25 years, it wasn’t about direct campaigning. It was really about the how. How do we look at people? How do we look at each other?
In Käthe Kollwitz’s work we see this “how” at work. How does she look at her fellow humans? Art says a lot about what is behind the camera, in my case, or what is going on in the minds of the draftspeople. You can see the point of view, and that, for me, is the biggest political message in my work. The title of my exhibition at MoMA, To look without fear, is witness to that approach, and to be open to the world.

Among Kollwitz’s best-known politically engaged artworks is a series of posters that speak out against war. Have you encountered her posters?

In the 1980s, her Nie Wieder Krieg (Never Again War) poster was part of the peace movement vernacular. It was art history and it was history, yet during the Cold War, a time when there was a tangible fear of an arms race going wrong, the poster felt very current. It didn’t have the smell of the 1920s on it. In 1984, it felt part of a then-current desire to get over all wars, something that of course we still haven’t achieved today, and that in some ways seem more distant from than ever.

Why do you think this poster has felt relevant for so long?

The strongest thing about the poster is how vocal it is. It’s the mouth, one hears a voice shouting, and the raised arm is such an exclamation mark. The reason this person is energized about this demand—“never again war”—is the suffering that they experienced.

Kollwitz made it in 1924, six years after the bloodiest, most atrocious war in human history took place in Europe. For the first time, people witnessed industrial means of killing. In 1914, when people were marching into and volunteering for war, they had no idea what they were getting into. This war resulted in previously unimaginable misery in the trenches; many thousands from both sides were just cannon fodder with no chance of survival. This traumatized European societies in profound ways. This idea that civilized, cultured neighbors who shared a common European culture would commit such bloodshed against each other was an absolute shock. That, I think, is what we see in this poster six years after the end of the first World War, imploring us to never go back there again.

What about Kollwitz’s poster against Paragraph 218? Do you think it is still relevant today?

It is fascinating to look at Kollwitz’s poster agitating against the German law that criminalized abortion. It’s from 1923, exactly 100 years before the US Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. Women having control over their bodies and men controlling women’s bodies—it’s a struggle that is never over. I often say in interviews that I also see it as my duty to protect civil liberties that we enjoy, and that prior generations have fought for.

It wasn’t easy to get women’s voting rights established in Germany; achieving equality for women was an uncomfortable struggle, to say the least. The women who stood up and spoke for their rights were ostracized. They were not safe. Their efforts certainly weren't greeted with immediate applause. But their bravery is really admirable. If we are not defending what has been achieved in the past, we are doing a disservice to those who fought for those freedoms.