Longitudes

Longitudes cuts across Latitudes’ projects and research with news, updates, and reportage.

Wolfgang Tillmans’ “Truth Study Center (NY)” (2010)

Mon, Dec 11 2023

The cover of “The Last Observer” featured Wolfgang Tillmans’s “Truth Study Center (NY)”. Issue 6 of the catalogue-in-progress of “The Last Newspaper” (New Museum, 2010). Edited by Latitudes.

In the frenzied weeks of autumn 2010, we had the chance to “live with” artworks during the course of ten weeks while we live-edited a weekly tabloid that ultimately constituted the ten-part catalogue of “The Last Newspaper” (October 2010–January 2011) exhibition at the New Museum. For almost the entire duration of the show, Latitudes commissioned articles, opinion columns, adverts, interviews, and focus pieces, and also wrote about the featured artworks, artists, events, and issues covered (or missing!) in the exhibition we were embedded in.

For ”The Last Observer”, the sixth of the ten issues of “The Last Newspaper” (pdf here), we commissioned then-writer Lorena Muñoz-Alonso to interview artist Wolfgang Tillmans about his work “Truth Study Center (NY)” (2010). Tillmans’ work shared the floor with our temporary office and is a project he began in 2005 with a show at his London gallery Maureen Paley.

Photo: LeBal Books here.

Forward ten years. In 2021, the interview “Is This True or Not?” was included in the 352-page reader “Wolfgang Tillmans: A Reader” (ISBN 9781633451124), published on the occasion of his retrospective “To Look Without Fear” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and edited by Roxana Marcoci and Phil Taylor – see pages 171 to 173.

(Above and below) Wolfgang Tillmans, “Truth Study Center, 2005–”, installation view at the New Museum, 2010. Photos: Latitudes, Barcelona. Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley Gallery.

We recently received a request to use our Tillmans’s New Museum installation photograph in the highly anticipated publication “Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance” (Verso Books) by our former teacher, and now professor in the Ph.D. Program in Art History at CUNY Graduate Center in New York, Dr. Claire Bishop.

In “Disordered Attention...”, Bishop “identifies trends in contemporary practice – research-based installations, performance exhibitions, interventions, and invocations of modernist architecture – and their challenges to traditional modes of attention. Charting a critical path through the last

three decades, Bishop pinpoints how spectatorship and visual literacy are evolving under the pressures of digital technology.”

The book will be available from June 2024. An excerpt was published in Artforum in April 2023, titled “Information Overload”.

Cover of the forthcoming book “Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance” (Verso Books, 2024).

RELATED CONTENT:

Night at the (New) Museum, 11 Dec 2010
At Last...The Last Newspaper catalogue!, 10 Dec 2010
'THE LAST OBSERVER' AVAILABLE NOW! #6 issue of the 10 Latitudes-edited newspapers for 'The Last Newspaper' exhibition, New Museum, 10 Nov 2010
Max Andrews reviews in frieze: ‘A Provisional History of the Technical Image, 1844–2018’ (LUMA Foundation, Arlès) and Pere Llobera's ‘Acció’ (Bombon Projects, Barcelona) and ‘Kill Your Darlings’ (Sis Galería, Sabadell), 4 January 2019

2010, 2024, claire Bishop, interview, New Museum, New York, The Last Newspaper, Wolfgang Tillmans