In his exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in September, Turner Prize-winning artist Wolfgang Tillmans featured a newsletter from Quaker Social Action. Rowena Loverance went to investigate:

RL: So what’s this about you and the Quakers then?

In Friends’ meetings, also, from the fact that everyone is free to speak, one hears harmonies and correspondences between very various utterances such as are scarcely to be met elsewhere

WT: Back around 2002 I was inspired by Quaker thinking. I went to Meetings at Friends House and Bunhill Fields. I went to Brockwood, no that’s not right… what’s that Quaker place called?

RL: Woodbrooke. You included a long extract from Caroline Stephen’s Quaker Strongholds in a book about your work.

WT: Yes, that would have been about the same time. I took out a subscription to the Friend; I’ve still got a copy of Quaker faith & practice (Qf&p). Now, I reflect almost with sadness how interested I was then, and how it’s been superceded, I’m not sure by what.
It’s not been an active withdrawal. Since then I’ve spent time in Berlin, where the Quaker presence is minimal. And my attendance has fallen, to just once or twice a year, if I’m honest.

RL: When I saw the Quaker reference in the show, on a table installation on religion, with lots of references to homophobia, at first I thought, ‘Oh great, we’re all right’, but then I thought, ‘Hang on, is he gunning for all of us…’

WT: The name for the table installations is Truth Study Centre. The title is tongue in cheek, obviously. I started making them in 2005. In the last ten years, we’ve seen the perils of organised religion. I’m exercised by the question ‘Where does good or benign religion start?’ It becomes harder to draw a line. I grew up with only a positive association with religion. I’m not from a religious family; I discovered the local church as a hotbed of green politics and social action. It was all about liberation, including sexual liberation. The church nurtured something in me, the music, the singing. Of course you meet people who have a less positive experience, and you feel sad: they throw the baby out with the bathwater. After 9/11 I thought that it would open people’s eyes to the need to be more modest about asserting what God wants, but the opposite seems to have happened, people became more entrenched. So since then I must have felt less need to attend, even such a ‘mild’ expression of religion. But yes, I put the Quakers in as a positive alternative, along with Krishnamurti, whose books I discovered at a Quaker Meeting.

RL: In Germany, where you were brought up, you were a conscientious objector from military service…?

WT: Well, that’s a heavy word. It used to be a difficult choice, they really grilled you. But after Vietnam, it was more of a political, a lifestyle choice. About ten per cent of each year group chose it. By my time it had become more acceptable. It sounds a more noble action than it was. And of course community service felt like a more useful choice.

RL: I’m trying to tease out whether your interest in Quakers is about Quaker witness or about a particular way of seeing the world.

WT: A way of seeing the world. I felt at home there. And the witness comes next, as the only sensible answer. After all, other people do that too. What appealed to me was the possibility to have a religion that isn’t prescribing what God is thinking – but at the same time not abandoning faith. As I see it, art is a similar activity of faith. It’s controversial to say so, but art is useless. That is its power and its freedom. Without doing anything, it still holds incredible energy and can reach parts of thought that other things can’t reach. The uselessness of art means you can think thoughts that are absurd, on a par with the absurdity of life. It could be that I’ve moved on, that now it’s all about the work, that for me art and spirituality are all one thing. Looking with attention, close observation, that was what made me feel a strong connection to the Quakers.

RL: There’s a quote in Qf&p about not seeking the Atlantic but exploring it (Qf&p 26.17). It’s not about finding, but about possibility. Is that what your art’s about?

WT: The minute you apply a goal, you’re being restrictive. I’m not selfless, we can’t efface ourselves, but it’s a fine balance between wanting and getting. When there’s too much wanting involved, the work comes across as phoney. I’m constantly asking myself, ‘Is this the right question’? What was the right answer ten years ago, isn’t right now, because perceptions change, the public changes. It’s certainly never about arriving.

RL: What about the community aspect of the work? You used to be very interested in that, with portraits of your friends and things like your editorship of The Big Issue. Recently your work has been more abstract. Are you less interested in that now?

WT: People being together is still important to me. I wouldn’t want the abstract work to be seen as a lonely, alchemical process. It’s about playing with physics and chance. There are certain givens, the laws of optics, the quality of the paper, I try to master these, but I also allow for what life gives me. I see chance as a potential gift – with the right of free refusal included – that what doesn’t work, I can set aside. When I shine the lights on the paper in the dark room, I’m engaging in the same activity as when I photograph an apple tree. This is a manifestation of nature, and so is this. They’re all ingredients that the world is made of.

RL: What are you going to do next?

WT: You could call it photographing the world, outside my own environment. After the last ten years exploring the abstract, I’m rediscovering photography. I’m interested in borders, in the refugee drama. I also want to record how the world has changed. Twenty years ago, when I started, people asked questions like, ‘Why did you take that photo?’ Now they don’t. Things have moved on. I’m trying to refocus my eye, to find out what that ‘point zero’ subject matter could be now, that carries great meaning but is so obvious that no one would pay attention. I don’t go anywhere with the idea of the picture I want to come back with. I put myself into the environment. It’s art as useless research; it’s aimless but not random. It’s very specific, but with no preconceptions. Of course, not everyone gets it.

RL: As I’m listening to you, I’m trying to relate what you’re saying about the work to similar ideas of how faith works. For example, Quakers are very hot on ‘that of God’, that God is present in everyone and everything, but when I was involved in ecumenism, I found that some people couldn’t understand this; after all, most religion works by prioritising some things as more to do with God than others.

WT: If people don’t get my work, I get accused of all that too, of being inconsequential. It’s much easier to live in a world of certainties. But everything has potential to be something – hence the title
of my Tate exhibition (2003) ‘If one thing matters, everything matters.’ If only you give it enough attention.

Wolfgang Tillmans’ current exhibitions are:
Solo show: the Walker Gallery Liverpool, now until 12 December.
Group shows:
• British Art Show 7, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, now until 9 Jan 2011; then Hayward Touring exhibitions: Hayward Gallery London, 14 February to 17 April; Glasgow 4 June to 21 August; Plymouth, dates to be announced;
• The Last Newspaper, New Museum, New York City, now until 9 Jan 2011; and
• Not in Fashion – Mode und Fotografie der 90er, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, now until 9 Jan 2011.