Tillmans's Touch

In an installation called the "Truth Study Center," Tillmans fills a gallery with 23 knocked-together wooden tables. He then covers their tops with masses of news clippings and assorted photographs, some by him and others found, some clearly meant to look good and others resolutely not. The accumulated imagery seems to come straight from Tillmans's stream of consciousness, as he contemplates all the objects and issues that have impinged on him. (One unusually spare table in the Hirshhorn version of this installation hosts nothing more than the pages of an article published barely three weeks ago by Naomi Wolf, titled "Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps.")

Another striking piece at the Hirshhorn, with a somewhat similar dynamic, is called the "Concorde Grid." It consists of 56 photos of that historic supersonic jet, barely glimpsed as it takes off and lands above the scrappy landscapes that surround your average airport. The unruly feel of its images seems to capture the "lifelike" encounter between an insignificant onlooker and an iconic object as they meet by accident within the haphazard flow of time.

But every time Tillmans seems to be doing one thing -- becoming, that is, an artist with a trademark strategy for making art -- he veers off in another direction.

He seems like somebody who avoids allegory and classic symbolizing, right? And then he makes a piece called "Memorial for the Victims of Organized Religions," which consists of 48 sheets of photo paper, in elegiac shades of black and midnight blue, arranged in a grid on a wall. They're like photographs of what it is to shut your eyes, or to focus on a starless night, in mourning for the evil deeds religion has inspired. So a work that seems at first glance to be art at its most formal and abstract -- like the Ellsworth Kelly color patches at the National Gallery, but without the color -- turns out to have the closest ties to issues the artist cares deeply about.

Maybe Tillmans's steadfast contrariness, his determined indeterminacy -- like the sheer, meaning-defeating quantity of information he provides -- are all part of his attempt to make an artwork that evokes life. That is, taken as a single work, the Hirshhorn's Tillmans exhibition provides a living, mutating, dynamic portrait of the man who made it, in the act of making it. Its shifts, twists, refusals and perplexities provide a faithful record of the shifts and twists and refusals and perplexities that any life is built around, but that most any art will have a tendency to iron out, just because of almost any art's inherent order.

That includes the art of Wolfgang Tillmans.

Even disorder can become an ordering principle; it takes effort and ambition to achieve randomness. Look at the wooden tables in Tillmans's "Truth Study Center": Their inconsequential look is achieved through very careful carpentry. The lifelike energy in Tillmans's agglomerations of images is achieved through very deliberate labor; the dimensions and components of each museum installation are recorded with a tape measure before a show comes down, so it can be re-created in any part of it that is bought.

The Hirshhorn installation is much closer to a carefully considered magazine layout meant to capture a chaotic, energetic feel -- Tillmans was famous early on for his design of magazine spreads of his own art -- than to an actual tipped-out box of old photos.

The true surprise of the Hirshhorn exhibition isn't its disorder; it's how fine it looks. That's not how I felt the first time I saw a similar Tillmans installation. I was sure that it was about a compelling exploration of ugliness and the truly haphazard. But now Tillmans has taught me better.

He's taught me that, all along, his work has simply had the trademark look of the latest captivating art -- or of what captivating art has come to look like, since he came on the scene.

Wolfgang Tillmans is at the Hirshhorn Museum, on the south side of the Mall at 7th Street SW, through Aug. 12. Call 202-633-1000 or visit http://www.hirshhorn.si.edu.