The Artist Who Wants to Make the E.U. Sexy—And Defeat Brexit

Last Wednesday afternoon, four thousand miles away, Wolfgang Tillmans slouched at his desk. The photographer had Skyped me from the apartment above his Berlin studio, to discuss the poster campaign he’d released that day against “Brexit,” the British referendum on quitting the European Union, slated for June 23rd. This project may seem oddly activist for a German artist who became known, in the nineties, for his snapshots of London gays and clubbers; who, when he won the Turner Prize, in 2000, was praised for his attention to the “unregarded aspects of the everyday” in photos of armpits and sky. Tillmans is forty-seven, and has his hair cropped close to his rugged head; when we spoke, he wore a purple Nike T-shirt, and there was other evidence of youthful chic around him—a fuchsia sock on the back of a bentwood chair, two blocky prints on the far wall. But all was of a piece: if the E.U. is to survive, Tillmans said, it must become fashionable.

“I’m an observer of opinions, fashion, counter-fashion, of how ideas become trendy and untrendy,” he told me. I noticed a gray band on his wrist, presumably from an event the night before. “The total unsexiness of the E.U.—endless nights of negotiations in Brussels—has become unsustainable.” He thinks of the twenty-five posters as simple messaging vehicles, but they are also seductive. “Say you’re in, if you’re in,” one reads, over a plane of gallery white. “DON’T COME TO GLASTONBURY WITHOUT HAVING USED YOUR POSTAL VOTE!” another says, over a Crayola mass of tents. The giant music festival begins the day before the vote, and Tillmans particularly wants his creations shared and printed by students, who are thought to be anti-Brexit but are no longer registered automatically to vote, owing to a new Conservative law.

“My life has been shaped by living in two places,” Tillmans said. When he first visited London, in 1983, he was a student himself, trying to improve his English. He stayed for three weeks with a woman he calls “my English mum,” who had been his mother’s counterpart in a 1955 school exchange. (“Ten years after Germany and Britain threw bombs on each other, the headmasters said, ‘We have to do this,’ ” Tillmans told me.) Culture Club had gone to No. 1 with “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,” and when the group performed at the Dominion Theatre, Tillmans attended the concert with his best friend, Lutz, of the early photograph “Alex & Lutz Sitting in the Trees”—a young man and a young woman, dressed only in trenchcoats, balanced on separate branches of a towering beech. “London always meant freedom for me. It was a place to project where I wanted to go.”

Tillmans returned to Britain in 1990, to study at Bournemouth University, and he lived “an E.U. reality” before the arrival of Generation EasyJet. There were no tuition fees, for one thing, and Tillmans fell in love with London when it was at the center of a pan-European house-music movement. “Workers’ rights, women’s rights, gay rights, free partying—I understood that these were relatively new, the result of European reconciliation,” he said. Defending them, he believes, is a matter both of pleasure and of principle. “Hedonism is not the opposite of being politically engaged,” he explained. “You can lose yourself at the club, and you are actually celebrating freedom.”

Tillmans lit a cigarette. “What do we lose with Brexit?” he asked. “The idea of sixty years of peace, the shared values. When you look at the charter of the E.U., the third point is: nobody must be put to death by capital punishment. I find that extremely cool.” He wants to recharge the terms “negotiation” and “moderation” with “positive and fashionable energy.” He told me, “The ones who have a lot to gain are the underminers of Western society: Putin, Erdoğan, Trump. When they say, ‘I don’t like this gay, muesli-eating, bicycle-riding, European softness,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘It’s war.’ ”

The image cut out, then came in. In the Brexit photos, drawn largely from a recent show in Portugal called “On the Verge of Visibility,” Tillmans zooms in on the turbine of a plane or the froth of sea water until they appear immaterial. “In our mind, we perceive clear and clean borders, but when you approach a cloud the edges dissolve into nothing, into a gradient.” I asked if this phenomenon reminded him of his ideas about Europe. He said it did. “It’s molecules coexisting. It’s not more or less chaos than you should have anticipated. It’s as variable as life and nature are.”

Before signing off, I asked Tillmans about the works visible on the far wall. He said they were by two of his assistants, a group that includes an Irish citizen, an Italian, a Briton, and an American. In February, he asked them for research on the pros and cons of Brexit; together with his assistants, he began generating text on a shared document. The words on Tillmans’s favorite poster, “What is lost is lost forever,” came to him late last year, when the underground gay night club Spectrum, in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, was shut down. Another message arrived last weekend, at a dinner in London, where he’d shown off poster drafts on his iPhone and solicited advice. “What emerged was the question of belonging,” he told me. “That’s how I came up with the last poster: ‘It’s a question of where you belong. We are the European family.’ It’s borderline happy clappy, but it’s true.”