Critical realist: Katy Siegel on Sidney Tillim - Critical Essay

But by the early '80s, Tillim felt the urge to return to writing, in part simply to remind the world he existed and also because he was energized by the changes in an art world that finally embraced representation and mass culture but, he felt, misunderstood the issues at stake.

It was not easy to start up again: Many of the young editors guarding the gates at Art in America and Artforum didn't know who Tillim was, and his early editor Kramer, long a knee-jerk critic of new or imaginative thinking, rejected his solicitations of the New Criterion. But once he broke back into publishing, his very marginality, his stance on the wrong end of the generation gap, freed him to write some of the best work of his career. In a 1984 Artforum piece titled "The View from Past 50," Tillim movingly and wickedly described the plight of the artist not yet a grand success at midlife, past the point of probability--the pressure of status on friendships, generational conflict, the rush of the crowd to every new avant-garde. These social conditions are couched in personal, often funny language: "All of the preparations for a gross Oedipal assassination appear to have been made. Every celebrity is an assassin because his name appears where yours could have been."

The subject that pressed Tillim back into print was the newly fashionable one of photography and mechanical reproduction. During the 1970s, Tillim had taken up collecting examples of photomechanical and other reproductive technologies found in print from the nineteenth century forward, amassing several amazing collections that ranged from children's books to cookbooks to early editions of Darwin to copies of works by well-known artists like Cameron and Giorgione. Tillim's investment in the photomechanical was equal parts aesthetic appreciation, historical scholarship, and affection for the pathetic quality of many of the not-quite-art popular reproductions, which he linked to his own humble artistic beginnings entering a "Draw Me" contest in the back of a magazine. His obsession gave him a special perspective on the increasing presence of both art that used reproduction and art criticism that relied on Walter Benjamin's famous essay--what his friend and Artforum editor Joseph Masheck called "the art world dynamic whereby quite flatfooted interpretations of Benjamin paraded as more-rad-than-thou, even as the talk-as-such underwrote the luxury commodification of once unfetishized photography."

In 1983, Tillim sent an essay on Benjamin--cold--to Artforum editor Ingrid Sischy, who published it in a special issue on mechanization and the future in May of that year. As Sischy remembers, "The thing that clicked for me about him was that he was a real original thinker, extremely phobic about being one of the sheep. He had these extremely well-formed idiosyncratic positions, the kind that happen when a critic is also an artist." Tillim's essay displayed his extensive knowledge about the histories, forms, and uses of various processes, such as photolithography, woodburytype, heliotype, albertype, photogravure, and the photoengraved halftone process, highlighting his complaint that Benjamin generalized "photography" and "reproduction" beyond usefulness, failing to attend to their specific social and formal realities. In a deep critique of Benjamin's polarity between the high and auratic and the modern and mechanical, Tillim argued for the presence, pleasure, and even aura of common photomechanical pictures. As he wrote of At the Farm, a 1930 children's book illustrated with staged photos reproduced in halftone with color overlay, "Again the images have been transformed into magical icons, slightly kitschy perhaps, but their inadvertent beauty is enhanced rather than diminished by the fact that they are mechanical reproductions."