kotori
Fool of Fortune
- Joined
- Oct 9, 2001
- Posts
- 28,474
Keep downloading that porn, boys and girls. It's art.
__________________________________________
Big Hot Blurry Painterly Nudes!
By MIA FINEMAN
When the German photographer Thomas Ruff started looking at Internet pornography about four years ago, it was for research purposes only. He was thinking about making a new series of photographs exploring the genre of the nude, and as he always does when he has a new idea, he began by studying existing images. Online, he first came upon pictures by fashion photographers like Helmut Newton and Peter Lindbergh, but these slickly produced, stylishly erotic nudes left him uninspired. So he continued to point and click, and before long he found his way to some porn sites, which led him to still more porn sites.
"Those images were not necessarily more honest," he said recently, "but they were more wide ranging. With Helmut Newton, you only get Helmut Newton's version of a nude body. But on porn sites you have both amateurs and professionals and pictures that represent every different kind of desire and sexual fantasy."
Mr. Ruff, who often works with appropriated imagery, began to download the pictures and manipulate them on his computer, intensifying colors, blurring outlines and greatly enlarging the scale. The resulting photographs are both provocatively blunt and visually ravishing. Blurry, painterly and coolly mysterious, they recall the early photo-based paintings of Gerhard Richter — a comparison Mr. Ruff grudgingly acknowledges. "The link is there," he said, "but this kind of blurriness was always part of photography, even if Richter put a kind of trademark on it."
The "Nudes" series was first exhibited at the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea in the spring of 2000. Not long ago, one of the least explicit works from the series (a shot of a woman wearing a red undergarment) was featured in an installation of contemporary photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hanging just steps away from sensuous, painted nudes by Bonnard and Modigliani, the photograph cast a sly backward glance at the erotic delectation that pictures of naked flesh have always inspired.
This month, Harry N. Abrams is releasing a book of 100 of Mr. Ruff's nudes, with an introductory text by the notoriously louche French author Michel Houellebecq. (The text, a brief excerpt from Mr. Houellebecq's third novel, "The Platform," recounts the narrator's experiences at a fictional sex club in the south of France.) The publication coincides with an exhibition of the artist's most recent work opening at Zwirner on Thursday.
This rather risqué project signals a new direction for Abrams, a traditional publishing house best known for producing art history textbooks and classy museum catalogs. While some European publishers — most notably Taschen in Cologne — have actively cultivated a market for sexually graphic art-photography books, Abrams has been slow to adopt an X-rated aesthetic.
"I suppose the main fantasy Ruff's photographs arouse in me is that I'll get in trouble for publishing them," said Eric Himmel, Abrams's editor in chief. "Really, though, this fantasy is no more likely to come true than most. I'm programmed to think of explicit sexual imagery as being transgressive, but I was startled to see how many people are open about their familiarity with the virtual playland that Ruff explores. This is one landscape that everyone seems to have passed through at one time or another."
Rather than condemning the proliferation of pornographic images, Mr. Ruff's photographs remind us that the Internet is only the latest — and probably not the last — visual technology to serve the age-old alliance between sex and commerce. "Today we're in the grips of a really remarkable explosion of pornographic imagery on the Internet, much of it quasi-legitimate," said Linda Williams, a professor of film studies at the University of California at Berkeley who has written extensively on the history of pornography. "But it was the same story in the early days of photography, and later, in the marketing of VCR's and interactive media. An emerging medium — especially when it's new and not fully respectable — is always driven by pornographic content."
Mr. Ruff, 45, belongs to a media-savvy generation of artists who work with a heightened awareness of the ways in which modern experience is filtered through images. He studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, along with the photographers Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky. The three artists (now collectively known as "Struffsky") rose to art-world prominence in the late 80's and together established a kind of imposing house style for contemporary photography: spectacularly matter-of-fact, technically flawless and enlarged to a colossal scale. Although the "Struffsky" style is often sensational, it has its origins in the rigorous, analytical approach of their teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher, a redoubtable husband-and-wife team who systematically photographed the "anonymous sculptures" of 19th-century industry — gas tanks, water towers and blast furnaces — in a deadpan, documentary style.
Of the three artists, Mr. Ruff is the most experimental, always working in series and exploring a different photographic form or genre with each new project. While still a student, he began an extended series of portraits, shooting friends and classmates in the deliberately neutral style of passport photos or mug shots. "When I did the portraits, I wanted to make pictures of friends, but at the same time I wanted to make a portrait of the genre of portraiture," he said. The color prints, blown up to 7 feet by 5 feet, are both mesmerizing and disquieting. Though every hair and pore is rendered in meticulous detail, the expressionless subjects remain frustratingly remote.
For the last 10 years or so, Mr. Ruff has flipped back and forth between making and taking — sometimes creating his own images, sometimes appropriating them from other sources. In the late 80's, he produced a series of enormous prints of starry night skies from a set of negatives that he bought from the European Southern Observatory. A few years later, during the first Persian Gulf war, he used a night-vision enhancer to photograph the streets of Düsseldorf after dark, creating dramatic nightscapes with the eerie, greenish glow of military surveillance film. In 1999 he made a series of photographs of Modernist architecture by Mies van der Rohe, using digital technology to alter the original images.
In his new show at Zwirner, Mr. Ruff will present two recent bodies of work, both based on appropriated images that he has digitally doctored. In one group, "Substrates," he downloaded the colorful Japanese comics called manga from the Internet, blurring and layering the images to produce protean abstractions with wild, pumped-up colors that blend and swirl together like psychedelic oil slicks. The idea, he said, was to try to create a sense of depth through color alone. "I was thinking of medieval painting where you always have warm colors in the foreground, green in the middle ground and blue in the background. If you abstracted the image, you would still see that sense of space," he explained.
The images in the other series, "Machines," come from a set of glass-plate negatives from the 30's that Mr. Ruff acquired when an industrial-drill company near his studio went out of business. Most were straightforward photographs of lathes and drill-sharpening machines, probably intended for reproduction in an industrial catalog. In some, the background had been whited out, creating the effect of a strange, ghostlike fog hovering behind the machine. From these negatives, Mr. Ruff made a series of large prints, adding only a few touches of color — mostly muted, dusty greens — that enhance the mood of industrial nostalgia.
The results are surreal and strangely anthropomorphic, recalling Francis Picabia's drawings of machines, but without the Gallic wit and Dadaist double-entendres. Or perhaps, looking a little closer to home, these pictures of antiquated technology are an unconscious tribute to his mentors' photographs of the "anonymous sculptures" of the industrial age — a tribute made particularly timely not long ago when Mr. Ruff took over Bernd Becher's teaching post at the Düsseldorf academy.
After trying his hand at an eclectic range of photographic genres — portraiture, astronomy, pornography, industrial photography, abstraction — what's next for Thomas Ruff? "For 15 years I've wanted to photograph flowers," he said. "Maybe when I'm 80 I'll be able to make images of flowers that are good enough to show."
*************
Mia Fineman is the author, with Maria Morris Hambourg, of Richard Avedon: Portraits.
__________________________________________
Big Hot Blurry Painterly Nudes!
By MIA FINEMAN
When the German photographer Thomas Ruff started looking at Internet pornography about four years ago, it was for research purposes only. He was thinking about making a new series of photographs exploring the genre of the nude, and as he always does when he has a new idea, he began by studying existing images. Online, he first came upon pictures by fashion photographers like Helmut Newton and Peter Lindbergh, but these slickly produced, stylishly erotic nudes left him uninspired. So he continued to point and click, and before long he found his way to some porn sites, which led him to still more porn sites.
"Those images were not necessarily more honest," he said recently, "but they were more wide ranging. With Helmut Newton, you only get Helmut Newton's version of a nude body. But on porn sites you have both amateurs and professionals and pictures that represent every different kind of desire and sexual fantasy."
Mr. Ruff, who often works with appropriated imagery, began to download the pictures and manipulate them on his computer, intensifying colors, blurring outlines and greatly enlarging the scale. The resulting photographs are both provocatively blunt and visually ravishing. Blurry, painterly and coolly mysterious, they recall the early photo-based paintings of Gerhard Richter — a comparison Mr. Ruff grudgingly acknowledges. "The link is there," he said, "but this kind of blurriness was always part of photography, even if Richter put a kind of trademark on it."
The "Nudes" series was first exhibited at the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea in the spring of 2000. Not long ago, one of the least explicit works from the series (a shot of a woman wearing a red undergarment) was featured in an installation of contemporary photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hanging just steps away from sensuous, painted nudes by Bonnard and Modigliani, the photograph cast a sly backward glance at the erotic delectation that pictures of naked flesh have always inspired.
This month, Harry N. Abrams is releasing a book of 100 of Mr. Ruff's nudes, with an introductory text by the notoriously louche French author Michel Houellebecq. (The text, a brief excerpt from Mr. Houellebecq's third novel, "The Platform," recounts the narrator's experiences at a fictional sex club in the south of France.) The publication coincides with an exhibition of the artist's most recent work opening at Zwirner on Thursday.
This rather risqué project signals a new direction for Abrams, a traditional publishing house best known for producing art history textbooks and classy museum catalogs. While some European publishers — most notably Taschen in Cologne — have actively cultivated a market for sexually graphic art-photography books, Abrams has been slow to adopt an X-rated aesthetic.
"I suppose the main fantasy Ruff's photographs arouse in me is that I'll get in trouble for publishing them," said Eric Himmel, Abrams's editor in chief. "Really, though, this fantasy is no more likely to come true than most. I'm programmed to think of explicit sexual imagery as being transgressive, but I was startled to see how many people are open about their familiarity with the virtual playland that Ruff explores. This is one landscape that everyone seems to have passed through at one time or another."
Rather than condemning the proliferation of pornographic images, Mr. Ruff's photographs remind us that the Internet is only the latest — and probably not the last — visual technology to serve the age-old alliance between sex and commerce. "Today we're in the grips of a really remarkable explosion of pornographic imagery on the Internet, much of it quasi-legitimate," said Linda Williams, a professor of film studies at the University of California at Berkeley who has written extensively on the history of pornography. "But it was the same story in the early days of photography, and later, in the marketing of VCR's and interactive media. An emerging medium — especially when it's new and not fully respectable — is always driven by pornographic content."
Mr. Ruff, 45, belongs to a media-savvy generation of artists who work with a heightened awareness of the ways in which modern experience is filtered through images. He studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, along with the photographers Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky. The three artists (now collectively known as "Struffsky") rose to art-world prominence in the late 80's and together established a kind of imposing house style for contemporary photography: spectacularly matter-of-fact, technically flawless and enlarged to a colossal scale. Although the "Struffsky" style is often sensational, it has its origins in the rigorous, analytical approach of their teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher, a redoubtable husband-and-wife team who systematically photographed the "anonymous sculptures" of 19th-century industry — gas tanks, water towers and blast furnaces — in a deadpan, documentary style.
Of the three artists, Mr. Ruff is the most experimental, always working in series and exploring a different photographic form or genre with each new project. While still a student, he began an extended series of portraits, shooting friends and classmates in the deliberately neutral style of passport photos or mug shots. "When I did the portraits, I wanted to make pictures of friends, but at the same time I wanted to make a portrait of the genre of portraiture," he said. The color prints, blown up to 7 feet by 5 feet, are both mesmerizing and disquieting. Though every hair and pore is rendered in meticulous detail, the expressionless subjects remain frustratingly remote.
For the last 10 years or so, Mr. Ruff has flipped back and forth between making and taking — sometimes creating his own images, sometimes appropriating them from other sources. In the late 80's, he produced a series of enormous prints of starry night skies from a set of negatives that he bought from the European Southern Observatory. A few years later, during the first Persian Gulf war, he used a night-vision enhancer to photograph the streets of Düsseldorf after dark, creating dramatic nightscapes with the eerie, greenish glow of military surveillance film. In 1999 he made a series of photographs of Modernist architecture by Mies van der Rohe, using digital technology to alter the original images.
In his new show at Zwirner, Mr. Ruff will present two recent bodies of work, both based on appropriated images that he has digitally doctored. In one group, "Substrates," he downloaded the colorful Japanese comics called manga from the Internet, blurring and layering the images to produce protean abstractions with wild, pumped-up colors that blend and swirl together like psychedelic oil slicks. The idea, he said, was to try to create a sense of depth through color alone. "I was thinking of medieval painting where you always have warm colors in the foreground, green in the middle ground and blue in the background. If you abstracted the image, you would still see that sense of space," he explained.
The images in the other series, "Machines," come from a set of glass-plate negatives from the 30's that Mr. Ruff acquired when an industrial-drill company near his studio went out of business. Most were straightforward photographs of lathes and drill-sharpening machines, probably intended for reproduction in an industrial catalog. In some, the background had been whited out, creating the effect of a strange, ghostlike fog hovering behind the machine. From these negatives, Mr. Ruff made a series of large prints, adding only a few touches of color — mostly muted, dusty greens — that enhance the mood of industrial nostalgia.
The results are surreal and strangely anthropomorphic, recalling Francis Picabia's drawings of machines, but without the Gallic wit and Dadaist double-entendres. Or perhaps, looking a little closer to home, these pictures of antiquated technology are an unconscious tribute to his mentors' photographs of the "anonymous sculptures" of the industrial age — a tribute made particularly timely not long ago when Mr. Ruff took over Bernd Becher's teaching post at the Düsseldorf academy.
After trying his hand at an eclectic range of photographic genres — portraiture, astronomy, pornography, industrial photography, abstraction — what's next for Thomas Ruff? "For 15 years I've wanted to photograph flowers," he said. "Maybe when I'm 80 I'll be able to make images of flowers that are good enough to show."
*************
Mia Fineman is the author, with Maria Morris Hambourg, of Richard Avedon: Portraits.
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