Műcsarnok, until 15th February 2009
1200Ft.
Dózsa György út 37 (Hősök tere) [map]
Pest, XIV, Hősök tere (M1), 2 min
A walk through Thomas Ruff’s retrospective exhibition at Műcsarnok might initially strike a discord with viewers. Firstly for the fact that Ruff, who is a leading contemporary photographer, isn’t actually photographing that much, and secondly he isn't so concerned with photographs in the traditional sense.
Thomas Ruff doesn't so much take photographs as 'take' them. However, Ruff is no petty thief nor is he a rip-off merchant. A great deal of his photographic output has to do with the appropriation and manipulation of images into a broader conceptual idea.
One of his greatest concerns is commentary on the image as well as photography as a medium, to illustrate first-hand that a photograph is not in fact what Roland Barthes would call the “spectrum” - the actual things being photographed. Rather, Ruff’s work concentrates on Barthes’ “stadium” - the interpretation and contextualization - or in Ruff’s case, re-contextualization and de-contextualization. He is not so much a Photographer as he is an Artist, or Mediator.
His most noted work to date is his jpeg series where he pulls somewhat iconic images from the Internet - such as the freshly attacked, yet still standing, Twin Towers in New York - blows them up to enormous proportions (the long side usually measuring around 3 meters), and pixelates them, removing information which renders them unrecognizable at close range. However, the image of the 9/11 attack (ny02, 2004) is missing from the show, bringing into doubt how representative this “retrospective” actually is.
His other noteworthy series that features photos pulled and manipulated from the Web are his Nudes, a series of pornographic photos. The artist doesn’t pixelate these images in the same manner but instead blurs them, bringing countless genitals, plastic-looking breasts and vinyl lingerie into the realm of what might just border on tastefulness.
One of his greatest concerns is commentary on the image as well as photography as a medium, to illustrate first-hand that a photograph is not in fact what Roland Barthes would call the “spectrum” - the actual things being photographed. Rather, Ruff’s work concentrates on Barthes’ “stadium” - the interpretation and contextualization - or in Ruff’s case, re-contextualization and de-contextualization. He is not so much a Photographer as he is an Artist, or Mediator.
His most noted work to date is his jpeg series where he pulls somewhat iconic images from the Internet - such as the freshly attacked, yet still standing, Twin Towers in New York - blows them up to enormous proportions (the long side usually measuring around 3 meters), and pixelates them, removing information which renders them unrecognizable at close range. However, the image of the 9/11 attack (ny02, 2004) is missing from the show, bringing into doubt how representative this “retrospective” actually is.
His other noteworthy series that features photos pulled and manipulated from the Web are his Nudes, a series of pornographic photos. The artist doesn’t pixelate these images in the same manner but instead blurs them, bringing countless genitals, plastic-looking breasts and vinyl lingerie into the realm of what might just border on tastefulness.
Ruff has been doing what he calls “sampling,” ever since his Stars series from the 1990s, where he takes detailed photos of the night sky that were made by astronomers who had the very powerful equipment he didn't have access to. Here, Ruff is displaying and appropriating them in the form of large C-prints. The same goes for his Newspaper Photographs, in the sense that he’s “stealing” the images. The artist liberates newspaper photos from their captions to see if they still mean anything to the viewer, and of course the iconic ones (i.e., Hitler) do, and the banal do not.
Some of the work in the exhibition will have you wondering what exactly Ruff considers photography in the first place. His Substratum series, for example, just looks like old iTunes visualizer screen shots. Similarly, in the Zycles series, which takes centre stage in the exhibition space, Ruff uses computer formulas to create huge psychedelic canvases, which he likens to children’s meaningless scribbles. And meaningless they are, especially with the sub-par explanations he gives with each series. Perhaps he reveals too much; that there really isn't as much going on behind each photo as one might give him credit for.
One of the finer points of the show is the fact that Ruff focuses on precision within fine art, especially with his large-scale passport style portraits (which, gasp, he actually took). He is a product of the Academy of Art that studied under the Bechers, who, along with his peers, such as Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, elevated photography into the realm of fine art. These technically crafted, extremely large prints are a fine example.Such technical precision, however, may easily be lost on anyone outside the world of photography, and is unlikely to be enough to make the aesthetics of this exhibition alone stick with you for very long.
Jacob P.
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