Thomas Ruff at Rüdiger Schöttle

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The absolute banality of Ruff against the subjects depicted. Some subjects: Skies littered with stars, explicit sex, people's unique and individual faces: all are given a treatment that is attempted to be at total remove, Ruff's almost struggle to render it boring. All the grandiose pomposity used to describe the "historically and photographically fascinating source material" is given what is akin to pressing ⌘I in photoshop. The measure of the means doesn't necessarily define the ends, but the gesture's simplicity, along with all its attendant "negativity," doesn't so much revitalize the source material, as the PR would imply, as it shows the source - as any other material - as manipulable by the slightest command to alter it indefinitely, completely alter it, at a whim be reduced to complete and utter inversion, and all the stupid simplicity of that.


see too:  Thomas Ruff at S.M.A.K.

Thomas Ruff at S.M.A.K



Of all the Dusseldorfers, Ruff’s brilliant origins, as the most boring among, saved him the inevitable decline of initial impressiveness since it was all already, had always been, mired in conceptual dust, making him the smartest guy in the room, hard to get tired of something that was tired to begin with. Their slightly bent derivativeness, of all the projects strata, Warhol by way of driver’s license, Richter blurs, Science approbation through appropriation, virtual photograms, etc... it’s all a clever connect the conceptual-historico dots whose failing to come full circle (reveal something concrete) your standard dissonance equaling enigmatic art poetry. The blandness of all the miracles on display here meant to weigh like the blankness of Celmins’s stars, the discrepancy between seeing and knowing and raw computing power vs photograms and your spirit versus your image, and technology vs banality, and school dogma vs blankness, the cold embalm soothes the atrophied soul well, I sorta like Ruff’s dark hard paralysis candy, Richterian emptiness.