Ruff Trade

What you see, above, is not my own image. It's one of Thomas Ruff's Nudes. For this entry, I thought I would share some of my inspiration. I wrote the following text for my lithography class, to discuss the inspiration for my final. It is short, and just skims the surface of research I have been doing, but I still think it is insightful.

On Thomas Ruff’s 2000 Nudes KN 30

I first discovered the work of German photographer, Thomas Ruff, about a year ago, while browsing the upcoming auction catalogue, on the Christie’s website — a site I frequently visit, partly to find inspiration, and partly to remind myself to continue working towards my dream job in the art market. I can no longer recall what work of his I saw, but it was intriguing enough to motivate me to do further research. At any rate, it was very soon after this decision that I discovered KN 30 (2000), of his Nudes series, and vowed to one day own a print of it.

Thomas Ruff, who is associated with the Dusseldorf School of Photography, is known for producing series of large, similarly composed photographs. However, in recent times, he has abandoned traditional photography, for digital manipulation of preexisting images. This is the case with his Nudes, which were sourced from internet pornography.  Ruff’s process, of using the work of others, as a basis for his own experiments, is not new or revolutionary. One could even argue that it is merely another expression of the belief that all ideas are borrowed, and that art is original only insofar as it recombines and reconstitutes its objects to form minor variants. 

Rather than perceiving this as a fundamental flaw, I recognize Ruff’s openly appropriated works as precedents for my own practice. I have always preferred to produce studies of the masters, and to adopt their vocabularies than to attempt to invent my own language. I believe that this is, at least in part, due to my difficulty expressing myself, as someone with alexithymia — the inability to recognize emotion. Furthermore, as someone with Asperger’s, I lack the social intuition that most people develop early on. In response, I avidly study the behaviour of others, and have consciously appropriated much of my comportment from characters in the films I love. This is to say that, by beginning with an immediate source of inspiration, such as a photograph, and then, acting upon it, I can better understand myself, and my relation to the world in which I live. Even though this impure jest can never be a perfect representation of my true self, in providing me with a language, it arguably gives form to my self, because I would otherwise be unable to define it. Indeed, one could say that my perpetual sense of otherness attempts to resolve itself in a sort of Lacanian mirror created by the artistic self-expression of others.

There is another, less philosophical allure about Ruff’s KN 30: its mystery. The photograph features what appears to be a heavily blurred, but sexually suggestive, young woman, dissolving into an empty, dark background. It has a painterly quality, reminiscent of a number of Gerhard Richter’s blurred portraits, such as the 1996 Selbstportrait. For me, Ruff’s photograph evokes my own sexual frustration at the unknowability of women in my quotidian life, and of woman as Other. This anonymous woman is the exclusive subject, the sole receiver of my gaze, but she does not submit herself to my power as the beholder. Not only is she forever unfocused, taunting my desire to know her, but she crosses her languid limbs, while pulling absentmindedly at her underwear, at once confirming her nudity and denying me the pleasure of beholding it. 

Yet not all enjoyment is thwarted. On the contrary, her suggestive mystery stimulates the imagination, inviting fantasy well beyond that which can be offered or supplied by the instant, explicit gratification that is internet pornography. Although Ruff did not inspire my Models series, his tormenting blur, in Nudes, parallels one of the primary goals of my series. I wanted to transform these impossibly beautiful, and completely inaccessible women into purely aesthetic paintings — idolatrous objects — thereby underscoring the very nature of my subject. The viewer recognizes the basic form of the subject, but is obliged to revel in the limited amount of information provided by the posterized image.