Thomas Ruff, phg.01, 2012. Chromogenic print from the Photograms series.

Thomas Ruff, Zycles 3080, 2009. Made with Cinema 4D software.

WORDS BY: John D’Agostino

Thomas Ruff: ma.r.s.08, 2010.

Ruff takes the NASA generated imagery and effectively “colorizes” the images himself, much as Ted Turner did some years ago with black and white movies. This lends a surreal, eerie and fictional quality to the images, as the color is quite literally ‘added’ after the fact, and not simply tuned or adjusted.

‘It is maybe because photography has been misused such a lot that I think you have to be very careful when you’re looking at a photograph. You always have to know the conditions under which it has been made – because otherwise you cannot read it, or you could misunderstand it, or the image can be misused. Since photography is such a realistic medium, it pretends that everything you’re looking at was in front of the camera. But in the meantime it wasn’t.’          -Thomas Ruff

If photography pretends to show us reality, Ruff delights in showing us the deception behind it, almost as a kind of Penn & Teller figure, eager to pull back the curtain on the manipulations in his process.

Thomas Ruff, Andere Portrait, 1985.

One of Ruff’s lesser hailed but brilliant projects is his series of Anderes portraits. Using an analog machine Berlin police used in the 1970′s to create composite pictures of witness descriptions, Ruff reconstructed artificial faces, mixing two faces at a time, male with male, male with female.

Ruff’s photographs have lost their innocence. Their new-found authenticity, if they have one, is in a pre-arranged reality true to Ruff’s vision of it. He considers himself an investigator of the medium.

His photograms series, currently up at Zwirner gallery, turns this well known photographic tradition on its head, making them digital, multiple, and enlarging them to gigantic sizes.

Formerly one of the most ‘handmade’ of mediums, made literally by placing objects directly onto photographic paper and exposing them without a camera (to great effect by masters like Maholy-Nagy or Man Ray), Ruff’s illusory depths here are created entirely in computer via a ‘virtual darkroom’ that employs lighting effects and simulated objects.

Thomas Ruff, r.phg.03, 2012. Chromogenic print.

Ruff’s work is a repeated exercise in a technology mediated vision, where process is unavoidable. And yet, it is, in the end, as always, a promise.

New technology promises us that it will allow us to see new kinds of images – and that the images made with these processes will be inherently new, exciting, significant. And that these images will be as good, if not better? than the old-fashioned handmade.

The digital may indeed yet fulfill all of these promises. Or it may not. Interestingly, much of Ruff’s latest work is so quite literally computer generated that some of his projects could technically be thought of as more “computer illustration” than photography. For Ruff’s “zycles” and photograms, (unlike his colorized MA.R.S pictures for example), have no actual counterpart in any kind of reality.

For me, the most troubling aspect of this technological promise is the degree (or not) to which such processes can still project at least a modicum level of humanity, for that in the end, is the eternal question. Do computer generated images eventually throw out the baby with the bathwater? Do they somehow lose their humanity in the process? At present this is still unclear.


The machine made image is here. And it is here to stay – that is unavoidable. Someday, as artificial intelligence experts think , we may even have autonomous AI’s, specially designed ‘artistic’ programs, that will create works of art for us all by themselves.

But whether these computer generated forms can still teach us something about ourselves? or somehow convey human passions, human concerns, human ambitions? That is another matter. Or if these new processes, now stripped of their humanity, just provide us back with the cold, logical stare of an algorithm, a computation, a set of data. The artist, now effectively handicapped and complacent, content to just show whatever the machine can now make – much easier than he ever could.

In some cases, technology serves only to terribly alienate both producer and audience. This is no better illustrated than by the sad testament of George Lucas’s Star Wars prequel films, whose hamfisted and uncomfortable scenes of dialogue make the original films sound like high Shakespeare. It was often not the actors fault, for Lucas, in love with new technology, forced the hapless all-star cast to stare into empty green screens all day,  “imagining” a dialogue with a to-be-later-added CGI character. Perhaps this is an apt metaphor too, this imagining a non-existent dialogue with technology.

However, the key, I believe, particularly for Ruff, is in his role as mediator of the machine. The real art in his work, if you will, is in the mediation. In the quality, in the degree to which (or not) he can effectively and subtly manipulate the computer generated effects to his own personal ends. At times, his work does indeed feel revolutionary and daring, his commitment to a new visionary kind of take on photography assured.

The HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And yet, at other times, some works come across as a little too cold and impersonal, a little too scientific? A little too artificial. One is reminded of the critique of another great science fiction auteur, director Stanley Kubrick, whose  gloomy genius some critics felt lacked an emotional richness, and eventually sympathized a bit too much with the inhuman over the human: all those automated dolly shots into the distance, the sinister HAL computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the sadistic drill sergeants screaming at Marine drones in Full Metal Jacket, sexual fantasy and love reduced to shattered myths in the widely misunderstood Eyes Wide Shut. In Kubrick’s seminal Paths of Glory, years earlier, it was all too clear that Kirk Douglas  was  fighting against the automated systems of bureaucracy and control, even if the war could not be won, it was something to at least be resisted. But in later films, it is not so clear at all. The machine, it would seem, finally won.

Actress Sean Young as Rachel, the haunting Replicant, in Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, 1982.

And yet, the artificial does not always have to be inhuman, as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner reminds us. Ironically, the most “human” and rich and emotionally complex characters in this dystopian future are arguably the Replicants, the artificially created ‘simulation’ human beings. Harrison Ford’s Deckard realizes that his role as bounty hunter / pseudo slave-catcher is the actual act of dehumanization, made even more poignant by the final possibility that he is a Replicant himself, tricked into hunting down his own kind because he is told they are inferior beings. Interestingly, Blade Runner’s Replicants have a passion for photographs – they need them! even if they are based on untrue memories.

As Alan Turing famously hypothesized in his Turing test, the day we are convinced we are conversing with a human being, but rather are in fact really communicating with just a computer or artificial intelligence program, is the day we must treat and “think” of the artificial as the human -even if it isn’t. 

So too, would I then prophesize a ‘Turing Test’ of sorts for the likes of computer generated artwork from artists the like of Thomas Ruff. The times we are fooled into thinking we may be looking at the hand of a human being, and not just some satellite or computer algorithm, is perhaps when this mechanized imagery is at its most brilliantly treacherous, when it is its most compelling.

For while Ruff’s endless experimentations and machinations are inherently fascinating to document and discuss, in the end, the degree to which they can somehow convey the human? is their real test, in my eyes.

In their eerie starkness, their ghostly afterimage, made entirely in the machine, some new kind of humanity – may just emerge.

Thomas Ruff’s photograms at Zwirner gallery, Spring 2013.

Thomas Ruff’s Photograms and MA.R.S exhibited at David Zwirner in New York, Spring of 2013.

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Poet, painter, engraver and prophet, William Blake (1727-1857) is arguably the greatest artist Britain ever produced, whose singular talents in both words and pictures were neglected for almost a century after his death. For Blake, a man’s vision was the one and only great fact about him. Poetry, art and religion were not separate activities, but all extensions of man’s greatest quality: his imagination. For an artist, the only question that interested Blake was: Do you see?

WORDS BY: John D’Agostino
WORKS: www.EmpireofGlass.com

The task Blake set out for himself was not to just depict a scene, but the representation of vision. For Blake, man’s ‘Original Sin’ was the losing of his visionary faculty to focus instead on more practical matters. The word mysticism originates from the ancient Greek, literally – to shut the eyes. In Blake, here is the artist-mystic, someone who claimed to have visions his whole life. ‘Seeing’ for Blake was not simply using the eyes, but the brain as well. Blake set out to use discipline and will-power on his senses to attempt to see further and deeper than any artist before him.

To see a world in a Grain of Sand,

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.

William Blake, The Ancient of Days, 1794.

In his prophetic books, Blake juxtaposed images and text in a way not done since the Middle Ages. His imagery is populated with great winged beasts, angels, demons, ethereal women, children at play, and imposing Yahwehs with long white beards. Blake synthesized many different myths and religious histories, both Christian and pagan, into psychodramas where the main action often would take place within the mind of a single individual. His creatures glow with a spectral, inner phosphorus, summoned up it would seem, directly from heaven or hell itself.

Rimbaud said: “The poet should be a visionary; one should make oneself a visionary . . .” This was Blake’s credo. Despite Blake’s unique gifts, he felt that the visionary faculty was something naturally occurring in all men. ‘The Man of Genius’ or those he called ‘The Men of Imagination’ were only individuals who had spent time and effort disciplining the visionary faculty.

Vision was not something you were born with, or somehow ‘caught’ by accident like the measles, but rather the result of a long, hard discipline of the senses, the forcing of the imagination in new directions. For Blake, everyone could see a world in a grain of sand – but only if they chose to see it. British author Colin Wilson deemed this essentially two different ways of seeing the world, that, can simply be called ‘The Inspired’ and ‘The Uninspired.’ The artist’s task is to connect the two. In Blake, imagination was “the real and eternal world”- of which the everyday “vegetable universe” was but just a faint shadow. Blake’s was not the reality of the retina. His pictures were a superior reality. Blake conceptualized the imagination – both in verse and image – as active, dynamic and most importantly, volitional. He makes almost all other artists seem like victims of impotent aspirations in comparison.

This text first appeared as part of the paper The Strength to Dream: How Remnants of the Past Illustrate a Legacy of the Representation of Vision by John D’Agostino, published in ArtForum’s Art&Education Papers Archive, 2010.

View the paper online here.
Purchase Hardcopy here.

As Blake puts it: ‘And I know that This World is a World of Imagination & Vision… to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees.”

Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter series of novels such as Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs often make use of Blakean imagery. In Michael Mann’s underrated thriller Manhunter (1986), William Peterson’s knack for seeing as killers do leads him to Francis Dollarhyde, the ‘Tooth Fairy’ killer. Kidnapping an unscrupulous tabloid reporter, Dollarhyde shows his bound victim slides of William Blake to terrify him. On the screen he shows him Blake’s The Great Red Dragon – the combined fears of all of mankind: the Prince of Darkness himself, from The Book of Revelations.

Do you see? Do you see? Dollarhyde asks. For Blake, the answer was definitely a yes.   •

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Skeleton & Flesh (2012)

New Works from Empire of Glass

John D’Agostino, Spring Torrents, 2012 (in progress). 4 panels, approx 10×20 feet.

John D’Agostino, The Hammer of Los, 2012 (in progress). 4 panels, approx 10×20 feet.

John D’Agostino, Summit & Flower, 2012 (in progress). Diptych: approx. 60×96″

Works currently in progress for 2012′s body of work include a number of new sizes, including diptych, triptych, square and more.

For more information on these new works, please contact the artist or visit:

www.EmpireofGlass.com

The post Skeleton & Flesh appeared first on John D'Agostino's The Treachery of Images.

WORDS BY:   John D’Agostino
WORKS:    www.EmpireofGlass.com
One of America’s most acclaimed artists, Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) embraced virtually every artistic medium, from stained glass windows, lamps and mosaics, to pottery, metalwork, interiors and enamels.
 

Louis Comfort Tiffany, Fish Panel, ca. 1906. Provenance: Vito D’Agostino

Louis Comfort Tiffany, Gould Landscape Window, 1910. Provenance: Miss Helen Gould, Vito D’Agostino.

Tiffany asked why so many of us made such little use of our eyes, and why we so obstinately refrained from using color in architecture, clothing and elsewhere, when nature so clearly indicated its mastership. He referred to this as the “sovereign importance of color” – and set out to rectify the situation in a relentless “quest for beauty.”

The elder son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of the famed Tiffany and Company jewelry store, the young Louis began his career as a painter, working under George Inness (1825–1894). Early notable designs of his included the redecoration of The White House for President Chester A. Arthur in 1881. At the World’s Fair in 1893 in Chicago, over a million visitors waited in line to see his ornate Byzantine Chapel, and at the Paris Universal 1900, Tiffany won the grand prize, a gold medal, and the Légion d’honneur. Internationally recognized as one of the greatest forces of Art Nouveau, Tiffany’s work would still fall completely out of fashion by the 1920’s.

Tiffany used the medium of glass to challenge the pre-eminence of painting. In glass, Tiffany found a medium of endless possibilities that expressed his love of light and color. He felt that no painting could capture its brilliance, at one point creating stained glass windows based on well known artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec to prove the point home. He could suggest a myriad of natural surfaces, from hard stone, primal magma and volcanic rock, to the sensuous, iridescent surfaces of winged creatures like butterflies, dragonflies and peacocks. Claiming a palette of some 5000 colors, Tiffany had an incredible array of different kinds of favrile glass to work with, from lava (volcanic) glass, to cypriote glass, to drapery glass and ripple glass, just to name a few.

Tiffany began experimenting with glass about 1875 in Brooklyn. He was inspired by ancient Roman, Greek and Egyptian glass, that, when dug up hundreds of years later, were imbued with an incredible iridescent quality, due to the ores and oxides of the earth seeping in. Frustrated with the limited palette of the glass of the time, he turned to making his own opalescent glass, with the colors fused inside in molten form. This was in stark contrast to the predominant method since the Middle Ages, which was the staining of colorless glass. Using a witch’s brew of secret recipes including metallic oxides, chromium, silver, gold and even uranium, Tiffany called his trademark glass favrile, after the Old English word fabrile (hand-wrought), a signification meant to reflect the hand-made quality of his glass. It cannot be duplicated even today. Quite simply, it is the finest glass ever made.

  “Infinite, endless labor makes the masterpiece. Color is to the eye as music is to the ear.”
-Louis Comfort Tiffany

This text first appeared as part of the paper The Strength to Dream: How Remnants of the Past Illustrate a Legacy of the Representation of Vision by John D’Agostino, published in ArtForum’s Art&Education Papers Archive, 2010.

View the full paper online here.
Purchase Hardcopy here.

An eccentric, autocratic perfectionist, Tiffany was notorious for walking down the production lines of Tiffany Studios with his cane, smashing anything he found to be unacceptable. Stories exist of craftsman actually scurrying to hide works from him in the fear that he would destroy them. “Mother Nature is the best designer” he said, and he set out to summon up the kingdom of nature, in all its glory. Using sophisticated abstract forms derived from nature as the material for his Art Nouveau motifs, historians like Robert Koch would later dub him the grandfather of Abstract Expressionism, a narrative confirmed by my father, artist John E. D’Agostino (born 1941), whose original inspiration for the abstract was not any of the expected originators of the movement, but Tiffany himself.

While Tiffany’s work would suffer from the vagaries of taste and fashion, the uniqueness of his oeuvre today is unquestionable. Perhaps the lowest moment was in 1936, when salvage dealers were smashing Tiffany’s celebrated lamps against the curbs, just so they could melt down the intricate bronze and lead frames holding the glass for scrap metal. For the artists of Art Nouveau, the lotus, a motif Tiffany would use again and again, appropriately, symbolized rebirth. For art lovers like my grandfather Vito D’Agostino, it was just a matter of time. Tiffany’s reputation would plummet from international renown to obscurity and disfavor, but only to rise yet even stronger once again.    •

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