Access / Absence by Will Fenstermaker

Access / Absence

Will Fenstermaker

ACCESS / ABSENCE William Fenstermaker

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Art Writing SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS April 29, 2016

Advisor: Nancy Princenthal

________________________________________

Chair: David Levi Strauss

________________________________________

Fig. 1: Remains of World Trade Center (2001), Peter Morgan ii

Fig. 2: jpeg de01 (2005), Thomas Ruff iii

Once upon a time there were the mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives,   for those who were not prisoners of the mass media. Well, it’s all over. We have to start again from the beginning,   asking one another what’s going on. —Umberto Eco

Contents Introduction In the Archive

Chapter One Access / Absence

Chapter Two Pixel Mosaic

Chapter Three Snapshot Aesthetics

Conclusion What Lies Behind the Image?

Note

Bibliography

List of Illustrations

Image Credits

Acknowledgements

Introduction In the Archive Tucked away in an office park in suburban Maryland are many hundreds of pictures. Pinewood boxes mark the names of artists whose works are stored within: William Hawkins, María Martínez-Cañas, Trevor Paglen, Gene Davis, and many other names that comprise the Smithsonian Institution’s permanent collection of contemporary art. Unframed works on paper are placed in flat-files, and unwieldy works are stored in crates. Many are hung on metal screens, which can be pulled out like drawers into a central aisle. Most of these screens hold more than a single work and, fully extended, will cross the aisle, transforming the corridor into something like a gallery of ever-expanding dimensions. It’s cold where such works are kept. There are many conservators and registrars who spend their days here, tasked with the upkeep and maintenance of the pictures that live within. They make use of various tools and machines for inspecting and conserving pictures, many of which are decades old. They thread in and out of the aisles, digging out paintings hidden behind paintings, unboxing photographs kept on shelves. Forms are sent to and from the office attached to the archive: notes on conservation, provenance, and loan requests. With the arrival of these last forms, works of art are taken from their screens and boxes, packaged soundly, and brought to new locations, where they’re secured to uncrowded white walls. The people who work in this facility monitor the flow of hundreds of pictures, moderate their exposure, and exercise quality control. Hanging on the third screen down on the left row is the reason why I’m here. Thomas Ruff ’s jpeg de01 was on view until only two weeks before I wrote to the Smithsonian, requesting access to their storage facility. For much of the year, this is where the work lives. There are other works from Ruff ’s “Jpeg” series in other storage facilities, but in February, 2016, none are on view in the United States. And yet, in part because of the event depicted in jpeg de01, the German artist has found his pictures in permanent collections of American art across the country.

When the third screen on the left is pulled out, the aisle becomes obstructed by a picture over nine feet high and six wide. At first, I’m standing very close. The geometric patterns that compose the photograph are much more apparent in person than in the book I had first seen this image in. Grids of eight-by-eight squares—each square just over a halfinch across—contain variations of a single hue, and the entire photograph appears like a mosaic of thousands of smaller pictures, each unit an abstract variation of the same sixtyfour units. I’m reminded of a conversation between William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, whose paintings are often subdivided grids, like cross-sections of bustling apartment buildings. Burroughs said that Gysin’s paintings reminded him of myriad worlds “illuminated by each individual color.”1 A world of blues, and a world of reds, a world for every shade in between. Gysin replied that one is incapable of ever seeing all of these worlds at the same time. “No,” Burroughs said. “I can’t see all of these different levels at once because it is as if they existed independently only.” Each piece accessible only individually, the conglomerate inseparable from its parts. He might have been describing this photograph, too. Up close, these grids stretch in seemingly infinite variations several feet to my left and right, above and below me. Some grids appear to be composed of uniform units, or almost so. Others are mosaics of sixty-four different hues. I begin to adjust my eyes to these grids and see them as units in and of themselves, and then, in certain areas, several grids seem to connect together in some semblance of a larger picture. These conglomerations are fleeting, each connection dismantled almost as soon as it’s noticed. Everything before me—this archive, this mosaic, Burroughs’s conversation running through my head—contributes to a fractal space in which relations are incessantly reconfigured, seemingly distinct objects blending together by virtue of their proximity to one another or via some other vague, unknowable connection. Here is where images, once removed from their original places in the world, are made more clearly distinct from that William S. Burroughs, “Port of Entry,” in Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs   1960–1997, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2001), 652–56. 1

which they represent, by nature of their relations. The kaleidoscopic grid before me mimics the shifting archive, as if a quivering network had settled over the room. Pixels, units of space to be filled and arranged in every which way until, at last, they form an image. “When you see one layer of the picture,” Burroughs said, “then you suddenly see it all. The eye which I am using as a port of entry jerks me abruptly into a landscape I never saw before.” Gysin said that some people have voiced objections to exactly what Burroughs described, as if to suggest that his paintings don’t accurately depict the interrelations, the matter and time that fill the space between things. However, Burroughs defended Gysin. “Everything can and does become something else,” he said. I take a few steps back. The image takes form.

Fig. 3: jpeg de01 (2005), Thomas Ruff in the Smithsonian Institution storage facility near Washington, DC, in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, February 10, 2016.

Chapter One Access / Absence To the individual, the collective experience of the age represents a bond—and also,   in a sense, security: there will always be possibilities even in disaster. —Gerhard Richter, 1962

What happened in spiritual terms, the leap out of security, out of what is usually   taken for granted, out of life, that sometimes happens to a small extent in art,   too, otherwise art is nothing. —Karlheinz Stockhausen, regarding his description of the 9 /11 attacks as “the greatest work of art imaginable,” 2001

When the Twin Towers fell, Thomas Ruff was on Canal Street. A photographer by training, he ran toward the destruction with a camera in hand. The attacks on September 11 are said to be the most photographed events in history, events designed to be endlessly repeated through photographs.1 Ruff ’s photos, though, can’t be found among the thousands made that day. When he returned to his studio in Düsseldorf, Germany, the artist sent his film to a developer and the rolls returned blank. He blamed this on an airport scanner, or perhaps his camera’s batteries were dead, but it hardly seemed to matter. Ruff had, by then, long been using found images as source material for his work, and newspapers and TV channels across the globe had already broadcast thousands of images of the devastation in Manhattan. A fledgling internet media industry had begun to shape itself around the seemingly endless eye-witnesses, photographers, and videographers. Peter Morgan worked as a photojournalist for Reuters on September 11, when, like Ruff, he photographed the events on the ground. By that evening, a photo of his was on the homepage of the Washington Post website. According to a press release from late October, the Washington Post, “like nearly every top news site in the nation… saw an unprecedented spike in traffic” in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. That month, they reached 242 million monthly views—131 million more than their monthly average up until 1

David Levi Strauss, “The Highest Degree of Illusion,” in Between the Eyes (New York: Aperture, 2003), 182. 5

that point.2 It’s difficult to estimate what percentage of these viewers saw Morgan’s photograph, but regardless of the number of views, this image, and others like it, were part of a major recalibration in the viewing habits of a specific media consumer. One whose relation to the world revolved increasingly around a burgeoning stream of digital images, which were to be found over a rapidly fragmenting media landscape that was fighting to meet a sudden demand for web content. In his essay “Reweaving the Internet: Online news of September 11,” the journalist and media critic Stuart Allan observes that “few online journalists would dispute the claim that television led the way in covering the attacks during early hours.” However, throughout the day, the websites of mainstream news outlets, like msnbc and Associated Press, were overwhelmed by users who sought additional information online. In its early stages, the web simply lacked the bandwidth to support the number of visitors who were now flocking online, desperate for more information. These sites responded by streamlining their pages, stripping them of non-essential data, and, in many cases, expanding available bandwidth to accommodate rising traffic, and drastically lowering image resolutions; cnn cut their average page size from 255 kilobytes to about 20 kilobytes. Yet, mainstream outlets continued to struggle with managing the flow of traffic, and users turned increasingly to lesser-known sites, like the Drudge Report, which Allan singles out as an example of one such formerly niche forum. “Definitions of what counted as a ‘news’ site were even more dramatically recast by the crisis,” Allan writes. “Several non-news sites stepped in to play a crucial role, their operators promptly recasting them so as to make information available as it emerged.” As part of the desire for more information, viewers who, on September 10, might have relied almost entirely on television news and the accompanying sites of major networks, began moving outward, further into the internet, which found itself uniquely able to satisfy the burgeoning demand. For someone trying to make sense of the attacks, the Don Marshall, “September Breaks All Records for Washingtonpost.com; Site Doubles Page Views and Posts Largest Visitor Gain of Top Newspaper Sites,” Washington Post (October 24, 2001).   www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/mediakit/mediacenter/sept.htm. 2

Fig. 4: jpeg ny02 (2004), Thomas Ruff

aftermath, and the perpetrators’ justifications, there was no shortage of content. The critic David Levi Strauss notes that “there were so many photographs taken of the event and its aftermath that the New York Times changed its policies to include more images.”3 In fact, the testimonies of witnesses—reported, recorded on video, and captured in photographs— proved too numerous for newspapers and cable networks to handle, even within the 24 hour news cycle, and so the web became home to seemingly endless amateur photos, videos, and verbal accounts. Letters written by survivors. Photographs of the missing. Notes from employees of the World Trade Center. Assurances to family members with internet connections that their loved ones were safe. On September 12, the internet scholar Rogers Cadenhead observed to the New York Times, “This unfathomable tragedy reminds me of the original reason the Internet was invented in 1969—to serve as a decentralized network that couldn’t be brought down by a military attack.” 4 In their October press release, the Washington Post boasted of its “unique position as the only top news site not linked to a television network or a nationally distributed publication.” Among today’s media producers, no one can say that this is still the case. By 2004, when Ruff began to revisit the events of September 11, he found a web media industry that had settled into its new role as a reliable, yet balkanized, forum for timely original reporting. And, when Ruff turned to the internet for images for his “Jpegs” project, one of the photos he found was that by Peter Morgan, on the homepage of the Washington Post. The nature of 9/11, as an event designed to be photographed, means that there is no single iconic image. There are, instead, immediately recognizable categories of images: the first plane before impact, the North Tower standing above smoke, ashen scenes on the ground, first responders in action, of which the photos of James Nachtwey come closest to

Strauss, “The Highest Degree of Illusion,” 184.

Stuart Allan, “Reweaving the Internet: Online news of September 11” in Journalism After September 11,   ed. Barbie Zelizer (New York: Routledge, 2002), 119–40. 4

iconic. The redundancy of such images is pertinent to Ruff ’s project, as it resists the process by which events are reduced to an idealized, iconic image.5 “Most of the images [in the “Jpegs” series] were taken from the Internet,” Ruff has said. “Some come from postcards, others I took. What I did [with the digital images] was alter their pixel structure, enlarging them, sometimes changing the color slightly.”6 Morgan’s photo is still available today for download from Reuters, and the fullresolution image contains about 450 kilobytes of data. When Ruff downloaded Morgan’s photo, he compressed it to 85 kb—less than a fifth of its original size—and saved it as a jpeg image. In doing so, he stripped most of the data from the file. The jpeg file format compresses images by dividing them into more manageable packets of data, which take the form of eight-by-eight square grids of tonal variations within a single hue. The file format from which his series gains its name condenses the image into a characteristic gridded structure. When Ruff printed the compressed version of Morgan’s photo to over nine feet in height, he made this pixelated structure immediately apparent to any viewer. Then, he mounted it on glass and named it jpeg de01.

✜ In 1983, the Italian polymath Umberto Eco wrote about the fracturing of the media landscape by television, which had led to an “incontrollable plurality of messages that each individual uses to make up his own composition with the remote-control switch.” 7 Under such a condition, it became no longer possible to hold over this landscape a single umbrella

The example of manufacturing of iconicity that most readily comes to mind is Bill Gates’s decision to move Corbis’ servers to an underground location in Pennsylvania. Most images are buried, while a single, iconic image is preserved and circulated. This image, chosen by Corbis, becomes our perception of the event because it is the only one on the market. See: Erin Biba, “Underground Caverns Keep Things Cold, Safe… and Secret,” Wired (January 31, 2011). www.wired.com/2011/01/ff_caverns_safeguard. 5

Vicki Goldberg, “In Conversation: Thomas Ruff with Vicki Goldberg,” The Brooklyn Rail (June 1, 2005). www.brooklynrail.org/2005/06/art/thomas-ruff. 6

Umberto Eco, “The Multiplication of Media,” in Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt, 1986), 148. 9

Fig. 5: jpeg bd01 (detail, 2007), Thomas Ruff

named “mass media,” as theorists such as Marshall McLuhan had done. In 1967, the same year as the publication of McLuhan’s much-praised The Medium is the Massage, Eco had written, credibly, “McLuhan’s theses on the nature of the media stem from the fact that he uses the term ‘media’ broadly, for phenomena that can at be at times reduced to the Channel, and at other times to the Code, or to the form of the message.”8 In these writings, Eco aims to reorient media criticism in such a way that it no longer relies on totalizing, overwrought theories that mass media—and, in particular, the “bombardment of information”—lead, somehow, to the end of humanity. The prevailing theory of the late twentieth century was that images of violence were “desensitizing” and contributed less to documentation than to spectacle.9 The theorists who promoted this conception are dubbed “apocalyptic” by Eco, who restates their view: “The mass media do not transmit ideologies; they are themselves an ideology.”10 The bombardment by information and imagery, for the apocalyptics, leads to the obsolescence of the human being, by limiting its experience to an artificial representation of reality. The experience of an actual world is nullified by a representational one, they claimed. 11 If seen through this apocalyptic view, Ruff ’s “Jpeg” series could be taken as exemplary of the digitization of the contemporary experience as one with a screen. Through a tautological reflexivity, Ruff ’s images represent the representation of images.

Eco, “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare,” in Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt, 1986), 138.

See: Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Kalamazoo, MI: Black & Red, 1967); Jean Baudrillard,   Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1994); The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1991); Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1977). 9

Eco, “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare,” 136–37.

This fatalistic view has been extended. To propose that “The Internet Does Not Exist,” as e-flux does in a 2015 anthology, is to commit an act of violence in the second order. To speak of “the cloud,” for example, is to speak a posteriori of its infrastructure—the servers buried in remote deserts, the cables that span entire oceans, the laws and regulations dictating the laying of wires inside buildings, which in turn connect to myriad boxes and emit measurable waves. If the complexity of such a system is unimaginable, all one has to do is ask one of the thousands of people who face daily harassment on social media, who have had to move homes or request the help of police in response to death threats and vows of sexual vendettas, for their stances on the theory that such interfaces are not, in fact, real. That they’re merely the “simulacrum” of some actual peril. Or that, at the very least, the origin of the words found so threatening is shrouded in doubt, as if they appeared from a magical ether rather than were cast by the hands of a man—and it’s usually a man—espousing actual hate. A final example: We know the Gulf War took place because we can call up documentation of it instantaneously, and the photos will give us the faces of people who died. 11

For Eco, McLuhan presented an opening for an alternate reading. Eco writes, “Where the apocalyptic saw the end of the world, McLuhan sees the beginning of a new phase of history,”12 wherein the human being became a more social organism due to the uniformity of content within mass media. For McLuhan, the human being does not become entirely obsolete, as this new, more social creature has been born, and exists in a visual space that “is uniform, continuous, and connected.” 13 In The Medium is the Message, McLuhan writes that “Real, total war has become information war… The cold war is the real war from—a surround—involving everybody—all the time—everywhere.” 14 The disciples of this view might interpret Ruff ’s “Jpegs” series as an embrace of the common experience of warfare and nature: as media. This is the position taken by Bennet Simpson in the introduction to Aperture’s 2009 monograph on the “Jpeg” series: The Web is our age’s total representation: a construction or rendering of what is known, experienced, exchanged, spoken, and shown. Ruff ’s photographs suggest pictures of “the world” in its current guise—not as an individual vision, but as an authorless, generic, and collective expression. Or, in a word, as media. 15

It’s a reading condoned by Ruff, but in vague terms. “Probably I’m working on a kind of grammar of the media,” he says in an interview with Vicki Goldberg.16 When discussing the “Jpegs” project, and his work in general, Ruff often foregrounds the history of the medium itself. Adrian Searle’s review of a Tate Modern survey reads, “his work has always been concerned with the emptiness of the photographic image, the camera’s affectless gaze, and how the gaze itself—of the camera as much as that of the artist or of the people being photographed—is his true subject. What Ruff is really about, this line runs, is the fact that the photograph can only ever record the surface of things.”17 12

Eco, “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare,” 136–37.

Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (Berkeley, CA: Ginko Press, 1996), 45.

Ibid., 138.

Bennet Simpson, “Ruins: Thomas Ruff ’s Jpegs,” in Jpegs (New York: Aperture, 2009), 3.

Goldberg, “In Conversation.”

Adrian Searle, “The Evil of Banality,” The Guardian, (May 13, 2013).   www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2003/may/13/photography.artsfeatures. 17

Seeing a change in the dissemination of photographs, their context, and their composition, Ruff acknowledges that his work is, “probably,” a way of bringing this shift into view. The change is not superficial, though, but is rather inherent to the process. It has to do with the pixelated structure of immaterial images, and their new digital homes. I doubt that a reading of Ruff ’s work in line with McLuhan’s writings captures the complete picture. For one, the implication of this reading is that a person’s experience of an event or image is no longer an individual thing. Mass media, according to McLuhan, bring everybody into contact with the same things, and so experience becomes collective. This would imply that artists like Ruff are little more than the feeblest whistleblowers, who might hope to expose some mechanism of a systematized apparatus, but offer no glimpse of another way. When the concept of a “medium” is flattened to encompass all images everywhere, then never mind artistic decisions or channeled subjectivity: the “Jpegs” photographs would all come from the same content mill as the appropriated imagery itself, only with no self-awareness, no capacity for change. Eco departs from McLuhan by noting that ideological dictums could not be spread solely through control of the medium, as the meaning of an image is not transmitted along the same channels as the image itself. “The receiver of the message seems to have a residual freedom: the freedom to read it in a different way.”18 McLuhan’s information war is won not by those who control the message, but by the skeptical viewer. “The medium transmits those ideologies which the addressee receives according to codes originating in his social situation, in his previous education, and in the psychological tendencies of the moment.”19 Thus, Ruff ’s “Jpegs” can indeed make reference to the uniformity within the transmission of images—and the drive toward ideology—but must also make room for those who stand in front of the object itself, who find it in the halls of a museum, rather than transmitted through mass media.

Eco, “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare,” 138; emphasis in the original.

Ibid., 141. 13

Ruff, citing the photographs of Karl Blossfeldt, praises images that “cross over,” that defy isolated categories, 20 such as “documentary images” and “fine art photography.” He claims allegiance to the phenomenologist and media theorist Vilém Flusser,21 who writes that the production of photographs has become automatized, and images are now produced by a set of established rules, almost without the need for the human hand. Revolutionary freedom for photographers, Flusser writes, can be found in few places. Among them are images that defy categorization, because they are “unpredictable,” and deny the rules-based proliferation of the camera, which is conceived by Flusser as an independent apparatus.22 Eco and Flusser present two poles of the same argument. Where Eco gives agency to the viewer, Flusser gives it to the photographer; but both propose radical photography as an act of rebellion against, rather than complicity with, photography-as-media. Things begin to come into focus if we view Ruff as engaged in a little game, in which the players are the photographer and the viewer, and the objective is to subvert or make visible the ways in which various institutions objectify—in the literal sense, of transforming a thing into an object, which can be bestowed with value—and flex control over images. In his book, On the Museum’s Ruins, Douglas Crimp notes that when the history of photography was subsumed by the greater history of art, new categories were imposed on old photographs: Books about Egypt will literally be torn apart so that photographs by Francis Frith may be framed and placed on the walls of museums. Once there, photographs will never look the same. Whereas we may formerly have looked at Cartier-Bresson’s photographs for the information they conveyed about the revolution in China or the Civil War in Spain, we will now look at them for what they tell us about the artist’s style of expression.

The art industry thus exerts its power over art objects, ordering them “ontologically, as a museum of subjectivity… Everything that has determined its multiple practice is set aside

Philip Pocock, “Thomas Ruff,” Journal of Contemporary Art. www.jca-online.com/ruff.html.

Michael Famighetti, “Thomas Ruff: Photograms for the New Age,” Aperture (Summer 2013). www.aperture.org/blog/thomas-ruff-photograms-for-the-new-age. 21

Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2000). 14

in favor of photography itself. Thus reorganized, photography is readied to be funneled through a new market, ultimately to be housed in the museum.” Beginning with the silkscreens of Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, Crimp argues, the institutional ordering of photography as an art medium began to fail. He writes, “categories are subsequently divested of their fictive autonomy, their idealism, and thus their power.” As artists, photographers, and curators continue to subvert this drive toward categorization, they begin “to make inroads back into the world.” 23

✜ It seemed at times as though those who controlled the images maintained too tight a grip for me to ever gain access. For weeks I contacted museums and galleries all along the East Coast requesting permission to view the works they held from Ruff ’s “Jpeg” series. They were kind, but unhelpful. Ruff ’s gallery, David Zwirner, stonewalled requests for information. Both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York regretted to inform me that their holdings were not on view. The “Jpeg” works are face-mounted on glass, and so must be treated similar to large paintings, stored on sliding screens rather than in drawers; an object demanding a decision: whether to exhibit or to bury. The Met, I learned from a 2011 Wall Street Journal article, maintains a long-term storage facility with works by Anselm Keifer, Chuck Close, and Anish Kapoor only several blocks from where I live. This article mentions only a warehouse near a sports complex, commonplace, watched over by two cameras;24 I think I know which building this is, but can’t be sure. The facility where the Ruff was kept—which might have been the location mentioned by the WSJ and could easily be another—lacked a viewing room; otherwise, a curator assured me, I would certainly be allowed to view the work. Ruff ’s gallerist, David Zwirner, maintains a storage facility in the Chelsea gallery district, but I was similarly Douglas Crimp, “The Museum’s Old, the Library’s New Subject,” in On the Museum’s Ruins   (Woburn, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1993); emphasis in the original. 23

Erica Orden, “Where Museums Hide Treasures,” The Wall Street Journal (January 21, 2011).   www.wsj.com/articles. 24

refused access. As I wandered around Chelsea one day, knowing that buried amid the myriad nondescript garages were the works that I sought, as well as countless others, I thought about the information war and access; but I was not thinking of Marshall McLuhan, and certainly not yet Umberto Eco. Instead, I thought of Paul Virilio. In the titular essay of his 1994 book The Vision Machine,25 Virilio wrote that the new form of camouflage had little to do with disguising an object from view, and instead with overwhelming the surveillance system, hiding the real object in plain sight within the swarm.26 Secrecy achieved through propagation. After visiting jpeg de01 at the Smithsonian Institution’s facility outside of Washington, DC, my search spread westward until finally it reached the Pacific Ocean. The Broad Museum, newly opened in Los Angeles, owned three works from Ruff ’s “Jpeg” series. They only had to confirm that the photograph had been transferred over to their new facility downtown. When they did, I travelled to Los Angeles, a city to which I’ve never been, to experience an image. ✜ The truth about diamonds is that they aren’t actually rare. Their value comes from a vicelike grip on the market by a small number of businesses, which stockpile their gems, dishing out only enough to keep the price inflated. Like diamonds, chromogenic prints are produced in limited editions in order to control their value as objects. And they are fragile. Exposure to light, in particular, will damage them over time. The vaults beneath the Broad in Los Angeles, like the storage facilities of all such museums, are light and climate controlled, to ensure the longevity of the works. One vault in particular holds three works from Ruff ’s “Jpeg” series. There is jpeg ny05 (2004), another image from 9/11; jpeg bb03 Somewhat ominously, my copy of this book contains a printing error—I can only assume as the result of a tagging system. The 18 opening pages are actually the first of a book about training horses. The author notes, much as Virilio does subsequently, that in training a horse, “you must understand his nature and behavior, and you must have his attention.” Susan E. Harris, The USPC Guide to Longeing and Ground Training (New York: Howell Book House, 1997), 3. 25

Paul Virilio, “The Vision Machine,” The Vision Machine (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, 1994), 69. 16

Fig. 6: jpeg bb03 (2007), Thomas Ruff in cold storage at the Broad Museum, Los Angeles, California, â&#x20AC;¨ February 24, 2016.

Fig. 7: Aquarium, Atlanta, Georgia (left, 2013), Thomas Struth; and Madonna I (right, 2001), Andreas Gursky in cold storage at the Broad Museum, Los Angeles, California, February 24, 2016.

(2007) depicts the burning of oil fields by Iraqi military forces in Kuwait; jpeg bd01 (2007) is of an anonymous skyscraper. Along with these works are photos by numerous other artists, including Ruff ’s contemporaries Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, who are among the highest paid photographers in the world. The curator who serves as my guide tells me that prior to the museum’s opening in late 2015, the Broad existed solely as a number of warehouses in Santa Monica, and visitors needed to arrange special appointments to gain access. The construction of the museum downtown was undertaken, in part, out of a desire to bring Eli Broad’s collection to the public. 27 Perhaps because of the collection’s history as an exceptionally private institution, the architects of the new space, the firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, decided to make the storage of artworks an exhibition itself within the museum. Climbing the staircase at the center of the museum, the viewer comes upon small windows, which look upon a room filled with paintings and photographs hung on screens, not dissimilar to the Smithsonian’s larger facility. Guided tours will take visitors inside the room; automatic lights flicker on, a screen on which paintings are hung is pulled out like a drawer, photos are snapped. But the curator and I are standing in a vault beyond the tour groups’ route. Surrounded by photographs, the curator tells me that she sees the building as “a physical manifestation of DS+R’s photographic work, in which they turned a camera to look deep into the innermost spaces of buildings.” In response, I mention Louise Lawler’s photographs, which track works of art as they move through institutions, including some made to accompany On the Museum’s Ruins. The utility of photographs plays an important role in Crimp’s argument, as their inclusion in the collections of museums of art marks a major shift in the medium’s history. In fact, photography’s very designation as a “medium,” Crimp argues, is due to the

Despite the cynical quotes surrounding “Museum” in his headline, Ben Mauk in The New Yorker makes a good point about the historical precedent for the conversion of private collections into museums: “Private collections have long existed in the public sphere—the Frick Collection, once a family affair, is a world-famous New York institution—but, in recent years, such collections have increased in size, influence, and renown, particularly in markets… that have a dearth of institutional art spaces and a surfeit of would-be Medicis.”   See: Ben Mauk, “The Rise of the Private Art ‘Museum,’” The New Yorker (May 28, 2015).   www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-rise-of-the-private-art-museum. 27

Fig. 8: Pollock & Tureen (Arranged by Mr. & Mrs. Burton Tremaine, 1964), Louise Lawler

engulfment of the history of photography by the larger history of art. Ruff ’s work is not innocent in this matter. He is well known as a member of the Düsseldorf school of photography, a group of artists who studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher in 1970’s Germany, and some of whom maintained affiliations with the painter Gerhard Richter. The Düsseldorf photographers are often held as examples of the commodification of photography and art objects in general as, in the 80’s, their work began to sell at exorbitant prices. 28 When it was sold at auction for $4.3 million in 2011, Gursky’s Rhine II was the most expensive photograph ever purchased.29 Ruff often protests the lumping together of Gursky, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, and himself, despite the fact that he shares a studio in Düsseldorf with Gursky. “There was never really a group,” Ruff has said. When he began schooling in the late 70’s, Struth was away in New York City on a stipend, and the Bechers were perpetually busy. Instead, Ruff says, his Kunstakademie friends were mostly students of Richter and Klaus Rinke.30 And it’s true that Ruff could be considered the most heretical disciple of the Bechers, as he abandoned early on the characteristic austere air and edge-to-edge clarity, and instead claimed the influence of painters. When Eco described the freedom of the receiver of a photograph to interpret a message at will, qualified by one’s codified subjectivity, he was calling for a form of “semiological guerrilla warfare,” in contrast to the information war as conceived by Virilio and McLuhan. Such a battle, he writes, “is not to be won where the communication originates, but where it arrives.”31 If the only remaining freedom lies within the viewer or the creator, and must resist the forces that would turn an object into an agent of mass

In the Broad’s vault, where the three most famous men of the Düsseldorf school share space with Jeff Wall, Sharon Lockhart, and others, are two versions of the same photograph by Andreas Gursky. When I ask, the curator tells me that one is a reprint, and when the artist gifted this updated version, he asked that the old one be destroyed. The museum declined. Florence Waters, “Why is Andreas Gursky’s Rhine II the most expensive photograph?” The Guardian (November 11, 2011). www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/8884829/Why-is-Andreas-Gurskys-Rhine-II-the-mostexpensive-photograph.html. 29

Daniel Birnbaum, “Thomas Ruff talks to Daniel Birnbaum,” Artforum (April 2003).

Eco, “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare,” 142. 21

media, then the only power left to the institution is to control access to the art object. But Ruff ’s images are by and of the internet. The art object comes and goes, but a digital image, if it lives online, can remain accessible there. It isn’t tied so strictly to the object and can slide on and off at will; it has the potential to fulfill Roger Cadenhead’s vision of the internet as a decentralized network, a defense against targeted attacks. Yet, Ruff ’s “Jpegs” are, undeniably, objects: Their end state is here, in a museum, and the digital files are protected. Ruff ’s oscillation between the realms of cyberspace and meatspace is what strikes me most about his “Jpeg” series, because by tracing it we can map the symbiotic modeling that occurs between the internet and the archive or museum. It is in this liminal space— where the artist makes his decisions, while also embracing the many decisions relegated to an algorithm beyond human hands—that freedom can reside. These moments comprise the act of objectification, which pauses the stream of transformations, causes the viewer to look meaningfully at the state changes. When Ruff removed a digital photograph from one circulation and brought it into another, it existed for a time in an intermediary stage, between the deluge of digital imagery and the engulfment of the object by institutions, of which the internet, increasingly, is also one. Rather than Ruff, it is Thomas Struth who most directly works with the role of photography within the museum institution. For decades, he composed photographs of museum patrons standing before works of art, Struth facing their backs. One room at the Broad, however, contains four works from Struth’s “Audience” series, in which the artist inverts his gaze. Rather than examining from afar the relationship between museums and their patrons, Struth has placed his camera at the foot of Michelangelo’s David, photographing the audience as they circle about and respond to the sculpture. I’ve always found them to be fascinating pictures, and having them arranged alone in a room, one on each of the four walls, gives rise to a curious realization: This is not exactly a museum of art. It’s a museum of museums. Our every attempt at establishing order is here on display.

Fig. 9: Audience 11 (Galleria dellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Accademia), Florenz (2004), Thomas Struth in the Broad Museum, Los Angeles, California, February 24, 2016.

Chapter Two Pixel Mosaic Aesthetics can be understood… as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of space and the possibilities of time. —Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics

We can’t rely on the picture of reality that we see, because we see it mediated through the lens apparatus of the eye, and corrected in accordance with past experience. —Gerhard Richter, 1972

Artists have long been willing to outsource fundamental steps of their processes and relegate the rendering of basic forms to other hands. Renaissance workshops followed medieval guilds, and coincided with early shifts from feudal to mercantile production. For Jonathan Crary, each new image production process results in a revised understanding of perception, and permits a different “mode of seeing” by the viewer. Beginning in the Enlightenment, he wrote in Techniques of the Observer, the accelerating rate at which new production processes were invented led to a period in which observers were constantly and profoundly altering their “set of relations between the body on one hand and forms of institutional and discursive power on the other.”1 While Crimp makes clear the reduction of an image, by a museum, into simply an artifact of a larger moment within the history of a particular medium, Crary argues that each medium, taken as a conglomerate of artists related through their techniques, contributes to a shuffling of the relationship between viewer and object. Through incremental developments, this relationship is no longer between a viewer and “an object quantified in relation to a position in space,” but of an observer “codified and normalized… within rigidly defined systems of visual consumption.”

Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 1992), 2–3. 24

For example, Crary notes that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “touch had been an integral part of classical theories of vision.” After the invention of various optical toys, which demonstrated vision’s freedom from simple representation of the external world, touch became disassociated from sight. “The loss of touch as a conceptual component of vision,” he writes, “meant the unloosening of the eye from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility and its subjective relation to perceived space.”2 This set off a chain of developments in the nineteenth century, through which vision came to be understood as a construction—one based on how the brain organizes sensory stimuli— rather than a strict reading of tactile representation. In the nineteenth century, with its unprecedented rate of invention of vision machines, this destabilization of the relationship between viewer and object led to the understanding that vision itself is “a kind of discipline or mode of work,” in which the reliability of perception could no longer be taken for granted. It’s not impossible for me to imagine the discomforting awe that struck the fireside poet Oliver Wendell Holmes when, in 1859, he first peered through a stereograph and was confronted with a picture of himself “not as a surface only, but in all our dimensions as an undisputed solid man of Boston.”3 I liken his experience to the first time I donned a virtual reality headset. But what strikes us today as rudimentary must once have been great wonders. Since the advent of computers, or perhaps shortly before, what Crary calls “modes of vision” have arisen faster than we can account for them. The sense of wonder in making new vision—seeing, suddenly, differently—still strikes us on occasion, but has become commonplace, even expected. With the discovery that perception itself is a construction, it is now being incessantly reconfigured, and we have come to expect as much. To a certain degree, this has to do with the treatment of images as visual information.

Ibid., 18–19.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” The Atlantic (June, 1859). www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1859/06/the-stereoscope-and-the-stereograph/303361. 3

Vilém Flusser defines information as “an improbable combination of elements,”4 suggesting that the significance of information is inversely correlated to the likelihood that such a combination of elements could arise randomly, or without mediation. For example, it’s unlikely that a random array of pixels would depict a human face; but if it did, that would certainly be significant. The mental capacity that developed to handle information processing, Flusser writes, is “second degree imagination.” This differs from first degree imagination, which “produces images that represent the concrete world,” in that second order imagination expresses itself through a juxtaposition of elements, rather than a linear progression of events. Flusser writes, Here is how second degree imagination works: clear and distinct elements, of which rational thought is composed, are being pulled from their linear structure in order to be inserted into other structures. They form thus mosaics, generally of two dimensions (as in computer screens)…5

The units of such mosaics are properly called “pixels,” and they are the most basic unit of Thomas Ruff ’s “Jpeg” series. ✜ A preeminent artist of “vision as a mode of work” is the German painter Gerhard Richter, a teacher at the Düsseldorf Academy when Ruff was a photography student. Richter’s photographic paintings, which he began in 1962, are handmade reproductions of photos. The photos were either taken by the artist himself, or collected in an archive he named Atlas. Sometimes these paintings were photographed and then destroyed, with only the archival negative or digital file remaining as evidence, and in other instances the painting is the final product. The use of photographs, Richter says, frees him of “the need to choose or construct a subject,” and allows him to avoid “any commitment to the subject.” When pressed for details by the art historian Benjamin Buchloh, Richter replies, “I looked for photographs that showed my present life, the things that related to me.” 4

Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 84.

Flusser, Into Immaterial Culture (New York: Metaflux, 2015), 30–31. 26

Fig. 10: Atlas (Sheet 13: Photographs from Newspapers, Books, etc., 1964), Gerhard Richter; â&#x20AC;¨ With grid marks visible. 27

Because, he believes, the objective quality of painting was “imperiled or made redundant since the invention of photography,”6 Richter was freed to concentrate on subjective, aesthetic decisions. Richter sees his photographic paintings, even when they’ve been reproduced and destroyed, primarily as a painter’s endeavor. “As far as the surface is concerned,” he writes, “my pictures have little to do with the original photograph. They are totally painting (whatever that may mean).” Nevertheless, in reproducing photographs, Richter took a systematic approach, in an effort to keep “the thing that distinguished the photograph from all other pictures” intact. The photograph to be painted was first partitioned into a grid, whereupon each section could be measured in relation to one another, and constructed in parts. Regarding the characteristic blur of his photorealistic paintings—as if the source photo was out of focus—Richter writes, “I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth, and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.”7 Ruff acknowledges in an interview that “one could say there is a resemblance between Richter’s approach to painting and our investigation of the photographic medium.” 8 There are other artists—indeed, painters—whose work can also be characterized as a modeling of information, and be used to draw helpful analogies in Ruff ’s work. Chuck Close’s works also have parallels with Ruff ’s, particularly in their progression toward the dissolution of images of über-clarity. The critic Nancy Princenthal notes that “the conceptual project to which Close had [by 1978] already… committed himself, which translates facial features into abstract data, has since become the bedrock of the Internetbased world, where digital identity capture and its fungibility (and theft) are matters of

Gerhard Richter, “Extracts from Writings and Interview 1962–2003,” in Gerhard Richter: Atlas, the Reader,   eds. Iwona Blazwick, Janna Graham, and Sarah Auld (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2003), 17–18. 6

Ibid., 13; emphasis added.

Birnbaum, “Thomas Ruff.” 28

Fig. 11: September (2005), Gerhard Richter

widespread concern.”9 Ruff also worked with similar themes predating the internet. Initially known for his austere portraits of Düsseldorf friends and classmates, begun around 1980, Ruff rejected the notion that such expressionless photographs captured any essence of the sitter. “He chose a neutral image of the face and upper torso that emphasized the portrayed person’s face and avoided any psychologizing interpretation,” a catalog published by the Haus der Kunst reads. “Because, according to Ruff, a photograph only reproduces the surface of things anyway.”10 Over a decade later, Ruff revisited portraiture with his “Andere Porträts” (“Other Portraits”) series, in which he overlaid old portraits of his in a Minolta Montage Unit, a device used by law enforcement to create composite images. Ruff then rephotographed the output, in part as a gesture toward the role of double-exposures within the history of the medium.11 The eerie effect, though, arises from the ghostly anonymity of a totally artificial face, which was nonetheless constructed by a machine used by law enforcement to obtain reliable identification. Regarding portraiture in this mode— which makes use of austere depictions in which the figure is centrally composed, first employed by colonialist and then ethnographic photographers—the critic Julian Stallabrass notes, “The push and pull of identification and distancing… exhibit[s] a transparent complicity with commercialized spectacle. There is a link, in other words, between the presentation of these subjects as a mere image and the familiar powerlessness of people in day-to-day democracy, of image and news management, of the hollowing out of citizenship in favor of consumerism.” 12 This style of photography, which captures none of the sitter’s “essence,” so to speak, relays no information other than outward appearance, is nonetheless taken by the state as a reliable record. The sitter is reduced to her image, her identity to “Citizen of the State.” Such issues of identification within a surveillance society, particularly as exacerbated in the age of the internet and of data mining, are a recurrent theme in Ruff ’s work. 9

Nancy Princenthal, “Chuck Close: Ways of Seeing,” in Chuck Close: Recent Work (New York: Pace, 2015), 7.

Okwui Enwezor, et al., Thomas Ruff: Works 1979–2011 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2012), 62.

Ibid., 118.

Julian Stallabras, “What’s in a Face?” October, vol. 122 (Fall, 2007), 71–90. 30

Fig. 12: PortrĂ¤t (K. Lehmann, 1986), Thomas Ruff 31

Fig. 13: Anderes Porträt 143/59 (1994–95), Thomas Ruff 32

Fig. 14: Self-Portrait II (2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;10), Chuck Close

“All over we have those video cameras. In the supermarkets, the car park,” Ruff says. “If you stand in front of a customs officer, you try to make a face like the one in your passport. So why should my portraits be communicative at a time when you could be prosecuted for your sympathies?” 13 The abstraction of people into data, images into concepts, comes, as influence, as much from Richter as from the Bechers and their typology grids. Barely a decade after the beginning of his photographic paintings, Richter began to see color as inextricable from composition, and began to use both in tandem as a gesture toward what he called “artificial naturalism.” In 1973, Richter painted a series of colored rectangles, their arrangement determined by a random process, as completely devoid of artistic intention as he could imagine. Richter described 1,024 Farben (1,024 Colors) as an attempt “to represent all extant color shades in one painting.” However, the actual palette was limited to 1,024 colors, as to go beyond that number, Richter thought, “seemed pointless, since the difference between one shade and the next would no longer have been detectable.”14 In Vik Muniz’s “Pictures of Color” series, the Brazilian artist reproduced famous paintings with swatches torn from perforated Pantone color palettes, which were arranged in a large grid that gives way to an image at a distance. These collages were photographed and reproduced as immense chromogenic prints, in which the dull tones of the collage contain myriad variations in hue, like a clay desert seen with the clarity of early morning light. In After Gerhard Richter, Muniz divided Richter’s canvas, Betty (1988), into such a grid, extending Richter’s original process of partitioning photographs to be painted. Each square of the grid was matched to a corresponding Pantone swatch, which also contains a small white strip beneath the colored square, listing a numerical identification for each unique color value. In finding the right shade of paint, an artist must make many decisions, the answers to which can only come from years of experience. What color is this? How does this color

Pocock, “Thomas Ruff.”

Richter, “Extracts from Writings and Interviews,” 14. 34

work with the others on the canvas? What layers need to be made to gain the desired shade and luminosity? How does the eye read this color as it runs along the canvas, carrying with it the remnants of all the other shades it has passed? And, finally, which pigments, specifically and in what amounts, to mix in order to gain the desired hue? To circumvent these questions, Muniz subdivides Richter’s Betty, and quantifies the color value of each partition. What comes after Richter, Muniz suggests, is the standardization of painting. To extend Muniz’s conception to its theoretical conclusion: an artist’s knowledge of paint and all its intricacies, whether gained through intuition or experience, no longer seems to be an important, if at all relevant, step in the process of art-making. This maroon is #7a2e16, for example, and the knowledge of this fact is divined not intuitively or within the process of painting, but from a codex or black box, which has performed the computation itself. The painter thus becomes a printer. Richter and Muniz’s standardized, gridded calibration of perception, which concentrates on hues within the middle ranges of human vision, contains striking similarities to the standardization of digital image formatting by the Joint Photographic Experts Group. The organization from which Ruff took his series’ name, jpeg was an acronym for an organization before it became a metonym for a class of image file formats. Since 1992, jpeg has published a “lossy” image compression algorithm as a way of storing images using relatively little memory, but at the expense of a certain amount of detail. Lossy compression means that the output of the compression process will contain different— usually less—data than the input. The most common containers for the jpeg compression method are jfif and jpeg/exif (or a combination of both), but because all jpeg containers use the “.jpeg”15 extension, the acronym for the institution has stuck as a metonym for a number of image formats. Jpeg compression depends on the fact that we don’t see color as well as we can see grayscale. We can’t register the full depth of high-frequency changes in color intensity either, so jpeg compression flattens out some of the more extreme color ranges into the Jpeg is both an acronym for the institution and a metonym for the various containers it publishes;   .jpeg refers to an image file saved under one of jpeg’s compression algorithms; “Jpeg” refers to Ruff ’s series. 15

Fig. 15: Gas Tanks (1983â&#x20AC;&#x201C;92), Bernd and Hilla Becher

Fig. 16: 1,024 Farben (1,024 Colors, 1973), Gerhard Richter

Fig. 17: After Gerhard Richter (2001), Vik Muniz 38

visible spectrum, assuming these losses will be negligible. The standard level of compression reduces the amount of color in an image by 75 percent. Such down-sampling has minimal effects on an image seen at a typical viewing distance, but the dullish colors become more visible at higher magnifications. As a result, many of the shapes in Ruff ’s “Jpeg” works wear purple haloes at a distance, but break into reddish-blue mosaics when enlarged or viewed up close. The jpeg and jpeg/exif algorithms also determine the composition of the image. These formats divide images into eight-by-eight square grids, and use a complex process known as “discrete cosine transform” to determine the luminosity of each of the sixty-four pixels. The intermediary stage is a grayscale pattern, on top of which a single hue is then laid, resulting in fairly detailed, but compartmentalized, images that best approximate their sources when not viewed too closely. The level of compression, the chrominance artifacts, and the compositional patterns are all predetermined by a rules-based decision-making process built by the engineers employed by jpeg. The only control retained by the artist within this process is to select the level of compression. Ruff chose to compress the “Jpeg” images as highly as he could—that is, he reduced their quality—which strips data from the image file and results in a tonally flat image. 16 When the low-res images are drastically enlarged, these automated processes become the composition of the work itself. It becomes immediately apparent that information is missing, that the continuity of the image’s representation has been disrupted. Ruff ’s use of the jpeg compression process did not begin in 2004, but rather in 2001, with his “Nudes” series. These works also took as their point of departure the viewing habits of new media voyeurs—in this case, those looking at pornography. A form of imagery in which amateurism is its own genre, pornographic photographs and video stills gave Ruff a pretext for exploring the proliferation and dissemination of digital images. Ruff doesn’t say whether his source images were also .jpegs, or whether they were different file formats. Because the .jpeg extension is the most common image file format, one might assume that his process actually entails a double compression (one by the original image-maker, and the second by Ruff). It’s likely that Ruff ’s project makes use of .jpeg images mostly, but also, possibly, png, tiff, gif, and raw files made by certain digital cameras, which all use different compression algorithms. I can only speculate. What is certain is that the compression algorithm that Ruff employed was one of the jpeg containers. 16

Throughout the series, leather-bound dominatrices wield whips and chains. Unsettlingly wide objects are inserted into orifices. In the relatively tame ree07 (Red Panties), a woman spreads her legs in a comparatively vanilla pose, mimicking the come-hither splay, if not quite the explicitness, of Courbet’s L’Origine du monde. Decades after the sexual revolution, the candid exploration of specific orientations and fetishes shouldn’t come as a surprise, and Ruff ’s aim isn’t to shock. When I first saw the “Nudes,” what most immediately stood out to me was not the blatant depiction of intimate sexual acts, but rather the ways in which the images were distorted and how this steered their effect away from more obvious pleasures. The process through which Ruff made his “Nudes” was largely the same as that of his “Jpegs.” After finding an image he liked on the internet, he saved it with fairly high compression, and then printed the image, enlarged to such an extent that the gridded structure becomes visible. The result is a lack of clarity in the image, as if viewed through a sheer veil. It’s a direct contrast to what we think of as pornography’s aim, which is typically to be as explicit as possible. Some critics have compared the pictorial effect to impressionism or pointillism, and this isn’t far off, but it’s also more than an art historical tip of the hat. My own sense of the “Nudes” is that they feel more like a Richter painting than a Seurat. While the “Nudes” do share the same pixelated structure as the “Jpegs,” their grids are much subtler, to the point that the subject is much easier to discern while only a few feet away. The photographs, like Richter’s paintings, seem to fade in and out of clarity depending on the distance they are from the viewer. For Richter, the purpose of this blur is “to make everything equally important and equally unimportant,”17 and there’s a similar flattening of hierarchies in the “Nudes,” where this process of ambiguation is more seamless than in the “Jpegs.” In the “Jpegs,” the transition between pixel and image takes place over a greater range and seems to jolt in and out of clarity, whereas the “Nudes” blend more gracefully, and yet the eye never fully registers an explicit act. Simultaneously, the “Nudes” take as their source the most voyeuristic images—pornography—and, in their ambiguity between clarity and suggestion, 17

Ibid., 13. 40

Fig. 18: jpeg de01 (detail, 2005), Thomas Ruff

cohesion and disruption, imbue them with some level of intimacy, even tenderness. The “Nudes” themselves are also an outgrowth of an earlier body of Ruff ’s work. Between 1981 and 1991, Ruff collected over 2,500 photographs from newspapers and magazines, and exhibited 400 of them, captionless, at twice their original size. Several things become immediately apparent at this enlarged scale. In “Zeitungsfotos” (“Newspaper Photographs”)—which is also the name of a section in Richter’s Atlas—the dot matrices and half-tone patterns through which printers compose an image are made visible, as is the pulpy texture of the newsprint. Each photo is composed of a mosaic pattern of black ink— sometimes diluted to form gray—and empty space, as in Zeitungsfoto 153. In a few works, the film grain from the original photograph is also enlarged. Much like the “Jpeg” series, many of the “Newspaper Photographs” contain images associated with war—destroyed landscapes and missiles launch pads, dark-suited men, Hitler and his dog—but they are balanced with anonymous portraits and landscapes, space shuttles, architecture, and mundane, household objects. All of these are subjects recurrent throughout Ruff ’s entire body of work, and the source images of both Ruff ’s oeuvre and Richter’s Atlas also draw heavily on a kitschy, snapshot aesthetic; both archives are filled with awkwardly composed family photographs, pastoral sunsets, and the play of light among trees. This suggests that Ruff ’s subject is documentary in nature, his work a record of a medium that is already wellestablished. It’s through the images’ manipulation, their re-contextualization, and the dismantling of their façades that they gain new meaning.

✜ In the anthology Interaction: Artistic Practice in the Network, curator Susan Hapgood notes that web-based art “thwarts preexisting art distribution systems and markets,” as “it cannot easily be controlled by existing institutional power structures.” Such work opposes the museum’s exercising of control over visual objects—that is, through the deliberate withholding or controlling of access to them—by freeing the image from the object, converting it to easily

Fig. 19: ree07 (Red Panties, 2001), Thomas Ruff

Fig. 20: Zeitungsfoto 153 (1991), Thomas Ruff

transmissible information. The irony of Ruff ’s “Jpegs” is that, in exposing the nature of this shift, they tether the image once again. “By the 80’s, more traditional qualities crept back in (desire for objects, for marketable commodities, for singular star personalities),” Hapgood writes, “at the same time that the earlier work was being historicized and chronicled (and made precious simply by virtue of its cultural importance).”18 Flusser imagined a utopia that exchanges information seamlessly, non-linearly, one which he describes as a “‘telematic information society’ in which all the interested persons would be connected in a constant dialogue with each other.”19 In such a telematic society, the promised ideal inherent in Hapgood’s conception of web-based art, “no information is lost, unless it is deliberately deleted. This implies that the past is always present and that the future is the past represented.”20 The failure of such a utopia to arise can be attributed to the internet itself becoming an institution, which concretizes data and transmits it linearly, standardizing and commercializing the conceptual ordering of information, allowing its conversion into objects, and once again subjecting the image to the established techniques of image management. There are no high-resolution files of Ruff ’s “Jpegs,” unless someone rephotographs the large-format print. Once the digital files were compressed, Ruff never saved enlarged versions other than the actual objects he printed. And yet, even the minuscule data of the compressed files, which vary between roughly 75 and 150 kb, is stored on restricted servers, accessible only to those who’ve been granted rights for reproduction. The “Jpegs” as objects are less egalitarian, less immaterial, than digital files, and in this way, they expose the alliance between what Harold Cohen called “the decision-making power of programs,”21 and the construction of value by a cultural élite, rather than the egalitarian hordes of the web.  Susan Hapgood in “Institutions: Architectures of Attention,” in Interaction: Artistic Practice in the Network   (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2001), 73. 18

Vito Campanelli, “Telematics,” in Flusseriana, edited by Siegfried Zielinski, Peter Weibel, and Daniel Irrgang (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univocal, 2015), 394–96. 19

Flusser, Into Immaterial Culture, 39.

Harold Cohen, “Introduction,” in Harold Cohen (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1983), 7. 45

Chapter Three Snapshot Aesthetics We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every   photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it…? An accumulation of   nameless energies… A religious experience in a way, like all tourism. —Don DeLillo, White Noise

Several years ago, a small bribe gained me early access to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, where a friend and I sat alone in the highest tier, waiting for the sun to rise. Far below us and half a mile away, a crowd was starting to form. They filled the kilometer-wide space between the temple and its walls. They came in buses, and would return to them only minutes later, but first they wanted to take pictures. From above, for an hour before dawn, it appeared as though the ancient Khmer city was once again a bustling hive. The capacity of the Angkor complex is just shy of 80,000 people, and the sunrise over Angkor Wat, the largest temple, is the main attraction. Only a small number of tourists broke off from the crowd. Only a few dozen visitors continued along the pathway that stretched languorously out beneath the travelers’ feet to meet the base of the temple. The front gates were open, allowing access to the outer gallery, but these intrepid few were prevented from continuing further into the concentric structure by the guards whom I had paid and flashed an identification card issued by the travel publication I was interning for at the time. As the sun began to rise, I counted two more visitors at the temple’s crowning tower, and each of us, without exchanging words, took up a corner of our own. The sunrise over Angkor Wat is, no doubt, a splendid vision. Tour guides publish recommendations on how to obtain the best photo from outside the temple, near the lake within its furthest walls. A lens with a focal length at least 200mm, a tripod, a spot near the front of the crowd, a generous fee paid for an early-rising tuk-tuk driver, or, better yet, a ticket on such-and-such bus. The photos of Angkor Wat sunrises taken by these tourists are all over the internet, and they all look much the same. People travel across the world to remake a photograph that already exists. 46

Fig. 21: jpeg ca02 (2004), Thomas Ruff

✜ In Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, when a noxious cloud flies over a small town as a result of a toxic spill, the residents are unprepared for their chemical reckoning. Tragedy, for them, has been a thing that only happens to people on TV. Over time, though, the toxic clouds render the sunsets unspeakably beautiful, and the survivors gather on an overpass to watch the sky. “Certainly there is awe,” one character says about the community’s response to the view. “It is all awe, it transcends previous categories of awe, but we don’t know whether we are watching in wonder or dread.” The implication of this scene is that such sublimity can be attributed not to the sky itself, but to the citizens’ previous failure to engage with the world around them. When the toxic sunset appears, it’s as if this is the first time they’ve ever seen a sunset at all. This scene at the end of the novel contrasts with one from the beginning, when two characters visit a tourist trap: the most photographed barn in America. There, they stand at a designated vantage point, listening to the cacophonous clack of shutters. “What did the barn look like before it was photographed?” one character asks. “What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can’t answer these questions because we’ve read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re here, we’re now.” Here, DeLillo proposes a corrective to Walter Benjamin, who famously wrote that while traditional art forms such as painting support a quasi-religious “strange tissue of space and time,” the “aura,” photography, a form of mechanical reproduction, “emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.”1 In the years between Benjamin and DeLillo, the ritualistic worship of an image as such has been subsumed by the cult that remakes, endlessly, in the image of. The aura, DeLillo suggests, can in fact be found in Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1968), 224. 1

Fig. 22: jpeg msh01 (2004), Thomas Ruff 49

photographs, and is created through the ritualistic act of reproducing images—redundant ones, mostly; but their redundancy is exactly the point. The image-as-an-image hardly matters; what matters, instead, is simply that we were there, an experience to which the image can testify. In this way, tourism has replaced religious cult-worship as the medium of the aura’s generation. Tourists have always depended on records to testify to their travels. The Grand Tours of the European empires took aristocrats and other members of the upper class across the Continent and into Asia, Africa, and the other colonies, where they documented their travels by commissioning paintings. In parts of India, a genre of landscape painting known as Company Painting—so named after the British East India Company—developed during the eighteenth century through commissioned depictions of local landscapes and architecture. Meanwhile, the motherlands were experiencing the growing popularity of dioramas and panorama painting, which, according to the scholar Tanya Agathocleous, “was understood to ‘transport’ the viewer… through its extension of the experience of the aristocratic Grand Tour to the middle and working class.” The sweeping circumference of the panorama’s canvas and the perspectives of the diorama created the illusion that “foreign lands might be apprehended at a glance,” 2 but it was always just that—an illusion. The experience of the image-maker (or commissioner) abroad and the viewer back home diverged, creating a class to whom all the world was becoming available, and one that had to be content with paltry imitation. When photography became prevalent in India in the 1840’s, Company Painting began to fade away,3 and the same technological development saw the decline of panoramas and dioramas. Until, at last, it seemed as though everybody had a camera of their own. The instantaneous manifestation of a country beyond one’s own borders made possible by this

Tanya Agathocleous, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century   (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2013), 87–89. 2

Marika Sardar, “Company Painting in Nineteenth-Century India,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History   (October 2004). www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cpin/hd_cpin.htm. 3

new apparatus had an air of magic to it, and it began to appear as though every hand were capable of casting such a spell. Something of a reversal occurred when the ubiquity of the camera helped universalize the ability to document one’s travels: the ability to turn a resonant image over and over in one’s mind became a high modernist ideal, prominent in the literature of Proust, Woolf, and Joyce. Bernardo Soares, the reclusive heteronym of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, wrote, sometime in the early twentieth century, “To see something in constantly new ways is to renew and multiply it. That is why the contemplative person, without ever leaving his village, will nevertheless have the whole universe at his disposal.”4 Reclusiveness, contentment with illusion, was claimed by some as the domain of transcendent poets and artists.5 Tourism initially developed in tandem with the aesthetic concepts of sublimity and awe, and thus the tourists at Angkor believe themselves to be in sympathy with the monks who, today, still live and worship at the Buddhist temple. Tourism itself is a form of communal pilgrimage, so the belief goes. And yet, at a certain point, the citizen wealthy enough to travel began also to see the world mostly through its representation, with eye pressed firmly to lens. The globe was becoming both more accessible, and less directly accessed. What happens when we look up from our cameras? We might see something like Thomas Ruff ’s “Jpegs.” A potential photo opportunity; something that has been endlessly photographed, repeatedly and seemingly without thought. Something that appears to exist only to be photographed.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (New York: Penguin, 1998), 86.

This is not to take Pessoa’s reclusiveness as a universal blanket. Benjamin’s definition of the flâneur is made in opposition to both the recluse and the tourist, who seeks “great reminiscences, the historical shudder…   to gain access to the genius loci with a military password.” Baudelaire describes the flâneur as “the passionate spectator… amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define… We might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness.” Sontag notes that the flâneur became a model for street photographers, the “voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.” But the tourists, who turn their gaze toward historical triumphs—the great cities, the conquered lands—have   set out to recreate every corner of the world with their pictures. Their photos are the ones that have   become Ruff ’s “Jpegs.” 5

Fig. 23: jpeg ri02 (2007), Thomas Ruff

And, as if to fill the void behind this surface-image, we take more photos. The snapshots produced by tourists are the records of their passing by, of their one-time presence at an altar, where they both captured its likeness for posterity and contributed to its monumental presence in time and space. However, they are absent humanity because they depict a world without true inhabitants, just as there are no photos of people within Ruff ’s series. In many of his projects, Ruff takes few photos, preferring to make use of found imagery. He had first become a photographer because he wanted to take beautiful pictures, and after submitting twenty of his “most beautiful slides, landscapes of the Black Forest and holiday pictures,” Bernd and Hilla Becher accepted him to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In the first year, Bernd told Ruff that those photographs “were more or less stupid” because they, in Ruff ’s words, “were not my own photographs but clichés, and they were an indication of the photographs I had seen in magazines.”6 Ruff ’s “Jpeg” images were conceived as stand-ins for such images; auratic totems at which individuals can place their offerings. He says the concept behind the “Jpegs” was to create images or types of image that stand for 10 or 50 or 100 other images—in Germany we call it exemplarisch or “exemplary.” I didn’t want to choose a picture and say, “This is Angkor Wat on the 10th of February, 1988.” That kind of information is okay but it doesn’t help you look at the image. So if you have a picture from 9 /11 of the Twin Towers in clouds of smoke… it’s not only the Twin Towers, but stands for any other building that was bombed in the last twenty years. 7

Particularities like the date the image was taken and the fine details of the structure depicted—the sort of things that might give away a subjective experience—are stripped out. In Ruff ’s photos of Angkor, bas reliefs, which might otherwise be used to identify one temple from another, are indiscernible among the pixelated distortion. Apart from the works held by the Smithsonian and the Broad, I’ve turned to Ruff ’s “Jpegs” in a 2009 monograph published by Aperture. The sheer scale of the works is missing in this book, but something else is gained. To flip through pages of anonymous

Pocock, “Thomas Ruff.”

Guy Lane, “Thomas Ruff Interview,” Foto8 (October 24, 2009). www.foto8.com/live/thomas-ruff-interview. 53

imagery, stand-ins for places I could visit if only I knew them by name, is to experience the repeated frustration of seeing life through a lens. Within the book are more than just pictures of war and destruction—although these comprise roughly half of the series. Over the three years that Ruff worked on his “Jpeg” series, images of numerous events became sources for works. It can be difficult to identify them, as their names, like the images themselves, have been compressed. Some are easy: jpeg ny01–06 are photos of 9/11, aerial views of the gap in the skyline masked by smoke; likewise, jpeg de01 is of the collapsed towers, and the Smithsonian suggests that “de” stands for destruction; jpeg bb03 is of the burning of Kuwaiti oil fields by Iraqi forces during the Gulf War, although I’ve found no speculation regarding what “bb” stands for. These images, in part, comprise the first category of the series, which Ruff has named “catastrophes created by man.” Jpeg tj01 is a patch of sky seen through snow-covered branches, or possibly a white cherry blossom tree, where the clouds are angular and tinted green. Jpeg wd01 depicts a ray of light falling through a forest canopy. There are several photos of icebergs and glaciers ( jpeg ib01–02, jpeg ir01) in the series, and here the categories break down, or bleed together. The other three categories are named “catastrophes created by nature,” “nature conquering man-made creations,” and “idylls.” But are these flows of ice majestic accomplishments of nature, or catastrophic in their melting away? There are many buildings too, with names like jpeg j01, jpeg soi01, and jpeg hdem06; boats ( jpeg sh01); missiles ( jpeg icbm01, jpeg icbm02, jpeg rl01); and even a man-made island ( jpeg ri02), a photo that Ruff took himself: I was on vacation on an island that was entirely man-made, a completely artificial creation for Western holiday-makers who think that it is idyllic. The sand, the palm trees, all the nature had been brought to the island. So it was not a paradise, it was completely artificial. And I decided to make a final category: idylls. They are places that look beautifully untouched; but the images I chose or photographed are not true idylls—they lack real nature. There’s no place on the whole world where man has not left either his footstep or garbage.

The internet, among its many uses, is where we store the images that serve as a record of humankind’s passing. Before the internet, such an archive had to be constructed 54

manually, individually, and many artists used photographic archives both as source material for separate projects, and as a sort of concentration of contemporary image culture. According to Buchloh, Richter’s Atlas provided a way for the artist to engage with history through the curation of images. Buchloh presents Atlas in opposition to an earlier archive of photographic images: Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, which re-envisions the concept of the archive as a cultural record of “transmission, reception, and polarization,”8 rather than historical categorization. Warburg recognized the transference of mnemonic images to physical objects. Constructed as a rejection of the formalist theory of aesthetics of the time, the Mnemosyne Atlas is characterized by Giorgio Agamben as a project “in which the stylistic and formal solutions at times adopted by artists appear as ethical decisions of individuals and epochs regarding the inheritance of the past.”9 Warburg writes, “Memory no longer arouses an immediate, purposeful reflex movement—be it one of a combative or a religious character —but the memory images are now consciously stored in pictures and signs.”10 According to Buchloh, the Mnemosyne Atlas, undertaken between 1925–29, was conceived “as a model of the construction of social memory” through the collage and photomontage. By juxtaposing images ahistorically, and in defiance of other commonly accepted categories,11 Warburg redefined “graphic montage as the construction of meanings rather than the arrangement of forms.” That is to say, through the careful arrangement of images, Warburg presented a rereading of cultural history, one that tried to subvert the drive toward aesthetic categorization that Crimp would outline decades later. However, between Warburg’s and Richter’s archives, Buchloh writes, due to “the rise of photographic media culture” there came a moment when it was “possible to imagine Giorgio Agamben, “Warburg and the Nameless Science,” in Potentialities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1999), 93. 8

Ibid.

Aby Warburg, quoted ibid., 95.

“There, cheek by jowl, were late antique reliefs, secular manuscripts, monumental frescoes, postage stamps, broadsides, pictures cut out of magazines, and old master drawings.” Kurt Forster, quoted in Benjamin Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” in Gerhard Richter: Atlas, The Reader (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2012), 90. 11

Fig. 24: Mnemosyne Atlas (Panel 45: “Superlatives of the language of gestures,” 1927–29), Aby Warburg

Fig. 25: Atlas (Sheet 193: “Seascapes,” 1970), Gerhard Richter

that mass cultural representation would cause the destruction of mnemonic experience and of historical thought altogether.” 12 Whether or not this moment truly came to pass is irrelevant, as, emigrating from East Germany to Düsseldorf in 1961, Richter “found himself in a Germany preoccupied with forgetting, or… repressing its own recent past, suspended in a state of moral ambiguity.” 13 The alienation Richter felt as a member of the fatherless generation called him to examine his family’s own moral history—through his paintings of Uncle Rudi in his Nazi uniform, based on a photo taken just before his death by Allied Forces—against the ideological tone of mass media. His Atlas, then, contrasts to Warburg’s in that it “juxtaposes the construction of public identity by media culture with the construction of private identity through the family photograph.” As photographs began to be seen as detrimental to the ability to hold a memory-image—or, to pose it inversely, mental memory-images were increasingly “downloaded” in the form of tangible images— the juxtaposition of family photographs with images of more communal events was a way of maintaining a cultural identification. An extension of this is easily seen on Instagram and other photo-sharing media, where selecting a single tag or geo-location brings the user to an array of images, all of the same object or scene. The point of all these postings is not necessarily to contribute to such a proliferation, but to construct an identification between the person posting and the community, to participate in a communal experience. I am like you. I have been where you have been, I have seen the things you have seen. Here, with our bodies left behind, we are the same. Ruff, who was born in Zell am Harmersbach, West Germany in 1958—within a notably less oppressive environment than the German Democratic Republic, where Richter was raised—nonetheless follows his teacher’s lead. However, for him, the consumerism of mass media makes it difficult to engage directly with history because consumerism is, by nature, ahistorical. And so, first he must reveal the ways in which he believes the images of mass media stand in our way, obfuscate substance with surface. But perhaps by doing so, he

Ibid.

Adrian Searle, “Slow Developer,” in Gerhard Richter: Atlas, The Reader, 129. 58

also reveals the hope inherent in our snapshots, our continued awe at this new, technological sublimity. “Right here is all the world,” we might say of our computers. Pessoa, once again, expresses the anxieties of an age in which such accessibility is possible. “What’s travel,” he writes, “and what good is it? Any sunset is the sunset; one doesn’t have to go to Constantinople to see it.” With our cameras in hand, we naïvely set out to achieve what Pessoa once restricted to poets and artists: The true landscapes are those that we ourselves create since, being their gods, we see them as they truly are, which is however we created them. None of the four corners of the world is the one that interests me and that I can truly see; it’s the fifth corner that I travel in, and it belongs to me.

By “fifth corner,” Pessoa means the imaginary realm, the sensations on which “we must base our life’s reality,” the inner images we hold of how the world is or might be, and which we offer up for all to see.

Conclusion What Lies Behind the Image? In April, 2016, Thomas Ruff exhibited new work at David Zwirner gallery in New York. The first dozen or so images to appear of his new series, “press++,” depict pockmarked moons and missiles at launch, astronauts in profile and dark-suited men eying a fighter jet in take-off. The iconography is similar to Ruff ’s “Newspaper Photographs” because, like them, they were first published in newspapers during the Cold War. But unlike the “Newspaper Photographs,” “Jpegs,” and Ruff ’s other series that drew from mass media imagery, the photographs of “press++” have not been stripped of their context, nor has their compositional structure been magnified to the point of destroying the image.1 Across the surface of each image are archival notes, which were written on the backside of prints kept by the photography agencies—typewritten captions, handwritten scrawls, stickers, and stamps signifying transmission over the AP wire service. The process of overlaying each side of the image is similar to a digital version of Robert Heinecken’s “Recto/Verso” contact prints, in which the artist exposed opposing sides of magazine ads to the same silver gelatin or color reversal paper. In his project, Heinecken sought to depict, in some way, the scaffolding behind and relations between imagery within contemporary media culture, but Ruff ’s juxtaposition exposes different power relations. Ruff trades his interest in the “grammar of the media” for an interest in the metadata of the media—the tags and keywords, dates and relations by which some phantom committee places photographs in relation to each other. The archive is where relations are re-ordered, where images are taken out of the world and re-contextualized within the solipsistic history of images. Ruff, though, sees his inclusion of archival context within the surface of the image as a deletion of information, as it reduces the material to pure surface. “Normally if you add information to information, you have more information,” he says. “In this case, I There are more images from “press++” to be unveiled this year—images of architecture and other pleasant things, like ballet and the arts, images that come from “the whole newspaper, from the front, big international news to economics and culture.” However, just as 9/11 was the genesis of his “Jpegs” series, “press++” also begins with photos of war. 1

Fig. 26: press++ 20.33 (2015), Thomas Ruff

destroy information, I would say, because the image is disturbed by the writings. In a way, they become pure imagery.”2 He believes the surface of the image is disturbed not by the exposure of its compositional structure, but via its obfuscation by writing. Writing and images have for most of their history operated in tandem, alternating between illustration and exegesis. Often, when we talk about images we treat them as if they exist alone, but the truth is that they always have a context. Ruff ’s dual assertions— that his images are nothing but surface; his work is only about the medium of photography —are incompatible. He conflates a brief moment in the history of photography into a metonymical model for understanding our reading of images. The claim that photographs can never be anything other than surface presumes that they exist in a vacuum, that the viewer cannot be allowed to read into them; or, in the case of “press++,” that the viewer must read the writing across the surface as an imagery, rather than words. Obviously, we are free to do so, or not, as we choose. Ruff, however, proposes a relationship restricted to the picture and its maker. The surfacing of archival metadata in “press++” gives insight into the process by which photographs are made distinct from that which they represent, and into the unique role that the archive—now, the internet—plays in this excising. But if meaning cannot live within the photograph alone, and is constructed instead, always in relation to, then the subjectivity of the viewer cannot be denied. And, if Ruff ’s work is about the medium of photography, then it must also be about what happened to photography around the turn of the millennium—when a certain type of media viewer, whom many theorists and artists argued was pacified by the overwhelming deluge of imagery, was once again awoken by the power of photography. In 2004, Susan Sontag, who had previously argued that images were desensitizing, and so we had become accustomed to treating them as surface, revised her views. “To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism,” she wrote. “It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the

Emily McDermott, “Thomas Ruff in Space and Time,” Interview Magazine (April 5, 2016). www.interviewmagazine.com/art/thomas-ruff-press. 2

world, where news has been converted into entertainment… It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world.”3 The two major shifts that re-calibrated our perception of images are the rise of the internet and digital photography, which turned once-passive consumers into creators, and 9/11, which shocked viewers in the West into remembering that tragedies, even if only experienced through depiction, have, in fact, actually happened. In another time, we might have constructed a monument to remember by. However, if 9/11 truly was the most photographed in history, if more people then ever before stood together and produced images of an event that was happening before their own eyes, if they for months afterward propagated those images along the newly established infrastructure of web-based mass media, then what other memorial is necessary? What else can testify that we were there, that such a tragedy occurred, other than, perhaps, the spectral power of two holes left in the ground? When all that remains is an image bereft of content, we are free to fill it as we like, and it can sometimes be more helpful to remember our sensations through voids left untampered, as it results in a sort of reflexivity, frees our contemplation from its tether to an object, and leaves space for our thoughts to roam freely. Graham Bader, drawing a parallel between the World Trade Center Memorial and the open spaces that now demarcate the Berlin Wall, wrote, “The power of the voids at and around Ground Zero is generated by their origin in real historical circumstance rather than such purely commemorative intent: They are indices as well as icons of the losses they mark.”4 For two months after 9/11, the artist and filmmaker Laura Poitras shot footage at Ground Zero. Her camera, though, was not aimed toward where the towers once stood. When she unveiled her footage in 2011, viewers of her film installation O’ Say Can You See? came face-to-face with spectators who had stopped to contemplate the sudden gap in their skyline. When the object is no longer present, its absence leaves us no totem to project upon, and so Poitras directs our gaze back upon ourselves, where we can study not 3

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2004), 110.

Graham Bader, “Honored in the Breach: On Absence as Memorial,” Artforum (April, 2012). www.artforum.com/imprint/issue=201204&id=30570. 4

an image but our responses to one. Perhaps in a nod to the kind of surface reading that would deny an image its context, Poitras projects this footage on a screen suspended in the middle of a room. It’s flat; there’s no imagining that we might be looking at a window through which people are mourning. And yet, these faces—pure, expressive faces—cannot be denied their context in history, because behind them we fought clandestine wars. On the verso of this screen is projected declassified footage of U.S. military personnel interrogating suspected al Qaeda combatants. “Who is Fatima?” a camouflaged man asks off-camera, dangling supposed evidence. Another armed man stands in the background, his face obscured by a balaclava. The response comes from a third man, wearing shackles. “My daughter.” Dissatisfied with this response, the masked man covers his prisoner’s face with a burlap sack. We cannot see both at the same time—our dumbfounded fixation and the violence set off in its name—but they are two sides of the screen. Poitras makes visible the relation between them, their inextricable link. In this same recto/verso manner, Ruff ’s “press++” clarifies his continued interest in the ways by which we excise images from the world, and view them as incapable of speaking to anything other than their own existence. The internet, through its use of metadata—if we conceive of it as a multifaceted apparatus for maintaining relations between distinct things—has exacerbated this re-ordering by purely formal or superficial relations. But this is actually a tendency as old as the concept of the archive itself, which has always been subject to institutional momentum, rather than any sense of historicity. From Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas to the internet’s potential to subvert the comparatively rigid image management of art historical institutions, there is still space for freedom from the reorganization of history through the categorization of its images. By linking the internet, mass media, and art historical institutions, and exhibiting their fabric, Ruff asks us to question the decision-making powers of non-human apparatuses:

Fig. 27: Still from Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Say Can You See? (2001/2011), Laura Poitras

Fig. 28: Still from Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Say Can You See? (2001/2011), Laura Poitras

It is maybe because photography has been misused… 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. I think it was once said that “The illiterate of the future is not the person who cannot read, but the one who cannot read photographs properly.”5

It falls to the viewer, then, to bear responsibility for maintaining proper relations between the image and the event. It might also be one of our last freedoms—to decide what “proper relations” are. Ruff ’s “Jpegs” series is much more than a lesson in photographic grammar or an unveiling of the systems of relation. The images live in the grey zone between traditional art photographs—subject to the museum’s reign—and the utopian vision of a telematic society advanced by internet culture. And it’s their liminal nature that causes us to think about which direction we might be heading, about which aspects of the past depicted are worth preserving and which we’d be better off forgetting. David Levi Strauss writes that the architects of 9/11 “tried to turn our extreme attraction to images of violence and catastrophe against us, but they underestimated the extent to which these images have actually supplanted reality for us.”6 The most photographed event in history, the most photographed barn in America, the spot where Ansel Adams stood, the image that stands for ten or fifty or one hundred images, the relations between them that we construct in our search for understanding. Every so often, we are reminded that images are only a shimmering curtain, behind which we might catch a view of a place we barely recognize. A place that, while we haven’t been watching, has been subject to the dual entropies of humankind’s civilization-building and the epochal churning of time. No museum can maintain artifacts forever; no institution can eternally hold an image of the world as it once was. They leak out. They fade out into history, along with the events that they depict, until they are rescued by curators to be preserved as a moment of their own history—the history of images. But as long as the images are

Lane, “Thomas Ruff Interview.”

Strauss, “The Highest Degree of Illusion,” 185; emphasis in the original. 67

accessible to us, and we are cautious of their tendency to stand in the way of things, as long as we preserve our freedom to look differently, they can be used as markers against which we can codify or triangulate our own outlook on the world. Within the pixel mosaics, it’s easy to find suggestive patterns; the fractal structure of all things, endlessly repeating itself as we zoom in, narrowing our view. The atomic swirl of a detonation on Bikini Atoll; light reflecting off the buds of a Springtime bloom; metamorphic layers bent and chiseled into shapes unachievable by any tectonic motion— formed first into tools and domiciles, which kept nature at bay; then, structures of religion, in which we crafted images to deify the world; structures of science, where we sought a physical understanding of it; structures of bureaucracy, where at last we claimed dominion and bestowed order according to our models. All of the images we’ve made now seem preferable to and more understandable than whatever it is out there that they represent. Yet, every image also contains a fragment of what was left behind. Within the grids of Ruff ’s photos, the striated façades of the Twin Towers, rising upward, are reduced to several dark, vertical lines. An abstracted representation, unforeseen, disorderly, and disruptive, the remnants of a thing that exists only still in images, there for us to find when we sort through the rubble. — 2016

Fig. 29: jpeg ny01 (2004), Thomas Ruff

Fig. 30: jpeg icbm01 (2007), Thomas Ruff

Fig. 31: jpeg kj01 (2004), Thomas Ruff

Fig. 32: jpeg la01 (2007), Thomas Ruff

Fig. 33: jpeg wd01 (2005), Thomas Ruff

Fig. 34: jpeg ib02 (2007), Thomas Ruff

Fig. 35: jpeg cc01 (2004), Thomas Ruff

Note Beginning June 1, 2016, the Associated Press Stylebook recommends the word “internet” be lowercased in all instances. As of this writing, the Chicago Manual of Style still requires capitalization of “Internet,” but allows for lowercase “web,” “site,” “net,” “page,” etc. The University of Chicago argues that the “Internet” is a single, unified network, subdivided into of all these parts. I don’t think that’s an accurate description of the internet’s infrastructure. AP agrees, reasoning that the internet is “a decentralized, worldwide network of computers that communicate with each other.” This, I think, is closer to my own conception of the internet as “a multifaceted apparatus for maintaining relations between distinct things.” AP also correctly notes that the World Wide Web (which, as a proper noun, is capitalized in both style books) composes only a portion of the internet, and therefore these two terms cannot be used interchangeably. For these reasons and more, I’ve chosen to lowercase “internet” in this writing, and eagerly await Chicago’s recommendation to do the same.

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List of Illustrations Figures 1.

Peter Morgan, Remains of World Trade Center, September 11, 2001, 11.5 x 17.3 cm. Reuters Photographs.

Thomas Ruff, jpeg de01, 2005, chromogenic print with diasec, 278.8 x 184.7 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Sarah and Gary Wolkowitz.   Courtesy David Zwirner, New York / London.

Ibid. Photo by the author.

Thomas Ruff, jpeg ny02, 2004, chromogenic print with diasec, 269 x 364 cm.   The Metropolitan Museum. New York, New York. Courtesy David Zwirner,   New York / London.

Thomas Ruff, jpeg bd01 (detail), 2007, chromogenic print with diasec, 226.07 x 185.1 cm. The Broad Art Foundation. Los Angeles, California. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York / London.

Thomas Ruff, jpeg bb03, 2007, chromogenic print with diasec, 185.1 x 249.6 cm. The Broad Art Foundation. Los Angeles, California. Courtesy David Zwirner,   New York / London. Photo by the author.

Thomas Struth, Aquarium, Atlanta, Georgia, 2013, chromogenic print, 213.36 x 362.9 x 6.99 cm. The Broad Art Foundation. Los Angeles, California; Andreas Gursky, Madonna I, 2001, chromogenic print, 282.26 x 207.01 x 6.35 cm. The Broad Art Foundation. Los Angeles, California. Photo by the author.

Louise Lawler, Pollock & Tureen (Arranged by Mr. & Mrs. Burton Tremaine), 1964, silver dye bleach print, 71.1 x 99.1 cm. The Metropolitan Museum. Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, and Jennifer and Joseph Duke Gift, 2000. New York, New York.

Thomas Struth, Audience 11 (Galleria dell’Accademia), Florenz, 2005, chromogenic print, 179.5 x 291.5 cm. The Broad Art Foundation. Los Angeles, California.   Photo by the author.

10.

Gerhard Richter, Atlas: Sheet 13, from Fotos aus Zeitungen, Büchern, etc. (Photographs from Newspapers, Books, etc.), 1964, 66.7 x 51.7 cm. Courtesy the artist.

11.

Gerhard Richter, September, 2005, oil on canvas, 52 x 72 cm. The Museum of Modern Art. New York, New York. Gift of the artist and Joe Hage. Courtesy   the artist.

12.

Thomas Ruff, Porträt (K. Lehmann), 1986, color photograph, 40.6 x 33.3 x 1.9 cm. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York / London.

13.

Thomas Ruff, Anderes Porträt 143/50, 1994–95, silkscreen on paper, 205 x 155 cm. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York / London.

14.

Chuck Close, Self-Portrait II, 2009–10, oil on canvas, 182.9 x 152.4 cm.   Courtesy the artist, Pace Prints, and Pace Gallery.

15.

Bernd and Hilla Becher, Gas Tanks, 1983–92, silver gelatin prints.   Courtesy the artists.

16.

Gerhard Richter, 1,024 Farben (1,024 Colors), 1973, oil on canvas, 299 x 299 cm. Courtesy the artist.

17.

Vik Muniz, After Gerhard Richter, 2001, chromogenic print, 185.4 x 124.5 cm. Courtesy the artist.

18.

Thomas Ruff, jpeg de01 (detail), 2005, chromogenic print, 278.8 x 184.7 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Sarah and Gary Wolkowitz.   Courtesy David Zwirner, New York / London.

19.

Thomas Ruff, ree07 (Red Panties), 2001, chromogenic print, 110.2 x 136.2 cm.   The Metropolitan Museum. Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation   Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, and Jennifer and Joseph Duke Gift,   2000. New York, New York. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York / London.

20.

Thomas Ruff, Zeitungsfoto 153, 1991, chromogenic print, 37.8 x 35.7 cm.   Courtesy David Zwirner, New York / London.

21.

Thomas Ruff, jpeg ca02, 2004, chromogenic print with diasec, 188 x 243 cm. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York / London.

22.

Thomas Ruff, jpeg msh01, 2004, chromogenic print with diasec, 276.2 x 188 cm. The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Beth Swofford. New York, New York. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York / London.

23.

Thomas Ruff, jpeg ri02, chromogenic print with diasec, 188 x 322 cm.   Courtesy David Zwirner, New York / London.

24.

Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas (Panel 45: “Superlatives of the language of gestures”), 1927–29.

25.

Gerhard Richter, Atlas: Sheet 193, from Seestüke Foto-Collagen (Seascapes Photo Collages), 1970, 66.7 x 51.7 cm. Courtesy the artist.

26.

Thomas Ruff, press++ 20.33, 2015, chromogenic print, 184.2 x 233.2 x 7 cm. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York / London.

27.

Laura Poitras, still from O’ Say Can You See?, 2001/2016, two-channel digital   video, color, sound. Courtesy the artist.

28.

Ibid.

29.

Thomas Ruff, jpeg ny01, 2004, chromogenic print with diasec, 256 x 188 cm. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York / London.

30.

Thomas Ruff, jpeg icbm01, 2007, chromogenic print with diasec, 242.6 x 184.8 cm. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York / London.

31.

Thomas Ruff, jpeg kj01, 2004, chromogenic print with diasec, 269 x 188 cm. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York / London.

32.

Thomas Ruff, jpeg la01, 2007, chromogenic print, 186 x 294 cm. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York / London.

33.

Thomas Ruff, jpeg wd01, 2005, chromogenic print with diasec, 255 x 185 cm. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York / London.

34.

Thomas Ruff, jpeg ib02, 2007, chromogenic print with diasec, 240 x 185.1 cm. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York / London.

35.

Thomas Ruff, jpeg cc01, 2004, chromogenic print with diasec, 188 x 247 cm. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York / London.

Image Credits Fig. 1 © Peter Morgan / Reuters; Figs. 2, 4, 5, 12, 13, 18–23, 26, 29–33 © Thomas Ruff / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Germany; Fig. 8 © Louise Lawler; Figs. 10, 11, 16, 25 © Gerhard Richter; Fig. 14 © Chuck Close; Fig. 15 © Bernd and Hilla Becher: Fig. 17 © Vik Muniz; Fig. 24 © Aby Warburg; Figs. 27–28 © Laura Poitras.

Acknowledgements To Levi, who saw something in my writing two years ago. I am grateful that he did, and for his teachings. For his generous departmental scholarship, which made everything possible. When I write, I imagine him my reader. To Nancy, who shared her time, her edits, and most all her infectious composure. She will always be a model for how to write, and how to think about art. To Debra Bricker Balken, Thomas Beard, Jennifer Krasinski, Dejan Lukic, ´ Lucy Raven, Charles Stein, Annette Wehrhahn, and the Art Criticism & Writing faculty and staff at the School of Visual Arts. For showing me everything. To Blessy Augustine, Tereza Belfort, Ann Collins, Colin Edgington, Isabelle Gillet, Zalfa Halabi, and José Peña Loyola. I will miss their camaraderie. To Edward P. Jones, Thomas Mallon, Fred Pollack, and the English & Creative Writing faculty at the George Washington University. For laying solid foundations. To my friends and colleagues at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Public Books, and SVA Galleries; to the staff of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, and David Zwirner in New York; to Tom Huhn and his undergraduate students at the SVA Visual & Critical Studies department, through whom I relived the joy of discovering my favorite thinkers. To Momus and its editors, who published my conclusion in a different form, after working tirelessly to get it right. To my family. I boast of my three sharpest readers. Finally, to Ashley, without whom there’d be no book, because I’d not have   been here to write it. For her love and guidance, her boundless patience while I chased   late-night Eurekas!