Visual Arts

In more than two dozen series on various subjects, Thomas Ruff has investigated the capacities and limits of the medium of photography.

The exhibition Stellar Landscapes at the State Museum for Art and Cultural History (Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte / LWL) in Münster has now gathered together four series that, using the related themes such as the stars, planets and space travel, study the “presuppositions and conditions of pictures in the context of classical photography, science and painting”. They do this with the photographic methods appropriate in each case. Ruff’s interests in astronomy and photography, cultivated since youth, here meet in an enlightening dialogue.

Moon and rockets, art and science

Alone the aim, to capture cosmic space in photographs, requires Ruff to use found photographic material instead of his own photographs. The entire series therefore is based on photographs that are freely available and he has downloaded from the Internet. Appealing are the four large series Sterne (Stars) (1989–1992), zycles (Cycles) (2007), cassini (2008/2009) and ma.r.s. (2010), supplemented by small black and white prints based on newspaper photos of moons, rockets, satellites and fields on earth from 1990/91. Overall, the exhibition gains its power from confronting the visitor with different, complementary artistic and scientific questions.

“Stars” – science at the cutting edge

The large formats of the well-known series Sterne impress the viewer first of all by showing him a sea of small white dots, mist and clouds against a black backdrop, and this without any hierarchical order whatever. The pictures are enlarged, unaltered sections of the southern sky, taken over from telescope photographs from the archives of the European Southern Observatory in the Chilean Andes.

The infinity of stars shown in long exposure and drawn into two-dimensionality by Ruff imagines an image of space that has never existed, because these heavenly bodies are never simultaneously present. If in fact Swiss researchers have recently detected elementary particles that move faster than light, whose speed Einstein determined as the maximum possible speed, then this would put part of his theory of relativity in question. Thus Ruff’s photographs continually touch directly on the cutting edge of scientific research.

The uncertainty of the research corroborates the knowledge contained in a photograph as a work of art, namely that a photograph can never copy reality. This applies accordingly to all the photo series.

“Ma.r.s.” – “We see not with our eye; we see with our brain”

Even the latest Ma.r.s. photographs, with earth-like, naturalistic landscape sections of the planet’s surface, simulate pertinent information about reality. But Ruff has colored the black and white photographic material from the NASA archive. In this way, he creates images of images of reality that were already deceptive. The digital camera functions like an eye. “We see not with our eye; we see with our brain”, maintains Ruff, and the camera functions, so to say, as the brain in technical perception.

“Cassini” – Saturn as seen by Ruff

Using the NASA images of Saturn as his models in the series cassini, Ruff treads a very different path. The photographs of the planet, whose surface, unlike that of Mars, consists mainly of cold gases, were not made from the earth by human beings, but were taken by a space probe. Ruff has abstracted the photographic models into strongly colored, image-busting forms against a black backdrop. Only the ellipses-like curves suggest the rings of Saturn. The purportedly authentic documentary character of these photographs rests solely on their comparability to the thing represented. In this kind of personal interpretation, Ruff decidedly distances himself from the school of objective photography that extends from Blossfeld to Bernd Becher, his former teacher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy.

Ruff uses the camera and computer not as extensions of the eye but rather as technical devices: one should, in his view, “let the machine work as it does in any case”. He uses the artistic photograph to constantly explore the medium of photography itself, the modes of its emergence, its information content, and all this in connection with science and research.

“Cycles” – What do magnetic fields look like?

The balance between science and art is attained quite differently and to an extraordinary degree in the large photographs in the series zycles (cycles). Inspired by a nineteenth century antiquarian book by James C. Maxwell about magnetic fields, Ruff used a 3D modeling program on his PC to depict magnetic fields on the basis of cycloid formulas. The fields appear as purely virtual bands, like the movements of the planets; these fill the virtual space of the screen in the forms of ellipses, loops, and angular lines caused by disturbances.

Solely according to aesthetic criteria, Ruff draws the details of these mathematical formulas into two-dimensionality and colors them. Thus the viewer can be seduced by the almost musically oscillating rhythm of the entwined fabric; he wanders in thought between the disciplines of music, abstract, informal painting and science, including possibly even neurology – the very field that deals with the cognitive capacity and the ability to form associations.