Thomas Ruff
«Nudes»

The university colleague of Andreas Gursky exploits the Internet’s so-called ‹thumbnails,› which indicate the download of a larger format. Ruff downloaded such ‹thumbnails› of pornographic images and attached them to a panel image-format. When greatly enlarged, the low resolution of the images turns them into painterly, blurred images. Questioning authorship, artistic character, appropriating foreign commercial-material, artistic innovation, and a work’s suitability on the art market is taken to the limit. Only through digital post-processing is it possible to make these images retrieved from the Internet suitable for the art market in the preferred larger format. In this sense, Ruff follows the images’ natural tendency to commercialize sexuality, in that he himself works them over again for the art market. This releases the porno imagery from its Internet relationship, from the archival categorization they exist in there (for example ‹oral,› ‹anal,› etc.) and isolates them as images, whereby Ruff then follows the tendency of post-photographic image production and generates individual images from the excerpt of an inter-media zone – or more precisely: constantly shifts images from one inter-media zone to another.