RUFF, THOMAS

Thomas Ruff: Surfaces, Depths
Edited by Gerald Matt. Text by Catherine Hug, Douglas Fogle, Kurt W. Forster, Gerald Matt. Interview by Gerald Matt with Thomas Ruff. Surfaces, Depths is a representative selection of Thomas Ruff's works, over a period that already spans about 25 years, with projects ranging from portraits and interiors to telescope and space probe pictures and "nightsight" photography. >>more
Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg
ISBN 9783941185500
US $60.00 CAN $72.00 TRADE
Hbk, 9 x 11.75 in. / 288 pgs / 101 color.
Pub Date: 11/30/2009 Active/In stock

Thomas Ruff: Jpegs
Text by Bennett Simpson. How much visual information is needed for image recognition? A pretty small quantity of data will go a long way for the brain and the computer, both of which take shortcuts for the sake of >>more
Aperture
ISBN 9781597110938
US $85.00 CAN $102.00 TRADE
Clth, 11.25 x 15 in. / 132 pgs / 65 color.
Pub Date: 05/31/2009 Active/In stock

Thomas Ruff: 1979 to the Present
Edited by Matthias Winzen. Essays by Ute Eskildsen, Valeria Liebermann and Per Boym. All fields of contemporary Western life are captured by the lens of Thomas Ruff's large-format camera: petit bourgeois homes in the provinces and suburbs; modernist and current architectural structures; the startlingly alien faces of fellow >>more
D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.
ISBN 9781891024726
US $75.00 CAN $90.00 TRADE
Hardcover, 10 x 13 in. / 272 pgs / 304 color / illustrated throughout.
Pub Date: 12/02/2003 Out of print/Not available

Thomas Ruff: Machines
Essays by Caroline Flosdorff and Michael Stüber. Arguably the most versatile artist of the Dsseldorf School, Thomas Ruff reinvents himself as an artist, both conceptually and aesthetically, with each new body of work. From architectural photography to portraits, from aerial views and >>more
Hatje Cantz Publishers
ISBN 9783775714235
US $39.95 CAN $48.00 TRADE
Clothbound, 9.5 x 11.5 in. / 96 pgs / 62 color.
Pub Date: 01/02/2004 Out of print/Not available

Thomas Ruff: Schwarzwald Landschaft
Text by Jochen Ludwig, Christiane Grathwohl-Scheffel. German photographer Thomas Ruff (born 1958) is closely associated with the city of Düsseldorf though his studentship under Bernd and Hilla Becher, but he actually hails from the small town of Zell am Harmersbach, in >>more
Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg
ISBN 9783941185517
US $45.00 CAN $54.00 TRADE
Hbk, 8.5 x 11.75 in. / 80 pgs / 55 color.
Pub Date: 04/30/2010 Forthcoming/Awaiting stock

BLOG

Features and Themes of the Spring 2010 D.A.P. Catalog

By Thomas Evans

For each season of the D.A.P. catalog, new themes and trends coalesce across the 600-odd titles announced therein, indicating emergent preoccupations and new areas of research in the arts. The Spring 2010 catalogue opens with an exciting and extremely significant culmination to that strain, in the form of The Museum of Modern Art's forthcoming appraisal of the female artists in its collection, Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art. This volume, and the occasion of its publication, marks a bold move on MoMA's part to initiate a reassessment of its collection, and will no doubt encourage other institutions to follow suit...

In the current catalogue, another set of strengths emerges (not that it lacks for new monographs on neglected female artists--see forthcoming titles on Angelika Hoerle, Mercedes Matter, Lee Lozano, Unica Zürn and Birgit Jürgenssen). As always, the General Interest section boasts many 'books for life,' with ambitious and superbly produced monographs on Ed Ruscha, Yves Klein, Marina Abramovic, Francis Bacon (already shipping), Henri Cartier-Bresson, Botticelli, Burne-Jones, Rousseau, Renoir, Robert Doisneau, Edweard Muybridge, Walker Evans and others; each of these titles presents its own particular stack of reasons to anticipate its publication with excitement.

Photography monographs are clearly more than well represented on the Spring 2010 Books for Life shelf, but a particular emphasis falls this season on innovative group catalogues, with Aperture's groundbreaking tome on the Düsseldorf School (the three generations of photographers schooled by Bernd and Hilla Becher, including Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Simone Nieweg, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth among others); Starburst, Hatje Cantz's fantastic survey of the color-photography boom of the 1970s, with William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, Joel Sternfeld, William Christenberry, John Divola, Mitch Epstein and many others; and the Guggenheim's Haunted, which traces the presence and recurrence--the "haunting"--of contemporary photography and video art by specters of the past, in the form of defunct or outmoded technologies and subjects.

Publishers such as Metropolis and NAi are doing important work to publish imaginative responses to ever-more-pressing issues around climate change and sustainability, and the General Interest section contains several extremely innovative titles on this subject: an expanded edition of Fritz Haeg's bestselling "attack on the front lawn," Edible Estates, which includes several new projects and a manifesto by Will Allen, the founder of the famous Growing Power project in Wisconsin; Reading the American Landscape, an amazing and epic-scaled survey of the typologies and taxonomies of the American landscape, "from verandas to concert halls, individual plants to entire parks, highways to railroads, indoor exhibition spaces to public sculptures, desert horizons to secluded gardens"; On the Water, Guy Nordenson's sobering but imaginative exploration of the impact of rising currents on the New York and New Jersey shorelines; and two great titles from Hatje Cantz--Arium, which tackles the porousness and interaction between weather and architecture, and Migropolis, a psychogeographic survey of Venice's recent transformation under the twin pressures of climate change and tourism. A related publication in the Highlights section is Radical Nature, which collects utopian and ecological strategies devised by artists and architects from the 1960s to now, such as Buckminster Fuller, Joseph Beuys, Robert Smithson, Luke Fowler and others; also worth mentioning in relation to these titles are two impressive photography books on the collapse and decay of Detroit: Andrew Moore's Detroit Disassembled and Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre's The Ruins of Detroit.

D.A.P. has long supported publications on artist's books, and both books on artist's books and broader surveys of printed matter are notable presences in the Spring 2010 catalogue. The highlight title here must be JRP's In Numbers, edited by Andrew Roth and Philip Aarons, whose subtitle--"Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955"--both announces its premise and draws the reader into further inquiry. "Serial Publications" refers to publications by artists with innovative and prominent design qualities--publications that don't quite fit the 'artist's book' category, and several of which D.A.P. has distributed or does distribute in both original and facsimile editions: Wallace Berman's Semina, The Situationist Times, Joe Brainard's C Comics, General Idea's File magazine, Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer's 0-9, Provoke, the Fluxus annual boxes, Art-Language, North Drive Press, Donald Parsnips Daily Journal, LTTR, Permanent Food and many others. The publisher Primary Information has made a specialty of this realm, and this season will be issuing a timely facsimile edition of Willoughby Sharp and Liza Bear's Avalanche, the New York-based magazine that handed the critical reins over to artists and which was a crucial touchstone publication for American artists in the 1970s. Primary Information also brings us two further facsimile editions: Lee Lozano's best-known works, her notebooks, and Coffee Coffee, Aram Saroyan's influential collection of Concrete/Minimalist poems, first published by 0-9 in 1967. Other titles on artists' books include the first surveys of book works by Sol LeWitt and Olafur Eliasson, and Four Corners' wonderfully designed survey of Eduardo Paolozzi's text and collage contributions to Ambit magazine, The Jet Age Compendium. A D.A.P. staff favorite that cannot go unmentioned here is Ellsworth Kelly's Thumbing Through the Folder, which supplied the Highlights divider spread for this catalogue, and which is comprised of a conversation between Kelly and Hans Ulrich Obrist, interleaved with reproductions of collaged postcards by Kelly--a previously unseen and very charming body of work that is beautifully housed in this volume.

A large portion of our theory list this season also clusters around a common topic. "The Educational Turn" is an expression heard with increasing frequency in the art world, especially in art pedagogy and curatorial theory, and several titles address how art is studied, mediated, encountered and sold: Rethinking the Contemporary Art School, Curating and the Educational Turn, A Manual for the 21st Century Arts Institution, Arts in Society and The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude. At the slightly friendlier end of our writings list, two strong new titles on Pop art deserve note: a much overhauled reprint of John Wilcock's The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol, first published in 1971, and unique in its insider angle on the early days of Warhol's coterie and career. Publisher Chris Trela has worked hard to make this the book it should have originally been, and greatly expands our sense of the era and of Warhol himself by reprinting it. Published by MFA Publications, The Pop Revolution is the late Alice Goldfarb Marquis' social history of Pop art--a group portrait," as she describes it, "of both the artists and the people who made some of them rich and famous in just a few years, while setting in motion the drastically altered way art has been marketed and appreciated--in the monetary and aesthetic sense--up to the present day." This book is certainly as readable and as superbly written as her previous works on Duchamp and Clement Greenberg.