By Claire Demers, originally published in Christopher Street, September 1977

Claire Demers: What do you think your influence has been on the New York art scene?

Andy Warhol: Gee, I don’t know. I just work all the time. There are so many different styles, you know, different ways of people painting and categories and… there’s so much, so much variety. I don’t know if I have influence it or not.

CD: How do you feel about New York?

AW: I just love New York. I have to fly around a lot, but I just can’t wait to get back to New York. I think it’s the best place in the world. I’d rather have an apartment Uptown than Downtown or in the middle, and that would be my vacation – going downtown.

CD: What makes New York unique compared to other cities?

AW: Well, right now we’re getting all the kids from the different countries in Europe and they’re creative and bright and rich and you get these different people here and they’re all so talented and there’s just so many… it’s just actually a country in itself. It’s different from any other place in the world.

CD: Do you have any nostalgia for the old New York?

AW: Oh no. I like old things torn down and new things put up every minute. I like new buildings going up.

CD: Who has changed more in the last twenty-five years: you or the city?

AW: Well, I just just thinking – when I walk on 17th Street, where we are, and across the street to Park Avenue – that about twenty years ago everybody had short hair and then they gradually got long hair and now it’s like it was twenty years ago. Everybody has short hair again and it looks like nothing has happened. It’s really strange. But there’s a lot more people. They always say New York never increases – people are leaving it and stuff like that – but I don’t think so. I think there’s actually a lot more people. It’s not as bad as Japan. Japan is just too crowded.

CD: I’ve never been there.

AW: Oh, really. You’d hate it. It’s just so jam-packed.

CD: If you were to paint New York, what color would you paint it?

AW: I’d paint it red.

CD: What changes would you like to see in this city?

AW: Oh, no changes. I like it just the way it is. But the crime is really so bad. That would be the only change: if they could do something about that.

CD: Have you ever done any of the touristy things like climb the Statue of Liberty or take the Circle Line boat tour?

AW: I haven’t done those. I really would like to do that. But I’ve done other things like the Twin Towers, gone to the top of that and the Empire State Building and to the Rainbow Room.

CD: What’s your favorite building?

AW: My favorite building is that new one on 54th Street and Lexington Avenue. I looked at it this morning about 5 o’clock. It’s where the church is. There’s a modern church and then they built a high-rise over it.

CD: You’ve seen great changes in your lifetime. For instance, the merging of art with fashion, the merging of art with business. In what direction do you think art is going?

AW: Oh, I think it’s going to become fashion art. That’s the direction it’s going.

CD: On your talk show, “Nothing Special”, what would you do differently? Would you use what you call “transmutations”? Would you recycle the leftovers on your TV show?

AW: Well, no, I think people look at anything. So I think if you just had the camera on anything, that would be nothing special and people would look at it – just like sitting looking out of a window or sitting out on a front porch. You could just watch things go by. I mean you could do that for hours.

CD: You have a wonderful way of discovering talent in unknowns. What do you look for?

AW: Anybody doing different things, interesting things, being imaginative, so I think then it works in the other direction where if you’ve really no imagination, then it’s really great too, just the complete opposite.

CD: The success syndrome never seems to affect you. How do you keep your sanity? How do you keep yourself intact?

AW: I just keep on working… and take a lot of plane trips. I read a lot on the plane. Do you get a chance to read on the plane, at all?

CD: If there aren’t too many people on board.

AW: Oh, it’s summer now, it’s so crowded isn’t it. You can really notice the difference.

ASX CHANNEL: ANDY WARHOL

(All rights reserved. Text @ Claire Demers. Images @ The Andy Warhol Foundation)

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Walker Evans’ Many Are Called is a three-year photographic study of people on the New York subway. Using a camera hidden in his jacket and a cable release running down his sleeve, Evans snapped unsuspecting passengers while they traveled through the city. Evans said that these photographs were his “idea of what a portrait ought to be,” he wrote, “anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.”

ASX CHANNEL: WALKER EVANS

(All rights reserved. Images @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

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3D-ma.r.s.08, 2013, courtesy of David Zwirner, NYC

By Vladimir Gintoff, ASX NYC, April 2013

The German photographer Thomas Ruff is the anomalous schoolchild of the Dusseldorf Art Academy and Bernd and Hilla Becher’s tutelage. Breaking and reinventing the rules of photography for over three decades, his body of work remains peerless in its insight, diversity and envelope pushing tactics. Two new projects at David Zwirner, photograms and ma.r.s., extend Ruff’s flair for innovation, and his mining of photography’s past to reveal its future. Almost always working in series, Ruff frequently develops new technologies to facilitate concepts that are at the edge of visual and technical vanguards.

ma.r.s. (stands for “Mars Reconnaissance Survey”) is a series of images based on surface depictions of the fourth planet, taken by a high-resolution camera on an orbiting NASA satellite. Ruff downloads these images from the web and then performs desired alterations of color, orientation, and perspective. The results are monumental landscapes, which are simultaneously familiar and alien. Some are also stereoscopically enhanced – with the aid of 3D glasses – to vividly render the planet’s heavily cratered topography. The effect is novel and surprisingly vivid, though like anything 3D, a suspension of disbelief is mandatory.

Non-stereoscopic images, such as ma.r.s.06 (2010) and ma.r.s.09 II (2013), are rich in surfaces that are unknown and exotic. The clarity is often so exact, it would not be unreasonable to think these images are staged or not landmasses at all, but perhaps a greatly magnified bacterial organism or other microscopic fare. Ruff’s color enhancements confuse us further. The Mars here is not red, but the hues present are optically and aesthetically pleasing.This is a new world, a place of slicked ethereal surfaces injected with the illusion of moisture or the rapid speed of motion. One may be reminded of early American survey photographs by the likes of Watkins and O’Sullivan. Like those nineteenth century mavericks, here is Ruff, a twenty-first century pioneer. He is changing how we think about our world – now part digital and virtual – through new and inventive possibilities for image making.

The Pyramid and Domes, a line of dome-shaped tufa rocks in Pyramid Lake, Nevada, seen in 1867, Timothy O’Sullivan

 
Simultaneously, the photograms in the exhibition are monumental displays of color, form and detail. Composed of varying squiggles, orbs, arcs, and rhythmic lines; they share the biomorphic aspects of ma.r.s. but also bring atomic associations into play. Ruff is indebted to twentieth century darkroom experimentations by Maholy-Nagy, Man Ray and Schad, but his technique relies on software that favors algorithms over a sleight of hand. There is complexity and maturity here that is not found in the analog precedents, though their merit is not being questioned. With Ruff, it is as if we are viewing the chaos of particles at a subatomic scale, millions of times larger and more terrifying, but also more beautiful. These visual ballets, like free radical atoms, feel fleeting, as if their chaos has been suspended in a frozen moment of calm for our viewing.

The photograms are best when they are least inhibited, when control seems to have been lost to the machines that created them. Images like phg.04, r.phg.03 and r.phg.s.03 (all 2012), are matrices of chaotic interactions where the implied movements appear autonomous. Ruff’s earlier zycles images look like a prototype drawing for the finished photograms. In those works, arcs of organized color or “cycloids,” are the overlapping depictions of mathematical curves. James Clerk Maxwell’s nineteenth century treatise on electromagnetism and his engravings of magnetic fields, were sources of influence for that project. Likewise, Ruff’s cassini and Sterne images establish his longstanding interest in the cosmos, which ma.r.s. reiterates and also acts as an extension of.

In a recent interview, Ruff spoke about his 1980s quote stating, “There have to be at least two copies of a photograph, otherwise it’s not a photograph.” A sentiment that has alarming acuity for his highly-varied projects and our evolving sense of the photographic medium. The prints for ma.r.s. and photograms exist as multiples, as photographs, and are representative of expanding views on what photography is or can be in these exponential times.

Vladimir Gintoff graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2012 with degrees in Photography and Art History. He writes for ASX and works as a gallery assistant in New York. He can be contacted at vladimirgintoff@gmail.com, or via his website, vladimirgintoff.com.

ASX CHANNEL: THOMAS RUFF

(All rights reserved. Text @ ASX and Vladimir Gintoff,

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