Building Blocks of the Media:
Thomas Demand’s Staged
Photographs
Clearing, 2003, ©Thomas Demand, VG Bild Kunst, Bonn
courtesy: Esther Schipper
For his large-scale
photographs, Thomas Demand
builds models of spectacular locations and political scenarios using
cardboard and paper. His eye is attuned to the media; his work dissects
collective visual memory and has made him into one of the most
internationally renowned German artists of the day. Now, New York’s
MoMA will be showing Demand in a large
retrospective in March. Harald Fricke visited the artist in his
Berlin studio.
|
Thomas Demand
©Thomas Demand
|
The latest model is still in the studio. It’s a window with
a rocket launcher in front, similar to one of the homemade explosives
terrorists used in the seventies. Next to it, the end result is already
hanging on the wall: a large-scale photograph depicting the carefully lit
scene as though it were the film set of an action thriller based on real
life. Rocket Launcher (2005) is a piece that refers to authentic
media images dating from the era of the
Red Army Faction. Thomas Demand must have worked hard at it, because the
viewer can hardly tell from the photograph that the objects depicted are
all made from paper and cardboard. The artist, who was born in Munich in
1964 and studied sculpture at the
Düsseldorfer Kunstakademie and
Goldsmiths College in London, has become an internationally celebrated
star; his photographs command six-figure prices and are made in editions
limited to only a few prints each. Last year, he represented Germany at
the Sao Paulo Biennial, and an overview of his photographs from the past
ten years was shown in
Kunsthaus Bregenz. In a few weeks’ time, New York’s Museum of Modern
Art will be giving Demand his most extensive retrospective to date.
Office, 1995, ©Thomas Demand, VG Bild Kunst, Bonn
courtesy: Esther Schipper
Fitting rooms,
skyscrapers, the TV studio in which
Robert Lembke’s quiz show "What Am I?" was filmed in the seventies –
Demand has built and then photographed painstakingly detailed models of a
number of different situations. The photograph Bathroom (1997), for
instance, shows the tiled interior of the Swiss hotel suite in which the
German Christian Democratic
politician Uwe
Barschel committed suicide; the same year, Demand built a model of
Jackson Pollock’s studio for Barn, which the photograph
depicts as a darkened shack. In his photographs, Demand repeatedly
reconstructs spectacular locations: For Office (1995), he built a
model of the former Stasi
(State Security) Headquarters following the storm of furious East Germans
and recorded it in a photograph 183,5 x 240 cm. in size; there’s a video
of the Tunnel (1999) in which
Lady Diana died, completely filmed before an artificial cardboard backdrop.
One could, in fact, call the photographs an abstraction of
infotainment; in any case, Demand reconstructs the unrelenting image flow
in cool, distanced settings; in the process, he refrains from using shock
effects, showing instead the small, theater-like confines of the media
reality.
|
Factory, 1994, Deutsche Bank Collection
Harald Fricke: There’s a photograph called
"Factory" from 1994 in which the word "Demand" appears in large
letters on the roof of a building. Were you intending to erect an ironic
monument here – the artist as image manufacturer?
Thomas Demand: No, there were other reasons for that. The building has
the perspective of an early
De Stijl drawing. I needed another small component for the row of three
chimneys to take the whole thing in a new direction. And so I looked for a
word to use as the additional element. I could have written "ambition",
for instance, but then I would have quickly wound up with a metaphoric
banality. Because I was studying in London at the time, I came up with the
idea of using my own name; on the one hand, it made the thing personal,
and on the other, "demand" has a meaning in English that’s comparable to
the German word "ambition". Besides, you can find the word on every
pound note – it carries a high degree of general validity. For Germany,
however, I made a version of the work in which the word doesn’t appear at
all.
How did you change over from
sculpture to photography?
Actually, it
wasn’t a changeover, but progress. While I was a student, I experimented
with all kinds of forms; I made sculpture from paper as a reaction to the
clear-cut, rigid assertions of
Katharina Fritsch and
Thomas Schütte, who were using ceramics and bronze. I wanted to make
things that can be made in a single day and for this reason were quick,
transitory. Hence cardboard, paper, tinfoil, and balloons – cheap material
that everybody’s worked with at least once. But after two or three years,
my professor,
Fritz Schwegler, remarked that I wasn’t getting any further in my
development: I was making objects for one day and then throwing them away.
Because you wanted to reject classical sculpture’s claim to eternity?
It was probably an agreeable gesture for dealing with art, but a learning
process wasn’t really apparent in it. I’m grateful to Schwegler to this
day; his remark led me to begin photographing the sculptures to find out
if I was making any progress with them. But then I was very disappointed
by the first photographs of the documentation; the quality was just too
poor. And so Schwegler sent me to
Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photography class, but they couldn’t really
help me either, because what I wanted to learn was how to document
sculpture. For me, it became easier to shake off the shortcomings of my
own photography by starting out with a 35 mm. camera to get back to the
demands of the concrete image. Basically, this process hasn’t really
changed to this day: I make a sculpture, try to find the best possible
lighting conditions for it, and only then do I take the photograph.
And that’s where you learned to convert sculptures into photographs?
Everything has its advantages and its disadvantages. One of the advantages was
practicing objectivity like a dialect and then limiting myself in the
means and my own personal possibilities for reading the image. This helps
keep the viewer’s possibilities for interpretation open. On the other
hand, the choice can become very random. That’s typically German, too: you
move very quickly from the particular to the general. In England it was
the other way around, the artists there were more interested in the
particular, and then remained with the individual experience. If you take
a look at Damien Hirst, it’s the
single shark in the tank, not “sharkness” that he’s portraying. This
method of creating a specific statement that acquires a general validity
due to its tremendous power is something I learned in London.
Studio, 2000, ©Thomas Demand, VG Bild Kunst, Bonn
courtesy: Esther Schipper
[1]
[2]
|
