PHOTO: Thomas Demand-The Stutter of History

Thomas Demand’s images may appear to depict the real world but upon closer inspection they resonate with a fragile similitude that belies the fact that they are actually photographs of his handmade three-dimensional sculptural recreations of found images culled from the media. After choosing his source images, Demand uses colored paper and cardboard to reconstruct the spaces that they depict in three dimensions at a one to one scale. He then photographs these scenarios and subsequently destroys his models leaving behind only the ghostly photographic doppelgänger.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Jeu de Paume Archive

Bringing together 60 works (photographs, films and wallpapers) that span his career, the exhibition “Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History” focuses on four important areas of Demand’s work that can be summarized as “Uncanny Histories”, “The Architectonic Impuls”, “Mysteries of Everyday Life” and “Images that Move”. Uncanny Histories: The primary focus of this exhibition is the large-scale photographic works that form the core of Demand’s artistic output. The exhibition include examples from the earliest moments in his career to the present cutting a wide swath across a range of significant political and artistic moments in visual history. These uncanny histories range from works derived from seemingly banal images to historically important yet visually unidentifiable moments from the history of art and politics such as the studios of Jackson Pollock in (Barn1997) and Henri Matisse (Atelier 2014), the site of the Florida recount of the 2000 American presidential election (Poll, 2001), the control room of the Fukishima nuclear power plant before its partial reactor melt down (Control Room, 2011) or more recently the home of the Boston Marathon bomber (Backyard and Bloom, both 2014). Whether reconstructing an image of an East German television studio (Studio, 1997), a generic looking photo copy business (Copyshop, 1999) or the acoustic tiled room of a sound recording studio (Labor, 2000) Demand often foregrounds the act of recording, reproduction and dissemination of images and content in his work. In another work, Space Simulator (2003), the artist uses an archival photograph to recreate the Apollo Mission Simulator used to train astronauts at the Kennedy Space Center from 1968 to 1972. This work becomes a kind of metaphor for the artist’s entire practice as Demand’s work seeks to simulate the world that we inhabit. The mysteries of everyday life: Alongside these more monumental works the exhibition includes Demand’s ongoing series of “Dailies” that have been a revelation in their source material, medium and scale, and stand in sharp contrast to his other works. Domestically sized and printed with a diasec transfer process these works are then framed more along the lines of traditional photographic works although they go through the same creative process of transformation from image to paper sculpture to image. Their other significant difference within Demand’s oeuvre is their source images. They are based on photographs of the world around him taken with his iPhone and range from images of clothespins attached to an outdoor clothesline set against a blue sky, an empty frozen yogurt cup discarded on a shelf, a bar of soap balanced on the edge of a sink and disposable coffee cups shoved through the holes of a chain link fence. The “Dailies” encapsulate Demand’s personal take on history which is just as much constituted by the minor random images we encounter in everyday life as by world historical events. The delicacy and intimacy of these works stands in creative opposition to the monumental scale and topics of his larger historical works. In Demand’s work the “Dailies” constitute a kind of silent autobiography of the artist’s everyday visual life. The architectonic impulse: Demand studied with the sculptor Fritz Schwegler at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf who encouraged him to explore the expressive possibilities of architectural models. In his architectonic explorations of the visual world Demand started to employ wall- paper in order to give his photographic and sculptural practice a spatial and architectural dimension. A recent exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York employed wallpaper that was installed floor to ceiling bearing one of Demand’s recreated images of school lockers on top of which he hung a group of photographs from his “Dailies” series. This exhibition includes an array of his past wallpaper projects which will be deployed as architectural interventions on which to hang his photographic works. Additionally, his series of “Model Studies” (2011), straightforward photographs of abstracted elements of architectural maquettes by well-known architects will add an additional layer of texture to this exhibition’s presentation of both the content and form of his practice and its underlying exploration of the built environment. Images that moves: Film animations have been an important part of Demand’s practice since his recreation of the tunnel in which Princess Diana died in his work Tunnel (1999). More recently Demand created his magnum opus of stop motion animation with his film “Pacific Sun” (2012) in which the artist painstakingly recreated a YouTube video of the interior of a cruise ship experiencing horrific turbulence. Returning to the banal recording of spectacular moments of everyday life that now circulate endlessly on the internet, this work brings together all of the topics in Demand’s work and is a centerpiece of the exhibition. The exhibition provides both an overview of the artist’s way of seeing the world as well as a lesson in how we might approach the onslaught of historical events that we consume through the world of images.

Photo: Thomas Demand, Pond, 2020, C-Print / Diasec, 200 x 399 cm, © Thomas Demand, Adagp, Paris, 2023

Info: Curator: Douglas Fogle, Jeu de Paume, 1 Place de la Concorde, Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, France, Duration: 14/2-28/5/2023, Days & Hours: Tue 11:00-21:00, Wed-Sun 11:00-19:00, https://jeudepaume.org/