Thomas Demand Research Articles

The Illusionist

The Illusionist

The Cave of Images: Understanding Visual Politics in and Through Plato's Republic

Plato's Republic links seeing to philosophizing and civic order. Socrates denounces images, but the dialogue's inquiries depend on them while revealing and even enacting the mutual constitution of the visual and political fields. Introducing the text through work by the conceptual artist, Thomas Demand, and representative criticisms of Plato by Ernst Gombrich, Hannah Arendt, and Arthur Danto, I explore the key dependencies and performative moments. My reading undercuts prevailing approaches to Plato while presenting the politics of vision and the visuality of politics in ways relevant to the current image environment yet overlooked in much contemporary political science and theory.

Seeing is (Dis)Believing: A Reading of Thomas Demand's “Modell/Model” (2000)

AbstractIn this commentary I interpret Thomas Demand's photographic work “Modell/Model” (2000) as undermining the strong temptation to think that when we view a photograph – a light‐capturing mechanism – seeing is believing. Demand provides a regress of models of models (recalling Plato's skeptical view of art as unknowing copies of copies) that ultimately proves unfathomable, hence, uncanny. Demand is the Socrates of contemporary art photography: here seeing is not‐knowing. What we do not know is that Demand's photograph is based on a partially erased paper and cardboard model of the scene depicted in a Nazi era photograph of a model of the German Pavilion (Hoffman, 1937) – which recalls the global ambitions of Nazism and the aesthetic connection Hitler wanted to make between neo‐classical fascist architecture and the “new man” of the Third Reich.

On the Experience of Viewing Thomas Demand’s Photographs

Using a phenomenological approach, the article describes the experience of viewing a recent exhibition of Thomas Demand’s photographs. The focus is on both the visual experience itself, and the extent to which the events of the weekend inextricably intertwine with the way the photographs make meaning. Demand’s large-scale photographs are found to be more than just surfaces intended for aesthetic appreciation through visual inspection. His construction process, from source-image, to model, to photograph, supplemented with an information-laden press release, creates visual connection-points inextricably interwoven in the experience of being itself. Demand’s work, it is argued, through conspicuous refusal to easily connect indexically to the original scene, makes visible ways in which photography may be understood through ways of knowing described by existential phenomenology.

Dailiness According to Demand

Thomas Demand's Dailies (2008–) are visual aperçus, yet often they trigger a sense of déjà vu, and this paradoxical combination of the fresh and the familiar is typical of Demand. “The images that come to me,” he tells Alexander Kluge in an extraordinary conversation, “some are very banal, others greatly laden with meaning, but actually they are all things I know.” And we know them too, or think we do. In part, this is because Demand builds his images from prior representations, such as news photos, postcards, and iPhone snaps. Yet this doubling is not performed in the interest of a postmodernist critique of reality as a construct. Demand treats the photographic mediation of the world as a given, and he assumes that we do as well; his project is less to demystify the real than to remodel and reimage it. His art is indicative of a cultural shift in the perceived relation between representations and referents, one in which the old opposition between the indexical and the constructed becomes less relevant. In a world in which almost every image is both photographic and contrived, the indexical aspect of the medium does not automatically trump its other aspects: We no longer assume the truth-value of the photographic image, and we are alert to its fictive capabilities. In this condition a new realism becomes necessary, one that uses artifice to make reality real again—that is, sensible, credible, or simply effective as such. Demand is a key figure in this new art of artifice in the service of reality.

Banality, Memory and the Index: Thomas Demand and Hitler’sphotographer

In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”, André Bazin elucidates how photographic images enable the subject to elude death because by its very nature the image preserves the subject through the act of memory and remembering. This characteristic implies an indexical relation between the image and its referent and a reliance on memory’s capacity to recall such images. Problematising this position are photographs that are removed from their original context, detached from collective memory and forgotten, or images that, in their very banality, erase or negate meaning? This paper explores the disruption to photography’s meaning and memory in selected photographs by Thomas Demand that are restagings of photographs by Adolf Hitler’s official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. This paper analyses these photographs in terms of memory and indexicality and considers how banality can affect the circumstances of looking — a concept that is here applied in order to reconsider these images.

Visual Time: The Image in History

Visual Time offers a rare consideration of the idea of time in art history. Non-western art histories currently have an unprecedented prominence in the discipline. To what extent are their artistic narratives commensurate with those told about Western art? Does time run at the same speed in all places? Keith Moxey argues that the discipline of art history has been too attached to interpreting works of art based on a teleological categorization - demonstrating how each work influences the next as part of a linear sequence - which he sees as tied to Western notions of modernity. In contrast, he emphasizes how the experience of viewing art creates its own aesthetic time, where the viewer is entranced by the work itself rather than what it represents about the historical moment when it was created. Moxey discusses the art, and writing about the art, of modern and contemporary artists, such as Gerard Sekoto, Thomas Demand, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Cindy Sherman, as well as the sixteenth-century figures Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Albrecht Durer, Matthias Grunewald, and Hans Holbein. In the process, he addresses the phenomenological turn in the study of the image, its application to the understanding of particular artists, the ways verisimilitude eludes time in both the past and the present, and the role of time in nationalist accounts of the past.

A Future Without Spectacle: A Refuge from Cultural Hegemony in Contemporary Art and Neo-Humanism

Abstract This paper explores possibilities for the future of popular culture. Central to the arguments in this paper, is the search for a remedy to a visual culture that has been left deconstructed and fragmented by a Western obsession with postmodernism. This paper begins with a discussion of Boris Groy’s “society of spectacle without spectators” (2012) and the ramifications of such an observation as homological to the state of contemporary art and the human subject. A discussion of the works of modern and contemporary artists is used to illustrate contemporary art’s metonymic relationship to the future of popular culture. Specific examples are explored such as German photographer and film maker Thomas Demand’s works that create a “critical fiction” Liljegren (2013) to highly engage the spectator and are juxtaposed with postmodern speculations such as Baudrillard’s simulacra.

Another light: Jacques-Louis David to Thomas Demand

In this richly illustrated book, Michael Fried--one of the most esteemed and influential art critics and art historians working today--has gathered eight major essays written between 1993 and 2013, on topics ranging from Jacques-Louis David, Theodore Gericault, and Caspar David Friedrich through Gustave Caillebotte and Roger Fry to recent films by Douglas Gordon and Thomas Demand. Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, too, are distinct presences along with, in the background, the great art critic Denis Diderot and, in the case of Friedrich, the philosopher Immanuel Kant. As always in Fried's writing, the emphasis falls equally on observation and argument: never have these artists (and one critic, Fry) been subjected to so searching a gaze, and never has the meaning of their respective enterprises been laid bare with comparable clarity and force. Another hallmark of Fried's work is its extraordinary originality, and that too is fully in evidence throughout this remarkable book, which will add to his reputation as one of the indispensable thinkers of our time.

The danger and the saving power of Thomas Demand

Abstract Thomas Demand’s photography has often been understood by critics as questioning the causality of the medium, through an emphasis on personal artistic intentionality. Yet to focus on Demand’s production technique overlooks the fact that in his images, the world is not seen to be entirely under his control. By questioning at the boundaries of human and technological power, Demand gestures towards the historical construct which Heidegger called ‘the essence of technology’, the tendency in contemporary thought to believe that beings can be understood only insofar as they relate to humanity and our needs. Demand’s work ironizes this mindset, within which we experience the world as merely a picture, and thereby begins to suggest that other ways of being may be possible.

Documentary Photography and Preservation, or The Problem of Truth and Beauty

Many architects in recent history have been obsessed with documentary photography. This is true to the extent that we can identify an undercurrent of architectural realism that revolves around a certain involvement with photographic practices. We could think, for instance, of the impact that Nigel Henderson’s photographs had on the young Alison and Peter Smithson, or in Venturi and Scott Brown’s infatuation with Ed Ruscha and later Stephen Shore as visual models to approach American car urbanism. Similarly, and closer to our day, the collaborations between Herzog & de Meuron and Thomas Ruff or Caruso St. John and Thomas Demand call our attention to the recurrent way in which architects and photographers have felt drawn through the years to engage in increasingly collaborative projects. In this short text we revisit the historic process through which documentary photography was slowly defined as a fully fleshed genre over the course of a century, in an attempt to unravel what it is that these two disciplines have in common, and what it is that architects and preservationists see when they look at documentary photography.

An Archival Impulse: The Return of 1970s Leftwing Terrorism in Contemporary German Art

As the controversial Kunstwerke exhibition “Imagining Terror” (“Zur Vorstellung des Terrors”, 2005) has shown, an intimate bond exists between left-wing terrorism and the arts. From the 1970s onward, the arts have steadily been preoccupied with West German terrorism, turning it into one of the most prominent yet also most contested topics in German art today. Part of its attraction lies in its interdisciplinary character, connecting terrorism to various fields such as media theory, art history, and memory studies. As such, leftwing terrorism has come to constitute its own kind of archive, and probing into it can uncover traces beyond its immediate topicality. Drawing primarily on two recent essays – Hal Foster’s “An Archival Impulse” (October 2004) and James Meyer’s “The Return of the Sixties in Contemporary Art and Criticism” (Antinomies of Art and Culture, 2008) –, the following article will take a look at contemporary German art’s renewed fascination with leftwing terrorism, asking what might be at stake when a new generation of artists simultaneously draws on and expands upon this archive. Some of the trends one can observe in this process are a reformatting of history, a shift in focus to themes previously tossed aside and forgotten, and a retelling of stories as counterfactual. They speak to an interest in the 1970s that is not only topical but also aesthetic in nature. Artworks exemplifying this kind of archival impulse include Thomas Demand’s “Attempt” (2005), and Andree Korpys/ Markus Löffler’s “Conspirative Housing Project Spindy” (1997-2001).

The Aesthetics of an Incident: Thomas Demand's Animated Film "Pacific Sun"

The Aesthetics of an Incident: Thomas Demand's Animated Film "Pacific Sun"

Photography after conceptual art

1. Introduction: Photography After Conceptual Art (Diarmuid Costello, University of Warwick and Margaret Iversen, University of Essex). 2. Auto-Maticity: Ruscha and Performative Photography (Margaret Iversen, University of Essex). 3. Ed Ruscha, Heidegger, and Deadpan Photography (Aron Vinegar, Ohio State University). 4. Subject, Object, Mimesis: The Aesthetic World of The Bechers' Photography (Sarah E. James, University of Oxford). 5. Exit Ghost: Douglas Huebler's Face Value (Gordon Hughes, Rice University). 6. Productive Misunderstandings: Interpreting Mel Bochner's Theory of Photography (Luke Skrebowski, Middlesex University). 7. Roni Horn's Icelandic Encyclopedia (Mark Godfrey, Tate Modern). 8. Thomas Demand, Jeff Wall And Sherrie Levine: Deforming 'Pictures' (Tamara Trodd, University of Cambridge). 9. Almost Merovingian: On Jeff Wall's Relation to Nearly Everything (Wolfgang Bruckle, University of Essex). 10. Morning Cleaning: Jeff Wall and The Large Glass (Christine Conley, University of Ottawa). Index.

The photograph as contemporary art

This book, now updated and expanded, is a profusely illustrated survey of the use of photography in contemporary art since the mid-1980s. It features the work of more than 170 of internationally renowned and up-and-coming artist-photographers, including Andreas Gursky, Nan Goldin, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Richard Billingham, Jurgen Teller, Thomas Demand, Christopher Williams, Sherrie Levine, Jeff Wall, Wolfgang Tillmans, Zoe Leonard, and many more. Themed chapters consider subjects such as narrative and storytelling in art photography, photographing the everyday and the insignificant, the use of photography in conceptual art, and the cool, detached, and objective aesthetic prevalent in current art photography. A new eighth chapter examines why many artists, in the age of digital photography, make work that focuses on the physical and material properties of photography, respond to the changing means of distributing photographic images, and push the boundaries of technology to reach larger and more diverse audiences.

Paper Truth

An article dedicated to the German artist Thomas Demand opens by describing a German Disneyworld employee working in the Bavarian beer garden at Epcot. When questioned about working in a replica of her homeland, the employee replied that her hometown had been completely demolished in World War II and was reconstructed afterward. Thus, what is perceived as an authentic place of origin is often an imitation of its former existence, and conceptually, isn't too far removed from Disney's amusement parks.(1) The relation between this anecdote and Demand's artwork reveals something of the manner in which critics tend to interpret his work. Demand, who began his career in the 1990s, reconstructs interiors and other locations according to documentary photographs and objects; he builds these life-size reconstructions strictly out of colored paper. Demand then photographs the fabricated locations, which he eventually destroys. His exhibitions present large-scale photographs of paper reconstructions that, when first perceived, look like documentations of real objects and places. At first glance, his works tend to deceive the viewer. Only after a closer look, when encountering the disturbing effect of the works, does doubt arise regarding the nature of the images. Interpretations of Demand's work posit two very different views concerning its truth. On the one hand, the works can be understood as dealing with the production of visual images that reflect one another, devoid of any substantial core. On the other hand, some of his critics stress the referential aspect of his works--the indication of specific, concrete locations. Yet, despite their differences, all interpretations agree upon another prominent aspect of Demand's work: the extraordinary skill it exhibits. Using Demand's work as a lens, this essay elucidates the unique way works of art bare truth--truth that is not the opposite of falsehood and that has nothing in common with historical fact. This truth is derived from the artist's know-how--a know-how excluded by the discourse of art. ART VS. HISTORY, FACT VS. FICTION According to Aristotle, the difference between the historian and the poet is that the former relays what has happened, while the latter deals with the possibility of what might happen. (2) This distinction did not, of course, prevent the emergence of works of art such as historical novels or paintings. Theorists have claimed that what gives historical painting its privileged status in art history is part of another Aristotelian argument: the claim that exquisite painting should represent significant human actions. (3) Thus, for example, although it seems that in the painting The Death of Marat (1793) Jacques-Louis David did not save any efforts in supplying his viewer with historical information such as the crime scene or the murder weapon, the praise lavished upon this painting actually points toward the subject matter and its painterly characteristics rather than its reliable depiction of a particular historical event. Generally speaking, the failure of works of art in mirroring true information, a standard derived from Aristotle, seems obvious and inevitable. As is well known, the supremacy of historical paintings did not last long. Yet, the art world of the late twentieth century was stimulated from an opposite direction by questions related to the referential aspect of works of art--this time concerning questions of representation in relation to reality. In an essay dedicated to the American artist Cindy Sherman, Rosalind Krauss analyzes Sherman's Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), a series of black-and-white photographs in which the artist assumes the look of a Hollywood starlet and photographs herself in various costumes and locations (4) She begins by stressing the fact that although Sherman's works appear to recall a specific film, they do not in fact contain any singular cinematic reference. …

THOMAS DEMAND, JEFF WALL AND SHERRIE LEVINE: DEFORMING ‘PICTURES’

What are we to make of the return of the ‘picture’ in photography after conceptual art? In this article I engage directly with the lineage provided by Jeff Wall for his own brand of ‘pictorialist’ photography, and his surprising appropriation of Sherrie Levine to this end. I suggest that Wall's gesture of appropriation and the structure of his own works reveal a more irrational sense of the ‘picture’ as a force of deformation which may usefully be extended to the work of Thomas Demand. I argue that Demand's work does not support the terms of modernist aesthetics, and in particular, cannot be credibly interpreted as founding photography as a ‘medium’, as Michael Fried has suggested. Instead I argue that Demand's work presents photography as parasitic and bound in an irrational relationship to sculpture. Neither medium is self‐supporting and each is instead ‘propped’ on the other, forced to cohere by the deforming operations of the ‘picture’.

On the Very Idea of a ‘Specific’ Medium: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell on Painting and Photography as Arts

274 I would like to acknowledge the support of a Leverhulme Trust research fellowship while working on this paper, versions of which were given at the 2005 Photography Theory Symposium in Cork and the 2006 annual conferences of the United Kingdom Association of Art Historians, the British Society of Aesthetics, and the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand. I would also like to thank Jim Elkins, Michael Fried, Stephen Melville, Stephen Mulhall, Joel Snyder, and an anonymous referee for their comments on earlier drafts, and Claire Bishop, Dominic Rahtz, David Raskin, and Daniel Sturgis for their assistance with images. 1. James Elkins, ‘What DoWeWant Photography to Be? A Response toMichael Fried’,Critical Inquiry 31 (Summer 2005): 941; hereafter abbreviated ‘W’. SeeMichael Fried, ‘Barthes’sPunctum’, Critical Inquiry 31 (Spring 2005): 539–74; hereafter abbreviated ‘B’. The book to which Elkins refers is provisionally titledWhy PhotographyMatters as Art as Never Before. It has been widely previewed; in addition to various lectures and ‘B’, Fried has published short papers on Thomas Demand, JeffWall, and Luc Delahaye (‘Being There’,Artforum 43 [Sept. 2004]: 53–54; ‘Without a Trace: The Art of ThomasDemand’,Artforum 43 [Mar. 2005]: 198–203; and ‘WorldMergers’, Artforum 44 [Mar. 2006]: 63–64, 66, respectively). It was also the source of his 2005 Lionel Trilling On the Very Idea of a ‘Specific’ Medium: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell on Painting and Photography as Arts

Bernd and Hilla Becher: life and work

Bernd and Hilla Becher's lifetime project of documenting the industrial landscape of our time secures their position in the canon of postwar photographers. Their work--at once conceptual art, typological study, and topological documentation--has influenced German photographers of a younger generation, including Thomas Struth, Thomas Demand, Candida Hfer, Thomas Ruff, and Andreas Gursky. This compelling, exhaustively documented biography describes the Bechers' life and work and offers a critical assessment of their place in the history of photography.Becher scholar Susanne Lange, granted access to the photographers' archives and quoting extensively from interviews with them, writes the first sustained analysis and biography of the Bechers' extraordinary partnership. She discusses, among other topics, both the functionalist and aesthetic dimensions of the Bechers' subject matter, their typologizing (which she finds reminiscent of nineteenth-century naturalists' classificatory schemes), and the anonymous industrial building style favored by German architects. She argues that industrial building types impose themselves on our consciousness as the cathedral did on that of the Middle Ages, and that the Bechers' photographs--which seem at first glance only to record a vanishing landscape--serve to examine this shaping of our perceptions. Their work provides us with a rare opportunity to see how we see.Bernd & Hilla Becher: Life and Work, with 53 duotone plates and more than 200 additional illustrations, is the first book to delve deeply into the sources and vision behind the evocative and melancholy beauty of the Bechers' work. It will be indispensable both as a reference for students of postwar German photography and as a guide for readers who want to know how to approach the Bechers' monumental project.

Staging history

Using Thomas Demand's work as an example, this essay considers the symbolic function of photographs as illustrations of historic sites or events. Demand takes pictures of large-scale sculptural paper models, which are reconstructions based on existing images, many of them images of historic significance. The hybrid nature of these photographs is embedded in the process of their making and reveals itself only after close examination. Traditional notions of indexicality are suspended since the final image is not directly connected to the time or place where the ‘original’ was taken. For the viewer, this process of removal is countered by the immediacy of the photographic image and raises questions about our relation to photographs as illustrations of history. These complex layers come into focus if one reads Demand's artistic project through the lens of Braco Dimitrijevic's propositional photographs of the 1970s. Unlike many early conceptualists, Dimitrijevic did not invoke the ‘documentary’ photograph in order to subvert veracity but to demonstrate the suggestive power of the image, even when it operates in the realm of hypothesis. His images of nondescript sites carry the title, ‘This could be a place of historic interest’, and the combination of image and text pushes the definition of history and the photograph beyond the limits of a complete and closed past into a future tense. The suspension of photography's indexical power is also a central aspect in Demand's work, although he achieves this through an intermediary step rather than a linguistic directive. In Demand's images the historic (con)text is always implied but never accessible, and this separation temporarily liberates the image from any prescriptive reading and shows the image as artifact. Demand's photographs go far beyond a play with authenticity. One might say this is simply his artistic method. Instead, I read his work as an exploration of the symbolic nature of photographs (and especially the historically significant photograph) through a process of abstraction and de-familiarization.