May 30, 2005, the Museum of Modern Art [Text by Roxana Marcoci]

Thomas Demand : [brochure] March 4- May 30, 2005, the Museum of Modern Art [text by Roxana Marcoci] Author Demand, Thomas, 1964- Date 2005 Publisher The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition URL www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/116 The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition history— from our founding in 1929 to the present—is available online. It includes exhibition catalogues, primary documents, installation views, and an index of participating artists. MoMA © 2017 The Museum of Modern Art 2.Studio (detail). 1997. Chromogenic color print, 6 >4"x1T 554" (183.5 x 349.5cm). Collection the artist The German photographer Thomas Demand The identical gray stacks comprising two Kitchen, 2004, is a sort of is widely recognized as one of the most hundred fifteen cardboard boxes have their sequel to Poll. This work innovative artists of his generation. Born in point of reference in the film archives of appears to portray a prosaic, 1964, the son of two painters and the the German filmmaker and propagandist Leni messy kitchen, yet the image grandson of an architect, Demand studied at Riefenstahl. The Minimalist alignment of actually derives from a news the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf boxes elliptically gestures to the regimented photograph of Iraqi leader and at Goldsmiths College in London. Initially spectacle of athletic bodies in Riefenstahl's Saddam Hussein's hideaway trained as a sculptor, he took up photography Olympia—Feast of the Nations and Festival in his hometown of Tikrit, to record his ephemeral paper constructions. of Beauty, a two-part work on the Berlin where he took refuge during In 1993, he turned the tables, henceforth Olympics of 1936. Demand suggests that the American invasion of making constructions for the sole purpose of Nazi Germany was, to a degree, a product Iraq in 2003. Shot from a photographing them. Demand begins with created by the persuasiveness of the mass high-angle perspective, the an image, usually, although not exclusively, media and the film industry. crammed cooking area with culled from the media, which he translates In a country filled with Third Reich build its aluminum oven, pink into a three-dimensional, life-size paper model. ings, the postwar period in which Demand plastic pitcher, egg carton, He uses colored paper and cardboard to grew up held the promise of reconstruction. bowl of soup, and sundry recreate entire rooms, parking lots, facades, Themes of reconstruction, therefore, inform 3. Trick.2004. 35mm film loop,59 seconds.Collection the artist pots reads like a scrambled and hallways, and to simulate such diverse many of his works, among them Staircase of Purist still life. Once again, materials as wood, plastic, metal, and cloth. 1995 (front cover). This image recreates the Addressing Fascism's ominous take on mod a mundane sight turns out to be the coded His handcrafted facsimiles of architectural Bauhaus-style stairway of Demand's second ernism, Demand, in 2000, produced Model, representation of a political incident. spaces and natural environments are built in ary art school, built in the 1950s. Staircase a constructed photograph of Albert Speer's Demand's few scenes of nature also the image of other images. Once they have especially recalls Oskar Schlemmer's 1932 architectural design for the 1937 International unmoor the traditional mode through which been photographed, the models are destroyed. painting Bauhaus Stairway, which depicts the Exposition in Paris. The artist made the work photography represents observed reality. The resulting pictures are at once convincingly Machinenstil (machine-age) vision of Walter the same year that the questionable nature of Among them, Clearing of 2003 (fig. 1),which real and strangely artificial. Gropius's architecture in Dessau. Schlemmer building national pavilions at world fairs was recreates a section of the Giardini in Venice, Devoid of human presence, the places selected this work as part of his first solo raised during Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany. is a tour de force. Made of 270,000 individually Demand depicts are historically significant, exhibition, which was shut down a few days Not all of Demand's photographs derive cut green-paper leaves, the photograph is although he provides few clues that would later as a result of a heinous review in a from episodes in German history. Some refer cinematic in its panoramic scale and dramatic allow for easy identification. For instance, Nazi newspaper. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., asked to the process of image-making, such as use of light. Playing on the nostalgia of the Boom of 1994, an image of a space where Philip Johnson to acquire the painting as a Studio of 1997 (fig. 2), which depicts the set Romantic landscape tradition, Demand sug the furniture, windows, and even the ceiling future gift to The Museum of Modern Art of the first German quiz show What's My gests that not even the natural environment have been blown to bits, is based on a photo "to spite the Nazis just after they had closed Line?, from the 1950s—its brightly colored, should be taken as a given. In Clearing, the graph of Hitler's headquarters at Rastenburg, [Schlemmer's] exhibition." What Demand's striped background replicating television color ersatz sunlight breaking through the leaves East Prussia, after it was bombed by a mem Staircase does is to bring together the inter bars. Another, Barn, of 1997 is based on bears a suspicious resemblance to calendar ber of the German resistance on July 20,1944. laced narratives of these two stories: the Nazi Jackson Pollock's studio in East Hampton as photography. To achieve the effect, Demand The scene is meticulously ordered to mimic vilification of Bauhaus art and architecture and it appeared in photographs taken by Hans employed an illumination device of 10,000 disorder. Contrasting the chaos of Room is the rehabilitation of its modernist principles Namuth in 1950. Namuth's classic pictures of watts that is typically used in the film industry. Archive of 1995, inscribed by a sense of order. during the reconstruction period of the 1950s. the "shaman's" workshop, in which base As with so many of his other models, the material of car enamels and radiator paint elaborate fabrication of Clearing functions like were transformed into expressive abstraction, a movie set, lasting only as long as the shoot. contributed to the growth of Pollock's world Given the cinematic quality of Demand's wide fame. By blotting out any traces of paint photographs, it is not surprising that he cans, brushes, sticks, and cigarette butts on decided to set some of them in motion, pro the floor, Demand's image has just the oppo ducing to date five 35mm films. His most site effect. It estranges the space of Pollock's recent film, Trick, of 2004 (fig. 3), refers back presence, allowing it to retain a stripped- to the beginnings of cinema. Based on down, bare-bones aspect. one of the first films of the Lumiere brothers, Among Demand's photographs of contem Turning Plates, of 1896, Demand's Trick porary events is Poll of 2001 (fig. 4), which reenacts a sequence in which a performer reconstitutes scenes from the havoc of the executes a stunt by spinning a set of bowls 2000 American presidential election and and plates on a tabletop. What comes into the media's attempts to report the results of view in this—as in all of Demand's works— the voting in Florida's Palm Beach County. is an afterimage of a situation, an event, or Selected from a group of electronic pictures a place that continues to bewilder us with issued by Reuters, Poll shows rows of desks its presence long after its original manifesta topped by numberless telephones, uniform tion has disappeared from the scene. In memo pads, and blank paper ballots carefully an era when even the most sensationalist sorted into piles. The laborious process of stories have only a brief shelf life, Demand's manually recounting thousands of votes is photographs and films offer a paradigm for echoed by Demand's meticulous reconstruc memory premised on a new way of looking tion of the scene in paper. What Demand at what is presented to us as "truth." 4. Poll.2001. Chromogenic color print, 71" x 8'6" (180x 260cm). The Museum of ModernArt, NewYork. seems to say here is that this paper world is Fractionaland promised gift of SharonCoplan Hurowitz and Richard Hurowitz just another record of the fables of democracy. Roxana Marcoci 1.Clearing (detail). 2003. Chromogenic color print, 6'3%i"x 16'2%" (192 x 495cm). The Museumof Modern Art, New York.Gift of Caroland DavidAppel in honor of the Seventy-fifthAnniversary of The Museumof Modern Art ThomasDemand: A Panel Discussion A Conversationwith Thomas Demand THURSDAAYP, RIL14,6:00 p.m.T, ITUS2 SATURDAAYP, RIL16,3: 00p.m. An interdisciplinarypanel of scholarsaddresses Presentedat the Goethe-lnstitutNew Yorkin the photographic,cinemat ic,and architectural conjunctionwith the exhibitionat TheMuseum perspectivesthrough which Thomas Demand's of ModernArt, March4-May 20, 2005. photographscapture and fabricate reality. Moderatedby RoxanaMarcoci RoxanaMarcoci, curator of the exhibition, Goethe-lnstitutNew York moderatesa discussionamong Ulrich Baer, 1014Fifth Avenue AssociateProfessor of Germanand Comparative Admission:$10, $8 for seniors and for studentwits h Literature,New YorkUniversity; Wolfgang currentID. T icketcans be reserved by calling 212.439.8700, Becker,Film Director, X FilmeCreative Pool, andcan be picked up at theGoethe-lnstNew itut York on Berlin;Beatriz Colomina, Professor of History theday of theevent. andTheory, Princeton University School of Architecture;and the artist. Publication ThomasDemand Ticketares $10,$8 for members,$5 f orstudentwits hcurrent Thiscomprehensive publication presents ID,and can be purchased att he Information Desk in the Demand'smajor works from 1993to the present.

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