{"id":106005,"date":"2025-08-30T05:24:12","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T05:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/106005\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T05:24:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T05:24:12","slug":"sculptor-photographer-thomas-demand-on-reframing-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/106005\/","title":{"rendered":"Sculptor-photographer Thomas Demand on reframing reality"},"content":{"rendered":"

It seems apt that Thomas Demand would be giving me a detailed description \u2013 and I\u2019d be fabricating a vivid picture in my head \u2013 of an upcoming exhibition neither of us has yet seen, of which no images are forthcoming, that\u2019s being installed in Sydney while I\u2019m in Melbourne and he\u2019s in Berlin. Such layers of mediation and distancing are, after all, central to the work of this sculptor turned photographer turned megastar artist-at-large.<\/p>\n

The exhibition is titled The Object Lesson and is Demand\u2019s new staging of selected works from the Kaldor collection, for the 38th Kaldor Public Art Project, opening at the Art Gallery of New South Wales Naala Badu building this weekend. According to my imagination it\u2019s a doozy: an installation that\u2019s kaleidoscopic, loud, richly conceptual but viscerally engaging, hanging and hovering and plastered in wallpaper; a kind of portrait-in-objects of collector John Kaldor himself. But that\u2019s pure speculation: you\u2019ll just have to see for yourself.<\/p>\n

I first came to admire Demand\u2019s work around the turn of the millennium, having fallen in with a bunch of Brisbane-based art historians and architectural theorists with a shared interest in photography. The darlings of the moment were all German: Gerhard Richter and his paintings like blurry photographs; Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky and their monumental, saturated images of sites and places; Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose deadpan photographs of industrial architecture won them the Venice Golden Lion \u2013 in sculpture. But it was the slightly younger Demand whose work was most elusively fascinating, unsettling distinctions between photography, sculpture and architecture, between two dimensions and three.<\/p>\n

Even then, Demand was a key figure in debates about the fate and future of photography. Some of these are dull \u2013 a binary view of photography\u2019s \u201ctruths\u201d and \u201clies\u201d is too blunt for the subtle recursions of Demand\u2019s work. As he says, \u201cI am neither a detective nor a policeman nor a journalist.\u201d It\u2019s much more interesting to explore the work\u2019s interplay between veracity and verisimilitude, its manifestation of one of art\u2019s central tenets: that some truths are best told through fiction, and semblance is sometimes the purest form of fidelity.<\/p>\n

Leading up to our Zoom call I was overawed, nervy, anticipating imminent exposure as a nitwit. So I was mightily relieved to find Demand generous and wryly funny, in an earnest Germanic mode. At 61 he remains boyish in a stubbled kind of way, and it turns out his name is not prescriptive: he\u2019s not demanding at all but rather endearingly modest. He puts us both at ease by observing \u2013 from the shelf behind me \u2013 the \u201ccomfortable feeling\u201d that we have many of the same books.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s keen to tell me about The Object Lesson, the forthcoming show, in which he sees his role as less curator, exhibition designer or even installation artist, and more conductor: \u201cI would say it\u2019s a circus. I\u2019m the circus director and I have a couple of clowns.\u201d None of his own singular works are on display because \u201cit\u2019s all of me everywhere\u201d. Their \u201cdistant relatives\u201d are present though \u2013 because \u201cI see art by other people\u201d, he says, \u201cand sometimes I\u2019m envious I didn\u2019t do it\u201d.<\/p>\n

Demand is due to fly to Sydney to finish the installation a few hours after our conversation. This will be his second major work with Kaldor, his long-time collector and friend, after The Dailies had its world premiere in Sydney at the 25th Kaldor Public Art Project in 2012.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we\u2019re going to come back to the idea that a prompt cannot produce a picture, and the whole point of art, an artistic picture, is that you cannot describe it with words.\u201d<\/p>\n

That show, staged in the Commercial Travellers\u2019 Association Business Club \u2013 Harry Seidler\u2019s funny little mushroom of a building on Martin Place, from 1975 \u2013 has a\u00a0story of its own. Demand tells me how he stumbled upon the building, snuck in when the attendant went to the loo and \u201cwalked up the staircase and there I see this other world of, like, stillness and stuckness \u2013 of people sitting there looking into the city centre from their windows \u2026 this bubble of commercial travellers or judges or I still don\u2019t really know who stayed there \u2026 it\u2019s not a hotel, it\u2019s not a home. It\u2019s kind of this weird, dangling thing in the middle of the city.\u201d Demand\u2019s exhibition took temporary possession of the whole fourth floor, made selective renovations to the perimeter bedrooms, installed one photograph in each, and The Dailies was launched.<\/p>\n

Originally a sculptor, Demand first used photography as a means to document his elaborate paper constructions before they fell apart, and to avoid having to cart them around. Gradually the emphasis shifted from the sculptures themselves to the photographs, with the camera taking an increasingly significant role as the fixed eye for which the paper models were constructed \u2013 at full scale, always with the scene destroyed after the production of a single, carefully lit and framed image. The source material for the models is often pre-existing \u201cfound\u201d photographs from news media, depicting a place where something of political or social significance has occurred.<\/p>\n

Still with me? He starts with real photographs of real places, painstakingly remakes them as full-scale paper models that are close but not exact reconstructions of the image, rephotographs the scene, then destroys the model. In this way Demand re-presents the remains of the conference room where plotters tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler; the kitchen of the hut where Saddam Hussein was captured; the control room of Fukushima nuclear plant \u2013 and on it goes. Many scenes appear as seemingly banal domestic rooms, off to the side of historic events \u2013 just before or\u00a0after the momentous moment.<\/p>\n

Some subjects edge towards voyeurism \u2013 the tunnel where Princess Diana died, the hotel room where Whitney Houston ate her final, room-service meal. It feels like there\u2019s a risk of feeding prurience, profiting from the slavering image-appetite of the paparazzi. But Demand\u2019s elaborate translational process seems to offer a counterweight: the source images may be surreptitious and snatched, but in remaking them with such extraordinary, elaborate care, they feel somehow re-dignified. I\u2019m thinking in particular of Junior Suite, the Houston work, the quiet intimacy of which feels less sensational than elegiac.<\/p>\n

Many of the works\u2019 titles are puns and Demand never gives any exposition about the significance of a given scene, leaving the viewer to their own enjoyable sleuthing of the backstory. There are never any human figures but always the haunting sense they\u2019ve just stepped out of frame. Described as being \u201caround the corner from the horror\u201d, the scenes show no direct evidence of violence but frequently reckon with its shadows. There is also never any text or type: Office, for example, which reconstructs the ransacked and paper-strewn East German Stasi secret police headquarters, is full of blank pages, documents rendered void.<\/p>\n

Amid all this portentousness there are still moments of slapstick. Landing immortalises a conservator\u2019s photo of the aftermath following a museum visitor\u2019s tripping down the stairs of the Fitzwilliam Museum, knocking over three Qing Dynasty vases and smashing them to bits. Remaking all those shards seems equally fateful and perverse.<\/p>\n

The point of the models is not to deceive \u2013 to the close observer it\u2019s clear from minor imperfections in form and surface and an uncanny flatness of colour and texture that the photographs don\u2019t depict actual factual scenes but, rather, their reconstruction in paper. Sometimes they\u2019re coming slightly apart, wavering at the edges, and when I confess to Demand that I find these seams oddly affecting, he laughs and says, \u201cThat. That affection I need, you see. That\u2019s what I live from.\u201d It\u2019s what pays his bills.<\/p>\n

This talk of glitches leads us to the hallucinations of AI. To my surprise he\u2019s sanguine about its implications for creative practice. \u201cMaybe I\u2019ll eat my words, but at the moment I\u2019m thinking AI is actually quite interesting because it\u2019s a whole new Milky Way of possibilities,\u201d he says. \u201cAt the moment we\u2019re so happy that something \u2013 some image \u2013 is coming out, but they all look the same: it\u2019s either advertisement photography \u2026 or it\u2019s surrealist painting, like \u2018make me a puppet with six ears that looks like Queen Mary\u2019.\u201d As a stated optimist, he argues \u201cit\u2019s art that has something to offer against the full takeover of AI \u2026 As an artist you always want to claim that you do something which is not there yet, and so being original is going to be the task much more than before.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a deeper parallel with AI in Demand\u2019s work, given that his source images also emerge from a shared global image culture or \u201cpublic iconography\u201d, residing both in mass media and in people\u2019s heads \u2013 as tropes, visual associations, memories and connotations. An AI search engine might be more systematic and organised than the coincidence of finding an image in a newspaper on a train, but \u201cfor me, it\u2019s basically the same\u201d.<\/p>\n

Demand has also been \u201cchewing on\u201d the fact that the text-prompt basis of AI-image-generation seems entirely ignorant of a central argument of \u201970s conceptual art \u2013 an object, a picture of that object and a description of said object are not the same thing. We all know this \u2013 it\u2019s why we don\u2019t eat the menu at dinner. But does AI know? Demand finds this troubling.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy do we place so much trust in language being able to tell a pictorial product how it should look?\u201d he asks. \u201cI can only explain it to myself as a complete ignorance of art history by the makers of AI. They don\u2019t know anything about it. That would make sense, because of course they\u2019re not artists and they might even hate art, that\u2019s why they take it for free … I think we\u2019re going to come back to the idea that a prompt cannot produce a picture, and the whole point of art, an artistic picture, is that you cannot describe it with words.\u201d<\/p>\n

One response is to focus on materiality, the actual stuff of art and life, and this is a theme in The Object Lesson. \u201cAs an artist you look at artworks as objects as much as representations of an idea, you know, because you make objects,\u201d he says. \u201cWe always look at the surface of it, what it represents, what\u2019s on it, what\u2019s the context of it, but they are also really nice objects.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is true. Still, it\u2019s somewhat ironic coming from Demand, given the ambiguous status of three-dimensional things in his work, the oscillation between flatness and depth, original and simulation, as a nested series of images of models of images of places. If it all sounds a bit Ren\u00e9 Magritte, you\u2019re right: Demand tells me the title The Object Lesson is\u00a0taken from Magritte\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

The show is being mounted in the new AGNSW building designed by Japanese architects SANAA. Demand is very familiar with their work, having spent extensive time in their office compiling his series Model Studies. He also knows this specific building: \u201cI went for three or four years, every three or four months, to Japan from LA. And I saw that building very often on the tables, there being discussed \u2026 so I know the building as a model, you know, I knew it exactly.\u201d I ask whether his first visit felt like walking into a full-scale replica. \u201cAbsolutely,\u201d he says. \u201cI had a total feeling that I\u2019m walking through a model of theirs but just a little more refined, solid.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the decades, Demand\u2019s works have grown larger, more ambitious and much more labour-intensive. Some take years to make \u2013 Clearing, for example, depicts a forest with light filtering through a canopy made up of nearly 300,000 individually cut paper leaves. The time and craft is awe-inspiring. It\u2019s even more pronounced in the video works, including my favourite of all, the stop-motion animation Pacific Sun \u2013 I implore you to find it on YouTube.<\/p>\n

Demand\u2019s work is exhilarating. It incites you to look closely and then more closely still. In a 2006 conversation with the film director Alexander Kluge he described how, on finishing a model, he stands within it, very carefully so as not to break it, and in this moment of culmination has a sense of being inside an image. This feels like the articulation of a longing I didn\u2019t even know I had: the possibility of entering into a picture, climbing right inside and exploring it from within. Yes, I realise, on some deep existential level, yes. That\u2019s what I want too.<\/p>\n

\n This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
\n August 30, 2025 as “Scene stealer”.<\/p>\n

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