Rail: Also, the choice to be an artist is political.

Demand: Absolutely, but I don’t think it should be a pamphlet about what to do. That is too one-dimensional. There is a bigger fish to fry.

Rail: I also feel that there is curatorial pressure for works to be conceptual.

Demand: Yes, but you have to see that we have a lot of help now. In the time of Peter Paul Rubens, you spent ten years of your life learning some craft. Art comes really quickly in our time; it needs to be intelligently filtered. The balance between how long it takes and how difficult it is to get there—nowadays, it is fast. Maybe we have to compensate for that with human intelligence. Intention is also important: “Why do you bring it to us?”

AI is interesting—an exercise to rethink what we do. Something like Jackson Pollock—is that thinkable through AI? I don’t think you come to that result. Knowing from a statistical ground what happened, as AI does—you won’t end up there. Also, most of the prompting is language-based. The core of AI is a language model. Visual art is so much more than what is language-based. That is a difference.

Rail: Peter Halley, when asked about AI, and if he felt threatened or affected by it, remarked that he thinks art comes in the end from human’s individual awareness of mortality. This makes a difference with AI. I did not expect to hear that from a painter like him, but it was an interesting thought.

Demand: Ok, but I think that is also the answer of an artist who is older, and he would not have said that when he was twenty. He rethinks what he did as well, looking at early works. I am also looking at my work, and I think, “Oh, they fade away.” There is nothing wrong with that statement. Most of the work is fading away; you can’t really catch it.

Rail: We are fading away.

Demand: That is the sad part of it.

Rail: I could also see your work in the tradition of the still life, and one way of seeing that is as a reflection on death.

Demand: Absolutely. Dutch painting has completely figured that part out. It is all a memento mori.

Rail: Your images are very quiet. Maybe that sounds like a cliché—every photo or painting is silent. But your work is really quite silent.

Demand: What I want to have in the bigger photographs, like Ballroom, is that you have the feeling that somebody just left the room. Then it is silent, and you can peek in. It is not a crowded room; it is always an empty room, but not idealized. It is a real specific moment and space. Specificity is important to give you a hint of where it comes from, if you are interested to know the story behind it. A show has to work in the first thirty seconds, but if it is just thirty seconds, it is not good—it has to lead to something else. In my case, part of it is how it is made—that you realize it is all a big fake. But also relating to something gives this entry point. With painting you see the brush—it has an object character. Photography doesn’t have that. It has an industrial surface. If I want to have that part of painting, I have to produce it. When you look at a Frans Hals, his faces become animated. That is quite moving, really.

Rail: Where is Thomas Demand in these photos? In a way it seems like you want to disappear from the image.

Demand: But at the same time, I am everywhere. I put the viewer into that room. That is also why the photos are so big, often. It is like windows; you stand in the room. It is like a childish fantasy; you see a picture and you can just walk into it.

Rail: The discourse around your work is often about how real or fake it is—how you do it. But apart from technique, I was wondering: what kind of temperament is behind this? I picture a slightly melancholic creator, who loves the world, but also sees it slipping away, which could be a drive to make—

Demand: That is what an artwork is for. I will not be saying yes or no to your reading. An artwork has the potential to give you the chance to consider that. I could be the biggest douchebag, love horseracing, have no patience at all, and still make these works.

Rail: I am attracted to the scenes you make, but they do not appear as spaces where I would want to be. There is something claustrophobic or stressful about them.

Demand: It is not wellness art, for sure. That is a genre in itself now, the pictorialization of wellness. AI does that very well, by the way. I just curated a show about architectural photography in Vienna which opened at the end of May. In this context we were looking for a certain picture by Édouard Boubat—he photographed in the 1950s and ’60s, making pictures like the boy with the fish, the kiss in the rain. I realized that he has a friendly tone in his photographs, a feeling like “life is beautiful.” For twenty years after the war, photography was mainly there to show how beautiful life is. Even poor people can have fun—the sailor in Portugal enjoying the sun, even after a hard day of work. That kind of optimism has evaporated from this media. It is much harsher nowadays, much more documentary, in the sense of “this is how it looks.” Also, the role of kids has completely changed. Now it is about misery. Apart from what this says about our time, it also shows that the expectations of photography are changing all the time.

Rail: Which is related to the fact most people have a phone with a camera. As Cecily Brown has bluntly put it: “The phone is obviously the death of society and culture.”

Demand: I used to find things I could use for my work in books. And then I was hoping nobody else saw it, until I had my own go at it. Then the internet came. Now everything is on the table. Research itself is no fun anymore, you just pick like an editor. To create this excitement of having found something, like a trove, you need to find other ways. It is only in the last thirty years that sending pictures through the internet became popular and possible. What Cecily kind of rightly pointed out is that you have everything on a little device and it takes you out of the real world; it appears to be a mousehole you can escape through. In addition, now with photography everything is backlit, which is another problem. I am not complaining about these things. An artist needs problems—something we have and want to deal with. It is a challenge.

Rail: You need to carve out a space that is not there, in the sense of images—even if that is often not fully possible.

Demand: Every artist would claim that. You hope that you don’t repeat knowns. Then again, AI comes into it—they hope to kind of repeat what is there already. But I am quite optimistic; I find AI an amazing tool. It is all up my alley. I am looking for the common denominator—something you can recognize. Even though I am obviously not happy about the appropriation.

Rail: Thinking about the USA: it seems like we are living during a big shift into a repressive society. I was wondering what your thoughts about that are. You live and work both in Los Angeles and in Berlin. Also in your work, there are several anchor points connecting you to the USA in moments or places. What was your entrance into the USA? Was it the research grant you got at the Getty?

Demand: No, I was living in New York for three years already in the nineties before I moved to Berlin. I came on a grant from the Netherlands. I stayed there, a gallery showed my work, one thing led to another. My biggest collector in fact is the National Gallery in Washington. They have more than twenty five works. You should not forget that the US is also the biggest producer of images—if you think of film, popular culture, games—of iconic imagery. Maybe apart from China, although I can’t really say.

Rail: Those first years in New York—were they relevant to the content of your work?

Demand: Absolutely, until I got homesick. After some years I thought, “I am never going to be an American, and I am losing touch with what happens in Europe.” I felt like the American at the Oktoberfest in Germany. You put on lederhosen, you have the outfit, but you never get the point. I felt the other way around. I never understood the Americans really. I did not grow up with the TV series—the popular culture had so many images that are embedded in the use of language. I can learn about it, but I will never internalize it fully. Eventually, Dan Graham put me in touch with Klaus Biesenbach, who was back then trying to collect money to renovate an old factory in Berlin to create the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art. I could rent a floor there in the Auguststrasse for three years. Later, I had a studio together with Olafur Eliasson for fifteen years. Regarding the US, we stayed again from 2010 onwards till 2022, but then in Los Angeles. I still have the house there. I don’t have a studio anymore, but in LA you easily rent a studio—you find it in a day. The film business rents temporary spaces all the time. They are used to it, unlike Berlin.

Rail: What does it give you to work in Los Angeles?

Demand: The banal answer would be: nobody calls me. I have nobody to bother me the whole day, which is very different from Berlin, or another place where people know you. Also, the light is completely stable. When I shoot in Berlin, I have to do things before the rain season comes, because my things can wobble. Other than my older work, I nowadays use natural light a lot. In LA, you just have sun, and if you don’t finish today, you’ll do it tomorrow.

Then, I did not owe anything to the people living there. I wasn’t part of the culture, and that can be liberating. That has changed though—now we do know many people and have a lot of friends. But the city is opaque, it isn’t easy to enter. In that sense LA is very different: how people get together, how they communicate, how they structure their day. For me it is interesting as a counter-program—the patience, the calm way of running things. Then there is also the size. You get things in big sizes. You have spaces without columns. Every industrial structure has wooden beams. There is a skylight, and there is no column. In Berlin that is impossible.

Rail: LA, as a film city, is good for you.

Demand: Yes, and not just for me. A lot of students, when they finish art school, they go to LA. They can afford it and have a little garden. They might have to drive, but there is work in entertainment, film, gaming, and in art. Everything became unaffordable in New York. That is what my assistants in LA told me.

Rail: You don’t find that all this is changing because of the current administration? There is a big shift—a hostile climate towards independent art.

Demand: I don’t want to tell Americans what is happening in their country. That would not be appropriate. Plus, you should not forget: it is only half of them who voted for Trump. The election was like fifty-fifty. My audience was always the other half anyways. And the part I talk to, they go on the street, to demonstrate this has changed in recent years. There is a lot of resistance. It is kind of heroic: they risk being shot to protest ICE. The courts also fight back. They are quite resilient.

Rail: As a German you know very well where it can lead to. In that sense, the German-American relationship is interesting.

Demand: Absolutely. My late friend Alexander Kluge told me many times about the local elections in Thuringia in 1927, where the Nazis first only got 3 percent, but then it grew fast—in 1932, it was 42 percent. They came through the backdoor. They were really bad at budgeting and money. It did not come full force, but in two or three years it was done. Democracy is a very vulnerable system and based on a lot of agreements that are not written laws, but more like gentlemen’s agreements. You don’t have a law against bullying—we just do not do that. And then, when it happens and becomes official language, you are baffled.

Rail: European governments are still speaking about the US as an ally. But the takeover is already there in the US. It is not that it might happen; it has happened.

Demand: For a big part it is there, but I hope it is reversible. It won’t go back to what it was, but I hope it is reversible. And you have to keep in mind that it is not isolated—Germany is also not on the sunny side. The economy is not running very well. If the current government doesn’t hold, the Alternative for Germany will come into power.

Rail: Poll (2001) seems, in retrospect, a defining picture, if you want to understand what is happening now in the US with the fragility of democracy. It refers to the recount in Florida of the Bush/Gore presidential election in 2000. There were questions about the validity.

Demand: But Al Gore conceded. That was an example of gentleman’s behavior, which back then still existed. For me, what is essential about Poll is that it was an emergency center where the recount took place. It was a place for when there is a flood or hurricane coming, to coordinate the help effort. Back then I was looking at the relationship between a model and reality, and thinking of the many caricatures of a mouse in a labyrinth. So I wrote to academic institutions which do behavioristic experiments, and I asked them for pictures of the experiments they do with animals. They said, “We don’t need pictures, we just need the statistics.” At the same time, these images of the recount were everywhere. I just realized: that is a maze, and we are the mice! An election in the US reminded me of a behavioristic experiment: go left, get food; go right, get an electric shock, and someone measures how quickly you learn. Furthermore, in the image, there is a telephone and a torch on every desk. But nobody could tell me what the torches were for. Maybe for the eventuality of a power outage, to make sure no one manipulates the ballots. For me, it is a powerful image, but the reason that I stumbled over it was not the recount in the first place, but my research into models. That is an example of the lucky artist finding something that is pure gold, over time.