Thomas Demand Distinctively Visual

Thomas Demand is a sculptor and photographer from Germany. He is known all around the world for his phenomenal and engaging political still life artworks. When he first started he focused on sculpture, using photography to document his paper-and-cardboard reconstructions. However, in 1993, photography and sculpture traded position in his artistic process; the photograph became the “end product,” with the sculpture providing a means to that end. Demand’s following sculptures were made especially to be photographed. Photographs can look real or unusually artificial and Demand finds a perplexing balance between the two. He's considered to be one of the world’s greatest modern artists whose photographic work and, last stop-animation films, is at
the forefront of contemporary art. He’s illustrious for his large-scale images of paper-and-cardboard reconstructions of indoor scenes. Demand creates environments with social or political meaning. When first viewing, the pictures seem to portray actual settings, however nearer examination reveals that the scenes are entirely assembled by Demand. Through calculated illusion Demand has striven to overturn the notion of photography as inevitably objective, or “realistic,” medium. Demand’s images not solely aim to draw viewers into the illusion, but conjointly aim to underscore the role that photography plays in cultivating illusion. Merging craftsmanship and conceptualism in comparable parts, Demand pushes the medium of photography towards uncharted frontiers. His paper and cardboard constructed environments combine banality and spectacle, displaying the obsession with storytelling that pervades the significance of spaces. His originality has given him a strong recognition as one of the most innovative artists of his generation.
Demands aim is to reconstruct concepts of reality.
When he began creating photographs of others pictures, predominantly from various media sources, Demand tried to reprivatise an image of the world and the meaning of the world with very straightforward means. First Demand begins with an image, often discovered in mass media sources and frequently dealing with traumatic or politically important events or strained from personal memories. He then builds or creates a life-size and three-dimensional in door scene which is a replica of the image. He normally does this using cardboard and coloured paper but has used other materials as well. Demand uses paper and cardboard because it is inexpensive and easily accessible, and people know how it’s made and used and that’s is disposable, which he finds important. This is because he tries to communicate through scenes that everybody is familiar with. So, when you see a picture, in a weird way you have a feeling of déjà vu. To describe and explain his work Demand likes to use the words patience, imagination, abstraction, frustration, bricolage and failure. He came to photography through sculpture and a close observation reveals the subtleties at the heart of his work. This often takes time and precision as he has to recreate an image to perfection so that it would be very hard to tell the difference. Its all about the little details. The effect of these uncanny reconstructions is to destabilise our understanding of the sites which we ‘know’ so well through reproduction. Humans are not included in Demand’s photographs, but he leaves few clues that are an indication that there has been human activity within them. To keep the theme of illusion alive in his photographs, Demand destroys his paper and cardboard models after he is finished with them, to further complicate the relationship between reproduction and original that his photography investigates, also mimicking the fleeting fascination the public has with these significant
spaces. In his photographs, the medium is distinctly visible, restraining the models from seeming fully real despite their meticulously rendered detail. Thomas Demands work makes comments on the political and social world. The scenes that he recreates often possess meaning political and social meaning. His works address the general public’s obsession with narrative as well as contemporary photographers’ urge to separate from it. He believes that it is important to have a political statement or purpose as it is a sign of intelligence which he likes. When asked about the historical context in his works and his fascination of history, Demand replied with “No, its not about history, it’s about memory and how we share mediated experiences to construct our identities with images”. His works recreate recognizable imagery found in the mass media or locations where significant historical or media events have occurred, loaded with political or social meaning. Upon first glance, Demands “Copyshop” appears to be just another bland office interior occupied by a series of large photocopy machines, surrounded by bins and boxes and reams of fresh copy paper. But at closer inspection a realisation is made that the scene is completely made from paper and cardboard. The illusion is meticulously realised and highly effective, but deliberately not absolute: raking light in the distance captures the slight buckling on the front of one of the machines, clearly and again rather disconcertingly revealing that this is not a sheet of hard plastic or metal but something much more flimsy and ephemeral.
In Demands artwork “Backyard” we see side steps which lead up to the residence of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was one of the prime suspects of the bombings which took place while a marathon was being run by thousands in Boston, 2013. This work is similar and remindful of many of Demand’s accounts of recent history, presenting mundane or familiar spaces – kitchens, homes, bars and gardens – burdened with the mass of the events that haunt them. This image of Tsarnaev’s home presents the common and ordinary wooden architecture that is seen in the Boston neighbourhood. The closeness of the houses next to eachother suggests both density and community, but also sets a stage for a certain honest or straightforward living. Such an idyll is disrupted by objects strewn across the little patch of grass. These signifiers, in a culture in which one’s garden is often manicured to maintain the social contract, allows the portrayal of Tsarnaev to quickly form his status as an outsider.