Thomas Demand

www.onarchitecture.com

Thomas Demand Interview

By Felipe De Ferrari M., Diego Grass P. and Javier Toro B.

August 26, 2010

Arsenale, 12^th Architecture Biennale

Venice / Italy

I. CULTURAL CONTINUITY

OA In T.S. Eliot seminal essay Tradition and the individual talent, he writes about the cultural continuity that every oeuvre should have.

This argument is fundamental to architects like Peter Märkli or Adam Caruso himself, two people who have used it as their own sticking point in their struggle with novelty –paraphrasing Caruso’s own words, if there’s no cultural continuity, then that work is absolutely shallow and it has proved to be meaningless to our present condition. It’s the very same thing that he does in every opportunity he has: to display his interest in the ethical aspect of architectural practice.

Considering all this, we would like you to share your thoughts on this same situation but this time from your own discipline:

a) From your point of view, which oeuvres, artists or architects can be related to your body of work? For instance, Caruso always mentions Adolf Loos or Karl Shinkel in order to frame his approach in a proper way.

b) Are you interested in being referenced or related to somebody or something in particular?

Thomas Demand In my particular case, the works that I do are related with some images which somebody else made in another context for another reason, then, you know, by recreating that, I'm just trying basically to test them or retelling the same story with different contexts, with different means and obviously with a different outcome. The idea that something is giving on, to someone else and somebody else makes something with it and sends it on to other people, is actually the back point of my all work. And if you think of, I mean, people have said that the work is very much about memory, like how memory is actually changing how our identity is constructed.

So the back point of my work is actually taking on stories -pictures, memories- which I only got throw well-developed channels of information. -Photographs, images, newspaper, web, TV and so on-. So basically what I do is that I pick up someone else story, I re-teller with my means and I send it out again to the next one, but the context which I do that is art. So the core of my work is about cultural... it is not about tradition but a kind of hanging over: taking others people stories, and move them to another context.

I think that is also why we work very well together with Adam Caruso and Peter St. John and me because we are just trying to... we don't start by 0 -nobody start by 0- and we don't try to pretend that we are starting by 0. We don't try to say, this is a fresh start or something like that, because nothing is a fresh start and you are always related to another person's art. Art comes from Art. It is a way of thinking, a way of expressing yourself about the world or your surroundings, which is always related to someone else who did this before. So you never talk to a completely free space. That is why my photographs or films always look very specific, because I'm answering to a very specific communicable contexts of images of science, of details, of leftovers, constellations, light, spaces, architecture sometimes but not always.

It is very hard to say whom do I relate because it is not very easy to see the connection what I as an artist I think I'm influenced by. We can't really say. If I say that, I'm trying to say what I find good but it is not necessarily what you will understand in the same way. If I say Holbein, I obviously like Holbein because when I looked a Holbein I can somehow experience what he and the person who is portrayed or the all constellation of the thing -what kind of mind frame they had at that time-. This somehow gave me a great trust in art -in the possibilities of art- that you actually communicate with people over time, without the personal contact, that things themselves have a life and a meaning despite the fact that an artist made them. If I say Rene Magritte and Marcel Broodthaers, they are important for my idea of how art can be communicate in terms of spatial impression but also in how different elements are used together, but at the same time being themselves. That is a kind of influence for instance but it is not a very obvious kind of relation I have. My work is very different from all these people I said.

II. DUSSELDORF

OA We would like you to remember the time you first entered Dusseldorf Academy and how important it was –for good or worse- being there in the very same time frame when Bernd and Hilla Becher were training people like Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth. On this same matter, Swiss architect Peter Märkli [once again] remembers the days when he joined ETH Zurich in a time when it was heavily politicized: My experience was that school [ETH] was still suffering from a kind of hangover from the 68’ movement – perhaps a third of the students were only interested in the socio-political aspect of architecture.

Naturally this was not the Märkli’s approach: he was more interested in studying buildings of the archaic period –Greek or Romanesque architecture-. Considering this, we’d like to know:

a) How important were the years you spent at the Dusseldorf Academy for your current investigation? Which was the atmosphere during those years –in political, social, cultural terms-?

b) How important were the year after Düsseldorf at Goldsmith? Which were the fundamental differences that you saw –and still see- in those two institutions?

Thomas Demand I never studied with them. I just was there when they were teaching. I went one time to the class to ask a detail about photography -because I never learned it, I never studied or anything- so I'm actually pretty much an amateur in that. I was studying sculpture and when I went there, the Academy was a place was basically gave to you a lot of self-confidence as an artist which was really great because you were surrounded by professors which were really good artists. It didn’t feel provincially even when Dusseldorf is a very small town. It can attract a lot of people from the outside, to come and study. It was very open, like the old idea of academy with classes and professors but most of the time It doesn’t work -in this case really worked actually- so you had a group of thirty people around you. When I came it was the second generation after great names like Katharina Fritsch and Thomas Schütte and other people which we don't know today anymore but which were very grand, working with models, working with a very specific way of sculpture. Photography was with only these 3 people at that time which were really famous -and they are still famous- but I didn’t have anything to do with them by then. I still don't. I only know Andreas Gursky very well but the others, you know, they are people. But the second generation meant that basically It was very clear for me that this was not my future, I didn’t want to be the third generation with an sculpture language that it was not mine. So my work is based in these things like I throw things away and I get rid of things when I don't need them anymore, so, that is something which is very anti-sculptural because you work on something for weeks, and weeks, and months, you put all the material in that and then you have an object -the object you wanted- but you don't throw it away. That is not something they wanted. A thing that I would say is that my work is a documentation of what I do but not the work in a sense, and I'm trying to always make a reference to something else: the photograph is a reference to the sculpture, the sculpture is a reference to another photograph, which again is a reference to an incident somewhere which became known or something. This kind of referential strategy was something very unheard in Dusseldorf. Then I went to London -Goldsmith College- and there I realized actually that my way of working has another advantage, which I didn’t see in the time in Dusseldorf. For me at least, it was that I can actually tell a story and I always had troubles with narrative elements of my work in Dusseldorf because people said like: "No, no, no, you have to be very objective, like Bernd and Hilla Becher, don't start say anything, don't tell a story, just calm down" while Germany was in a state which was completely rebuilding itself: the wall came down, two countries going together, lot of stories coming up, lot of interests. The focus was in this kind of re-scheduling the modern western world in a sense, like re-building it, re-structuring the society and making decisions about how should it be? What do we take from the east? What do we take from the west? And all these things couldn’t be reflected in any of Dusseldorf art. The Dusseldorf art stops when the wall comes down and then there are a few people that developed further but that kind of thing was over then and I realized pretty quickly when I was in London that I had to move on from that. So that's roughly the atmosphere in Dusseldorf.

OA Is this one the fundamental difference that you lived in these two moments -in these two institutions?

Thomas Demand There is another difference in the institution of Goldsmith College. Because Goldsmith is a fantastic place if you know what you want to do -if you have a body of work-. If you don't know what to do, it is not very good for experiments. It is very good for refining, for rethinking, for presenting, for sharpening, for focusing, to leave unnecessary things behind you: for that it is very good, but not for developing a new way of working or something like that. For that is a child of its time, and the time was London art scene just coming to growing up and just a kind of understanding that there is something interesting in London as well, out of social context but also out of poverty simply and out of desperation. This kind of starting professionalization of it was very interesting for me, but it was very unlike Düsseldorf -complete opposite of Düsseldorf.

III. TECHNOLOGY

OA In many other interviews –i.e. with Alexander Kluge- you’ve stated that in the very beginnings of your career you used to want to do things in just one or two days, in a hasty manner, using a few resources and with as few inputs as possible. It is also a known fact that you work with analogue technology when you document your works. You’ve also done some works, which are almost impossible to do without the help of digital tools–i.e. Grotto*-.

We’d first like to know how all these new digital technologies that are now available for all of us have affected the conceptual aspects of your works. And secondly: how has it affected your everyday life and craftsmanship, as well as in the practical aspects of your office?

*36-ton grey cardboard object shaped and measured by computers and divided into 900,000 different layers.

Thomas Demand Well, the first thing is that I'm not a photographer, so digital for me is something, which is in a phone as much as in a machine, as much as in a camera. But for real photographer it is always very important the camera. For me it is a tool of communication: it is an agreement, a social agreement as much as a machine, because you know how a camera works and I know how a camera works. So if a show you a photograph, you know exactly what you are looking at. This is quite interesting for me: the camera as a platform of communication, but the camera in itself it is not so interesting. So for a long time, I keep working with an analogue camera. For me the more interesting thing was: how can I make sculptures which work with the idea of the digital, because when you look at my photographs -the sculptures that I show in my photographs- they very often have the feeling of a computer generated environment: they just have because as seamless, they lack detail. It's always look like a CGE. So I'm interested in the process of what is possible or what is interesting but not for the sake of its own, but what can I do with this which I cannot do in another way. That's forGrotto for instance was interesting and since then, I'm working quite a lot with digital files and digital cutting techniques, because sometimes it's just a waste of time and you can just get faster to what you want and also you're free because you don't have to employee outsource companies: you can do it actually really easily by yourself, you draw the thing and that's it.

OA At same time is more sophisticated.

Thomas Demand Yes, but I'm not interested in sophistication but It's just like simply things that you know, you can do very easily with this and it just less of an effort and you can concentrate on things you find really more interesting. If you have to make a tool -a cutting tool for everything- that it takes three weeks and then you bring it to someone who cuts the paper for you and then is the wrong paper: you only find out after a long process, so by this way I can experiment much easier and faster and It's more interesting and exciting. But digital as it is, is not very interesting for me. Digital is just like warm and cold. It's there. It is only interesting if you can make it speaking. If you can use to say something, which you couldn’t say in another way, then I'm very happy about the digital but I'm pretty unemotional about it.

IV. DEMOCRACY

OA In an interview with Harald Fricke, you were explaining the undisputable fact that we now have to face a total democratization of content, because of all these new multiple formats of reproduction: from photo cameras all the way through cell phones up until that thing we call Facebook.

Let’s have one of your quotes:

The truth content in a picture taken by a soldier in Iraq or the truth content of a tsunami video made by a vacationer in Thailand have become far greater than that of a James Nachtwey , who photographed the displays in men’s boutiques immediately after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, where there’s all this dust all over the shirts. These images are almost too artistic, and far too good; in contrast, one tends to more readily accept the authenticity of pictures taken by hobby photographers. That marks an incredible democratization process in terms of photography.

Are you interested in how this process of democratization may affect your work? Is it true that all of the search and research patterns we used to perform have completely changed, as well as the ways we now have to approach them?

Thomas Demand The photojournalism is a profession that should die. You don't need photo-journalists anymore and that's the weirdest development because everybody would have thought that if the digital cameras are coming, then the classic photographer -like art photographer- nobody need him anymore. But the art photographer is about the author. It is always about who photographs what and shows it to me why. And if you look at the photograph on Facebook, it is exactly the same strategy, which is important: Why is this photograph on Facebook? Who photograph is it? And why do I look at it?

The best photojournalist is the one who can disappear behind the story: is not visible, is not be seen, he is not in the room. So, for instance, Stalin and Lenin talking to each other and they were not aware of the photographer. That's the perfect photograph. Or, the action of an incident where nobody takes care of the photographer: soldiers running out into the field, but nobody take care of the photographer. But that's an outgoing model because now the soldier himself has a camera and photographs the others running out to the field. So, you don't need a third person standing there, being paid by the New York Times or something. So, the most interesting and the most touching images you can see are all done by people which actually are taking action themselves. Then it is important why do I see that photograph, which is in charge. This is the photograph, which really matters, the one that is cut done which people that are in the middle of something, because everybody has a camera with him today. I think that is the biggest change, the interesting thing and it is closely related with the question where the photography lies or doesn't lie. It doesn't matter if the photograph lies or not if you know who is the author, because it is clear that the author lies. You know what I mean. If you know about the author, he might have a reason for laying and then the interesting thing is why does he lie to me? But not whether the photograph lies. The photograph can be altered -we all know that-, that's not the point anymore. So all these questions becoming much more interesting if you just think about the fact of who is photographing rather than what is the photograph showing. And if you look at my work, my intervention on to the photograph is so clear and so much in the foreground and so present that you cannot mistake with another photograph: I made these and I made these to show it to you. If you are interested then you look it why I made these: Is there a story on the photograph, which I wanted to tell you? Is it a place that I wanted to show you? It is always about me. It is not about the place, the world or something else. This subjectiveness is really the core of the all operation.

OA But there are still a lot of places with very difficult access for common people with common cameras.

Thomas Demand It is very true. But everybody know that photo-journalistic get embedded, so what they show to us is heavily manipulated. It is not an innocent truth anymore. That is really something quite interesting because you look at a photo-journalistic picture today in a very different way that you looked fifteen years ago, because you know that they got invited by the government to show only things, which are good. They can show things, which are not so good, but they cannot show really what they want to show you: they have to show you something that the government wanted you to see. For instance, in Iran, when Medha died, it is obviously a photograph which can be discuss if it's true or not, but it's not done by the government and the circulation of the picture is un-governmental so it is not manipulated by power. And everybody can do that. They didn’t want to have any journalist in Iran -Teheran- at that time, but journalists didn’t have to go anymore: all they had to do was look at the websites, on the internet and try to get information posted by the people in demonstrations or something like that. They didn’t say: Ok, I send it to Germany and then it will be on CNN, they just posted it because they struggled and they want to show that struggle and then somebody else find it and takes it over. So information is completely uncontrollable in this sense and that is really the interesting thing. And this interesting thing puts a different lie on the classic photojournalism. So even if you have now somebody who goes and photographs Obama privately -of course not everybody can go there- but if you look that photograph in the context of all the other photographs which are done by people as well: on one hand it's a manipulation, I'm suppose to look Obama as a nice father but then why is Obama doing that? And why is the photographer doing that? These questions were never really virulent fifteen years ago. Until today you couldn’t tell me who is the person who photographed the kids running naked in Vietnam. You don't know the name of the photographer. But it would be very interesting to know why did he get there? What is the all point on this? These things are much more important now: who is photographing not what the photograph is showing, who is showing this to me and why. And this is a thing which came with Internet because we are much more active in get information. We know where we can get information and we can choose from so many channels of information that we actually need to have an idea of what information we choose.

V. PERCEPTION

OA The following quote is a fragment of the interview you had with Alexander Kluge, about the fundamental differences between displaying representational material instead of the object itself:

My tyrannical condition, as it were, is that I prescribe your vision.

According to this, most part of your work* has been communicated in the very same way you’ve decided to, which is quite different from the installations or other works done by the majority of artist. We’re not only talking about catalogues or specialized press: you control everything –same pictures, same point of view, and so on-. It would seem redundant to try to document one work which has been already documented in such a consistent and categorical way [therefore the only way left would be to document it in the very few opportunities you display your work, like exhibitions or else]-.

In that sense, one of the things you’re stressing with your work is the notion of perception related to its representation and the power of authorship –authorship or authority, it makes no real difference-.

We would like you to explain the motives behind this. Is it a discourse about the mediatization of your work? Or is it about perception and the physicality of the work?

*Your models, with the sole exception of Grotto and your series of wallpapers.

Thomas Demand Well, I'm not controlling, I'm getting asked and I give an answer. And I give my answer not someone else's answer, so, what's look from the outside maybe as like trying to control something, is actually not control, is just that I'm saying what I want to say and what I find interesting about things. And many of the things you look at you can say whatever you want. I'm getting ask why do I do this or what did get me to do that and I can only tell you what I need it to know what I did. But talking about Holbein's paintings- which I did in the beginning of this interview- we don't know what Holbein thought -why did he do what he want it-. What we do know is that he needed person in front of his frame and he needed that face to make a portrait. This is not a fantasy portrait he painted or something. And we even know by looking at the painting that is a very accurate portrait of the person, which died six hundred years ago. And that is king of important. In a sense he is not around to tell you anymore so when I get asked, I know that the work has its own presence -or it doesn't- but if somebody ask me, I would think it is actually really stupid to tell non-sense, or make stories or something like that. I'm telling them what I need it to make this work. That is all I do.

OA Can you to gives us more insights about this: is it about avoid redundancy at all costs so to transform it into the ultimate anti-rhetorical exercise?

Yes. There is another thing that I find really trivial for instance if you compare the making of Titanic with the film Titanic. I have to say that the film Titanic is the film that I want to see and not the making of Titanic. The making of Titanic is redundant: that's something for nerds and I find it banal really. We all know how paper models look like, so we don't need to... If I don't have a story to tell with that, then the all effort is really stupid. So, if I get asked -and only then, I'm not walking out saying "look, why don't you listen to me"- I want to talk about the things that I want to talk about. And the things that I don't want to talk about are not how do I make this? Thing that I want to talk about is why did I make this. You know, why do I think that story is enough? If the picture is strong enough for me to dedicate like four months of my life. Otherwise if is just a relation like before and after and all these things, it becomes like a discourse about a beauty product. You have before the breast transplant and then after that. Before and after is really an uninteresting question. And that is why I'm very reluctant to give other pictures than the pictures I make. Because that is what I put in the world and then people can do their own work and do something else. But It is not about control necessarily. It is just that I do take the liberty to talk about the things that I want to talk about and not what somebody else wants me to talk about.

VI. WITHOUT RETHORIC, WITHOUT ATRIBUTES I

OA Many of your works are based on socially charged image. Some of them are even recognized instantaneously, like thePresidency series –which are part of a collective or shared visual imaginary-. Regarding this, we believe it is extremely coherent and precise from your side to reduce the codes of these images into its very basics, in order to enounce them as contemporary typologies. But, on the other hand, this logical coherence could well be a kind of determinism in terms of the relationship between subject and representation.

What we want to ask you is how this internal logic embedded in your works ends up determining or even limiting the whole array of potential subjects to be represented and subsequently apprehended?

Thomas Demand Well, that's a thing that I can't really answer because I don't know. It's all speculation. I can only answer questions about how did I make it? or why did I make it? or what kind of things I was thinking when I decided to make it or something. What I would like to keep in mind is -or what I would like to point out- is that what I do is a representation of something which has been represented somewhere else. And what is coming out of that representation of the representation of the representation, that's the key question. So, in a way, how I do my work -I think I do my work actually quite obvious-. It's quite obvious what it is. I think you start to watch yourself watching.

We are talking about the conditions of seeing something: the conditions of representation. So if you look the "oval-office", its point is not how the "oval-office" look like because we all know that. The point is how quickly do I recognize and how much things do I need to recognize it. Maybe it's a stage in itself as much as my thing is a stage thing. These kinds of connections between what is pictured and how do we recognize it, which are the modalities of perception, these are interesting to me: how can I refer to that -you have never been there, I never had to be in there-. It is only because we all have seen the same picture. That is quite remarkable. These connections between images and changes of representation -it is not the oval-office of one president, because it changes all the times-, but the three windows, the desk, another desk with picture frames, and you have it. Maybe two flags, but not even that always. That is really quite interesting. It's like Hamlet with the skull and someone says to be or not to be and you know who is the writer and you know everything about it, but nevertheless you want to see the play. These modalities like how things are coming to us that's what I talk about. I can't talk about the "oval-office" because I don't know more than you do. If I read about my youth or you about your school time or something, if you would be a journalist I could say this is not true: the schools in Chile weren’t like this at that time or something like that. For me, if you're a writer you cannot say that, because that's not the point. You cannot say to -for instance- JohnUpdike it wasn't like you write it because it's a fictional thing but it's not completely invented. It's a fictional thing, a re-telling of a story, which we knew already. This kind of relation between fact and fiction is actually quite important and quite key to all what we do.

VIII. ONTHOLOGY OF THE IMAGE

OA From what we’ve read about you, we came to notice that the fist step in the whole process that you’re now into started with pure sculptoric exercises, and only afterwards you began to photograph those works, which in the end resulted in what we can see now in your recent oeuvres.

We’d like to understand which was the process that you developed in order to achieve this internal coherence between model construction and its subsequent registers as exercises of collective memory.

Being more specific, two questions:

a) How did you consciously realized and started to develop this practice related to memory?

b) To which extent do you consider this relationship between model and representation to be either an effect of cultural bias or about the phenomenology of our perception?

Thomas Demand I will answer the second question first. The idea of the model culturally actually is not to fix small things. In the architecture biennale you have this very often and you can think ok, models are small and buildings are big, obviously a scientific project -a theory- is a model. For instance the theory of supersonic speed: is a theory first, you have a model -a thought model in your head, of how it could work- and you try to find evidence for that. If you just go to an echo chamber for instance, if you have a model of landscape but you cannot make a test of the sound of a car in a landscape because the landscape has to many disturbing elements around it. So you need to create a surrounding where you can test a car for instance to drive throw the landscape very fast and listen to it, because if you run with the microphone behind a fast car, you running make so much noise. Maybe the street is dry and it was raining the day before so you never have any reliable test result. So in that sense you need a model -and the model is the room -the echo-free room-, which is a kind of representation of the landscape -without echo and without the conditions that make that landscape be different everyday-. That is also a model. The DNA for instance: to understand how DNA works, they need it a model to just understand spatially, they always said that the model was the key: Without it, we wouldn’t have known. A model could be the early Cubanetics: when you look at the Shannon’s projects where he wanted to prove that he can make a sort of cubanetic intelligent mouse, he had a mouse running throw a labyrinth because the labyrinth model was something which came from the evaristic research of the early 20's. The mouse running throw a labyrinth going to one electric shock and then going to another: that's a model. The evaristicresearch is a model as well. Even elections are models in a sense, because you just minimize the possibilities of choices for citizens to two different candidates, of five different candidates. That's a model as well. So the ideas of a model in our society is simplifying the world and eliminate all the unnecessary things to just a model of behavior, a model of understanding, or a model of perception. So if you put the notion of the model down to that, you just don't end up with small puppets house or something, you just end up with something, which you can understand and see clearly. That's the interesting thing about the model. And that is why I keep thinking that a model is actually something to be able to talk about things. That's one thing.

The other thing is how I came to it: it is very difficult because I started making sculptures but I didn’t want to store them. Then I thought in a representation of the sculptures should do for the time being. And then i understood that the representation is a problem in itself: what is there doesn't look like the photograph. Then I thought if I work with photographs which carrying the main things of the sculpture with it then the sculpture itself becomes either irrelevant or it becomes the reason for the photograph. It goes like that. Then I can think what happens if I put two photographs in one room: they talk to each other. Then if I do two rooms: they talk to each other as well. So, then you have a work. Everybody wants to invent something new everyday, but actually the really interesting things that I see, they only start to become interesting if somebody knows what is talking about: a certain kind of practice and a certain tradition -a inherent tradition in the work itself-, is actually for me much more interesting that somebody who does a video today, tomorrow he writes a poem and the third day he makes a photograph. It might be interesting but for me the really interesting thing is like the late Mies: how the late Mies was developing a language that he had already and how he make variations between projects -which are all very different- and how does he end up with one building which could serve any purpose, which is unbelievable for architecture. It's the opposite of what we thought about architecture. These kinds of things interest me much more, but for that you need to develop something very consistently. So If I don't have a good reason to make a staircase again -I made a staircase already-, I always would say everything that I wanted to say about the staircase I been said, in one picture. If I don't find another way to picturing it or a reason, then It is not interesting for me. And that is how this builds up and that is how I think in a long term about my work, simply. But I don't know where it goes to: now it's becoming a building, it will become on a film eventually, it will became in a show that I curate. The point of view is very recognizable but I'm trying to do things that I find interesting enough to spend time on them. That is all I can say.