Das Spiel mit der Erinnerung - Die Bilderwelt des Künstlers Thomas Demand

03
MEMORY ON DISPLAY
The Paper Illusions of THOMAS DEMAND
Badezimmer
Thomas Demand, internationally acclaimed
as a »photographer«; but yet not your usual
photographer, takes photographs of models;
photographs that are mostly recreations of
specific places. He builds life-sized models out
of pasteboard and paper in his studio that are
inspired by incidents he finds in the media and
private photos. Even though the models require
the greatest expenditure in the work process, he
photographs them, destroys and then dis poses
them afterwards. Regarding this he resembles a
Ceremonial Master during the Baroque period
who with tremendous expenditure also created
the perfect illusion of an artificial world for just
one festive evening.
His final photographic product, each one perfectly
mounted behind a mirror-like Plexiglas,
evokes the collective memory. The viewer sees
well-known visual images of scandals and political
or social events which have become part
of our common visual consciousness long ago.
As much as Demand reduces the images to a
few necessary details, the viewer develops his
own fantasy being confronted with the all too
familiar media images.
This happens with the »Badezimmer« (Bath
Room), where the Minister President of Schleswig-Holstein
was found dead in a bathtub in a
Geneva hotel in 1987; the old seating arrangements
of the German parliament when it was
located in Bonn; the devastated room in the
Wolf’s Lair that Hitler left just before a bomb
detonated.
Demand creates abstractions of these buildings
and rooms that we only know from photo graphs.
He creates them so that we can recognize that
they are constructed – by his choice of perspective
or of the moment. We can only tell the shot
has not been taken at the original location because
all individuality and every letter have been
erased. With these strange historical locations,