Thomas Demand

At first glance photographer Thomas Demand´s subject seems to be all too familiar. There are five different views of the Oval Office of the American President in his current exhibition at the Mumok Factory. The identification of this location happens of course in a split second.

The question is rather how many units of the famous neoclassical plaster ornaments adorning the upper end of the curved walls or segments of the cross parquet patterned walnut and oak floor are actually needed to provide the cues that this is indeed the Oval Office. Everything in this frequently rendered arena of political power seems to be in place. The president´s writing desk is there, the two flags on either side of it, the drappery behind it, the oval-shaped carpet with the presidential seal on it.

At the same time there is something highly disconcerting about these images: There are no people, no life.

But that’s not all. Demand´s photographs are not just emptied of people, but seem to have undergone a process of radical extinction of all human traces. Faces in family photos carry no features; books on the shelves have no titles; the presidential stationary is blank; the writing utensils carry no brand names.

This is a world reconstructed out of cardboard and paper. The German photographer carefully reconstructs segments of reality, sometimes in life size, arranges them in front of the camera and photographs them. Later on, the cardboard doubles created for the purpose of a Demand photograph are destroyed. “Presidency”, his five-part work, was commissioned by the New York Times Magazin in November 2008, shortly after the presidential elections.

The show at the Mumok juxtaposes “Presidency” with another body of works by Demand, called “Embassy,” created in 2007. Standing in the middle of the exhibition space, a sight of the American President´s office and an image of the façade of the Nigerian Embassy in Rome appear in the same field of vision and ultimately lead a most telling co-existence.

The viewer gets the eerie feeling that it may be a dangerous thing to get caught up in this perceptual frame in a center of power. The photograph is of the insignificant pink building with its shutters closed show a Nigerian flag hanging from the front. It was from this embassy that stationary and stamps were stolen in January 2001 later used to fabricate proofs of a supposed operation to smuggle uranium to Iraq. And so this modest building, which never made it onto the front pages of newspapers, achieved some brief political importance by legitimizing the rationale for the War in Iraq.

For the exhibition Demand partitioned a succession of spaces, such that the visitor seems to follow in the footsteps of the intruders into the Nigerian Embassy. Inside Demand´s photographic remakes, you arrive at the end of a staircase, and are then confronted with heavily secured doors, until one finally allows you to trespass. Appropriation of space by sight and movement coincide and are intricately linked with one another. In the end you finds yourself in an enclosed space studded with photographs of the ambassador’s vandalized room, with the large chaotic writing desk as the main site of crime in this politically motivated narrative.

Although the single images focussing your attention, there is no hard evidence from these photographically recorded facts. The photographic medium is unable to offer proof and in a political reality of silence and concealment nothing can actually be revealed. Cleansing all objects of human traces leaves the viewer disoriented, and reality in a kind of quarantine. Subsequently, his cardboard substitutes seem to be moved out of reach of human inscriptions.

The paradox about the oeuvre of this internationally acclaimed artist is that this attack on media realities is launched by a man who prefers to work with paper and glue and obviously takes a lot of pleasure in the hands-on part of his art.

With Thomas Demand, a new “factualist” of the calibre of Andy Warhol seems to have entered the scene. Both share a fascination with media imagery and believe that a duplication or reframing of reality can generate critical distance and insight.

A good example is “Kitchen” created in 2004. The title refers to an iconic media image in connection with Saddam Hussein´s arrest by the Americans in December 2003. At that time, press images of the dirty and messy Saddam kitchen from his hideout in Tikrit, Iraq went around the world. Demand´s sterile reconstruction shows that a kitchen is just a kitchen, and at the same time points out the helplessness and inaedequacy of such media politics. The photograph of a dirty kitchen had to serve as a signifier of the defeat of a political system and was circulated to cover up the inexplicable at the core of the enemy’s biography.

10:00-18:00 daily
Running now through Nov. 29
MUMOK Factory
07., Museumsplatz 1
(+43) 1-525 00-1400
press@nospammumok.at