In Thomas Demand's 6 June-20 August 2006 show at the Serpentine, we see tableaux without people, or brands, or labels, or writing. They are beautiful, but unheimlich.
Are the reams of paper in the Copyshop (1999) "real", or are they themselves mocked up in paper? They must have been modelled by Demand because there are no labels or logos on the wrapping. Or perhaps the wrapping is empty, and the ream of A4 is absent.
Grotto (2006) was made from 30+ tonnes of cardboard sheeting. It looks like Lego pixels, or might we say brixels. Demand is careful to tell us that it is a highly crafted approach: "No one single stratum gets repeated. There are 900,000 strata and no two are alike".
The photos are behind highly shiny glass, turning them into mirrors that can place you in these scenes. They're stage-lit like Cindy Sherman. Perhaps you're Emily in the (un)real puppet world of Bagpuss. I imagine that the photos themselves don't lend themselves particularly well to further reproduction in books or media. It's a good show.
Some of the critics are trying to find their own encasing model for Demand's modelling/modification/reproduction of the world:
Laura Cumming's review - Good day at the office, darling?:
It might have been even more exciting to enter that grotto as Demand must have done before he destroyed it. But that is the character of his art: private, impenetrable, hermetic.
Except for a work made specially for this show. Demand has taken those sinister photographs of ivy and turned them into wallpaper (slightly abstracted so that you have the needful hint of artifice), creeping over every inch of the Serpentine. It shades from nocturnal gloom to virulent green to a petrified white according to the pictures in each gallery, brilliantly orchestrating the moods of the exhibition. Doors leading out of this thicket suddenly seem like secret exits. People disappear through them as though to another part of the forest. Windows are shaded, corridors darkened; the building has been turned inside out. Demand has a model of the Serpentine itself, or an illusion thereof, finally allowing you inside one of his artworks.
Adrian Searle's review - To the cardboard cave!:
As much as Demand copies and recopies the world, he also describes it. And there is no such thing as a neutral description, even when everything is described in an excessively plain and uninflected way. Demand's coloured papers come as standard, in off-the-shelf hues, sheen and tone. His images have an emotional flatness, a palpable air of numb fixation. Just as there are no adverbs or adjectives in the manner of his descriptions, so there are no signs of use or wear in his images - no coffee stains, no dirt, no films of dust or greasy fingerprints or grime. His work is equivalent to the inert affectless prose of a police report. How is it so disturbing? After all, Demand's skill, the accuracy of his models and images, wouldn't detain us for long if his art were only a formal exercise. [...]
One might see the whole show as an analogue, a model, of a world that can never be described, and can never be escaped. One is stuck, as if in a cave.
Sarah Crompton - Gained in translation:
This massive sculpture - it weighs 36 tonnes - is the raw material for a new work called Grotte (Grotto), which will form part of an exhibition of Demand's work at the Serpentine Gallery, opening on June 6. Test prints for the photograph - one rejected for being "too Harry Potter", the other for being "too ice cave" - hang on the walls. [...]
But here's a thing: Demand wanted certain parts of the photograph to lack definition. So instead of altering the print digitally - which he will not do - he actually built "pixels" in cardboard, tiny squares that deceive the eye into thinking the photograph is unfocused, whereas it is in fact reproducing the "reality" of the sculpted grotto. [...]
"Digital is just a technique of the imagination," he says. "It is opening possibilities that wouldn't have been there before. But I lose interest in a photograph once I see it is digitally made because it is all about betraying you in a way. So I would like to think of my work so far as having a lot in common with what digital wants, rather than being digital. Basically, it is constructing a reality for the surface of a picture."
In conversation with Alexander Kluge:
Kluge: So huge mountains of card and paper arrive - you need 50 tons for the grotto as a whole. It comes by train, is transported to your doorstep, taken inside and cut up.
Demand: No one single stratum gets repeated. There are 900,000 strata and no two are alike.
Kluge: Like Nature itself which also isn't schematic and consists of similar strata.
Demand: The method is actually used in architecture, where things have to be generalised. In other words, the strata have a natural shape but, in the final instance, no computer can describe the actual complexity involved. You have to work in parts, but you can never assemble the parts to form a whole. We will see them for the first time when Grotto is finished. Partly this has to do with the fact that we used different programmes that don't understand each other. And to give the whole thing yet one more twist I used a computer technology that made things thinkable that otherwise wouldn't be possible, even if what was subsequently realised was in fact a 3-D model rather than a virtual space. in order to describe the oldest trope of architecture, the very first form of dwelling.
Comments