+
From: "Architexturez." <admin-in@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
+
Date: Wed, 07 Jun 2006 14:23:25 +0530
| not the cardboard architecture they
| taught you in schools...
Gained in translation
Thomas Demand makes art that is both disturbing and challenging by
modelling the world in cardboard and paper and then photographing the
results. On the eve of a new exhibition in London, he talks to Sarah
Crompton
.....
Working from newspaper photographs, and from those he commissioned from
a press agency and a private investigator, he became obsessed by the
many versions of the tavern that were in the public eye: by the place
where the events unfolded, the place that later became a target for
public hate, the replica of the place that the police built to try to
recreate events. In the end, Demand himself built his own replica of the
whole building, taking almost a year to refashion it down to the last
detail. The dying Yukka he made is still standing in his studio, its
shrivelled paper fronds reproducing with chilling accuracy "the plant
which is not only a metaphor for the total neglect of a person but also
the aftermath of this sad kind of place. It is at one and the same time
the saddest thing in the world and on the other hand a thing that
everyone has." Layer upon layer of complex meaning are thus worked into
these five photographs, which somehow symbolise a modern apocalypse, a
crime so outrageous that it stands outside time. But visitors to the
gallery will not know of them. They will just see a place - totally
innocent in itself - but freighted with meaning by the fact of its
recreation.
Demand says simply: "I need to put it all out in front of you. I can't
really say anything about the crime itself. I can only say something
about the fact that I know about the crime." Thomas Demand's art is like
that, at once blank and hugely expressive. It forces you to look and
look again at places that are at once familiar and alien; he asks you to
see and to think.
cont'd...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/05/27/bademand27.xml&sSheet=/arts/2006/05/27/ixartleft.html