A beautiful object may not translate into a beautiful photograph, but you can make an object in such a way that it will, Thomas Demand tells Aidan Dunne
Thomas Demand's photographic images, in his exhibition L'Esprit d'Escalier at Imma, have a very specific and curiously unforgettable look. They mostly feature deserted public spaces, such as offices, archives, car parks, or, as the show's title suggests, stairways. They look very real, but are also at a distinct remove from reality.
There is, as he puts it, "a small Utopian moment" when you look at them in the way that the dirt and grubbiness of everyday life is expunged. There are no signs of wear and tear, and there is less detail and none of the commercial trappings that embellish so many aspects of our surroundings, like trade names or labels. Amazingly, they depict a world made entirely of paper. Everything we see in them is paper, painstakingly crafted.
The photographs are the culmination of a long, exhaustive process, a process that both begins and ends with an image. They involve elements of research, sculpture, painting, photography and, on occasion, film-making, and it would be wrong to isolate any of these elements as being pre-eminent or more meaningful than another. The source images are drawn from news or archive photographs, or perhaps from memory.
With exceptional expertise and ingenuity - which he makes light of, incidentally - Demand then makes meticulous, life-sized models, in card and paper, of the places depicted in the photographs or recalled from memory. Once photographed, these models are destroyed, so that the eventual, residual work consists of the single image that we see on the wall of the gallery.
What sort of places are these anonymous-looking locations?
Demand uses titles that are precise but also deliberately evasive - Corridor, Landing, Shed. Yet, partly because they are uninhabited, partly because of their odd blankness, there is often an air of unease about them.
In fact, as is well known by now, Demand chooses locations that are charged with particular import. That import might be purely personal, or entirely general, but it can also be historically significant. Poll, for example, features banks of telephones, stacks of polling cards and other routine office accoutrements. In fact it is the scene of "a momentous political event", the controversial recount of votes during the US presidential election in November 2000, which, Demand notes, has been described "as an attempted coup d'état".
Other locations are equally charged, though not always so ominously. Landing he describes as "slapstick". It's based on a view of the three Qing Dynasty vases shattered when a visitor to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge tripped on a shoelace last year. It is to some extent slapstick, but the image is ripe with metaphor.
It is also worth pointing out that Demand has made an image of austere beauty in the work. The same holds true, remarkably, of Poll and practically everything else in the show. It's something to do with the way the messy complexity of things is distilled into arrangements of one material, paper, so that the entire surface of each image has a consistent, integral skin, as serene as a painting by Poussin.
In person, Demand is phlegmatic and unassuming, with a dry sense of humour. He is exceptionally articulate about his work but hates formulaic misrepresentations of it. One facile view, for example, frequently trotted out, is that it's a critique of photographic veracity. But why go to so much trouble just to frame a redundant critique? In the end the work is what it is, not a move in a game of critical theory.
In his early 40s, he has maintained what looks like a punishing schedule of exhibitions since the beginning of his career. One can see why he is, pardon the pun, in such demand. The conceptual and material richness of what he does is readily apparent.
It doesn't require theoretical exegesis to justify it. As he is fond of saying, "It's just paper. There's nothing mysterious about it. Anyone can see how it's done."
Born in Munich in 1964, Demand studied at the Kunstacademie in Dusseldorf. The sculptural tradition there leant towards the production of permanent objects. He realised pretty quickly that was not for him. Instead he started making sculptures of everyday objects in everyday, perishable materials, mostly paper and card. There were practical as well as aesthetic reasons for this.
"As a student, I moved around a lot and lived in small spaces. I could see my space filling up very quickly if I were to make these precious objects that would be too valuable to throw away."
So he discarded his sculptures after a while. Not that he wasn't serious about them.
"They were really translations into geometric form of everyday things. So they were beautiful geometricised objects, more the idea of a thing than a thing." Much of this has stayed with him. Then one of the professors said something that has a significant impact on him.
"He wasn't critical of my throwing the sculptures away, but he said: if you read a text you wrote five years previously you may think that it's very good or very bad, but you will be surprised by it. You will not look at it in the same way as you did at the time. When you are making sculpture you need to know if you are getting better or worse, so you have to document what you are doing." That meant introducing a camera.
"I realised I was a crap photographer. I could see that an object had a beauty, but lost it in translation photography." As it happened, perhaps the most famous teachers in modern photography, Bernd and Hilla Becher, were at Dusseldorf. He knocked on Bernd Hiller's door and explained what he wanted to do. Becher recommended that he embark on a three-year technical apprenticeship, which wasn't really what he wanted to hear.
"I realise now why he said that: because he did not have a professional background either. He could discuss content but not technical questions. That was Hilla's preserve."
He set about solving the problem himself and came to an important realisation. Essentially, it was that a beautiful object probably won't translate effectively into a beautiful photograph, but you can make an object in such a way that it will. "I mean, say it took me about an hour to make something in paper. I could give it another hour and make a second one for the camera."
This insight was crucial to everything he has done since. The models he makes are made to be photographed and incorporate all kinds of requisite distortions. As Ulrich Baer observes in his essay on the work, Demand treats "constructed space exclusively in terms of its appearance as a photograph". That is why source, construction and photograph are all inseparable aspects of one process.
Rather than staying put in Germany, Demand went abroad, living in Paris, London - where he completed an MA at Goldsmiths - Amsterdam and New York, before returning to settle in Berlin, where he is based now, working in a huge hanger-like space in the city centre.
Goldsmiths was decisive, pushing him into a new way of thinking about what he was doing. "This is a gross over-simplification," he says, "but it's something like this: In Dusseldorf you could talk about something commonplace, a table, and it is understood that you are talking about the concept of a table, any table. In London you talk about a table and it's this table, right here, with the chipped formica on the edges and so on." In London he had to be literal and specific.
One can see that he is something of a perfectionist. He has designed every aspect of the installation at Imma himself (enlisting architects Caruso St John to come up with a terrific screening device for the one film included). Audaciously, the walls are lined with black paper. The texture of the paper picks up on the textures within the images, but also reflects the architectural setting, outlining the elaborate architraves and detailing, so that the whole space comes to resemble, strikingly, one of his photographs.
The show's title, derived from Diderot's phrase, refers to moments of belated inspiration when, leaving a gathering, you think of a perfect riposte as you descend the stairs.
Demand likes in-between places. They are, to him, full of possibility just as Berlin, in flux of redefinition, is full of possibility and hence a good place for an artist to be. It is only now, he says, as he makes retrospective exhibitions, that he can discern long-term themes and preoccupations in his own work. Staircases in one form or another turned out to be one of them.
He has addressed the question of why the spaces in his images are always unoccupied in a couple of different ways. "The problem is, if there is a figure in a space you immediately focus on the figure. Imagine you look at a picture of a library. There is someone sitting at a table in the library. Immediately the image becomes a story about someone sitting in a library. What are they doing there? If you just see the library with no-one there, the meaning becomes more metaphorical, you ask different kinds of questions."
He has also pointed out that he is present in the images himself, in just the same way that a painter is in his or her paintings.
Even if we don't grasp all the associations of a particular image initially, there is a feeling of recognition.
It is that area of commonality of perception that he is aiming for. That common ground involves some dark areas of history, but it exasperates him to be labelled as bleakly pessimistic. That's one reason why he is so delighted with Dave Eggers' text in the show's catalogue.
Eggers invents some entirely imaginary biographic episodes in the life of "Thomas Demand" and concludes by emphasising how much he loves his work, and the world it describes.
Demand clearly relishes challenge. There are pieces in the show that are guaranteed to take your breath away. How did he do that, you are bound to ask. The answer is that he doesn't really know. "Each time I start something, I don't know how to do it until I do it."
L'Esprit d'Escalier is at Imma, Royal Hospital, Kilmainham until June 3
