«Bringing the dance of the world to rest»
Absorption and theatricality in the work of Thomas Demand
By Thomas Oberender
The connection between Thomas Demand’s photographs and the world of theatre does not seem obvious at first glance. According to a simple understanding of theatre, people act out on stage what other people are doing. At various times, people have also impersonated gods or animals on stage, in some cultures river spirits, ancestors or plants, and even robots have appeared on stage as humanoid beings for the first time, but the fact that people in the theatre almost always show people and only what concerns people has been an established habit in Europe for a good 200 years.
But the only thing Thomas Demand’s pictures do not show are people. Instead, they show interiors, urban spaces, occasionally natural spaces, a grotto or a forest. The settings lie open before the viewer, and you can see how people have disrupted the order of things in these spaces, scattering piles of paper on the floor or filling a tub with water, but there is no trace of the people themselves in the pictures - no dirt, no lipstick on a glass, no writing on the notes or books, no logo on the blue cream jar. It is as if the things in these photographs are living their own lives. The doorbells have no names, Demand shows a world without us.
A famous photograph by Thomas Demand shows a bathtub in a tiled bathroom niche. It was created after a crime scene photo showing CDU politician Uwe Barschel dead in the bathtub of his Geneva hotel room in 1987. In Demand’s photography, all that remains of this scene is the bathtub and the tiled room, but the colour of the tiles and the small carpet return. Inevitably, the viewer’s brain completes the scene around the person lying in the bathtub, insofar as one has ever seen the police photograph before.
Demand’s images are images after images. Starting with crime scene photos, media photographs or archival images, Thomas Demand and his studio team recreate the original photographs on coloured paper at a scale of 1:1. Like a model maker, he creates not only the rooms and façades from large sheets of paper, but also lanterns, plants and everyday objects, from water glasses to radios, from cots to cushions. The resulting visual worlds are eerily real in two ways - because of their references to the often scandalous stories behind the photographs, but also independently, because the aesthetic of his photographs gives them a mystery of their own.
Something is not right in these pictures, the eye senses that, and at the same time there is something deeply familiar about them. After the dull texture of their surfaces and the specific tonality of their analogue colour, the viewer eventually notices individual bumps and cuts in the paper, and this subtle unreality creates an uncanny valley, a gap of acceptance that soon closes again and becomes fascinating. Demand’s photographs, one after another, show a re-enacted world. The ashtrays, thermos flasks, scissors or plants she recreates are constructions of a pure surface, they are, like CGI figures, only the ‘skin’ of things, empty inside.
For the subconscious, photographs are factual images, and Thomas Demand plays with the medium’s promise of authenticity. Photographs are both an inherited, reflexive reflection of the world at a given moment and its dead image. For a light image, which every photograph is by its very nature, creates a general impression of a glimpse of life and detaches it from it. While a painter slowly fills the canvas point by point, photography captures the image in the complex simultaneity of all its elements.
The specific production method of Demand’s photographs reverses this process and gives the images back their time by successively building up the photographed space by hand according to the original photograph. Born in Munich in 1964, Thomas Demand first studied interior design and then sculpture and art in Munich, Düsseldorf and London. For practical reasons, he began photographing his sculptures as a student and soon developed an interest not only in the specific reality of these photographs, but also in the phenomenon of the surface itself.
Software programs create surfaces. Every mobile phone offers a surface that leads into depth, into social relations that are technologically shaped and capitalistically extracted. CGI figures are essentially text written on image-generating software. The human-like figure, like CGI objects or spaces, are pure surfaces, empty inside, just shells that are «filled» with tasks, ideas and feelings. Similarly, architecture, fashion or design create pure surfaces that are models, enveloping like the costumes of theatre characters into which life moves.
Even the character itself, as laid out in a theatre text, can be understood as a pure surface, as a literary code or analogous script that notes the shape of a character as the matrix of its outward behaviour, words and gestures, ready for its «application». In rehearsals, the actors read this code and slip into the shell it provides.
In doing so, they are guided not only by their personal feelings, but also by the formal elements that make up the behaviour of the characters: From the codes and conventions of social worlds, from familiar gestures or attitudes that they have observed in other people, in films, in the speeches of politicians, or simply from what is handed down in the dispositif of the theatre itself as mannerisms and techniques, the actors assemble their character. The ancestors of previous characters therefore haunt every character.
Just as echoes of older images of the world appear in each of Thomas Demand’s photographs. By recreating the original photographs in his studio, their original content is transformed into something abstract, triggering a chain reaction of references - memories of the original stories and facts, but also aesthetic reminiscences of works of art history that come back to the viewer through his photographs. Just as the players slip into their roles, Demand slips into the images in his studio.
And just as the actors trace a hidden logic and mood in the script and, through their embodiment, translate it into real and at the same time formal behaviour between people, Demand brings the objects and spaces of the original image back into the physical world in his studio productions in order to transfer them completely into another medium. In his work, the paper on which the photographic print appears shows a world made entirely of paper - its ‘object’ is its medium. For me, Demand’s deeper relationship with theatre is based primarily on three aspects: Style, Performance and Absorption.
His image-making process creates a look that is controlled down to the smallest detail and highly recognisable: the dark, luminous colours without any grain, the perspective from normal eye level, the light without angular shadows, the dull texture of the surfaces - all this brings into the picture a paper structure that is created and joined together from the smallest details, like the appearance of a figure, and discovers in it the patterns, the logic and the development of social relationships. Demand builds models, life-size sculptures in paper, in a craft that is both immediate and figurative, based on research, know-how and experimentation. Like each model, his images show a testing ground for our knowledge and a representative object that brings principles to life.
Theatre productions also create a world within a world on stage. Each play is a model of a specific reality, something recreated that not only reproduces its origin but creates something original. In the theatre, the costumes of the characters, their masks and the set are also «made of paper», designed for the moment and the situation of their appearance in the image of the performance, and disappear after the last performance, never to be seen again, like commodities. They, too, emerged from images, translating surfaces into space, only to become images again and disappear after the final curtain falls.
All the changes of substance that cover things in everyday life with speaking crusts, with traces of use and signs of wear, which in turn allow conclusions to be drawn about people - the rims of coffee cups, traces of cigarette smoke, snippets of used things - have been eliminated from Demand’s pictures. His cleansed objects appear as archetypes of things in themselves. And although Demand’s pictorial sources are so often based on stories that are relevant to our times, his work seems to evacuate them into a space outside of time. What found its place in Demand’s paper world looked no different as an image twenty years ago than it did yesterday.
On the other hand, Thomas Demand’s exhibition design, or rather the ‘performance’ of his photographs, has always been theatrical. In museums, for example, his photographs are often surrounded by curtains, partitions, cabinets, illusionistic wallpaper, showcases or lamps of his own design, which, through discreet interventions, gently bring the surroundings of his pictures closer to their aesthetic reality. Demand’s cinema boxes, suspended from the ceiling in his exhibitions in Moscow and Santander, are neo-futuristic sculptures, although they serve only the practical purpose of creating seemingly free-floating listening and viewing spaces for three or four people. The countless interior objects and site-specific architectures that Demand has designed for his exhibition situations now form a separate area in the artist’s oeuvre.
For the transmedia exhibition project «THE CAPTAIN LIED THE BOAT IS LEAKING» in 2017 by the Fondazione Prada in a Venetian palace, Thomas Demand and the curator Udo Kittelmann created various transitional spaces between the interlocking and interconnected work worlds of Anna Viebrock, Alexander Kluge and Thomas Demand through elaborate installations of rooms, walls, artificial stages and staircases. In some cases, memory spaces from Alexander Kluge’s films were recreated as walk-in ‘sets’, which in turn led into rooms in which a real set by Anna Viebrock was presented as a sculpture, accompanied by photographs by Thomas Demand, who shows his pictures in seemingly historical rooms of the Palazzo, which in turn were a mock architecture that never existed in this building.
This Venice exhibition allowed for a permanent fusion of fiction and fact in a space that, like the Palazzo itself, became part of the narrative. Here, for the first time, the idea of the model on which Demand’s photographs are based was transformed into an immersive overall architecture of the experience of his art, in which there was no outside, but only a labyrinth of aesthetic references that nested ever more inwardly.
From here, in 2022, the path leads into three pavilions that Thomas Demand has built for the Danish textile company Kvadrat, light buildings designed as if everything around them were made of paper - the leaf-like folded roof of the central building, the metal chairs made of paper struts, door handles, tables, wallpaper and lamps: all these things appear in this park in Ebeltoft like buildings from a children’s game, light and serious at the same time, abstract and concrete in their functional design.
The light rooms, ventilation grilles, tiles, columns, furniture, crockery, carpets - all of this could have slipped into the room from the images of one of his animated films. In the Ebeltoft Pavilions, Demand’s quiet, abstract yet warm pictorial world becomes a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk cosmos, where every photograph taken by visitors seems to have been taken in Demand’s studio.
It is a strange attraction that emanates from Demand’s images, drawing the viewer into the interior of his pictorial worlds. His photographs have no depth behind the rooms, they never direct the gaze into the distance, but always into the interior of his grottoes, offices, living rooms or laboratories. They give the viewer access to a magical close-up space that is both attractive and reassuring. As if beyond time and cleansed of the physical traces of man, the wild dance of the world comes to rest in Demand’s photographs.
Thomas Demand’s photographs show a human-free zone and things that speak for themselves. In Demand’s paper world, the artificiality of their existence is the reality of their existence without us - the world as it is: abstract, pure surface, one like the other.
The artist has stripped these things of our sweat and dirt, their labels and histories. The result is a pure language of things, of being things. Philippe Quesne brought it to life in the theatre in his «Phantasmagoria», the artists of the Bauhaus theatre followed this path, as did Mette Ingvartsen in her animations of forest, fog or fire.
For the American art historian Michael Fried, there are two types of painting, which he described in 1980 in his book of the same name with the terms «absorption» and «theatricality». For Michael Fried, the paintings of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and Jean-Baptiste Greuze create an intimate situation of contemplation. The situation of the exhibition recedes behind the work of art, and the viewer’s perception slips into the world of the painting and is absorbed by it. It absorbs the viewer’s reality. Fried contrasts this with the art of Minimalism, in which the situation of the exhibition itself becomes an event and ostentatiously draws attention to itself.
Thomas Demand’s work has both aspects. Each picture certainly has the character of a still life, a quiet situation that absorbs the viewer’s gaze and directs it into the inner space of the picture. At the same time, in his own exhibition concepts, Demand’s works appear embedded in environments that are subtly staged. Not as in Minimal Art, but as an extension of the atmospheric space of his photographs into the exhibition space itself.
In German-language theatre studies and criticism, Michael Fried’s famous book «Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot» has received little attention. In the sense of a strategy of absorption, it is not surprising that Anna Viebrock has adapted Thomas Demand’s photograph «Staircase» for a production by Christoph Marthaler, in which people move in an inner space of feelings and small rituals that they will never leave. Michael Fried’s concept of ‘absorption’ and ‘theatricality’ opens up an interesting perspective on recent theatre history, and without having touched the sphere of theatre directly, Thomas Demand is an artist whose aesthetic strategies and inventions are closely and fruitfully linked to the development of contemporary theatre.
from: Theater der Zeit, Issue 6/2023, p. 25-31,