The Evacuation Artist

At once photography's greatest asset & liability is the realism inherent to the medium's technical qualities: chemically aping the human eye's sensitivity to light. Thomas Demand, subject of a mid-career MoMA retrospective, fashions inexact paper sculptures from documentary photographs, linking him to Richter & Gursky. Stripping spaces of detail & affect, his work unmasks photography as a counterfeiter of reality. He is the Evacuation Artist, yelling Fire! in the media's crowded theaters, until they take on a pristine impersonality, a serene banality. His attack on photography's mimetic pretensions is the constant, stringing together his oeuvre.

The variable is the subject. Here Demand encases allusions within allusions, Chinese box-style, sliding the audience down slippery tunnels of reference. Consider the outwardly quotidian "Staircase":



attempting a facsimile of his high school stairway, Demand employs the Bauhaus style, invoking at once the Third Reich’s rejection of the art and architectural movement & the popular belief in postwar Germany that architecture could guarantee a democratic generation of moral integrity. Or Michael Kimmelman's note:

A patch of grass that he photographed turns out to be a laborious paper reproduction of a patch of grass, made blade by blade, which brings to mind a photograph by Mr. Gursky of a gray patch of carpet, itself devised as an ironic riff on Gerhard Richter's all-gray paintings, which harked yet further back to Jackson Pollock's drips.

Demand's rabbit-hole runs indefinitely deep.

He weds conceptualism to craftmanship brilliantly, neatly drawing insights into art & reality while skirting the murk of postmodern onanism.

Cultural Purgatory

Until recently, I had never really taken to Cy Twombly. A trip to MoMA over spring break spurred me to reconsider & now I'm fully under the spell. I'm trying to figure out why.



Codes are in our histories. One of my childhood fascinations was with cryptography, creating & breaking codes. Like my dad, Twombly had a short stint with Army intelligence, occasioning his famous self-appraisal: that he was 'too vague' to inflict the precise disorder of encryption. A convulsion of smears, scratches, & scribbles, his vagueness is at once pre-lingual & literate: pairing cave scrawl with Hellenistic namedropping. It is the vagueness of blurred borders, of ambiguity, of double lives. Perhaps I'm drawn to how Twombly inhabits a cultural purgatory, one foot in the lettered heavens & the other in the vulgar underworld. Sublimity tugs from both poles. His twin yearnings become nearly religious in their hope: for a dreamed paradise to be reified & a lost paradise to be recovered. He is too busy with the past & the future to confront the present.

Loneliness of the Lunatic

Can loneliness be commodified, fetishized? It's done every day, & too often it is the loneliness of the artist. Case in point: Henry Darger, the outsider artist par excellence. The fetishized commodity, here & everywhere, works from two cheapshot angles: sympathetically ("aww, what a sad man") & romantically (the loneliness of all great artists will be redeemed, in a sort of relentless art-historical Rapture, by posterity). Both of these angles point away from the art itself. The former relies on biography, the latter on myth (in a sense, biography writ large & abstracted).



Renowned art critic John Berger tired long ago of the romance with artistic loneliness. "He is lonely in the same way as a lunatic is lonely," Berger wrote of Picasso. "Because it seems to the lunatic that, since he never meets opposition, he can do anything." Picasso was less a man than a tempest, to whom loneliness was scarcely an obstacle. But Darger was no Picasso: his creative flights were so vagrant that they left the public grounded, scratching their heads, their esthetic vocabulary compressed into that single hollow phrase: "How ... interesting."