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.