German photographer Thomas Demand doesn't capture images. He constructs them. In a process that can be called “painstaking”, Demand sculpts large-scale interior and exterior environments using card stock, paper, and acetate. Drawn from countless photographic resources, such as historical, criminological, and tabloid documentation, Demand taps into our collective photographic history to reconstruct past realities. These realities are then reintroduce into visual culture as a contextual re-birth and reexamination.

Demand's immaculate constructions reveal truths about their own mock realities. For example, each scene is devoid of any human figure, depicting an uncomfortable stillness. It is an arresting visual silence, like a Candida Hoffer photograph, but on a smaller, more focused scale. The physical characteristics of the objects within a scene can also betray the scene's reality. For example, telephones without numbers, or countless papers strewn about a ransaked office, all blank. These elements are not oversights on Demand's part, but are qualities intrinsic to his practice. Viewers are invited to navigate the images and understand them within a larger contextual area. To make exact replicas would be besides the point. Demand's images raise questions about many facets of fine art and photographic histories. Can we treat these spaces in a phenomenological sense? Is this brand of photorealism to be considered sculptural, or merely photographical? Or both. Why is Demand known foremost as a photographer, when his formal sculpting abilities surpass that of his photographic skills?



The works themselves are the photographs, while the sculptural installations are ephemeral creations which are created in Demand's studio, lit, photographed repeatedly with a 4x5 studio camera. Then the installations are deconstructed, leaving only the photographs. The photographer Jeff Wall states: “A photograph is something that makes invisible its before and after.” This speaks directly to Demand's practice. We never see the environments before completion, in relation to human scale, or how they are constructed; and we also never see the aftermath of the process. We only see the carefully edited image that Demand picks from hundreds upon hundreds of shots. It is within that single shutter click that Demand allows us to (attempt to) understand the greater whole. Everything else is invisible.



Within the fine art realm, Demand's work may be seen as a hybrid of New York-based artist Vik Muniz, and the Congo-based Bodys Isek Kingelez. Demand relates to Muniz for actively creating fine art of great delicacy and representational mastery, only to be destroyed and presented only as a photograph and to Kingelez for his investigations of architectural spaces by means of scale models and hands on construction. However, Demand departs from these others thematically. Demand's photographs are rarely "just rooms" they are almost always references to events in world history that range from comically obscure to deadly serious postmodern Memento Mori.


Check out

http://www.thomasdemand.de/

Beethoven's 6th symphony plays softly. On the screen, there's an image of a stout hunter with a rifle slung over his shoulder, with green blazer, trousers and cap. The setting is a green lakeside forest. The visual and music reveal the pastoral ideal. The hunter walks though the landscape occasionally drinking from a flask. He arrives at a small wooden boat, which he rows to the center of the lake. Then he stands and blasts a hole though the boat's bottom. The music abruptly ends with the shotgun blast. Sitting back down, the hunter waits patiently as the water rises. After several minutes the boat and hunter are submerged and all that's left is the hunter's cap, floating on the surface of the water. The screen fades to black.



This is the story told in “The Lake” a short film by Danish video artist Peter Land. Like many of Land's works this film serves as an allegory without moral statement. It is both playful and unsettling. The viewer finds it difficult to reconcile the humor of the situation with the tragic and bizarre suicide. We naturally assume that this apparently happy hunter (played by Land) is out to enjoy nature as any hunter would. The jarring suicide just doesn't fit. Land manages to suggests that beneath the veneer of a beautiful summer day lies the desperation, pain and failure of being human.

Forklift fodder?

Canadian-born Brian Jungen's artwork often reveals itself slowly. Upon initial inspection of this piece, a viewer may see pallets stacked neatly on the gallery floor – almost as if they had been used to transport “the artwork”, carelessly discarded for the visitors to see. But these are no ordinary pallets. In fact, they only common trait they share with standard industrial pallets is their general form. In “Untitled” (2001), Jungen has crafted a set of ten, immaculate red ceder skids. Gone are the rough, unfinished edges, knots, burns, cracks, mixed woods and haphazard nails protruding. These pallets are hand planed and sanded surfaces, pegged together, quite obviously worked over to perfection. Visually, there's something amiss. We see a delicate treatment of an object that is traditionally known for its use, abuse, and eventual destruction. An object devoid of aesthetic value and craftsmanship has been rendered permanent and visually pleasing. And this comes as a surprise. By all means this transformation is absurd but its success is that it's believable. Think along the lines Jeff Koons, if he still cared about art. It is evident that these pallets weren't meant to have goods staked on them, or be fork-lifted around factory floors. They don't need to function, they simply exist and in so doing they spread their message. The pallets make their statement in a quiet and unobtrusive way. They won't speak to everyone, but through execution and concept they can show us that even in the most banal objects, there's potential for beauty.

Much ado about nothing

Problem solving has never been Andreas Slominski's strong suit. Since the late 1980s, the German artist has developed an expansive body of work focusing on the idea of “taking the hard way”. In his actions, installations and sculptures, Slominski presents problems which appear to have easy solutions, and then takes the most absurd, indirect solution imaginable. Without any concern for common sense or logistics, Slominski has mastered an art of inefficiency that can make even the most open-minded viewers scratch their heads, marveling at the apparent stupidity.

In “Stolen Bicycle Pump”

Slominski used the cover of night to find a locked bicycle with an air pump attached to the cross bar of the frame. He then used a hack-saw to cut a section of the frame right out, pump attached. Ignoring the plastic clips that fasten the pump and make for fast removal. The pump and section of the frame are then presented as the art object. The objects are often embedded with the story of the action that preceded them, telling the tale in a glance. This distinct story telling is an important feature of Slominski's work, acting to spread word of the work in a near myth like fashion.

In his 1996 “Licking a stamp”

the artist had a giraffe lick a postage stamp, then affixed it to a letter which was then sent out in the mail. Slominski's art is an exaggerated and painfully blunt model of what most art really is: an exercise in the unnecessary. Slominski doesn't gloss over the fact that his works are more or less pointless and uses this to comment on the self-aggrandizing nature of art. An artwork which so often presents itself as something with a utility and a significance, but at the end of the day, its uses are limited at best to conversation pieces for those already well-versed in art, or at worst, decoration. While Slominski's works often do have a function outside of “art”, its purposes are immediately nonsensical and circular, working in a closed system that is of no relevance to anything other than art.

His 1998 “Cough syrup transport system”

is again testament to this. Slominski worked with a team of scientists to develop a high-tech calibration device that would counter any vibrations or movements that might cause a table spoon of cough medicine to spill. Slominski's production suggests an attitude that like his cough syrup system, teeters back and forth between flippancy and reverence towards the art world. His work calls into question the nature of art and seeks to re-evaluate the “art object” as well as the processes by which they are realized within a structure that places infinite value on items that are apparently worthless.

It's a gas

It's not often you see small children at contemporary art exhibits. And for good reason: it's hard for adults to take in the breadth of artistic production these days, but for a child to make the leap from "Bob the Builder" to Matthew Barney is impossible.

Danish artists Henrik Plenge Jakobsen has a different idea about children in gallery settings. He welcomes their presence, and in works such as his 1998 “Laughing Gas House for Children” he depends on them to carry out the work's function. Through the union of a 'Little Tykes' Plastic playhouse and a canister of nitrous oxide, Jakobsen has created a ready-made and potentially interactive sculpture that can dope children into a state of mild hysteria.

The message sent is at best mixed. Depending on the opinion of the parent or guardian of the child, the work could be read as little more than a silly gesture encouraging “kids to be kids” by individually creating a more interesting and relevant experience in an otherwise unstimulating environment. On the opposite end, the work could be viewed as destructive--introducing a mind altering substance into a child's system behind the guise of “art”, subverting the “acceptable” setting the gas is used in, namely dental surgeries. In this sense, then, the work may be seen as no different than distributing alcohol to the children. Jakobsen remains ambiguous on the issue, summing up the work by stating, “It’s my experience that kids like drugs such as alcohol and also laughing gas”. Responsible? I'll have to think about it... Provocative? Very.

Check out more of HPG's work at http://henrikplengejakobsen.net

10 years gone.

German Artist Martin Kippenberger passed away 10 years ago today, March 7th 1997.

Image: (Martin, go stand in the corner, shame on you) 1989 Mixed media and bronze68.9 x 31.5 x 15.8 in (175 x 80 x 40 cm)

Taken from: www.zwirnerandwirth.com/

Can he do that?

I must have skipped over Santiago Sierra's three short pages in Taschen's "Art Now" close to fifteen times without ever giving any time to the blownout videograbs and grainy photographs. Recently, I found my eyes again on his section, and figured I should give it a shot.

In short, "social trauma" is a thematic package that Sierra's work can be wrapped up in. Another would be "kicking people when they're down". "10-inch line shaved on the heads of two junkies who received a shot of heroin as payment" is the name of the above work, and without wasting words, explains the seemingly playful image in a downright unsettling fashion.

Sierra's brand of explotation in and of itself doesn't create real change in the social structures it seeks to address, and in the end, it is the viewing public that will make decisions as to what to do with Sierra's provocations. To make up your own mind, check out this and other works at: http://www.santiago-sierra.com/index_1024.php