“My pictures give you an image of your future memory”: Thomas Demand in conversation with It’s Nice That

INTYou’re well known for your paper works now, but your technique was somewhat looked down upon by fellow students at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. How did you know you were on to something?

TDWell, you know, it wasn’t an idea in one afternoon, which then unfolded or anything. It came out of the process of making sculptures. Because every sculptor has the same problem – you make a sculpture and then you have to store it somewhere. And then you make two sculptures, and suddenly you have two sculptures to store and then you just think, ‘OK, do I really need a TV?’

INTSo it began as mere practicality? Is that why you started photographing your sculptures?

TDSort of. I didn’t know whether it was worthwhile investing a lot of money in material, and paper is simple, you can get it anywhere, you don’t need any help, you don’t need a workshop. And then, as I said, I also didn’t want to have to store them and with paper, I could make sculptures, get rid of them and redo them if I needed to. At some point, my professor at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf said, “You know, this is all very interesting. However, you should photograph them before you dump them to see whether your work is developing at all.” And at some point, I had to decide what “the artwork” was, and realised I like the fact that a photograph is a fleeting document of one single moment. I thought that was very apt to what I was doing in my sculptures because a paper sculpture also fades away.

INTDo you now enjoy the concepts attached to your process of destroying your works?

TDYeah – the longer you work with something, the more you find out about it philosophically. Of course, it’s a relatively strong idea to get rid of things, because otherwise things get rid of you. Things fade and so I’m just speeding up a process that is inevitable anyway. The idea is there in everything but if you point it out, you make it poignant and underline the fact that you can never revisit a moment, that you’re never going to be the same. It’s a very old and simple argument, but I found that very intriguing and convincing.

INTIn your work, you choose to create scenes that are “around the corner from the horror” and not the horror itself. What makes a scene or idea resonate with you?

TDThe potential of a narrative; the potential of a picture of giving you a narrative – a decisive narrative. Even if you don’t know the narrative, you can feel that this is a place where either something just happened or something is about to happen. And it’s not about drama, a splatter of blood on the floor, or something like that. But a simple arrangement of objects. We all have pretty much the same objects that we use every day. Saddam Hussein has the same type of stuff in his kitchen as I do. But the way that you frame a scene, or the way that you look at it, the way that you position these objects starts making a narrative. The more complex it gets, the more narrative you can create. The second thing is if it triggers the feeling that I’ve seen it before, but not in a nuisance way, like “I have seen this too often”. It’s more of a recurring thing, as if I can’t place where it is but it makes me feel something.

INTSo recognition of the scene is important then?

TDWell, it shouldn’t be too in your face or recognisable, because then there’s nothing I can add. I never want to do the World Trade Center, for example. And it’s never about the real fact either, because I don’t know more about the fact than you do. So it’s about the fact that we share. And the connection between people it implies, the construction of your identity as a contemporary citizen. For example, if I do a lecture in Argentina, and I talk about Donald Trump, everybody knows what I’m talking about. I haven’t met him, they haven’t met him, but there is a collective understanding which is a complete construction. It’s of interest to me that people can recognise it or work it out, though. So if you really want to know what the place is, what the image references, there are always ways to find out. The titling of my work tells you that it is actually not about that singular moment, however; it’s about the trace it has left in our public consciousness. An important point to me is that I can only talk about the things I needed to make the work, I cannot tell you what you should see, or what you might see.

INTCan you talk a bit about the significance of the fact that you create models and you don’t go to these places and take photographs?

TDFor me, photography is an agreement, mostly the technical kind. And, frankly, I can’t give you any expertise on that, because I never got trained. Although I cannot say I’m an amateur anymore.

INTI’m sure you’ve learned a thing or two…

TDIt’s just not what I come from. There are a lot of implications between the camera, the focal point of the device, the maker and the thing which is looked at. I’m on both sides of that because I also produce the world which you see. The second thing is that a model is a cultural technique. Modelling is as important as making images, it’s a filter of reality. And I’m not talking about architectural models or children’s toys. Demography is a model, a weather forecast is based on a model, everything needs to be a reduced version of reality to understand it and then draw consequences from it in real life. If you think of a simulation, for instance. In space travel, you will not survive the reality if you haven’t been trained for the emergency in a similar way before, because you don’t even know what it looks like, or what it feels like, and then it’s too late. So a lot of modelling is predicting our daily experience. It’s a central cultural technique and that’s why it interests me.

INTIs there an element in your work, then, of preempting things?

TDI would hope so, but I think what it actually does is shows you how you remember things. For example, if you take the notes from this conversation here, you have a totally different idea of what we talked about, and how long we talked about which subject than I do. Memory focuses on the most important things, and because you don’t have a picture in your head, you just have to reconstruct the whole thing and so you add things – memory constantly adds things. What my pictures sometimes can do or what I hope they can do is give you an image of your future memory. It’s the visualisation of an archival process.

INTWhat is the importance of scale in your work? Both the fact that you make things life-size, but also that you work so hard to make sure objects are believable?

TDI live in one-to-one and I don’t really understand scaling down. But it’s also because I’m trying to avoid very, very diligently any neatness. I’d rather have it a little bit aggressive or cold in order to escape the funniness of a model. I mean, if you look at architectural models, they always look great. But most of the buildings we have surrounded ourselves with are really horrible. So there’s something happening there with scale, you don’t look at the details. I will, for example, look at this table and think what’s the diameter? How far away is this mug from this plate? The placement of these things is completely coincidental, but if you redo a coincidence it allows you to bring all the experience you have into every little detail. That makes a model of a particular place and not just some place.