Thomas Demand’s stop-motion work rocks the boat
Photography exhibition sees artist delve into investigative journalism
You can search “Pacific Sun cruise” on YouTube and watch furniture and people sliding back and forth in a dining room as huge waves roll their cruise ship off the coast of New Zealand.
Or you can visit DHC/ART and watch a stop-motion animation by German artist Thomas Demand of full-sized cardboard furniture rolling across a cardboard room.
Which is more interesting: the YouTube surveillance camera video of true chaos, with people unable to stop themselves from crashing into walls and pillars? Or Demand’s video, which kills much of the event’s drama by removing the passengers and concentrating on the rhythmic back-and-forth of chairs, tables and paper? This video unfolds as a study of the relative inertia of light objects that begin moving before heavy objects, but come to a quicker stop.
My first reaction to Demand’s video was to marvel at the work involved in its making.
Demand said his video, which lasts two minutes, cost as much as a feature film to make. It involved teams of animators moving cardboard props inch by inch, from one marked position to another. A script had to be written to plot the changing positions of each chair, table and sheet of paper.
The answer to the question of which video is more interesting must involve the artist’s intention and his success in conveying it to his viewers.
Pacific Sun is an exercise in “complexity that borders on madness,” Demand said during a discussion with noted art historian Michael Fried at the PHI Centre on Jan. 17, the night before the opening. The complexity of the video just reflects “what happens in nature every second,” Demand added.
Fried saw evidence in Pacific Sun, made from a sequence of photographs, of a “real artist” at work. Demand’s photos and videos show things that seem ordinary, but “something is off. Everything is fabricated.” The objects, he said, “declare their ‘madeness’ and raise the question: What’s going on?”
The postmodern realm doesn’t care, declaring it’s up to the viewer to decide, Fried said. “The artist’s intention is not important.”
But real artists, said Fried, put meaning into an artifact. And everything in a Demand photo or video is determined — is “intentional with a vengeance.”
Demand, who started as a sculptor, doesn’t let the viewer choose a vantage point. By photographing — and then destroying — his sculptures, the viewing point is determined.
This attitude extends to the entire gallery, making the Thomas Demand: Animations exhibition one huge installation. Pacific Sun is projected into a corner of the gallery, while a video showing a cardboard version of the closed-circuit camera that recorded the original scene is positioned in the opposite corner.
The exhibition is displayed in both of the DHC’s spaces, with the main space devoted mostly to photographs and the satellite space to the videos.
The photographs are unframed but mounted on aluminum, their flatness emphasized by their contrast with patterned wallpaper that simulates curtains — the theatre’s device for hiding and revealing.
By showing photographs that depict deep space in a flat presentation before a wall that looks threedimensional, Demand has taken command of the gallery environment, Fried said.
Embassy, an installation of photographs, is not quite typical of Demand’s work, in that the particular event he chose from history is not one of which many people will have even a vague memory. And though it is not always crucial to know the background of an image, knowledge can be a springboard to understanding, Fried said.
With Embassy, a little knowledge is important, and Demand has included an explanatory text. The work takes Demand into investigative journalism, a stance that is becoming more and more common among contemporary artists pondering the world’s many crises.
On the night when 2000 passed into 2001, the Niger Embassy in Rome was burglarized and stationery stolen. A few months later, Italian newspapers were offered what appeared to be contracts — on paper with Niger’s letterhead — for the sale of uranium (yellowcake) to Saddam Hussein.
The contracts were obvious frauds, Demand said, since the Niger officials who purportedly signed the documents were long out of office.
Italian newspapers didn’t bite, and European intelligence agencies also knew the contracts were fake, he said. But in 2003, George W. Bush and Tony Blair used them to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Demand said he decided to recreate the embassy that Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, maintains in Rome, which is also headquarters of the World Food Program.
The embassy consists of four rooms in an apartment building.
He recounted how he gained entrance to the embassy, taking pictures with his cellphone, and how, after leaving, he immediately sketched the scene from memory. Then, posing as a potential renter to confirm the layout of the embassy, he spent a day in a similar set of rooms on another floor.
The result is a set of photographs of cluttered offices, with desks piled with stacks of paper. But these cold and banal architectural images depict a place where something happened that helped launch a war.
Demand’s arduous process of fabricating an image taken from the constant flow of the media stream serves as a way of “slowing down the unceasing information flux,” exhibition curator John Zeppetelli writes in the exhibition brochure.
By creating a meditative environment, Demand helps us understand that “these surface effects conceal a churning backstory rife with labour, love and resolve,” Zeppetelli writes.