The real simulations of Thomas Demand: a sculptor by training and inclination, Thomas Demand uses photography to record his three-dimensional tableaux, which are based on found, often historically loaded, photos. The tableaux are then destroyed. His pictures were just shown at MOMA

Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Pepe Karmel

A few years ago, my son and I took the shuttle bus from Orlando to Disneyworld. As we drove through the flat Florida landscape, I noticed that the woman sitting next to me was wearing the ID tag of a Disney employee. She was from southern Germany, it turned out, and worked in the Bavarian beer garden at Epcot Center. Wasn't it strange, I asked her, to work in a replica of the place she came from? "The town I grew up in was bombed during the war, and then rebuilt to look exactly the same as it did before," she said. "So it isn't really that different."

Like the German pavilion at Epcot Center, Thomas Demand's photographs offer a cleaner, heater version of the real world. At first glance, they appear to be straightforward records of unremarkable locations: offices, auditoriums, hallways, kitchens, bathrooms, staircases, stadiums and gardens, the familiar sites of mass society. It seems mildly perverse to give modest documents such heroic presentation: enlarged to mural scale and laminated to gleaming sheets of Plexiglas. And there is something off about the scenes in Demand's photographs. They record the traces of human activity, but no people appear in them. The surfaces are too smooth, the edges too sharp. Sometimes things are damaged, but they never betray the wear-and-tear of daily life. To walk through the retrospective of Demand's (mostly very large) photographs (1993-2004) at the Museum of Modern Art was to enter an unsettling alternate universe.

Like Epcot Center, everything in Demand's work is a fake, a meticulously constructed replica in paper and cardboard. Unlike Epcot Center, Demand's pictures often lead the viewer into a troubling confrontation with history, both German and international. A 1994 photograph with the anodyne title Room shows a conference room in a shambles: table collapsed, windows askew, moldings tumbled to the floor, chairs overturned. This is Demand's re-creation of the military conference room where Count Stauffenberg attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944. Four people were killed and the room was demolished, but Hitler survived.

Another photograph, with the equally dispassionate title Model (2000), shows part of a white architectural model atop a trestle table. Gleaming with the boundless optimism of early modernism, it looks like Walter Gropius's design for the Bauhaus or one of Kasimir Malevich's architektons. The catalogue essay by MOMA curator Roxana Marcoci reveals that the image was inspired by photographs of the model for the German pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition of 1937. A German brochure, showing the model being studied by Hitler, a would-be architect, and Albert Speer, its actual designer, stated: "By will of the 'Fuhrer,' a new monument in the National-Socialistic architectural sense has been erected." In fact, Speer's enormous, squared-off piers surreptitiously evoked modernist architecture while featuring just enough classical detailing to evade the Nazi ban against modernism. By merging the piers into a single rectangular block and eliminating the Prussian eagle atop them, Demand returns Speer's design to its modernist origins. Conversely, he invites us to confront modernism's disturbing implication in the bureaucratic logic of Fascism.

Demand's use of architectural symbolism recalls Anselm Kiefer's 1981 canvas, The Painter's Studio: Inner Room, which reproduces the "Mosaic Room" from Speer's 1937-38 Reichs Chancellery. But where Kiefer loads his imagery with angst and impasto, Demand maintains a sense of clinical detachment. The rhetorical point of his image is made by the subtle lighting and by the choice of viewpoint, lowered so that the model looms ominously over the viewer. Instead of the figures of Speer and Hitler, the right side of the photograph is occupied by a bare wall, a window and a radiator, painted in tones of green and gray that eloquently convey the tedium and indifference of institutional architecture. It is an object lesson in the banality of evil.

Other photographs in the MOMA retrospective evoke more recent moments in German history. Office (1995) shows drawers pulled open and papers dramatically strewn across table and floor. Here, Demand re-creates an event of 1990, the year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when, as Marcoci explains, "frenzied East Germans ransacked the deserted center of the former Stasi (secret police) building in East Berlin in search of their personal files." Countless people served as informers under German Communism: the ransackers were eager to find out what their supposed friends had said about them--but also to remove the evidence of their own activities as informers. (1)

Born in Munich in 1964, Demand studied church and theater design at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, and then moved on to the Dusseldorf Art Academy, where Bernd and Hilla Becher were training a generation of young photographers including Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Candida Hofer and Axel Hutte. Demand, however, studied with the sculptor Fritz Schwegler, who encouraged him to explore architectural models as an expressive medium. (2) Like Gursky et al., Demand makes mural-scale photographs with the formal impact of hard-edge abstraction and the allegorical density of Neo-Expressionism. However, he is not simply a photographer. Rather, his work has, since 1993, consisted of life-size paper and cardboard models that are constructed in order to be photographed, and then destroyed. At first glance, Demand's pictures recall the work of Jeff Wall, but with the human actors removed. It is tempting to describe Demand as a theatrical designer, because his work sets the stage for action or records its aftermath. The fact that he makes and photographs models, rather than actual buildings and furnishings, brings him closer to James Casebere and Oliver Boberg.