Thomas Demand @ MoMA
All the art chatter seems to be focused on Ashes and Snow, which opens to the public on Saturday at the Nomadic Museum (making its US debut at Hudson River Park‘s Pier 54). I am looking forward to checking it out myself, but if your taste runs more towards the conceptual end of things, I recommend you see the Thomas Demand exhibition which opens at the Museum of Modern Art tomorrow.
My friend Antony and I attended the opening last night. The galleries where the show is hung were relatively empty. Most attendees were clustered in the Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron atrium amidst a Rothko, Monet’s Water Lilies and… the open bar. Lucky us – it was fun to wander the galleries while they were sparsely populated.
From MoMA’s site: “Photographs can seem convincingly real or strangely artificial. The work of German photographer Thomas Demand achieves a disquieting balance between the two.”
The first thing I thought of upon entering the Demand exhibit is one of my favorite poems ever, Theodore Roethke’s Dolor, which begins:
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight…
And then I congratulated myself for no longer having an office job. Many, but not all, of the photographs depict mundane (but historically signifcant) office environments which Demand has painstakingly constructed out of cardboard. At first glance the images seem real, if slightly off. It’s an uber-mediated experience – he is working from photographs, he contructs a facsimile of it, photographs it himself and then destroys it.
Like I said, it was great to have the chance to see the work without being surrounded by mobs of people, and it’s definitely a show worth checking out. I must confess though – I was most captivated by Atget‘s series of Saint-Cloud photographs.
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Nadine Cheung
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