On Friday, Thomas Demand opened his first ever exhibition of photographs of architectural models he didn't built himself. The images shift from representational images of politically charged interiors to abstract compositions whose referents are virtually unrecognizable. His subjects at Berlin’s Esther Schipper are various models by the late West Coast architect John Lautner, whose “Jetsons”
-like constructions dot the California coastline. Some works feature dual or triple views of the same cardboard work, while larger photographs hone in on a single angle from which the eye focuses on abstract, painterly constructions of line and color, rather than the objects' original function as sales tools.
Meanwhile, at Sprüth Magers, Demand presents three photographs: a Fukushima control room, a hidden storage facility for paintings in Paris, and the empty shelves of one of Berlin’s recently disused Schlecker drug stores. ARTINFO Germany’s Alexander Forbes sat down with Demand the week leading up to both openings, to speak about the Lautner series and the slippery slope from abstract photography to water colors.
What spurred the shift from making your own models to working with Lautner’s?
It’s just a detour, really. When I finished the show at the National Gallery in Berlin, I had a couple of other projects like curating a big group show for a museum in Monte Carlo that went on to New York. I was busy with things but had to shelve some of them for a time. Amongst those, the Getty had invited me to L.A. as a research scholar. I had always wanted to go there, but never built up the critical mass to do so. While I was there, I saw these models that were in a special storage facility in the north of Los Angeles, and began thinking about photographing them. The tricky thing is that usually architectural models are very representational, and I’m not interested in display-oriented models, but in models for understanding and producing some sort of knowledge — a model of DNA or even a weather forecast is more interesting than a doll house. Architectural models are often produced to convince someone to buy a certain building. But apparently Lautner’s practice was to a large part based on making models in order to design and communicate the structures he wanted to create. Nowadays they’re all fairly fragile and run down. They were never supposed to last for more than two weeks but were found on the top of a cupboard or something when he died. They all represent buildings that were never realized. If they had been, he would have gotten rid of them after finishing the project. I found it really interesting to make images of buildings that never existed and will never exist, using the models as objects rather than representations.
At the same time, you have always had this practice of using photography to document sculptural constructions. Has the journey to finding them somehow precluded the sculptural aspect?
I usually do take a certain pleasure in building them myself. But in this case, coming to a model is a different thing than making the model. I’m trying to understand it and find a viewpoint rather than construct that viewpoint as I build the model itself, where I know more or less what the picture should be like ahead of time. So here, working with someone else’s model, you have to look at it from every direction, and really study the form to decide from where and how it should be shot.
Compared to what you’ve done in the past, which is much more clean, here you’re looking at more asymmetrically shaped forms and old models, which results in a roughness and abstract quality that formally differentiates this series from your previous work.
Well, what the camera does best is to capture things with a central perspective, which follows the same laws of representation as is seen in the European architectural tradition. When you look at a photograph of a Mies [van der Rohe] pavilion, you see a few vertical lines and two horizontal lines and you infer: OK, that’s the ceiling, that’s the floor, here you can go in and out. It’s no coincidence it’s called rational architecture. But this sort of rationalism does not work in Lautner’s work. It’s a kind of architecture that changes profoundly if you stand 10 meters to the left or right. It’s a space that’s best experienced from walking through rather than by standing and finding the nicest viewpoint. On a still image it can look rather clunky, really. But it isn’t clumsy at all. They’re amazing spaces and experiences. I didn’t understand it at the beginning and really didn’t like it originally. I’m still very ambivalent, but that doesn’t matter. It’s about working with something that has a particular referent, which is a somehow utopian vision; it will never exist, but has a contextual meaning. The architecture is secondary. It’s mostly about the object. The pictures are very abstract as well. Sometimes I go a little bit back so that you see it’s a spatial arrangement, but more often I stay very close so you only see material and some sort of composition.
Right, they’re suddenly a lot more painterly than previous works.
Exactly, but the problem with abstract photography is that you miss a referent. Part of the idea of photography is that there is something that records and something that is in front of that recording device. If the thing in front of the recording device is becoming dubious or opaque in some way, you lose what’s photographic about the whole process and you’d be just as well to make a watercolor or something. You need to have a certain indexicality or it quickly becomes like applied arts, design, or a formal experiment. These models gave me the chance to get very abstract, but at the same time, they still have a root in the real world, even if it’s not completely straightforward, like looking in the newspaper and recognizing something. It gives me possibilities in my other work that I previously didn’t have.
It’s funny that the thing that allows you to make abstract photographs is actually a very abstract entity in and of itself. It’s arranged cardboard that doesn’t represent anything in reality.
But I think it’s a fine line. It cannot be too abstract. You still need to have the understanding that they mean something. What I hope that you see is a certain doubt within the pictures: that it could be one way, or like that, or maybe even like this. There is no, boom: this is how it should be, end of story. Yet, it still represents something specific, it’s not just a heap of cardboard that’s been photographed from different sides. It has a certain inner coherence and consequence.
Thomas Demand's exhibitions at Sprüth Magers Berlin and at Esther Schipper both continue through October 20.