Thomas Demand’s Nationalgalerie: Reconstructing a German Archive

Summary

IN 2009 GERMANY CELEBRATED sixty years since the founding of the Federal Republic and twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That double-anniversary year two exhibitions opened in Berlin: the high-profile, popular show 60 Jahre—60 Werke at the Martin-Gropius- Bau and a solo show in Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie by the Munich-born artist Thomas Demand. Demand had been invited to participate in 60 Jahre, but, fearing that the show was concerned with things other than art, had declined. It seemed Demand was right: one critic dismissed 60 Jahre as “kunsthistorische[r] Blodsinn” (art historical nonsense) and Gunter Grass declared its disavowal of GDR art a scandal. Demand's own exhibition, which opened later in the year, thus acted as a counterweight to this maligned national exhibition, something underscored by its simple but bold title: Nationalgalerie.

Demand is famous for his large-format photographs of meticulously crafted paper and card models. While his subjects vary, his method remains the same: beginning with a source image (taken often from his own archive of print media, but also from memory), Demand makes a sketch, reducing it to its most basic structures, then constructs a model made to scale. He retains the colors of the source image, but erases any human figures, text, or other traces. Thus, while Demand's sources show very specific scenes, his photographs are stripped of any distinguishing features, an effect underscored by his titles, which indicate only the most basic— often spatial—elements, for example Raum (Room), or Büro (Office). Demand then walks round his model, chooses his lighting and camera angle, before taking a photograph. The model is destroyed. Demand's photographs are mounted behind Plexiglas and hung unframed.

Demand's decision to undertake the Berlin project is intriguing. Indeed Nationalgalerie represents something of a departure for the artist, whose work is as international as his reputation and, as one review noted, had until then been exhibited primarily abroad. Moreover, Demand claims to be “recht leidenschaftslos” (quite dispassionate) about any kind of nationalism. Demand's international status and apparent indifference towards Germany might indicate that an understanding of the exhibition in terms of national and, specifically, German identity is, as Mark Godfrey suggests, a “red herring.”