Mr. Demand, your artwork sees you meticulously re-construct scenes and objects out of paper, and then photograph the result. Does that mean you’re a sculptor, or a photographer?
(Laughs) Well, that’s the sort of question I usually only have to answer at immigration! I’m an artist, and every work goes through different phases, the cutting and sculpting of the paper, the arrangement of the paper elements, the taking of the photograph, and the final photo which gets hung up in a gallery. That’s the process of it. You have to imagine it like: I’m trying to build a model plane. I try to run down a hill with the plane, and I hope it takes off. The taking off part is the photograph. Building the plane is the building of the sculpture, and I’m trying to have a safe landing without breaking my neck, so I can fly again. That’s the making of the photograph and hanging it up.
The whole process is the art piece.
Exactly. One wouldn’t be there without the other. They need each other. Even in the final photo, I want you to have a sense of how it’s made — that’s why I also keep the imperfections in the paper sculptures. I don’t want to trick you, I don’t want to fool you, I want you to recognize the process.
“I like the aura of the pieces which don’t have the sense of industrial replication.”
Your process must seem quite tedious to the average person. In some of your pieces like Rasen, you hand cut and manipulated hundreds of individual blades of grass. Is that frustrating? Or maybe boring?
No, it’s actually Zen. It keeps you humble, you know? Sometimes doing repetitive things can be a meditation, like making Christmas cookies, it takes a long time and you eat them in like one minute… But you’re always happy to make them again the next year.
It’s just a part of the process.
Well, it’s part of life. In the end, all things must pass! It’s a very physical thing. And then after the piece is built, I destroy it, and that’s also something physical. I like to get rid of the things I make.
And despite having a team around you, you are the person who crafts every piece, right?
Right, I’m trying to do everything you see in terms of the actual work, cutting and glueing and taking the photo. Because otherwise, you end up only telling people what to do — and that’s not really my dream of happiness. Sometimes I delegate, after I’ve made a certain amount of one element, I can delegate someone to finish the rest so I can move on to other parts of the piece. But I do really try to make what you see, because I like the work, I get pleasure from doing it, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it. And that’s the problem with AI, for example.
What do you mean?
You can’t be proud of it because it takes away the actual making of something. You’re just delegating. I could ask AI to create these photos or even make them more perfect, but that wouldn’t challenge me, I would be bored. These days there are more AI generated pictures of Venice than there are actual pictures of Venice. So when Zalando wants to do an ad campaign set in Venice, they don’t need to fly there and get the permits, they can just do them with AI. That’s something that could easily be said for my work as well, but I don’t build things I don’t need. I do the artwork to take the pictures.
Even without using AI or Photoshop, you could make your pieces look more perfect or uniform — but you choose not to. Do you have to hold back on that impulse?
It’s kind of like a chef, when you’re cooking, you know when to add more salt. When it comes to cutting things out, I could use something like a machine to make each cut the same. But for example, with Klee, which is in my new show at Sprüth Magers, I hand cut every clover so that nothing is the same twice. I like the aura of the pieces which don’t have the sense of industrial replication.
The pieces at Sprüth Magers seem much more everyday — clovers, a red napkin, a puddle — than some of your other work which has famously featured politically-charged spaces like the Oval Office, a destroyed home in Gaza, the kitchen of Sadam Hussein, and a control room in Fukushima destroyed by nuclear disaster.
Actually, the puddle has a story of its own. It’s based on a photograph of a woman who disappeared in the parking lot of a Walmart in Pittsburgh. She walked over a puddle, which was actually over a large pit and she somehow fell through and disappeared into the ground. I felt there was something biblical about that, that the earth opens and someone disappeared. The other pieces you mentioned, the clovers, the red napkin, these are related to the kind of stock images that appear around the time of St Patrick’s Day or Chinese New Year. We’re bombarded by these images, all of them are similar, they’re very generic, and everyone is using the same images in a seasonal way. But at the same time, they only have this narrative when I tell you about it. They’re like an emoticon or a smiley or the weather, they have no narrative at all when they’re on their own.
They initially remind me a bit of your Dailies series, which features ordinary little scenes captured in paper.
The thing with the Dailies is that everything you need is in the picture itself. They have a narrative, unlike the Spruth Mägers pieces. They’re almost like a haiku or a short poem, a little anecdote. Two buckets in front of a fence. Two people drinking coffee. What does that mean? It’s like Magritte famously said: “I can’t paint a thought, I can only paint the things necessary for the thought.” With the Dailies, everything necessary for the thought is there in the piece, presented to you. The clovers on the other hand, are just clovers, the symbolism is what you bring to it.
But then you have something like the politically or socially charged scenes I mentioned earlier which are full of symbolism, but if you don’t recognize the place in question, you won’t understand the significance.
Well, it’s the same as going to a museum and looking at an oil painting of Henry VIII. Maybe he was fatter, maybe he was taller, or he was more or less good-looking? Maybe he was an asshole but you can’t see that in the face that is painted because the painter was forced to paint him nicely. Or you don’t know who he is, what kind of person he was at all because you don’t know anything about it. That’s all part of the game. The information is out there if you need it, if you want it, you just need to be curious enough to find it.