CH. 2- Once Upon a Time- Thomas Demand

Art in America, June 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.

Room, 1994


"Tunnel"- stills from a video, a recreation of the scene of Princess Diana's death


Sink, 1997


Space Simulator, 2003


Archive, 1995


Gate, 2004

CH. 2- Once Upon a Time- Tom Hunter

Interview with Tom Hunter by Anel Finel Honigman

Photographer Tom Hunter stages modernized adaptations of paintings by such icons as Vermeer, Manet and the Pre-Raphaelites by using models and settings from Hackney, the London neighborhood where he has lived for the past 20 years. He also draws upon the Hackney Gazette, the local weekly paper whose clever and sensationalistic tabloid headlines give him titles and narratives for many of his stunning and disquieting images. When Hunter arrived in Hackney in the 1980s (he still lives at the same address, just outside London Fields) the area was, in his words, a "total wasteland which became like a village." The area has no local tube stop, and its inaccessibility led its close-knit community of squatters to develop their own do-it-yourself (DIY) artistic, cultural and social life. As in New York's Soho in the 1980s, or Williamsburg, Brooklyn a few years ago, Hackney residents recycled rundown buildings amidst pockets of lawlessness; built and ran roving cafes; staged cinema nights in their homes; threw impromptu parties and raves; and organized exhibitions in empty spaces without the official oversight or funding that bureaucratized the creative culture of more gentrified areas. Yet the press focused on the neighborhood's high crime rate. Ignoring the positive aspects of Hackney's local life, it sensationalized the area's violence, poverty, drug-use and deprivation, particularly among the large and vulnerable immigrant communities. Hunter, who was born in rural Dorset in 1965 and received an MA at the Royal College of Art in 1997, currently exhibits with White Cube gallery in London and New York's Yancey Richardson gallery. His current exhibition, "Living in Hell and Other Stories"' is the first photography exhibition to be shown at the National Gallery.

Why did you choose to address contemporary subjects using the poses and style of well-known art historical images?

When I started looking at the Dutch masters, I decided to use the same strategies and highlights they used when depicting ordinary people, instead of the monarchy or mythological figures. I wanted to uplift the status of my subjects, so I started taking large pictures, and when people saw them, they started looking at the lives I was representing differently. Just as in Vermeer’s day, the people were fighting oppression. When I started working, we, as in the squatters, were fighting for independence from the Hackney council, and by my showing my neighbors in Vermeer poses, people started looking at them not as victims or perpetrators or criminals but as important people with dignity.

Do you think most viewers see art history as precious and irrelevant?
Definitely. That is another reason I wanted to work this way. I wanted people to look at the photographs and see history happening today, but also look back at the paintings and see that those paintings were not just about brushstrokes, color and light, but also about reality—stories of violence, people living in service. But when people go to a museum and they are told to be quiet and not use their mobile phones, they start to see paintings as things that are distant, things to be worshipped, not looked at.
Woman reading a Possession Order, based on Vermeer's "Girl Reading at Window"





"Lover Set on Fire in Bed"


"Hallowe'en Horror: Trick or Treat Thugs break Mum's Bones"


"Bounding Buddhist rushes to the Rescue of Neighbour's Pet"


"Father and Son run £2m Vice Racket"

CH. 2- Once Upon a Time- Yinka Shonibare

The artists in this chapter of the Cotton book are all dealing with photography in the tableau vivant style- that is, using involved set-ups and staged scenes to create a story or narrative. Many of these photographs are made as "quotations" or re-workings of older visual media- oftentimes etchings or paintings. The goal here with many of these artists is to demonstrate that photography functions as a continuation of an art historical tradition of visual storytelling that goes back hundreds of years.

One such artist is Yinka Shonibare, an artist born in Nigeria who lives and works in London. His series "Diary of a Victorian Dandy" features himself as the lead character of a series of images meant to show scenes of life in 19th century upper-class Britain, and they are loosely based on a series of etchings by Thomas Hogarth entitled "The Rake's Progress."

"Dairy of a Victorian Dandy, 14.00"

The titles of Yonibare's photographs indicate the time of day they are meant to "illustrate."












William Hogarth, "The Rake's Progress, Plate 8", 1735
















"Dairy of a Victorian Dandy, 3.00"














"Dairy of a Victorian Dandy, 11.00"
















"Dairy of a Victorian Dandy, 17.00"















"Dairy of a Victorian Dandy, 21.00"















"Diary of a Victorian Dandy" was a collision of performance and photography reflecting the nation's popular taste for the period costume drama and nostalgia for a utopian past at the heart of 'little' England. The production was shot on location over a period of three days in the opulent and sumptuous environment of a stately home in Hertfordshire. The artist Yinka Shonibare is the central character of the dandy and orchestrates an ensemble of professional actors, a make-up artist, a stylist, a photographer and a director. Behind the superficiality and self-satisfaction of Shonibare's Dandy lies a deeper social resonance. The work is a powerful parody of the artist's own life as a creative black British man living with a physical disability in contemporary Britain. He alludes to a black aspirational designer generation, the contradictory social codes implied in the conspicuous sartorial elegance of figures such as Chris Eubank and the keeping-up-appearances mentality of the contemporary British 'dude' scene.

The artist's imposing physical presence--he is the largest man and the only black man present in the photographs--underscores his role as the central character in each tableau. Whether he plays the rogue/hustler/provocateur, as in the billiard-room scene, Diary of a Victorian Dandy (17:00 hours), or the celebrated social lion, as in Diary of a Victorian Dandy (21:00 hours), Shonibare draws attention to the political, racial and sexual tensions that underlie these sumptuously constituted visual fictions. The episodes are based on any number of British genre paintings as well as on Hogarth's The Rake's Progress. Yet they convey Shonibare's own agonistic fantasies about private and institutional power. The images imply that although the artist may assume the role of Insider Hero or glamorous Man of Mystery, he is destined, because of race, to remain perpetually Other, even in his own imaginings.