{"id":50291,"date":"2022-10-22T15:22:56","date_gmt":"2022-10-22T19:22:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artoronto.ca\/?p=50291"},"modified":"2022-10-22T15:28:12","modified_gmt":"2022-10-22T19:28:12","slug":"thomas-demands-house-of-card-at-moca","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/v2.artoronto.ca\/?p=50291","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Demand’s House of Card at MOCA"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\u00a9 Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery\/Galerie Spr\u00fcth Magers\/Esther Schipper, Berlin\/Taka Ishii Gallery<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas Demand\u2019s practice of building models and photographing them has produced a child in “The Triple Folly,” a baby that has grown into an actual building in Denmark. By the artist\u2019s own admission, it may turn out to be an only child. It\u2019s a genesis story that gave Demand an opportunity to explore a tent-to-pavilion aspect of human habitation through postcards, prints, and publications in the wall vitrine facing “The Triple Folly” model on the second floor at Toronto\u2019s Museum of Contemporary Art. The model was realized through the London firm, Caruso St John Architects with their client, Danish textile firm Kvadrat, as a \u201cbreakout\u201d space from the company\u2019s nearby headquarters, suitable for house meetings, seminars, or even a concert, but light on heavy, practical use \u2013 a folly, in other words. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Thomas Demand, installation view, House of Card<\/em>, M Museum, Leuven, 2020<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This collaborative interface aspect of Demand\u2019s work is a dominant feature of his House of Card <\/em>exhibition at MOCA, beginning with Rirkrit Tiravanija\u2019s 2013 Thomas Demand’s Here<\/em> on the main floor, a life-size model of the karaoke bar Black Label in Kitakaushi, Japan, the exterior of which Demand repeats on the third floor in flimsier board and digital output in paper. The Black Label homage to the artist arose from Demand’s discovery and rendering of the bar at a 2008 residency at Kitakushu\u2019s Centre for Contemporary Art. Tiravanija\u2019s model imbues \u201clife” to an otherwise empty shell, offering karaoke and social ambiance to participating museum attendees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The model as a latent force that delineates our lived environment is given expression by Demand\u2019s photographs of model details by architects SANAA (Kasuyo Seijma and Ryue Nishizawa) and John Lautner. In Demand\u2019s photos, the pattern template files of the late fashion designer Assedine Ala\u00efa come across as magnified strands of DNA, worn down by years of use. Ala\u00efa\u2019s runway creations and the flesh and blood mannequins that inhabited them may only be inferred in the photos, as are the string of celebrities that came to champion them. SANAA\u2019s contribution to the architectural skins that clothe the art of significant galleries and museums across the globe typifies this crossing of the aesthetic from one discipline to another. Very likely, the inconspicuous site-specific ceiling installation by Martin Boyce on the second floor plays interference on the acoustics of the exhibition space. Its vane-like shapes in muffling the echoes of MOCA’s concrete architecture are a further interface of disciplines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Thomas Demand, towhee<\/em>, 2020 Framed Pigment Print, 135 x 172 cm<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Viewers of Demand\u2019s 2021 Refuge<\/em> installation on the third floor at MOCA are afforded a taste of the confinement that NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden is likely to have experienced in his Sheremetyevo hotel room in Russia as an exile from US authorities. The artist, it seems, had obtained detailed, firsthand experience of Snowden’s presumed room in Russia, upon which his paper and card version of it was based. The journalistic narratives constructed around the whistle-blower as either traitor or patriot exemplify just one front in our current war of information. The re-constructed details of Demand\u2019s Refuge<\/em> series provide an eerie simulation of the \u201ccell\u201d of its protagonist as casualty of this conflict, and his five weeks of isolation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Thomas Demand, Refuge V<\/em>, 2021, C-Print \/ Diasec, 160 x 200 cm<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The subject of Demand\u2019s minute-and-a-half 2001 film, Yard<\/em>, is Serbian leader Slobodan Milo\u0161evi\u0107 and his arrest on charges of war crimes against humanity. In the video, the staccato click of paparazzi camera shutters illuminate a wall behind a chainlink fence as the prisoner is handed over to authorities at the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Since Milo\u0161evi\u0107 isn\u2019t visible in the film, we are left to imagine, not only his presence, but any details of the arrest itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the wall vitrine above his postcard display, Demand hung a print of Rudolph Weigel\u2019s Judith and Holofernes.<\/em> The subject of numerous depictions through art history, Weigel has Judith standing in the doorway of a tent, calmly dropping the head of Holofernes into a sack after her decapitation of the Assyrian general. Implicit in the Biblical story is seduction coupled with its fatal deception. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rudolph Weigel’s Judith and Holofernes<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The roof of Demand\u2019s Triple Folly<\/em> model was inspired by a creased legal size paper, a nod to the laws and regulations governing the realization of any actual building. As they say, \u201cAll is fair in love and war.” Yet as Demand has demonstrated in numerous past works, \u201cfolly\u201d arrives in three dimensions, and who is to account for what happens inside the things we build?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steve Rockwell<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Images are courtesy of MOCA<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*Exhibition information: House of Card by Thomas Demand & Martin Boyce, Rirkit Tiravanija, Caruso St John, September 16, 2022 \u2013 January 8, 2023, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), 158 Sterling Ave, Toronto. Museum hours: Wed \u2013 Thu & Sat \u2013 Sun 11 am \u2013 6pm; Fri 11 am \u2013 9 pm., MOCA, Toronto, <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Steve Rockwell<\/strong><\/p>\n

Demand has demonstrated in numerous past works, \u201cfolly\u201d arrives in three dimensions, and who is to account for what happens inside the things we build?<\/p>\n

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