Thomas Demand, Real Simulation, Vilem Flusser- Photo as Object and John Rajchman, How to Construct The History of Exhibitions

 

                                 The Real Simulations of Thomas Demand

Thomas Demand makes art in the context of historical events such as war and socio-political issues with the medium of photography and sculpture in a very subtle way. Like Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Thomas Demand stages a sculpture in a form of an unconscious environment and photographs it. In his work Bruno Office, 1996, Thomas displaces blank paper on the floor and table, within an office as a response to the fall of the Berlin War where numerous people were informant. It is fascinating that Thomas instead of him to show photographic images, he rather takes away the evidence of those informants and still maintains the fact that papers hold the great source of memory and  the collective history or image of the society is attained through paper.

Office, 1995

 

                                        Photo As Object by Vilem Flusser

In the essay Photo As Object, the Vilem Flusser (1986) mentions that humans take upon themselves to preserve memory through photography. The author referenced apparatus as a machine that helps one to manipulate an original object or filter a decision. The apparatus then becomes a critical strategy through which one could create an idea. In the text, he distinguished between the cultural object and the industrial object that the cultural objects already have their shapes or forms and to change them, one needs to understand them before the information that objects carry could be manipulated thus based on the context of the theora whereas the industrial object is based on the praxis, which takes the involvement of experiments and practical evaluations for the user to better understand the function of the object for instance a machine.

 

                                    Les Immatériaux or How To Construct The History of Exhibitions 

 Jean-François Lyotard  discussion of exhibition references Immanuel Kant’s theory of aesthetics by  creating a dialogue between art and philosophy by analyzing strategies as way form significant history. According to John Rajchman (2009) Les Immatériaux explores new ways of understanding the role of the artist in terms of her/his work in the studio and what the white cube space does to the new work. The decisions that artists make in the process of producing art is mostly the fact of recreating history or creating history. The contemporary art as a culture has expectations of new ideas and strangeness of experience achieved by the audience. 

                       Untitled, 2017 (Exhibition After Life Ahead, 2017)

For instance, Pierre Hughes exhibition After Life Ahead, 2017, the artist created an exterior environment in an enclosed building in Germany. In the building, the viewers are exposed to multiple elements organic and inorganic to be viewed at the same time. It is an empty space and a yet a place full of logical components which create an ideological existence of self within the space through the critical presumptions of the technological and systematic process of those elements. The viewers may feel themselves from exterior to another exterior environment and yet only the wall brings to the viewer, the consciousness of the interior.  An exhibition such as Pierre Hugges's After Life Ahead develops the discussion of an exhibition space in a historical disparity between the modern and post-modern period, emphatically on the white cube space.