WHEN THE PARTY’S OVER—THOMAS DEMAND PRESENTS WHITNEY HOUSTON’S FINAL MEAL

Whitney Houston is a fallen angel. She went from being one of the most successful singers of all times worldwide, the recipient of dozens of gold and platinum records, to being a drug addict who let herself be abused by her husband and trashed her bathroom high on crack--this is how the image of the American born in 1963 in New Jersey changed within only a few years. When Houston was found dead of an overdose in the Beverly Hilton Hotel on February 11, 2012, the global public was not only shocked but felt vindicated: it had to end like this.

Images Etched on Collective Memory

Did it? A tragic accident or the inevitable end of a world star with drug problems? Thomas Demand's "Junior Suite" does not have a ready answer to this question. The life-size photograph of a paper model simply shows how Whitney Houston could have spent the last hours of her life before she overdosed: a plate with leftover food, a half-empty glass, a couple of crumpled-up napkins. There is no indication that just a short time later a tragedy would occur. The salt and pepper shakers are standing neatly one beside the other; the side table is neat and nearly untouched. All that might suggest that perhaps not everything is in apple-pie order is the eerie calm of the sterile setting.

"Junior Suite" is not the only work Thomas Demand has crafted out of paper and then presented in a large-format photograph. Like few other contemporary artists, he has committed himself almost exclusively to what one has to say is a medium he invented himself. He produces paper models of existing photographs with utmost precision and attention to detail, and then subsequently takes pictures of them--if possible, on a scale of 1:1. The original model is destroyed afterward. Demand (*1964 in Munich) uses only press images as his starting point. The combined method corresponds with the artist's formal training: after studying sculpture, he was admitted into the legendary photography class taught by Hilla and Bernd Becher. He had already produced his first reproductions of press photographs during his time at art school, preferring to base them on themes surrounded by scandal: his body of work includes the bathtub in which the CDU politician Uwe Barschel was found dead in 1987, or an exterior view of the Tosa-Klause, a cheap bar in Saarbrücken in which several children were allegedly abused and one of them killed in the early 2000s. In this case, all of the accused were acquitted. The vast numbers of images in circulation that serve Demand as source material have etched themselves on our collective memory to such a degree that once seen, they immediately evoke memories and emotions--regardless of the knowledge we might have about the situation today.

Radically Reduced, Yet Enormously Precise

Thomas Demand works with apparent contradictions: he reduces his subjects to the point that they only become models of themselves. At the same time, his models are so rich in detail that when viewed from a distance, they develop a strangely real character.

The bafflingly natural but only seeming "authenticity" of the photographed models is also what made Thomas Demand a darling of the art industry early on--an approving murmur is said to have gone through the ranks of the arty public during the first presentation of his works as a student at the art academy in Düsseldorf. The supposed authenticity, the proximity to the original is an exciting quality that is rarely offered in this form. However, it is by no means the only or the most fascinating feature of Thomas Demand's world, which is not exactly short of peculiarities. It opens the door to his works, immediately pulling viewers into what is taking place, only to immediately spit them out again and leave them on their own: because it quickly becomes clear at second glance that what is taking place is a remarkably strange image that develops in one's imagination: one's voyeurism has been aroused.

Thomas Demand presents crime scenes without a crime, scenes without people. The detailed paper models are just real enough to appear to be credible evidence, and in their clinically aseptic composition they are uncanny enough to effortlessly prompt a sense of foreboding. What really happened in the Beau Rivage hotel in Geneva in which Uwe Barschel died under unexplained circumstances? How did Whitney feel in her suite shortly before the lethal overdose passed through her body? The omission of the actual scandal, the radical reduction to what remains, to furniture, walls, table, chairs, and accouterments, are what increase the tension to the point that it becomes unbearable. There is no way out: Thomas Demand's photographs turn viewers themselves into paparazzi. Without the projection surfaces of real celebrities, without existing perpetrators and victims, one enters the heart of darkness, where base instincts and inhuman abysses create their own highly individual scandal.