by Carter Altman
In 1971, a long-haired former Navy lieutenant sat in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to give his testimony on the horrors of the Vietnam war. This man would later come to be known as the Secretary of State, John Kerry, but as he spoke in front of the committee, he was a representative voice for a generation of disaffected youth who were conscripted to fight in a war in which, on the whole, they did not believe. He spoke in the collective voice, with the intensity of men who were forced into a battle they were not mentally prepared for. Kerry spoke as an entity against the state, “We are angry because we feel we have been used in the worst fashion by the administration of this country.”[1] While only one third of the soldiers deployed to Vietnam were drafted into service, a large portion of those eligible for the draft were either ambivalent, or in active protest of armed military action overseas.[2] Most of these enlisted men were unprepared for the gruesome realities of armed conflict. Upon return home, they were shunned by a cultural zeitgeist that alienated them for their participation. In Kerry’s own words,
The country doesn’t know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped.[3]
This conflict and the resulting feelings of betrayal, alienation, and confusion felt by this generation served as the crucible that catalyzed the conceptual art movement.
In 1975, with the clarity and distance of time, Joseph Kosuth claimed that “it is impossible to understand conceptualism . . . without appreciat[ing] conceptual art for what it was: the art of the Vietnam war era.”[4] The Conceptual movement generated new practices of radical dematerialization and reimagined art as a form of protest against the institutions these artists felt had betrayed them. The specter of ‘Domino Theory’ haunted the presidency of Kennedy and Johnson, positioning America as an imperialist police force for the rest of the world—a role which many young Americans and artists saw as a perversion of democratic values.[5] The conceptual movement challenged institutions and conventions and used art as a mechanism of protest that would uncloak and expose the systems that shape the worldview of the mass-consciousness.
Figure 1: Macdonald, Fiona. “Thomas Demand: Making history –– with paper” Octovber 21, 2014. BBC
More than 50 years after the Vietnam war and the birth of the Conceptualist movement, the artist Thomas Demand’s 2004 piece entitled “Kitchen” is a natural successor to these ideas. While Demand’s art is not a reaction to an external conflict of forced conscription and idealistic visions of global American expansion, it is a reaction to a modern conflict: discerning truth in a media-saturated environment. His art has emerged from a period in which digital media diffuses content at an unprecedented,unyielding speed. Drawing from Conceptualist ideation, Demand confronts the notion of photography as a truth-telling medium. He counters that photography, like all other artistic systems, cannot be objective as it exists within a discourse of material practice. Demand calls into question whether the representation of an event through a photograph can capture the actuality of the moment or whether the visual reproduction is simply one perspective that becomes conflated with the whole truth. “Kitchen (2004)” differs from more traditional conceptual art because Demand’s focus is not solely on the de-materialization of the original art object (the only surviving physical representation of the piece is the cataloging of it), but also on the idea of objective truth, questioning the medium through which the object is catalogued.
The only surviving physical manifestation of Demand’s “Kitchen” is the documentary photograph of the work. Upon initial inspection, the photograph seems uninteresting. In the center of the frame is a boxy and sterile silver oven, with a door slightly ajar. Atop the oven is a tray and bowl filled with an indefinite sort of liquid, which is flanked on either side with a sink basin and what appears to be a small cutting board. There is a toy-like pink pitcher to the side of the sink and a propane tank in muted green below. Under the cutting board there is a bucket, a gas can, and what could be an orange peel. While the objects in the photograph seem innocuous, there is something uncanny in their essences. The objects in the kitchen are too clean. Their placements suggest an active environment, yet there is no dirt or discernible signs of wear. This discrepancy creates dissonance between what we assume the photograph depicts and the actuality of the thing observed. Upon further scrutiny, it becomes clear that these objects are not just arranged as a diorama of a working kitchen, but that they themselves are all craft representations of household objects. The toy-like quality of the scene displaces the subject from reality, entering a twilight zone-like world in which the usual assumptions of waking-life are replaced with the fun-house documentation of Demand’s camera.
This specific piece is part of a group of ongoing works he started in the 90’s in which he recreates scenes, from either personal experience or famous events, out of paper. He then photographs the works and destroys the original sculpture. This specific kitchen is a representation of Saddam Hussein’s kitchen within the home where he was captured by the American military in 2003. In an interview with the BBC in 2014, Demand spoke on his intention behind the series, “To reprivatise our idea of that part of the world – most of these parts I have never been, and I will never get to – because, for example, Saddam Hussein’s kitchen is probably not there now. But it was the world for me.”[6]
For Demand, the materiality of the sculpture itself is just the mechanism through which he creates the photograph, which is the true medium. That is not to say that the dematerialization of space and object through paper re-creation is de-emphasized, in fact he says, “It started because I could buy it anywhere, and people know how it’s made and used, which is important,”[7] but the uncanny use of materials is a mechanism he employs to comment on the photographic system which documents it. His intention is to “reconstruct an idea of reality we might all share – ‘illusion’ always implies there’s a trick or a trap, a moment where you say ‘oh, I was fooled’. I’m not after that at all, I’m trying to picture an idea of reality which is changing all the time.”[8] Demand’s paper replicas abstract the documentation of the art object, scrutinizing the role of photography as a truth-telling medium.
When asked to speak on his artworks in a 1969 interview with Patricia Norvell, Robert Smithson, the acclaimed conceptual artist, responded,
An object to me is a product of thought, you know. It doesn’t necessarily signify the existence of art. So that I would say that objects are about as real as angels are real… Mainly, you’re confronted with art, and my view of art springs from a dialectical position that deals with, I guess, whether or not something exists or doesn’t exist.[9]
Smithson, like Demand, seeks to engage with presentations of truth and reality. In a commentary on these Norvell interviews, Alexander Alberro wrote that,
almost without exception, the artists Norvell interviewed do not offer their work to the public for consumption or even interpretation, as artists have traditionally done. Rather, each in his own way relies on the public…to pursue the process he has started.[10]
Thomas Demand’s art works the same way: its process and intention is revealed through its visual consumption. The truth of the photographic reproduction is challenged through the viewer’s epiphany that what is being displayed is not reality but recreation. In that same moment, Demand challenges a belief in the objective truth of a photography, conceiving of every photograph as simply a reproduction or representation of something that exists in the external world. In this sense, his paper dioramas become just as ‘real’ as the actual spaces the photographs mimic. This is the Conceptualist revelation that ‘Kitchen (2004)’ achieves in its unconventional approach. This piece is not sculpture or photography, but it uses those forms to present an idea for the viewer to engage with.
Thomas Demand exists in a world foreign to that of the initial wave of Conceptualist artists. It is an epoch steeped in pervasive digital media, in which the Vietnam war exists only in memory and documentation. There is no longer a central monolithic institution to be organized around and reacted against as the maturation of the internet has decentralized conflict. Whereas the Vietnam war may have prompted young artists to discover new forms of protest by challenging traditional art practice, these explorations have not ended with that conflict.
The movement has evolved alongside an ever-changing social and political climate. In the modern world, the primary conflicts cannot be as neatly attached to an external war waged upon foreign lands, but, instead, affixed to internal conflicts, like that of differentiating truth from perception in a world where everyone can take and post pictures. Just as Vietnam catalyzed a generation of artists to challenge the conventions of art and materiality, the collapse of space and time manufactured by the digital age is the driving force behind a new Conceptual movement. While the contemporary Conceptualists are separated from their predecessors by time and technology, they continue their predecessor’s approach to unearthing the systems that organize our perceptions of the world. More than a half-century removed, Conceptualism still exists, albeit in a different iteration, continuing to allow artists to question their practice and the world around them.
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[1] “Transcript: Kerry Testifies Before Senate Panel, 1971.” NPR, NPR, 25 Apr. 2006, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3875422.
[2] Rutenberg, Amy J. “How the Draft Reshaped America.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 6 Oct. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/vietnam-draft.html.
[3] “Transcript: Kerry Testifies Before Senate Panel, 1971.”
[4] Michael King, “Art Is a Symbol: Conceptualism and the Vietnam War,” Lehigh University Lehigh Preserve, vol. 16, 2008, 36.
[5] King, “Art Is a Symbol: Conceptualism and the Vietnam War,” 36.
[6] Fiona Macdonald, “Culture – Thomas Demand: Making History – with Paper.” BBC, BBC, 21 Oct. 2014, www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140915-inside-saddam-husseins-kitchen.
[7] Macdonald, “Culture – Thomas Demand: Making History – with Paper.”
[8] Macdonald
[9] Patsy, Norvell, and Alexander Alberro, Recording Conceptual Art: Early Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, and Weiner by Patricia Norvell (University of California Press, 2001), 124.
[10] Patsy, Norvell, and Alexander Alberro, Recording Conceptual Art: Early Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, and Weiner by Patricia Norvell, 2.