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‘At heart I’m a frustrated nerd’ … Thomas Demand. Photograph: Christine Nguyen/© J Paul Getty Trust
Interview with Thomas Demand:
What got you started?
I grew up in an area of Munich that was full of artists and architects. My father was an artist; my uncle was an architect; my best friend’s father was an art dealer. I never considered doing anything else.
What was your big breakthrough?
Being part of a show called New Photography at MoMA in New York in 1996. It put me on the map.
You’re based between Berlin and Los Angeles. Which city do you find most inspiring?
At the moment, LA. I lived in Berlin for 14 years – the longest I’ve lived in any one place – but by the end, I felt I needed some fresh air. LA feels freer.
Do you suffer for your art?
Yes.
Is today’s art scene too commercially motivated?
No. In Germany, it’s seen as a bad thing if artists are making money out of art. In the US, it’s the other way around. I don’t see anything wrong with artists making money. And art really isn’t that expensive compared with other luxury goods – a painting costs less than a sports car. If art makes you feel something, then the expense is worth it.
Which other artists do you most admire?
Ed Ruscha and Gerhard Richter. They both followed their own little paths, and in doing so changed the way we view art for ever.
What’s the worst thing anyone ever said about your work?
People have said that my art is always the same. But they didn’t understand it.
Complete this sentence: At heart I’m just a frustrated . . .
Nerd.
What’s the best advice anyone ever gave you?
There’s a German saying that doesn’t translate well into English. People tell you to “always keep the ball low” – it comes from football, and means that you should try to keep your focus. My brother said it to me, and I found it useful. Artists are always looking for intellectual advice about their work. But the less you’re trying to load that on to your art, the better.
Laura Barnett
Guardian
The interior of the Sagrada Família during the consecration performed by Pope Benedict XVI in November last year. Photograph: AFP/ Getty Images
The first question, on entering the completed interior of the church of Sagrada Família, is: “Is it really there?” We have been so long accustomed to the idea that Barcelona’s most famous landmark is a permanent ruin, unfinished and unfinishable, that it comes as a shock to find it is now keeping out the weather, for the first time in its 130 years of making. The canned ecstasy of the Hallelujah Chorus plays on the PA system and sunbeams pierce its forest of columns with such dazzle and precision that, you think, they must be digital. It is like walking into the Colosseum and finding it all there, with awnings, crowds, sand, blood, beasts, gladiators and thumb-turning emperor which, being clearly impossible, would most easily be explained as a video game in three dimensions.
The second question is: “Is it really Gaudí?” The great Catalan architect famously adjusted his buildings as he went along, modifying details in response to unusual stones found in the quarry and forever testing his ideas with full size mock-ups. He had a donkey hoisted up the facade of the church, to see how it would look in a sculpted nativity scene, and made plaster casts of temporarily anaesthetised turkeys and chickens and, so he could model a Massacre of the Innocents, of stillborn babies. In the interests of spiritual research, he attended a death at a hospital and claimed he could see the moment when the soul of the departed met the holy family. Gaudí was fatally hit by a tram in 1926 and no subsequent architect working on the church has come close to matching his fanaticism or genius.
Rowan Moore
Guardian
Piss Christ, seen here with partial damage, depicts the passion of Christ and is said to be made with the artist’s own urine. Photograph: Jean-Paul Pelissier/Reuters
Before sharks swam in formaldehyde, there was Piss Christ. With this work in 1987, Andres Serrano created what is surely the visual manifesto and original prototype of the use of shock in contemporary art.
Other 1980s artists, including Robert Mapplethorpe and Richard Serra, ran into controversy, but Piss Christ is distinguished by its calculated offence and rhetorical nature – the way it sets out to be unmissably outrageous and adopts that offence as part of its meaning.
I mean, it’s called Piss Christ and is said to be made using the artist’s own urine. It is far more polemical than, say, a Mapplethorpe photograph of sadomasochist rites where the artist portrays what he found beautiful and causes offence almost accidentally. As such, Piss Christ is one of the most influential works of art of the past 30 years, the model for a strategy that has transformed the public impact of art.
Yet the joke on the latest protesters to take Serrano’s bait – hey look, Christians, I’ve urinated on the son of God! – is that Piss Christ works well as a modern work of religious art. I don’t know if the curators of the Vatican museum have considered buying a print, but it possesses a richly traditional dimension. The passion of Christ has always been associated with bodily fluids – it is true that artists traditionally stressed blood rather than urine, but they scarcely stinted on the revulsion of Christ’s fleshly death.
Jonathan Jones
Guardian
Talking liberties … Ai Weiwei’s face on a poster outside the Chinese liaison office in Hong Kong. Photograph: Kin Cheung/AP
The story of Ai Weiwei is turning into a dark fable that seems to belong in another age of modern history. In Bertolt Brecht’s play Life of Galileo, a dissident intellectual recants his beliefs under pressure from an intolerant regime. It was a hit in the US, but Brecht, a communist, decided in spite of its success to return to live in east Berlin. Later, as he observed the absurdities of the Soviet regime, he was moved to joke that the state should elect another people.
Those absurdities are brilliantly recreated in the historically set Berlin film The Lives of Others, and anyone who has watched it must surely feel a shiver of familiarity at official news from China that Ai Weiwei is co-operating with enquiries into alleged economic crimes and bigamy. Observers who side with the Chinese government on this should be ashamed, and those who dislike Ai Weiwei’s art and so welcome any prospect of his undoing are seriously confused about basic human rights. The fact is that regimes such as the Soviet and the Chinese are brilliant at exploiting weaknesses and flaws in the people they need to crush. Dissidents can be shamed and subdued in many ways. What do you think a police state is? It is a place where truth can be manipulated.
Ai Weiwei has spoken out eloquently for the universality of human rights and the worldwide hunger for freedom. Even if all the charges China are apparently raising were true, it would not alter anything – and given his brutal detention it is reasonable to assume they are false.
Jonathan Jones
Guardian
Excavators in Mes Aynak
A rescue operation is underway to save as much as possible from ancient Buddhist monasteries in Mes Aynak, Afghanistan, before the mountains become an open-cast mine and the site is destroyed. In what is now the world’s largest archaeological dig, around 1,000 workers are trying to excavate artefacts from the country’s second most important Buddhist site (along with Hadda), after Bamiyan.
The site, a former training camp of Osama bin Laden, has been leased to a Chinese mining company for copper production. Only what can be excavated and removed to safety will be saved.
Despite the impending archaeological loss, Mes Aynak has received scant attention internationally. Moreover, Afghanistan’s heritage has suffered much in recent years from civil war, looting and the vandalism of the Taliban.
Mes Aynak (Little Copper Well) lies 25 miles south-east of Kabul, in a barren region. The Buddhist monasteries date from the third to the seventh centuries, and are located near the remains of ancient copper mines. It is unclear whether the monastery was originally established to serve the miners or if the monks set up there to work the mines themselves.
Martin Bailey
Art Newspaper
Ai Weiwei at his installation in the Tate Modern. He has since been detained by authorities in China. Photograph: BBC/Getty
Two days before Ai Weiwei’s disappearance, the artist spoke out about police surveillance and harassment at his Beijing studio, and warned that “people with different minds and voices are being thrown into prison”.
Describing the scrutiny he had been receiving from the authorities, he said: “There are two surveillance cameras at my gate entrance, my phone is tapped and every message I send on my microblog is censored.
“Yesterday and the day before over a dozen police came to my place, but in my opinion, it is purely nuisance. They are coming again today,” he said, speaking to German broadcaster ARD in his last interview before he was stopped by officials at Beijing airport.
“China in many ways is just like the middle ages. China’s control over people’s minds and the flow of information is just like the time before the Enlightenment,” he said.
Charlotte Higgins
Guardian
Is it unfair to describe the majority of Dale Chihuly’s glass-based work as tasteless?
It certainly feels like inviting trouble. Taste, after all, is a social concept more than an aesthetic one, and is beside the point when judging serious art…
And yet, the two concepts — art and taste — can never be completely separated. And if taste is primarily a function of social life, the truth is that Chihuly has for a long time now been a social sort of an artist.
Sebastian Smee
Boston Globe
Sainbury’s in Plymouth (Photo: Alamy)
British architects have become political and cultural punch-bags, and the Budget’s “radically relaxed” planning rules in Enterprise Zones will batter them even more. Ruth Reed, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba), welcomes the Chancellor’s proposal with a pathos-laden hope that the new rules will “protect the essential requirements of sustainability and good design”.
George Osborne’s “gift” to enterprise, and Ms Reed’s painfully dutiful response to it, highlights the fact that the architectural profession is riven by confusion. Are architects cultured designers or glorified triage surgeons working in towns and cities lacerated by architectural collateral damage caused by political and commercial expediency, rubber-stamped by planners?
Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, thinks architects are conniving bread-heads. Sir David Chipperfield, one of Britain’s most culturally thoughtful architects, says the profession’s rising generation of new talent has been blocked from competing for major projects. Our Government has no rigorous interest in architectural standards. And now, even the Riba is daring to suggest that the current version of homo architectus could die out by 2025.
The Independent
Inner space … the Mark Rothko room at London’s Tate Modern. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian
The set of Mark Rothko paintings originally commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York are the treasure of Tate Modern. They occupy a room of their own, low-lit and filled with brooding intensity. The hazy outlines of what might be doors, windows, or the gates of heaven and hell hover on the wine red and imperial purple surfaces of Rothko’s mural-scale abstractions. In all of them darkness beckons, mordantly inviting the beholder to imagine vast apocalyptic landscapes, undefinable events on a cosmic scale.
Jonathan Jones
Guardian
Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Charnley-Persky House (image via davicobbcraig.blogspot.com)
Next month, the very first sunken conversation pit will open to the public as a museum. The Indianapolis Museum of Art plans to open a private residence designed by Eero Saarinen for industrialist J. Irwin Miller as a design and architecture showcase, featuring interiors (and the conversation pit) by Alexander Girard.
To celebrate, we’ve collected the best of American’s modernist houses turned museums, magnificent private residences now made public. There’s Philip Johnson’s Glass House, of course, but also Richard Neutra’s Neutra VDL, Louis Sullivan’s early Charnley-Persky House and Richard Meier’s epic bachelor pad, the Rachofsky House.
Kyle Chayka
Hyperallergic
