Model Agencies
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Merlin James and Thomas Demand — whose current solo shows face each other on West 22nd Street — might seem as different as two contemporary artists can be: One a poetic charmer, the other an austere, highly cerebral photo-conceptualist.
But a coincidence of means begs a comparison between shows of overtly contrastive mood and art-world temper. For both artists make their final images — small-scale easel paintings in acrylic in the case of Mr. James, a photographic installation in the case of Mr. Demand — from models of their own making. And both use buildings, though neither is concerned with architecture per se. The way models play a role in the precarious interchange of perceived reality and encouraged artifice constitutes a specifically contemporary attitude toward subject matter.
Mr. Demand’s installation is titled “Yellowcake” after the nickname for the enriched uranium used in nuclear weapons. His subject is the authenticity of paperwork that was considered proof of Saddam Hussein’s attempts to procure the minerals from Niger; such paperwork was later brought into question and related to a robbery of stationery and seals from the embassy of Niger in Rome.
Mr. Demand’s modus operandi entails re-creating physical places with paper models with considerable exactitude — though not disguising that they are indeed models. He then photographs in large format images with willfully bland, neutral, lighting. Although he has always used paper in his models, the use of it here relates conceptually to a case where stationery played the crucial role. In this case, the politics of the situation and questionable authenticity of the documents at the root of the matter add another layer to the artist’s habitual concern with the exchange between fact and artifice.
For Mr. Demand’s show, the 303 Gallery has been painted an institutional gray, and the photographic tableau printed so that the depicted spaces are effectively life-size. The Niger embassy is situated in a Fascist-era office building between the Vatican and the Olympic Village. As befits a Thomas Demand project, it exudes nondescript generic modernism. The photographs, like the models and the source of inspiration, are at once elegant and austere. Mr. Demand is clearly influenced by Bernd and Hilla Becher, the serial photographers of typologies of building structure, who taught at the Düsseldorf Academy where Mr. Demand studied sculpture. The C-print “Embassy II” (2007), for instance, mixes conceptual art’s matter-of-factness with consummate artistry in the way it crops the composition of a banister, the glimpse of hallway, and the entrance to the embassy premises. The image both provides a sense of place, and, at the same time, creates a near-abstract arrangement of planes.
Other images depict the depopulated offices as they might have appeared on the day of the robbery, with shots of the national flag hanging on the exterior balcony or in the lobby, and the disheveled desk from which the stationery was stolen. The images, however, only really start to become sinister when you know the backstory. Left to their own devices, they would simply be bland, in a cute, dinky way.
Unlike the central, causal relationship between final image and constructed model in Mr. Demand’s work, the relationship of model to painting in Merlin James is incidental and occluded. In fact, the viewer might only know that some of his paintings of buildings are modeled on the artist’s own dollhouse-like constructions from the gallery poster that shows the artist alongside a table of them in his studio. But what the viewer does pick up is a marked sense of artifice within the painted image, if not the source or the artist’s perception of it.
Mr. James’s exhibition is his third in New York in the last two years: He was the subject of a retrospective overview at Sikkema Jenkins in 2005, and earlier this year the New York Studio School presented his transcriptions of old master paintings, a show (organized by this critic) which also included work dating from the outset of his career. Even the present, thematically focused show includes old work. An evident aversion to a concentration on new work is of a piece with the artist’s refined sense of slow deliberation, and of art that feeds on different pasts — the artist’s own, the medium’s, and, in this case, the lived-in weather-worn buildings themselves.
Mr. James’s paintings are loveable in their quirkiness, but nonetheless willfully difficult: He wants to paint in bright, cheery colors, but insists on working unwieldy acrylic paint and various textured materials to get there. His palette is often muted to the point of muddiness; forms are obscured, and the handwriting perfunctory. He is the kind of artist who lives his oxymorons — surfaces are painstakingly spontaneous, images are tortuously slight.
Rather like Mr. Demand, Mr. James pays attention to generic modernism as a loaded motif. Mr. James prefers vernacular buildings over landmarks, but with a poignant attachment to them as specific places — one painting, indeed, is titled “A House in my Mother’s Hometown.” In some works, “House” (2007), for instance, a simple box-like structure denoting a modern house is filled in with child-like primary colors as if the motif is demanding a more modernist solution to the construction of the painting than in, say, the more romantic or impressionist approaches to older buildings and landscapes. It is as if Modernism itself is a subject of nostalgia.
A difference between Mr. Demand and Mr. James might come down to their individual mix of intention and temperament, but neither is a caricature of the hot romantic or the cool conceptualist. Mr. Demand’s precise, calculated coldness has political pertinence and its own kind of poetry, while Mr. James’s warm expressivity is no less cerebral, deliberated, or concerned with what it signifies.
Demand until December 22 (525 W. 22nd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-255-1121).
James until January 12 (530 W. 22nd St., between 10th and 11th avenues, 212-929-2262).