Thomas Demand, Le bégaiement de l’histoire — Second Seeing, Stephen Horne

[Fall 2023]

Second Seeing
Stephen Horne

[Excerpt]

I must be getting mixed, confusing here and there,
now and then, just as I confused them then,
the here of then, the1then of there.
— Samuel Beckett

What is this “confusion” of which the playwright Beckett speaks? He wrote this some seventy years ago, before electronic media came to our aid. Now we seem to perceive reality more in terms of circulation, of discontinuity in time, and to pursue the benefits of our being able to work creatively with repetition and reproducibility, often by way of loops and circuits. Perhaps we even apprehend appearance and disappearance, saving and losing, in less oppositional and non-linear sequencings. The German artist Thomas Demand presents an invitation to blur the difference between a making and a remaking that is pictorial reality…

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 124 – SEEING THROUGH IMAGES ]
[ Complete article, in digital version, available here: Thomas Demand, Le bégaiement de l’histoire — Second Seeing, Stephen Horne ]