The Power of Story

Haltestelle, 2009. ©Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, image from we-make-money-not-art.com

Here we have a different take on the power of stories and collective histories of objects.  The image above is a large scale photographer by the artist Thomas Demand, titled Haltestelle, currently on show at the Neue Nationalgalerie outside of Berlin.  The photo depicts a paper reconstruction by the artist of a typical wooden bus shelter in rural Germany.  The significance and inspiration for this work is the similar bus shelter that the members of the teen pop band Tokio Hotel stood at every day waiting for the school bus.  After the band became famous, the bus stop became a local tourist attraction and gathering point of fans, much to the consternation of the neighborhood.  As a way of eliminating this problem, and raising money for the city, the bus shelter was dismantled into pieces, and then sold on eBay.

If up until this point you were wondering what this has to do with deconstruction, here is the connection.  Storytelling and history increase the perceived value of an object.  The bus shelter was not just any bus shelter, but the location where this young band met every day, under the most banal of circumstances.  Without this history, nobody would bid on a piece of a rural bus shelter on eBay, but this loose connection made it an item to fight for.  This idea of the power of iconic concentrations of culture also reflects the artist’s work, as seen in some of the text that accompanied the exhibition.

Thomas Demand’s works test our reception of visual media and explore their influence on the structures of our memory, [he] conducts experiments in visual culture which centre around the questions of whether and to what extent a society’s appearance is condensed and concentrated in individual key images as well as being retained in people’s minds and remembered through such key images.

Storytelling can be a very powerful tool, and can shape how a person perceives and appoints value to an object or material.

Via we make money not art