Artist, Thomas Demand: In this case, I wanted to do something which is so fresh and so new at the time it has been shown for the first time, that it actually overlaps the idea of reportage.
Narrator: Demand was galvanized to begin Poll by the Florida recount of ballots in the U. S. Presidential election of 2000. Usually, he spends two or three months on a piece, from planning and building the model to the final photograph. Working day and night, he completed Poll in just three weeks, and it was first exhibited before Bush was sworn in as President. Besides the historical significance of the recount, Demand was excited by the key role that paper played in the process.
Thomas Demand: This one is very much, of course, about the paper itself. Very much about the fact that things I make are of paper, and then in the end what the significance of that material is. But also it adds this kind of weird, paradoxical idea that a piece of paper is becoming a representative of a piece of paper as well.
Narrator: The race between George W. Bush and Al Gore was partly determined by re-examining paper ballots with so-called “hanging chads” – incompletely punched holes next to a candidate’s name. Demand’s ballots have no holes or names. But he has meticulously reproduced the flashlights that were turned on behind the ballots to see how “open” the holes were.
Thomas Demand: The process of, you know, looking at paper with holes in, for more than six weeks, and finding out that in the end, two hundred or three hundred pieces of paper made a big difference in the fate of the world.
Narrator: Demand never paints the surfaces of his models. He prefers to use ordinary colored paper you could buy in a store.
Thomas Demand: Because you always think like you have seen this before, or you just have seen something like it. It looks very familiar. Everything, the paper looks familiar, the color range looks familiar. So somehow you have the feeling of, you know, you feel kind of home in that.