For in creating Yellowcake, Demand chose not to work from actual images to create his embassy sculptures, as he had previously, using instead his personal recollections of the place, to which he had gained access. Thus with a subject most in need of documentation, Demand chose not to document it at all, even for the simple purposes of his own eventual translation. Hence these images still do not exist, and any effort to take Demand's show as attempting to provide these bits of evidence is tripped up. Yellowcake then appears as Demand focusing for the first time on the nature and veracity of his own method, divorced, for the first time, from any relationship to imagery already at work. But this is not a simple navel-gazing exercise on his part. By choosing this location for reconstruction (that is outside the official accounting, but shouldn't be) limiting our access to his own potentially unreliable memories, and then beginning his well-established process of material construction and image-making, Demand foregrounds a certain transition that comes with his stepping into this particular fray.

Or, to put it another way, it is precisely because this setting is most in need of photographic evidence that Demand pushes the constraints of that need farther from him. And, in this way, he highlights in blazing colors the operation of political power on the provisioning of evidence but does so from the other side, so that we might see it more clearly. Thus we, being where we are, which is in the 303 gallery in New York, wanting nothing more than hard evidence of the current regimes continued ontological bankruptcy, are presented with a representation of what this evidence would indeed look like, only to find that it bears the same scars of contingency and haphazardness as the very narrative we are trying to resist. (The embassy's a mess.) It is not that Demand is saying that we are no better than our foes, or that any attempt at providing honest, corrective accounts is doomed to repeat their mistakes — rather he is reminding us of the oblique torque of politics on the praxis of representation. By departing from his method when we should most want him to maintain it, Demand not only recharges the empty spaces of his own presentation — making each blank sheet of paper a different sort of question than they were in his previous Office (1995) — but he also cautions us about abandoning our own commitments for the purposes of scoring political points in a vulgar game. For the effects of this forgetting, at least, he is happy to provide evidence.