How does Demand show the historical event as simulacra?

Thomas Demand, Bathroom, 1997

Thomas Demand often uses images of historical significance as the starting point for his sculptures. Bathroom, for example, is a reconstruction of the image taken of the bathtub in which the German politician, Uwe Barschel, was found dead in in 1987; a death that has never been resolved. 

The original image, shown above, was taken by journalists working for Stern magazine. The reconstruction made by Demand is incredibly similar, apart from the lack of the body being present in the image. The absence of the body alerts us to the time that has passed since the death of the politician; history has already defined this moment and now we are able to recognize the scene without the most important element (the dead body). 

Through images such as this- reconstructions of events that have already deemed to be historically significant- Demand is questioning the very idea of history. The way that history is recorded necessitates that it must function in a chronological, linear fashion- that events are the cause of the next, or the effect of the last. In this way, he is suggesting our perception of history is itself a simulacra; not the original event, but the recording of it and the placing of it within historical documentation in order to fit with the larger narrative that has been predetermined by society. History is not immune from political ties or cultural perceptions- it is never simply recorded as the facts of an event, but always given a slant, a sense of narrative. Baudrillard used the Watergate scandal as an example of this, suggesting that it was deemed to be a scandal to create a 'reinjection of a large dose of political morality on a global scale'. 

This idea could be seen to have a destabilizing effect on history itself, because it makes us question whether what we are taught, and perceive to be the facts of situations we never experienced first hand, is really what happened at all.