Daring the unknown

“As he works on the house, it becomes unknown to him,” Hannelore Reuen says (Schneider 2003b: 200), and in a press release for an exhibition of Schneider’s photographic work at Galerie Nelson- Freeman in Paris (2011), the artist is quoted for saying, “The more I deal with it, the more unknown it becomes. That's the challenge for me, to keep running on the spot.” After years of attempts, Schneider appears to have realised that what he is chasing, attempting to trap or to give shelter is an evasive

being that cannot be cornered in a room. Building for the unknown means to continue to produce work, the immediate meaning and purpose of which is ungraspable. It means repeatedly doubling rooms in the house as a continued reaffirmation of the undertaking itself. Schneider’s inwards

movement of doubling rooms within rooms becomes a commitment to itself, when to double a room holds no immediate architectural or functional promise nor fulfil a conceivable rational or emotional requirement. Through the repeated effort of doubling, the unconventional housework, if not homework, becomes an artwork – Schneider explains, “I was interested in heading for some neutral point that I myself cannot know. Moments like that only arise through chance” (Loock 2003: 36). Repeating rooms in an inwards movement is a way of zooming in, getting closer, shifting to another spatio-temporal dimension; a state emptied of all personal associations and meanings, a neutral zone, a void within the familiar house. Inside this gap, everything and nothing resides – ultimately, the

situation is out of the observing artist’s control, which is to say the way he seemingly wants it.

The persistence of Schneider’s preoccupation with and pursuit of what he continuously refers to as the

unknown is daring; it brings his childhood home and house to the point of conceptual breakdown. The

circumstance that events might have taken place in rooms, that rooms might be moving or changing imperceptibly, that something or someone possibly hides behind or within a wall are examples of this concern with the unknown that keeps returning as a theme during the interviews. It is the possible influence of something otherwise imperceptible, invisible or unrecognisable that preoccupies Schneider. Essentially, the artist appears intrigued by aspects of being beyond comprehension if nevertheless affecting human existence profoundly – such as, for example, death, emptiness and absence. When building u r 8, TOTAL ISOLIERTER TOTER RAUM [Completely Insulated Dead Room] (1989-91) [Fig. 4.5], Schneider challenged life’s final closure by building a space for this ultimate experience. As such, the room facilitated what the artist possibly imagined death to be like – to disappear from the reach of others into a space of endless darkness from where one cannot get out. Building this room can therefore be seen as an attempt to take charge of the event of death by providing a spatial setting for it. In contrast, HAUS u r might be seen as an attempt to accept the unknown through the doubling of living rooms, if not exactly rooms to live in although Schneider seemingly did. If in the early works, Schneider approached the notion of the unknown through radical spatial gestures calling upon extreme conditions, the doublings within the house in Rheydt appear to welcome a wider scale of the unidentifiable. Such potential phenomena are met with the openness of a pure, white surface – the bright artificial light making every corner visible and shadows from the sparse furnishing near absent. Visibility, however, does not appear to be the aim. When Ulrich Loock suggests that the artist through his room doublings might be “anxious about revealing something that is not visible” (36), Schneider responds that “the terms visible and invisible are not so important as conscious and unconscious perception, recognition and non-recognition.” The statement suggests that while it might

be possible to identify the double wall as a wall, it will not be apparent that this wall is a copy of another wall hidden behind it. In this sense, the double room holds a secret that the original room did not. Schneider continues, “… the built wall is visible but not recognisable…” (36). However, pushing the capacity of the double room that holds a secret further, Schneider states, “The question is not whether my rooms are secret, but whether you recognise yourself in them” (Williams 2010: 1). Do we become strangers to ourselves when occupying Schneider’s rooms? Do they make sense to us, add up, set the ground for a life that we know? Or do we sense the slight distortions of doors too close to corners, walls out of proportion, windows oddly blind? Are we disturbed by having to navigate a labyrinthine stacking of rooms when frequenting a relocated part of the house in an art setting somewhere? Do we fear the rough edges of the spaces cut out from the house in Rheydt, because we do not know what these spaces want from us, what the artist has in store for us, if we belong inside of them?

Schneider continues the practice of doubling while insisting that it makes sense to patiently, or stubbornly, continue to set the scene for something unknown to take place. That the effort is worthwhile is not only affirmed by the repetition of the gesture, but also insofar as Schneider is at all able to conceive the idea that there is something to pursue in the first place. It is the simple thought that something exists beyond human grasp which might inhabit the limit of thought, the fringes of the imaginable, the edge of a built environment and therefore influence our being. Schneider’s fascination with such imperceptible phenomena further entertains the idea that perceivable traces of past events linger in abandoned spaces. Considering the notion of the trace in relation to the clearing of German villages for mining purposes, he says:

That is the baffling thing, that things that have gone nevertheless leave a trace … You are walking through the landscape when you suddenly get the feeling that there could have been a house there, because there is still a pavement there … That is when you get the strongest sense of a time shift. But it would be a disaster if we really picked up on that sort of thing. We would constantly be running into walls. (Loock 2003: 68)

Yet, Schneider is already pushing against the wall when exploring the limits of perception in relation to its plane vertical surface. That a wall has to be built in order to make the investigation possible is a straightforward and literal approach, yet Schneider’s wall is a copy, a double hiding another wall behind it. The exploration is therefore not simply a study of the wall, any wall, or the building of a wall in a given location to see what will happen, if anything. It is specifically to copy a wall in front of another to thereby eliminate the notion of the original. Not only because the already existing wall becomes hidden, but because every embedded trace of time passed and every childhood memory disappear as well in the process, are forgotten once and for all.