The practice of doubling a house

Schneider’s claim that his doubles simply testify to the already existing walls and rooms in front of which they are built as identical twins, neutral and silent, is maintained throughout the years of working in the house. In 2010, he reiterates:

My working method is always one of doubling. A double just in front, just beneath or just inside what already exists, or a plausible double placed at another site. So, there is no invention. What little I invent is barely noticeable and unobtrusive. Doubling is a gesture which confirms what already exists in the present, not in the form of a statement or proof but like evidence in a court of law. (Williams: 1) To perceive doubling as a simple confirmation of the existing, with no claim to invent or propose anything new, is to insist on a straightforwardness of the doubling gesture that raises a number of issues. First of all, there is the way that Schneider’s description of doubling as artistic strategy diminishes his own stake in the seemingly self-evident logic of the practice. The personal investment and motivation behind the work is suspended when describing the act as a simple repetition of a physical presence, and Schneider’s attempt to evade a possible deeper meaning or implication of the work continues:

The doubling of what already exists legitimises the work in the simplest possible way. This resolves the question of legitimation … without giving it great importance. My work is focused in on itself. I don’t think much of psychologising artworks. (2)

Schneider’s double refers back to its original only – a wall is a wall and a room is a room. Nothing exists besides or beyond the double as simple repetition. There is no other meaning or added quality integral to the work, no trace remains from the past life of the artist and/or his family in the house, no psychological implications, nothing outside the work. Instead, Schneider claims, the work is all about the materiality of the double and the original that it copies. He says:

I choose to rebuild a room in order to really analyse the structure of it. By rebuilding a room, I truly understand the room. What is exciting for me is that from the moment I rebuild a room, the original room that lies behind it becomes hidden, and the newly built room is accepted as a room that has always existed. For me this emptiness is a part of the work. The more one continues to rebuild the same room, the more inexplicable the layers between the original and the copy become. (2)

Schneider claims that he gets to “truly understand” a room by doubling it, yet what is there to

understand? That a room can be detached from the continuity of the built structure of which it forms part without causing this house to collapse? That recognisability of the space between the original room and its copy decreases proportionally to the complexity of doubling the double? What kind of

analysis of the room’s structure is it that Schneider carries out? If the statement implies that a desire to

seek knowledge about built fabric is part of the work, then what is it that Schneider wants to know about the house? The answers to these questions linger.

Once the double room hides the original room behind it, the illusion is created that the copy is the original – a realisation that according to Schneider provokes a feeling of emptiness. The notion of this absence might relate to the physical gap between the two rooms, yet also derive from a sensation of loss once the familiar house disappears behind the walls of new rooms, even if this outcome is desired. Such an experience would undermine Schneider’s claim that nothing exists outside the physical presence of the work; that he simply is its maker and witness. At one point during the interview with Williams, the artist laconically confesses, “I once visited a psychiatrist, and he said he couldn’t help me understand this need of mine to build a duplicate room” (2). Williams has suggested that Schneider, by always doubling something existing, appears to ascribe particular meaning to the casting of his forms from existing moulds. Furthermore, that his approach is close to traditional art practise when faithfully mimicking reality in detail. Schneider’s response evades the address by taking refuge in the possibility that perhaps the work simply cannot be explained since even the psychiatrist was not able to. The resistance to interpretation of the work and its motivation is strong, yet the disavowal with reference to the psychiatrist is also revealing. It reveals something about Schneider’s compulsion to repeat, yet also about the tendency of traditional art practices to copy reality and therefore also to repeat – to repeat in the first place and to repeat the first place.

Schneider’s childhood home on Unterheydener Strasse gradually disappears behind the doubles over time. As such, the initial house is forgotten when slowly disappearing from sight, even if, structurally, the childhood home is not completely eradicated when merging with the doubles repeating it from all sides. The notion of the first home and house might, however, loom behind the added layers of walls otherwise attempting to obscure any recollection. Mark Cousins suggests that considering the disappointment most people experience when revisiting the first house that they remember, it does not seem to be important in an empirical sense (1993: 38). If the desire to recollect and retrieve a perceived lost origin is at the heart of much literature concerning dwelling, it touches on this

indisputable existence of the first place. Cousins’ complicates the relation to this house when asking, “At an empirical level, why on earth should one be interested in the first of something?” (35). Considering that memories of the first house not necessarily relate to a house that one has actually lived in, but can be memories of other houses, the original is an abstract concept. In fact, we might simply have

forgotten the first house, and only traces linger to return in the form of a patched up imaginary building. Cousins suggests that the first house might be the site of the origin of memory itself, for which reason we shall never be able to remember it. “It is quite impossible to remember the origins of the memory. We have to start not from an origin but from the core of repetition in the house,” he suggests (38). The thesis is interested in the way that the gesture of repetition might call forth something forgotten and therefore already known. It returns to this possibility below [4.3].

4.2.3 A room is a room is a room

If Schneider in 1996 states that he is not interested in the room itself, he talks about his interest in analysing the structure of a room for the purpose of a deeper understanding of it in 2010. What has happened in the meantime? Has the artist changed his mind about rooms over the years? While it is possible to argue that a deeper interest in spatial enclosures is likely to develop as the inevitable outcome of a practice of doubling rooms through a prolonged period of time, Schneider might also refer to the idea of a room rather than its actual physical constitution. As such, this room, no longer necessarily part of a house, is a category prior to building and architecture, inhabitation and purpose. As Brigitte Kölle writes about Schneider’s work:

[Schneider] simply says he builds rooms. Mostly he uses the singular form as though the room were a constant, as though one room were not by definition linked to another, as though there were not different rooms, mental, physical, visible and invisible, rooms that we find ourselves in and rooms which open up to us. (n.d.)

As though there was not a house, one could add. Schneider’s description of his work and the rooms that he doubles are according to Kölle like descriptions of rooms without qualities. They are like rooms materialising a first spatial principle in relation to which every thing and every event eventually will take place. Schneider simply builds a double wall or room and waits to see whether anything will happen. Implicit this waiting is the possibility that he will not be able to tell whether anything eventually does happen, because he might not necessarily know.

The title of the work, HAUS u r, refers to the site of the house, Unterheydener Strasse. It refers to the location as a kind of ur-site, thereby emphasising the notion of the place as an origin. The u and r of the title mark the first and last letters of the street name while also spelling ur, a prefix in the German language added to words as signification of a primordial connotation. In addition, the notion of a first ground might relate to the city of Rheydt, absorbed by Mönchengladbach in 1975, or in a wider sense to Germany. The thesis suggests that Schneider through the naming of the house and work as ur-house, and by establishing the category of the room as a primary category, reinstates a notion of originality otherwise obscured by the repeated practice of doubling. Schneider’s house marks an ur-site, first of all for himself in the form of his childhood home but also in terms of the exploration of rooms that he undertakes. It is a site that must be reconstructed to be worked over, it cannot simply be recollected or brought forward, it has not already existed in the way that it must, again, be built.

Insofar as Schneider’s methodology places the double wall in the space between the ur-wall in the background and the artist himself, it outlines a spatial movement of closing in. While the artist eventually is enclosed by his own creation, the double room, a space is also created outside this centrality, which is to say on the other side of the wall. These complex spatial displacements and overlaps, created by the doubling practice, are illustrated by the split wall diagram introduced in relation to Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau in the previous chapter [3.3, see also p.128 below]. Following this diagram, Schneider locates himself within the central void of its plan when locating himself within the double room. At the same time, the space between the double walls surrounding this central space

corresponds to the liminal zone unfolded by Schwitters’ Merzbau. However, as Schneider says, a room always evades total recognition, “When you're in front of a painting, you still recognise it as a painting. Rooms are different … You don't see a room completely. All the time, there is something behind you,” he explains (Roug 2003). If it is not possible to contemplate a whole room in one go, at one glance, this is because something always remains unseen behind the contemplating eyes of the subject. While a visual limitation does not foreclose that human perception still works in-the-round, it is in this blind field that Schneider, his camera, and by extension audience converge. The otherwise inevitable gap between artist/work and audience is bridged here – that is, we all come to see the house through the eyes of Schneider.