Replaying walls and rooms

When Gregor Schneider reconfigures the interior of his childhood home on Unterheydener Strasse, he distorts the initial layout of the house in a particular way. While retaining the basic outline of the house, which is to say its enclosing walls, the interior alterations are carried out without interfering with the building’s envelope and primary load-bearing structure. The two houses that ensue from this building practice – the existing host and the double – coexist for a start. According to Schneider, concept and building practice are straightforward, “I’ll explain how I work – my work is easy to describe – I place a wall in front of a wall, a room inside a room. It’s as if parts of rooms are replayed” (1). If this recollection of the work’s methodology twenty-five years after its initiation sounds simple, the nature of a house and the exercise of copying its walls within its rooms is, however, less than straightforward when occurring over time. The copied rooms become smaller than the already existing rooms, and the scaling exercise produces distortions in a number of ways, proportionally and formally,

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These later works include a black cube inspired by the Caaba placed at the centre of the Great Mosque in Mecca. Schneider’s cube was censored from the Venice Biennale in 2005 due to fear of terrorist attacks if it was to be installed as planned on St Mark’s Square. It was later paraphrased by Schneider for the show Das schwarze Quadrat. Hommage an Malewitsch [The Black Square: Homage to Malevich], Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (2007). In the room installation “4538 KM,” Deurle, Belgium (2006), Schneider constructed a sequence of rooms within the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens resembling the American detention centres on Guantánamo Bay seen in images that he found on the Internet. This theme was pursued further in the exhibition “Weisse Folter” [White Torture] at K20K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein- Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2007), with a set of repeated rooms and a critique raised of practices of torture that does not leave traces on the body or the room in which it takes place.

yet also on a psychological and experiential level. Over time, the distinction between the two houses blurs, they come to accommodate and support each other, they merge in places, if not overall. The teenager Schneider, who returned to the house in Rheydt in the mid-1980s, was rejected from military service as well as fine art studies – for a start, he had good time. He stayed indoors, inside the house, and copied its walls and rooms in front of and within the existing walls and rooms – he claimed not to know what he was doing. “I’m not interested in the room itself. The first time I built a room, I had no idea that’s what I had done. It was someone else that told me,” Schneider explains to Loock (2003: 36). He continues, “…I build rooms, that I don’t perceive as a room in a room or a room around a room … I look at a wall and am interested in any unevennesses on its surface: the tiniest hole, the slightest protuberance” (55). Suggesting that the copying of walls simply occurs, so that these can be studied in minutiae, as surfaces independent from any context, is a proposition that relates the building of HAUS u r to some of Schneider’s earlier experiments. “These involved going into a room, leaving it again, hoping that the experience would linger there and then inviting other people into that room,” he explains (55). In this sense, the building of rooms inside rooms is perhaps both more and less than required considering that simply entering and leaving a room possibly facilitates the kind of investigation into notions of presence and absence that Schneider is after. He says:

I am interested in observing and… well, there’s nothing like experience. A whole world opens up with all sorts of things that are not recognisable but which are there and which influence the way we feel, think and act, how we live our daily lives. (37)

When exploring whether past events linger in rooms, perceivable by later occupants, Schneider challenges the limits of perception. This is an investigation first undertaken with insulated boxes inside which the artist would hide himself. These initial studies led to the construction of the work u r 8,

TOTAL ISOLIERTER TOTER RAUM [Completely Insulated Dead Room] (1989-91), a dead room

built within an existing room in a seemingly conventional German dwelling house [Fig. 4.5]. The doubled room was a box-shaped enclosure with thick layers of sound-absorbing material in the form of a lead, soil and glass wool lining. Only one door gave access to the completely darkened room, and once this door closed there was no way out, the door could not be opened from inside. When building the room, Schneider was concerned with the possibility that a living being could be occupying the room and yet be completely detached from his/her surroundings, be imperceptible – ultimately left to die. Could the dead space itself even be considered to exist in a positive sense, or was it a void, a kind of black hole?

I was hoping that life would be the difference between a full and an empty box … I was interested in notions of immediacy … In that room you would no longer have been sensually perceptible. You would have been gone. Whether it was a hole or a window, I don’t know, I never went in … I was simply interested in impossibilities. (66)

An interest in impossibilities led Schneider to explore spatial entities such as sealed boxes and doubled rooms within a house. If in the early days, the artist was compelled to go to such spatial extremes in order to challenge the presence of absence and vice versa, the limit of perception would eventually be pursued within the setting of domestic everyday life. No less radical spatial/perceptual investigations within Schneider’s own childhood home – a place supposedly full of memories, familiar corners and well-trodden paths – would unfold once copied walls became copied rooms. The impossibility associated with the constructed absence in the early experiments is paralleled by the impossibility of constructed presence in the later, in the dwelling house. “Perhaps my work is also a preparation for one day not having to build anymore rooms,” Schneider suggests (55), as if everybody has a certain quota to build, and he simply has been trying to get his done. Speaking through the double, the rag doll Hannelore Reuen, Schneider explains about himself and his work:

Now he would say that he doesn’t plan things at all, but rather the things make themselves, that he just lets things take their course. It’s just like with his rooms: he only repeats what he found there in the first place. He actually doesn’t want to make anything, to invent anything. And so these rooms are created that look quite normal; but, in always doing the same thing, he falls into a trap. He says himself that he works with things that he can’t recognise anymore. And also with things that aren’t perceptible anymore. As he works on the house, it becomes unknown to him … He can’t even talk about his work anymore. (Schneider 2003b: 200)

Schneider thinks that he has fallen into a trap by simply repeating something already existing without any additions, any invention, any clear idea about what he is doing and why. While simply observing the walls and rooms that he has built with the stated aim to make them “look quite normal,” the repetition of the doubling practice turns the perceived normality into something else, something unidentifiable if at all detectable. Ultimately, in Schneider’s house, normality becomes a stranger.