Gregor Schneider
Gregor Schneider's international fame was assured when, with the installation 'Todes Haus u r' in the German Pavilion, a work made from vast sections of his natal home transported to Italy, he won the Lion d'Or at the Venice Biennale in 2001. He was not afraid to flirt with controversy then, and still does not shrink from associations with Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister who visited that same pavilion whilst in office, and who grew up within yards of the transported dead house; "it could be seen as a political gesture" he agrees. Schneider looks in the face of the fearful or awkward, his architectural installations creating spaces that are both familiar and revolting, needling at the question of "what stays in a room when something has happened there". In recent years he has remained steadfast in his practice, pursuing the realisation of works such as 'Cube', the work planned for the Piazza San Marco in Venice in 2005, cancelled, then again scheduled and cancelled in Berlin, that has since been created in Hamburg. His serious, deliberate manner is a world apart from that of his fellow German Gunter van Hagens, yet they are currently being named in the same breath, in light of Schneider's controversial proposal to create an exhibition of space in which a person can die.
Cube Hamburg 2007, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg 2007
I met the artist at the opening of his exhibition 'Doublings' at the Museum Franz Gertsch in the small Swiss town of Burgdorf. The exhibition includes documentation of the ill-fated Venice Cube, which was called off due to dismay at its dominance of the Piazza, or fear of unrest should Muslims have been offended by the work's allusions to the Kaaba in Mecca. The film then follows the successful installation in Hamburg, and harmonious reception by communities there. Schneider's installations based on the 'Haus u r' do not lend themselves to museum spaces, so for an exhibition at K21 in Düsseldorf last year, he created the new work 'Weisse Folter' (white torture). Schneider's own footage documents that installation inspired by an image he found of a cell in Guantanamo Bay: long corridors lead to cold interstitial spaces and spartan rooms, bleached by unremitting fluorescent light to give white a new association in a museum.
(Those readers likely to visit Burgdorf would do well to look away now, and skip to the conversation below.) Last week press were invited to a preview the site-specific installation 'Doublings'; the quid pro quo was that we were guinea pigs for a work that was more physically affecting than any art I have experienced before. Our sole instruction - to leave by the emergency exit. One by one visitors descended by lift into the installation. Once the lift doors closed, you were plunged into complete darkness, with no glimmer of light to anchor or orient. A moment passed, eyes adjusted but still it remained pitch black, and as I edged forward, the darkness was suffocating. There was no sign of an exit. I felt my way to a corner, but it turned and led further into the void. Some long moments later a few objects lit from above made for a clearing in the darkness; a plaster-like lump glazed blue, pieces of isolated wall, one with a furrow that could have been a drain had it led anywhere, another with a gash oozing Matthew Barney-like mucus. A door led to a bare room with linoleum and the whiff of nauseating detergent. Come out, and round the corner a window looks in on a twin of this room, though this version has no door. The other side of another pool of darkness a garage door is open, the space inside is empty, if expectant. Around these spaces a couple of figures are pinned to the floor by other lights above them, their heads shrouded in black plastic, their limbs lank.
Having circled these works one has to return to the blackness to find a way onwards. Another corridor leads away, around corners bumping into dead ends, before one emerges again to the same scene. A garage, a room, a view into the same room, objects and figures scattered. A clever sleight of hand to bring the visitor around in a circle, it seems, but then where is the exit? But minor differences become apparent, for this is a doppelganger of the first scenario, with minor differences - this time the hooded strangled figure on the floor has a stiff erection under its soiled trousers, and the space leads off in another direction. With great relief I saw the exit sign at the top of a short flight of stairs, beside the only 'real' part of the basement of the basement installation - the museum's bunker.
Pushing through the door I emerged into daylight outside the museum, to wander blinking back to the entrance of the building. Fresh from complete disorientation, I spoke to the artist.
Kind (sitzend ohne Kopf), 2004, Museum Franz Gertsch 2008
AR: Can you tell me about this installation at the Franz Gertsch museum, and how working in Switzerland has influenced you?
GS: It's very very difficult to realise rooms inside museums, as they are built for paintings and photographs on plexiglass. Most of these rooms can't be realised in museums, it's a high security space with lots of regulations and a circus where you are just able to realise something in 3 weeks and it's gone after 4.
Here [in Switzerland] you have little houses on top and many many floors built in concrete below the ground. In Switzerland they build skyscrapers into the ground.
AR: The work Weisse Folter makes reference to Guantanamo Bay and the reality of detention without trial. Here in the 'black museum' as you have called it, there is impenetrable darkness and disorientation which itself becomes extremely threatening. Has the fact that acts of imprisonment and torture have become commonly known reality changed your work, in terms of what is left to the imagination and what you actually enunciate?
GS: It depends what room I am working on. It's a question of the information I get from the room. If I have the room in my house I can work on reconstruction 1:1. But if I am working on [concepts of] other rooms, like Kaaba in Mecca or a red-light district, then I too am working in abstract, with internet images - I can't drive to the place, go into the dust, the detail. Then the space is more abstract, so I don't want to put too many personal things inside and the work is developed into a working process where you don't need an idea any longer.
I don't want to work with the museum building; I want to ignore this construction by different architects. When you start making everything black then you ignore the whole existing building, you are able to combine rooms that are shown in different contexts, or which were already built in another architectural context, and you are able to mix them however you want to, so I don't need to think about 'Should I build a corridor into the child's room?'. Everything is black, it's practical for me working with it, a functional thing for me to show rooms out of context.
Black is often happening in rooms, for example the totally isolated room in Giesenkirchen was completely insulated with concrete and sound-proofing material. It was black inside, but without using the black colour. You had pressure on your ears when you tried to look into it. The idea was to force a decision, so if you had gone inside the door would close by itself, and you would be gone, so you wouldn't be able to tell anything about this completely isolated nothing. Also I would compare this with the totally isolated boxes, remember when you are starting to build a room inside another you have a black shadow around it. There also was this black dead end in Naples, a long hall built inside an exhibition space, it took 20 minutes to find an end, at first people thought it was fun, but after 15 minutes they got frightened and had a physical experience of not finding the way out. So there are a couple of works where you are suddenly confronted with black.
Total Isolierter Raum, Giesenkirchen, 1989-91
AR: You have said in the past "the work consists of my beginning the work again and again", and this exhibition is entitled Doublings. Can you tell me about what repetition means when you move away from the Haus u r context?
GS: The house is something special, a radical project that you couldn't do in any museum, you wouldn't get the permission to do it. And it developed it's own rhythm since 2001. It's a doubling of something where you can no longer recognise a room inside a room, behind a room, you can't recognise the work any longer.
I'm getting more invitations now, so I got involved in rooms outside the house, other rooms. Sculpture is often made twice, first a prototype and then a copy. The first is built very intuitively and spontaneously, but the second one you know what you are doing, you think about what you did. You can compare this with the Artangel project, the twin houses - when you do something the first time, then you think you know what you did, but you only start thinking about what you did when you do it a second time. You start doing it in one house, then do it a second time in an other house, then you recognise many things you hadn't thought about, specially when you are working with used furniture, going into the details. The idea of the sculpture is placed between the two sculptures, which tells you so much about mistakes, the differences, you are not able to build it identically, you are always following something you can't achieve.
AR: Do you make work for your own experience or for others?
GS: The work is happening for itself, not for me, because there are parts I can't know it any longer. Sure if it is in a museum, in a public space, it is for visitors, for entering.
This year I'm building a museum extension in my home town, an entrance 40 x 40 metres in size, the whole length shall be 85 metres. It's called 'The End', it's completely black inside and outside, a new entrance into the museum. It's like a black hole, and I'm getting more and more involved in these questions of how museums can be changed, so that there's more happening than painting and photos. It will be realised; nobody asked me for this design, but now it will be opened on the 24th August.
AR: When I first read about the 'Todes Haus u r' (Dead House u r ) I thought the u r referred to Ursprung (origin) or primal. I've since read that u r relates to the street and town name...
GS: No, it's all these meanings inside these letters. There's also numbering, which a possibility to mark differences which you can't see any longer. You are able to give a number to something you can't speak about, which is interesting. For example, you are standing in a space where you know there's a wall in front of a wall, but you can't go behind, you can't take measurement, you can't take an image any more, but you can give this piece a number.
Mann, (liegend mit stiefem Schwanz), 2004 and Mann, 2004, Doublings, Museum Franz Gertsch, 2008
AR: What are you doing next?
GS: Next I'm going to Rome to Macro, they are making an exhibition together with a foundation in Venice. In Rome different kinds of rooms will be shown, and in Venice, in a small exhibition space close to Piazza San Marco [site of the cancelled 2005 installation] I will show the cube Venice documentation, which will run until the architecture Biennale, and I will invite lots of people to communicate this project, in the hope that it will happen once.
AR: Do you still want to realise 'Cube' in Venice?
GS: There are now lots of curators in Italy who want to support this project, and I want to communicate this project in Venice in the hope that it happens there. Lots of international curators have asked me to show the cube in different locations: in London, in New York, or Paris, but they couldn't. The cube is not possible in London at the moment - you should write about this!
AR: Why?
GS: It's also not possible in Paris at the moment, nor is it in Malaysia. I was invited to do it there, but they stopped it. Some other curators want to realise it in Shanghai and Singapore. I had hoped that after Cube Hamburg, it would be easier, but it's not. I have a list with 20 curators in different locations, who can't do it because of fears and ignorance and censorship. The cube in Venice and Berlin [at the Hamburger Bahnhof] was not realised because of censorship. The reasons are fears and ignorance of cultural things, and because there's not the will to communicate this project.
Cube Hamburg 2007, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg 2007
AR: Was the association with Mecca yours or someone else's?
GS: Cube is inspired by the Kaaba in Mecca but also it stands in a clear relationship with older work of mine and in relationship to modern western art; the wonderful thing of cube (Kaaba comes from the Arabic word for cube) is that each black cube is also Kaaba. But the sculpture is a unique sculpture, in form, function. It's not Kaaba in Mecca, it's a sculpture that wants to have all these associations.
AR: In some ways the equivalent of a number, a form free for associations to be made upon it?
GS: Yes, it's a unique, free, sculpture, this is something the Muslim community accept. They don't want see it like Kaaba, nobody in the world is able to transport a concrete building from Mecca to anywhere else, we're talking about a holy space. What I built is a metal construction covered with black foil, something the Muslim community expect and want to see; they also want to see this connection to the modern Western world. We not only took the alphabet from the Arabic world, we also took numbering, and the interesting thing is that numbers came from wall corners [1 - 4 around the corners of a square]. To show these historic effects is part of the sculpture, to show the connection between the east and west. The sculpture shows the connections, a very important sign at the moment. But there are lots of energies against it.
Gregor Schneider: Doublings
Until 15 June
Museum Franz Gertsch
Burgdorf, Switzerland
Aoife Rosenmeyer is based in Zürich after several years as a curator with Artwise in London. In Switzerland she is doing all manner of work art related and contributing to publications including Art World Magazine.
All images copyright Gregor Schneider/VG Bild-Kunst
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