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Gregor Schneider. By: Alejandro Aldrin, Isabel Gomez, Jonas Manuel, Jeremy Plana, Ryan Titong. Background Information. Gregor Schneider was born in Rheydt Germany in 1969 Studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts, Münster Academy of Fine Arts, and Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts.
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Gregor Schneider By: Alejandro Aldrin, Isabel Gomez, Jonas Manuel, Jeremy Plana, Ryan Titong
Background Information • Gregor Schneider was born in Rheydt Germany in 1969 • Studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts, Münster Academy of Fine Arts, and Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts. • He has been exhibiting his work since 1992. • Today he lives and works in Rheydt, Germany.
An overview of his works His main area of work is constructed rooms. In his works, he really struggles to create and the process is just such an important part of his work. He incorporates so much of his past and his self into his work. Gregor Schneider creates spaces and the viewer of the artwork (who is, in this case, actually a participant) explores the spaces. Schneider often populates his spaces using ideas that relate to the uncanny: the double, a man who may or may not be dead, architectural constructions that make little sense, and other strange things.
Gregor Schneider and the Uncanny • Gregor Schneider is an artist who builds these architectural spaces, designed to communicate to the viewer/participant a sense of unease or a physically manifested uncanny. • What is uncanny? • [The uncanny] …is a class of the terrifying which leads us back to something long known and once very familiar, yet now concealed and kept out of sight. It is the unfamiliar familiar, the conventional made suspect. (Sigmund Freud) • Basically the uncanny is a concept derivative of the homely and familiar, which for some reason has been concealed or repressed, resulting in an uneasy fear on its’ encounter (when you are experiencing the work.)
The Uncanny • One example of this is Schneider’s work “Haus u r.” In this work Schneider built double walls, secret rooms, and strange architectural designs that didn’t make sense. The house serves to disorient and make you feel lost and confused. • This is also why actually experiencing Schneider’s work is such an important part of understanding it. • Experiencing the work also plays a key role in the uncanny experience. I mean because if you are actually there then you feel that “uncanny feeling” for yourself. No one has to describe it for you because you know.
More Themes in Gregor Schneider’s Works Aside from the uncanny, Schneider seems to have a fascination with the dark and macabre elements of humanity. It seems that he has very morbid interests, but instead of pursuing this interest, he chooses to create such places that sort of express these things One example is his work “Weisse Folter” translated into White Torture, which is said to have been inspired by downloaded images of Camp 5 of Guantanamo Bay.
Gregor Schneider and Death • Gregor Schneider has been fascinated with death for a long time now. He has a work called Hannelore Reuen, which is a sculpture of a dead woman. One time, as part of an exhibition in Germany he fakes his own death. • In 2008 he proposed a project, in which he actually wanted someone’s dying hours to be spent in an art gallery with the public watching him as he died.
Gregor Schneider and Death • You can only imagine the reaction this got. • People compared it to watching executions. • Beatrik Kalwa, a gallery owner, said that “Existential matters like death, birth or the act of reproduction do not belong in a musem. There is a fundamental difference between portraying these acts in an art form, and showing them in actuality.” • Eugen Brysch, the head of a German hospice foundation says “This is pure voyeurism and makes a mockery of those who are dying.” • Schneider argues that death is already undignified and that his aim is to restore its grace.
Haus U R • Haus u r is a building that Schneider inherited. He started building double walls, adding secret rooms, locking things up in isolation, insulating space, creating the impossible. There are walls hidden behind other walls, there are spaces filled with concrete. Schneider’s house serves to disorient. Schneider’s house is a labyrinthine exploration of how it feels to be uncomfortable at home.
Haus U R Schneider is interested in things that people don’t usually see or notice like substances, spaces, or objects that are hidden. For example, when there is a gap between two walls, he fills the gap with red or black bricks. Even though no one will be able to see the bricks, they are there. For Schneider ‘the invisible works’ like these are just as important as the visible ones. Schneider talks a lot about descriptions of dimensions, materials, tools, and space. Even though it doesn’t make sense for a lot of people, for him, this is his own profound experience of space.
Haus U R Experience According to people who have experience the work, they say that although it disorients and confuses them, they are still influenced and fascinated by the work. People are fascinated by the fact that the entire work is the creation of affect, the creation of an environment, trafficking in atmosphere. Also, people seem to really remember that special feeling they get when they go through the experience.
Haus U R Experience For me, I think Haus U R is a really frightening house. Who would want to live in a house that has a wall in front of a wall, ceiling under a ceiling, and windows behind windows? There’s even a room that has a door with no handle on the inside and a nonfunctional knob on the outside; so once the door is shut, you’ll get trapped. You will always feel lost and never feel like you are ‘at home.’ The house has a very narrow hallways that you even have to squeeze through walls and crawl spaces. And I for one can’t live with this because I’m claustrophobic.
Totes Haus U R (Dead House U R) In this work, Schneider created a house with many rooms inside each room. In the house there were many cupboards, shelves, and boxes. The house had double walls and double floors and the windows cannot be opened from the outside. The house also had different rooms that seem ordinary but there is a strange quality about them.
Totes Haus U R (Dead House U R) In the house you have a bedroom, coffee room, guest room, a kitchen and other normal rooms, but you also have strange rooms like ‘the last hole,’ which is a completely destroyed room. Or the ‘cellar,’ which seems like some kind of party cellar that has colored lights and a disco ball. This causes a strange experience because you have these rooms that are familiar to you, but then all of a sudden you come across a very strange room.
Weisse Folter (White Torture) • What is white torture? • It's a term used for techniques of incarceration and control that drive humans mad without leaving visible injuries. Put people in a featureless interior landscape and isolate them from human contact, warmth, sunlight, leaves, the smell of dirt, and normal noises of everyday life, and most will eventually lose their minds. • Weisse Folter is basically a long hallway with many doors to the sides that extend into other corridors and cells. • The hallway itself has no features and is plain white. Some of the doors are open and some are not. • It looks like a maximum-security prison.
The Weisse Folter experience “You enter through a blank white door, and find yourself in a featureless hallway resembling a maximum-security prison. Some of the doors open, some do not. Around you is complete silence. If you find your way out of this area, you come to another which is totally dark, only to find yourself in another part of the exhibition which looks exactly like the first hallway you found yourself in. Most of the rooms look like tiny prison cells, but some of them feature strange, cheerless decorations: metal plates attached by hinges to blank walls; a permanently-locked chain-mesh door; a room shaped like a pointed triangle.” “The installation is filled with strange twists, dead-ends, and doors that lead nowhere. The featureless uniformity of the spaces offers no clues. If you let the door close behind you, you might just find yourself locked into a small space with no obvious means of escape. You do encounter other visitors, but because of the heavy soundproofing, you might not notice them even if they're very close to you.”
Themes in Weisse Folter I think that some of the themes or messages here are powerlessness and inhumanity. Just like prisoners who are completely at the mercy of the guards and bureaucrats who control what they experience, museum visitors are, for a short while at least, completely at the mercy of Gregor Schneider’s creation. For me, Weisse Folter has a feeling of isolation, loneliness and emptiness. Weisee Folter means "White Torture", a term used for a technique of control that drives people insane. I think the name fits perfectly with this art, as people will probably go insane if they stay in there for a long time.
The Cube The Cube is basically A 15-metre-high pitch black cube. It is built from aluminium scaffolding, covered by wooden panels and stands on a white plinth. You can’t go inside it. It’s just there. Gregor Schneider tried to construct it first in Venice then in Berlin, but it was rejected twice, because people said it was offensive to Muslims. The “original” black cube is The Kabaa, a cube-shaped building in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. According to Islamic tradition, the Kaaba, which means ‘cube’ in Arabic, is the first sacred structure on earth. Now the cube is in Hamburg, Germany.
Reaction to The Cube • On the negative side • “It’s very elitist and out of place. It’s a sensitive project as it makes reference to something that might scare people and won’t unite all of our people.” (a city local) • Also there are many complaints that the work is offensive to Muslims and people are scared.
Reaction to The Cube • Positive side • The government of the city supports the cube. • Also many local artist like the cube. • One artist says “If art is not able to upset us, then we might as well close down all the museums and theatres.” • Another one says “Hiding something we don’t like is not my idea of what our city is all about.” • Schneider says that his work was planned “without cynicism and with a clear conscience," he said. "I could have looked every Muslim openly and honestly in the eye."
Reaction to The Cube Muslim Support • Muslim communities and religious representatives in Hamburg were generally supportive of the cube • One Muslim described it as “a triumph for freedom of expression.” • The secretary general of the Union of Muslim Associations was there for the opening of the project and said he didn’t see a big problem. “I think it’s a very good idea,” he said. “Why are you scared?”
The Cube For me I think that it is art. Last meeting, we discussed about what things or objects in our environment are art. All thing in our society are art but sometimes we say that this an art work if the object is new to our eye, but the most important part that we say that the object is an art if we can see the essence of uniqueness, and the presence of its idea. Like The Cube. It’s a simple cube, plain pitch black, and no other detail but they say that it is an art work because they see the uniqueness of this art work. For me, this is an awesome art.
Die Familie Schneider Die Familie Schneider is probably the most unnerving work of Gregor Schneider. It consists of two identical houses standing side by side (house number 14 and 16) in an ordinary residential street in the East End of London. The houses look exactly the same. Not just the paint or curtains, but even the garbage back that were outside were arranged in the same way.
Die Familie Schneider Experience When you enter the house (number 14), behind the door there is a middle-aged woman washing dishes in the kitchen. As you walk pass, she will not even acknowledge your presence. After the kitchen, comes the living room, which is basically your standard English living room. Upstairs, in the bathroom, there is a man in the shower masturbating and as you move into the bedroom there is a child sitting calmly under a garbage bag. In the basement, from which a putrid smell emerges, there is a small mattress on the floor.
Die Familie Schneider Experience And then just when you think things can’t get much stranger you go next door (house number 16) and you see the exact same thing. The same house. Same people. Same smells and Same everything. So while in the first house, you may have felt this rational fear about being in a strange place, now the fear has turned into something different.
Die Familie Schneider and The Uncanny This has something to do with ‘The Uncanny.’ Now you have this feeling that you are experiencing this exact same thing again yet there is something strange and distant about it precisely for the fact that you have already just seen it. In this work, Schneider looks at the most ordinary domestic dwelling and sees its capacity to hide terrible deeds and nasty secrets. He turns something that should be familiar to us, such as a family home, and turns it into something else completely.
Conclusion Gregor Schneider has a lot to do with our topic now, which is the ‘ugly’ or the ‘horror’ of art, as well as the uncanny. It is obvious that Schneider’s works are not exactly what you would call beautiful or enjoyable.The whole idea and concepts behind his work are to make you uncomfortable or to make you experience that ‘new level of fear’ that Freud calls the uncanny. Despite all these things you cannot deny the thought and creative process that Schneider has put into his works and you can even begin to appreciate the brilliance behind his ideas. This really seems to emphasize on just how thin that line between ‘beauty’ and the ‘ugly or horrible’ really is and how there is more to an artwork than an "experience of beauty” but also exists an "experience of horror" or "experience of ugly."
