In 1986, Gregor Schneider began to build complete rooms that precisely replicate the rooms into which they were built in Haus u r, a modest, somewhat run-down house – Unterheydener Straße 12 – in the Rheydt district of Mönchengladbach, Germany. His work is thus akin to works by artists from Robert Smithson to Tacita Dean or from Gordon Matta-Clark to Absalon and Andrea Zittel, who take as their subjects specific places. Schneider’s interest is in rooms that are in the process of disappearing.
There’s no getting away from rooms. Schneider’s maxim finds its aesthetic equivalent in his strategy of duplicating or ‘doubling’ already existing rooms. Through their reproduction the rooms lose everything that might have been familiar about them. Schneider’s rooms bear the signs and tokens of petit bourgeois existence, and inside them the sense of abandonment is total. The abandonment of rooms from which there is no getting away is part and parcel of their fundamental designation, even if the water is running in the bathroom as if somebody were on the point of coming back. Since it was uncertain whether Schneider would continue to be able to use the Haus u r in future, he took out the reproduced rooms again, stored them in a hangar, installed them again in other places and once more constructed identical rooms – with the result that any orientation to a place outside the room in question is lost. He has Hannelore Reuen, his fellow resident in Unterheydener Straße, say that “He would like to lead a variety of lives in order to get out of the house. But he drags the house around with him wherever he goes. I don’t think he will ever get out of it.” With their characteristic irreversible abandonment the rooms hold us in thrall. In Schneider’s work the rooms embody a societal and historical power from which we cannot escape. This power makes it impossible for us ever to be at home.
Facing up to this power became an inescapable challenge when Schneider became aware of an already existing doubling in real life. In 2007, not far from the house at Unterheydener Straße 12, his Haus u r, he came across a very similar building at Odenkirchener Straße 202. This house was the birthplace of Joseph Goebbels, the later Minister of Propaganda in the German Nazi régime. Schneider began to search for traces of this past existence and made two videos, Essen [Eating] and Schlafen [Sleeping] in the Goebbels’ house, in which he identifies with the loathsome historical figure. Ultimately, however, he was able to extricate himself from the “spirit of Nazism” only by “pulverizing” the interior of the building and loading off the rubble onto a disposal site. Of Goebbels’s birthplace not much more remains than the cast of the doorbell panel realized in the form of a candle, to be lit and burn itself out (Unsubscribe, 2014).
For a long time Schneider has accompanied the affirmative doubling of rooms with questions as to the remaining presence of things past. I never throw anything away. Materials no longer needed, e.g. remnants of demolished built-in structures, are packed together to form sculptures (RS [Recycled sculpture], 1996–2023), shrink-wrapped, and set on palettes. This is taken even so far as to include left-overs from meals, which Schneider enclosed in gypsum brick in 1990. On the large scale, he has for decades confronted the destruction of villages and landscapes in his vicinity as they fall victim to the open-cast mining of lignite in the Rhineland. What remains of the disappeared villages? In an “amateur video” Schneider walks over a resulting wasteland and finds himself suddenly standing in front of a heap of earth containing human bones that come from a vacated graveyard (KNOCHENHÜGEL, [HILL OF BONES] Hofstraße, Alt-Otzenrath, 2008). A series of factual photographs shows the houses that were built for the resettled inhabitants of a disappeared village (GARZWEILER, 2008–2013). Finally, Schneider filmed the landscape that emerged after the end of lignite mining: a motorway in the distance draws the horizon of a dichotomized scene, above which the sun is going down in threateningly red and yellow hues (KUNSTLANDSCHAFT, [ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE] Tagebau Garzweiler, 2022), and beach umbrellas and sun-loungers – illuminated in synthetic colours after sundown – summon the audience to view the dystopia of the disappeared reality as a “Terra nova” (SONNIGER UNTERGANG [SUNNY DEMISE] Tagebau Hambach, 2022).
In his more recent works, Schneider has moved on from the affirmation of simultaneously abandoned and inescapable rooms to the recording of the post-apocalyptic reality of an artificial landscape. The exhibition title Homeless thus refers not only to the fact that Schneider’s disassembled rooms and his sculptures positioned on palettes lack any firm, established site of their own but above all to the fact that the devastation of villages and the countryside generates a “new territory” that makes any idea of being “at home” obsolete.
Ulrich Loock
translated by Richard Humphrey
