Text, Gregor Schneider, Interesting Artists, Park III

Gregor Schneider

"Leonardo da Vinci carried everything in his head. He still knew everything. ... But today! Today it's no longer possible to know everything. The ties between oneself and things no longer exist ... one has to create a world of one's own in order to satisty one's hunger for knowledge, for understanding, one's need for order" But be careful. It was also Beckett who pointed out to us over and over again that this other world could not simply be equated with our world by interpretation. The other world is neither an image of this world nor is it an image of any particular thought. But how then, is this other world to be understood?

The hero of this other world, Gregor Schneider goes to absolutely remarkable lengths to reconstruct one and the same room, stone by stone - we're talking about a weight of 3 tons here - on another site. He takes the room apart. He digs, he carries, he tolls, he sweats, he is covered with dust, he is sinking in filth. He takes action; and as he takes action, he is assuring himself of his own existence.

Whether or not a room comes into being that too, is unimportant "I'm not at all interested in the room. When I put a room together the first time I wasn't even conscious of having built a room. Someone else told me that's what I'd done ... I'm interested in actions running idle," says Gregor Schneider in the second play while he's drinking coffee and eating cake. And he also admits in this speech that he considers "action a higher form than thought"

Gregor Schneider as I had been further instructed, was supposed, in the first play to have dismantled the basement of his own house, which he describes as "a dump", transported it to a museum with a rich history and rebuilt it there. Sometimes he also refers to the basement as a "bordello". But what do these names mean? They explain nothing. A damp cellar smelling of mildew is no bordello. And yet these words have an erotic coloration that transports the room into other contexts. They also have a "vulgar" undertone similar to some of Buckett's titles, such as "More Pricks than kicks".

The room that Gregor Schneider dismantles is-as has been described-a part of the house in which Gregor Schneider lives, thus it is a (part of his) home. The other room stands-as has likewise been described-in a museum. It is a work of art. One and the same room cannot, however be a home if it's a work of art, nor can it be a work of art if it's a home. But it isn't one and the same room. The one room fits in a house, the other in a museum. What a contradiction! (And not the sort that can be figured out by reasoning.) Yet, what can't be explained through reason seems meaningless and therefore puzzling. And not only that. It transgresses the boundaries of decency and quickly slips into the realm of the criminal. In Beckett, crime - vioIent death, for example - is always lurking around the next corner; sometimes it's even part of the plot. And who knows how many corpses Gregor Schneider has hidden beneath the rubble of his basement floor?


In the second play "Dining Room", as I had been told, Gregor Schneider answers, while drinking coffee and eating cake, the question as to the forms of his actions: "Yes, and constant screams, piercing. Constant screams, and the attempt to raise their expressiveness. I have known the greatest possible expression in human screams." Who is Gregor Schneider this kind of person who, after taking another sip of his coffee, obliviously continues: "Dug holes, buried myself, jumped from tree to tree and made swimming motions while doing so, since - after all - each tree is a world, and between worlds lies water" Who is Gregor Schneider? Do the plays, whose main character he is supposed to be, even exist? The plays exist But what kind of plays are they? Are they a form of art or a form of life? Despair not, one might answer this question in Beckett's manner the one form belongs to life. Rejoice not, the other form belongs to art. A contradiction not to be dissolved by reason! It can only be met through action. Which is why Gregor Schneider regards "action as a higher form than thought".




The site of Gregor Schneider's acting - the site to which everything relates - is the "totes Haus ur" ("Dead House ur"). It's supposed to be located in a small town, in Rheydt, not far from Mönchengladbach in a shabby industrial region. Gregor Schneider has been working on this house for ten years. Occasionally he invites someone in for coffee and cake; one can even spend the night in the house. If one is lucky I was lucky.

One day I received a small card with the following content: "The guestroom hasn't yet been put back together / guests can't sleep here at the moment. But there's coffee and cake. Schneider/ Rheydt."

So not a play after all, at least not one by Beckett... or is it? The house really does exist. Tiled three-story façade, a door a narrow wooden stairway leading to a room in which a table set in white offers up coffee and cake. Here I am met by a short man with lively eyes whom I already know from the plays. The atmosphere in the room is one of petit bourgeois Gemütlichkeit. Then the man pushes a wall aside. I enter an in-between space which allows me to see that the coffee room rotates, like a stage, on its own axis, and that the window is an illusion. It's mounted, like a mirror image, in front of the window to the outside. Another wall is raised. I squeeze myself half bent over through a hallway and enter through the inside of a wardrobe, the guestroom, which - because it had stood for some time in a museum - is not yet rebuilt in its entirety. It's neat and white, and outfitted with a bed and a bathtub.

Back through the wardrobe, up a ladder it gets even narrower as the corridors wind like tangled intestines. I drag myself around the corner The cabinet of wonders: stuffed animals, skulls, a hand, a black mirrored ball hanging from the wall, an old armoire, rolled-up carpets, a mask, horns on the armoire. And again a window that isn't really a window; it provides no view to the outside. Is there any view from this house to the exterior? The cellar. Dark, cold, damp, and smelling of mildew. The oppressive cell whose walls are lined with lead and the room with the puddle from the first play

I stand again in front of the house and think back to the play "Dining Room", of which I'd been told. In this play Gregor Schneider is said to have expressed a wish during his coffee table conversation: "I dream of taking the whole house with me and rebuilding it somewhere else. My father and mother would live with me there; the older relatives lie dead in the cellar. My brothers live upstairs, here and there there live women and men who have no other place to go. Somewhere in the corner sits a large woman who's always having babies, churning them out into the world. I'm somewhere in there, too, constantly digging everything up." What a wonderful image, Beckett would say. The one house is blessed and therefore full of life; the other house is damned and the "Dead House ur".
Noemi Smolik

Gregor Schneider represents Germany at the 49th Biennale di Venezia."

http://www.postmedia.net/01/schneider.htm