Few artists can creep you out like Gregor Schneider. His work is scary and it’s absurd. But even as you giggle nervously when confronted with its less than subtle deployment of shock-horror tactics, a more profound disquiet creeps up on you. Schneider knows how to tap into our visceral fears.
You may recall his Artangel project a few years back, Die Familie Schneider. Two adjacent terraced houses in Whitechapel, east London, were identically kitted out. In each of these drably furnished, impoverished residences an “identical” family – twins - had been installed: Mother could be found washing up in the kitchen, Father could be spied masturbating vigorously in the shower, while in the bedroom, bodies had been covered in bin bags, with their legs poking out. Then there was the terrible crying of a child, faint and intermittent, upstairs in the attic, towards which you hardly dared proceed.This was a house of horrors presented in a domestic setting so drably normal that perversity was almost to be expected. But still, its effect was unnerving to say the least. Schneider has an obsession with fetid interiors. Since the mid-Eighties he has worked on the interior spaces of his own house, Haus u r/ Totes haus u r, in western Germany, continually shifting walls, ceilings and entire rooms. He has created rooms within rooms that precisely replicate each other, and over the years he has methodically photographed this project. This forms the basis of the exhibition at Sadie Coles.
These black-and-white photographs look like those taken at the scene of a crime. Some of them show empty, office-like spaces, kitted out with false windows and cheap plywood doors (pictured right), while others show dank, cellar-like bunkers. Some are full of junk and debris, their walls half demolished. In a few of his dilapidated interiors Schneider has created macabre tableaux: in one, a sex doll, partially covered, is squeezed between a radiator and some wooden debris. One gets the feeling that, if Schneider hadn’t invested all in his “art”, then things might have turned out very badly indeed. One thinks, perhaps, of Josef Fritzel.
But as if he has now done with working through his psychic traumas, Schneider also presents a separate series of photographs that relate to another work entirely. Cuba Hamburg (pictured left, in Venice) is a monumental black cube reminiscent of Mecca’s Kaaba. This had originally been placed outside the Hamburger Kunsthalle as part of the museum’s Homage to Malevich exhibition, which celebrated that artist’s radical 1915 painting Black Square. But these images appear merely as incidental adjuncts, for punning, coldly conceptual conceits evidently don’t hold Schneider’s attention for very long. The sculptural installations in this exhibition relate once again to Haus u r/ Totes Hause u r.There is a fragment of a plaster wall, a hanging lamp, a slice of concrete flooring and insulation, a huge phallic boulder trussed up like a wild beast within a wooden frame. An “eaves-dropping” ear has been carved into the plaster wall, though the gaping slit, pink and moist-looking, also resembles another part of the (female) anatomy. The work is suggestive of body parts secreted within walls. If you go round to the other side you’ll find that it’s only an embedded conch shell, but the wall, which is the first work you encounter, is also a reminder that you have entered this unwholesome space as a voyeur.
The exhibition continues down in the basement, and as we’ve learned from countless horror movies the basement is the last place visitors should venture. Having descended, I am suddenly enveloped in a darkness so complete that there is nothing to see and nothing to hear. I tentatively edge forward: is there a wall in front of my face or is it open space? I am in no mind to blindly explore, so I simply lean forward and find that, one by one, as if in dramatic filmic sequence - cue Psycho soundtrack - spot-lit bodies are revealed to me, or rather protuding legs (pictured right). Are they real? Will they move? Did I see something shifting? I don’t hang around for the answers, but quickly sprint back upstairs where normality resides.If you know this artist’s work you’ll know what to expect, but neither familarity nor Schneider’s absurdist humour will necessarily inure you to the genuine, primitive fear his work engenders.
- Gregor Schneider: Fotografie und Skulptur at Sadie Coles HQ until 2 October
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