Rachel Campbell-Johnston (The Times)
Tuesday January 27 2009
Your heart should be pounding. A major new installation by the German artist Gregor Schneider opens at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester next week.
Kinderzimmer will consist of a reconstruction of an abandoned nursery from a derelict village near the artist’s Rhineland home. Visitors will be invited into a completely dark space, a discombobulating, deserted blackness, while, in another room, a film of the abandoned world where this nursery once stood will be running.
Already, in the light of all those nasty nursery-tales-cone-wrong that lurk in our heads - and not least recent news stories about such monsters as Joseph Fritzl - the warning lights should be flashing. When you step into one of his creations you imagine scuttling around in the Bates Motel.
The last piece that he made in Britain was five years ago, but it was hard to forget. Schneider took over two identical terraced houses in Whitechapel, East London, adapting their interiors so that they were both exactly the same - right down to the eerie inhabitants: the woman who ignored you as she washed up in the kitchen, the naked man who kept on masturbating as you walked into the shower. As you stalked the fetid labyrinths of each dilapidated building, you felt haunted by the presence of some macabre history. But the sound of your breathing was your only companion. You were clambering about in the spaces that lay inside your own head. What kind of ghoulish imagination would make something like that?
The same imagination that, since it was 16, has been creeping around inside his old family home, creating a maze of completely soundproofed spaces into which no ordinary light penetrates, in which doors have no handles and windows open onto blank walls. And Schneider actually lives in this Dead House Ur. Even his popular 21 Beach Cells, a set of open prison-like structure that he set up on Bondi Beach in Syndey in 2007 had a dark side. The cells were open to beachgoers and contained a lilo and umbrella, but their wire walls evoked detention centres such as Guantánamo Bay.
The 39-year-old is no stranger to controversy. He has caused a great deal, including a big black cube - a cross between the sacred Kaaba in the middle of the Great Mosque in Mecca and that fundamental building block of modernism, Malevich’s black square - that was banned four years ago from the Venice Biennale on the ground that it might lead to religious reprisals. And, when Schneider’s long-standing plan to build a room in which a volunteer would die became public, it whipped up such a scandal that Schneider was himself subjected to death threats.
I catch up with Schneider as he works on Kinderzimmer, the grand finale of the Whitworth show Subversive Spaces: an exhibition exploring the contemporary legacy of Surrealism, which will include anything from Max Ernst’s collaged fantasies or the dreamscapes of Salvador Dalí to Tony Oursler’s mad mutterers and Robert Gober’s dismembered leg. He has to dash back to Germany to work, he tells me, on a Charles Manson show. “Charles Manson,” he says in a mock scary voice. “Gregor Schneider,” he echoes in the same tone.
Schneider may have come from a fairly ordinary bourgeois family, but he is aware of the power of presentation. His selective presentation of his life story, from a Roman Catholic childhood in which he served at the altar, through a spell working with the local undertaker to a precocious artistic talent that first revealed itself in paintings of virgins has caused it to be almost mythologised. One suspects it might be as much a part of his conceptual practice as any of his other creations. And yet, he is just “a constructor of rooms,” he says. And Kinderzimmer will simply be a continuation of what he has been working on for years.
read the full article at Times Online.
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