I've been obsessed with the German artist/architech Gregor Schneider for years but recently got really into him again after reading the novel 'There Is No Year' by Blake Butler which deals with the same domestic horror.. the psyche turned into rooms within rooms, false walls, insulated crawlspaces.
As a boy, Schneider would bury himself alive in the grounds of his family house and see how long he could remain so, breathing through a straw.
TOTES HAUS U R
'Behind the inconspicuous facade of a two-story building on Unterheydener Straße 12 in Rheydt, Gregor Schneider transformed his life into an artwork. The artist, born in 1969, dedicated fifteen years to converting and reconstructing his parental home. During this long process of maturing, a structure entitled Haus ur developed. By the time the public became aware of this transformation, however, only dull construction sounds emanated from the belly of the house. Schneider hammered, laid bricks, knocked. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
On the quiet, people puzzled what might be happening there. When by the mid-1990s reports leaked out increasingly, Schneider had been working for about a decade. There were small and large rooms, crawl spaces, rooms that almost imperceptibly revolved, halls narrowed to claustrophobic proportions, closed windows behind windows, and sliding walls. Schneider created a new world, his world. For visitors the labyrinthine cosmos was above all: uncanny.'
- Kulturkenner.de
DIE FAMILIE SCHNEIDER
'Gregor Schneider has called himself a painter, for want of anything better to say. Images, however, are singularly absent from the family setup in Whitechapel. Where are the framed photographs of loved ones, keepsakes, kids' pictures and scribbles? For there is a child here, somewhere or other. I heard a baby crying, inconsolable and far away, when I went down to the basement - unless it was just the wind howling in the flue. There is another room down there, with unopened packs of kitchen towels, biscuits, lollipops, stacked like gifts or as if for a game. I've seen the safety gate at the top of the stairs, the baby's changing mat in the bedroom. And the terrifying sexual graffiti, spied through the keyhole, in the attic of number 14.
Why is there a landscape turned to the wall against the living room wainscot? And nail holes, and nails without pictures in the hall corridor wall? It is as though pictures are prohibited here. But the house - renovated, refurbished, restored and distressed to an exact pitch of wear and use and unwholesomeness - is, it turns out, full of forbidden images. In fact, the entire house is an image, a duplicated, living image of itself and its occupants, whose stairs we tramp, whose thresholds we cross or recoil from, whose basements we crawl about in - not once, but twice.'
- Guardian.co.uk
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