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
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