Nine years pass from Schneider returns to the house on Unterheydener Strasse and begins doubling its walls and rooms (1985) until a copy of one of these rooms is constructed in Galerie Andreas Weiss, Berlin (1994). The selection of photographs categorised as “HAUS u r 1985-1994” shows the rooms built during to this first stage of the work. Schneider produces a series of double walls and rooms and numbers these interventions, so that the first doubling exercise appears to have been u r 0. A
photograph of the work from Schneider’s website shows three connected, whitewashed brick walls forming a small spatial enclosure [Fig. 4.14]. It could either be the blind end of a narrow corridor or a niche within a larger space – the caption added to the image describes the work as a “Room within a room, chalky sandstone, mortar and wood, 1 door, white walls and ceiling, cement floor,” (Gregor Schneider 2013). In other words and despite appearances, a small enclosure with a cement floor, a ceiling and a door through which one enters/exits the room. When the same photograph is reproduced in the catalogue to Schneider’s exhibition in Los Angeles in 2003, it is labelled, “u r 2, CHAMBER, Rheydt, 1988” (Schneider 2003a: 19). While the two photographs are identical, something happened between 1985 and 1988 – u r 0 became u r 2. The small room without designation in 1985 had become a chamber by 1988.
Photographs of u r 2 taken in Rheydt (1988) are exhibited at Konrad Fischer Galerie, Düsseldorf (1997) [Fig. 4.15]. The photos labelled u r 2, ABSTELLKAMMER [Box Room] display the chamber in a different state compared to the two previous images. They also reveal the relationship between the room, its entrance door and the room from where one enters. In addition, the 1988 room is described as slightly smaller than the 1985 room – according to the website the width has shrunk from 128 cm to 96 cm and the height from 236 cm to 225 cm. This shrinkage suggests that Schneider has modified the room by doubling its walls. He has built a room within a room already within a room using breezeblocks held by a wooden framework. The blocks have been plastered over and the floor, previously of cement and covered by a brown carpet, has in 1988 become a concrete floor. Schneider will reconstruct this latter version of the room a number of times in various locations, the first time in Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (1996) [Fig. 4.16]. On this occasion, one notices that the door to the small room is located closer to the corner of the larger room compared to the situation in Rheydt. If these spatial events and displacements of Schneider’s doubled box room come across as minor and insignificant to the point of being rather meaningless, then such are the histories of most of the doubled rooms. The nature of the work is such that its signs and movements are almost imperceptible – one cannot be sure what has happened from one version of a room to the next. If one asks what is going on, why he did it, what it means and why an audience should be interested, then the answers are not straightforward. The rooms are simply recognisable. They are familiar and trivial to the point where to look behind their immediate insignificance seems to lead nowhere. If, eventually, we no
longer know what we are looking at then what are we looking for? The thesis is interested in how Schneider’s continued doublings of these seemingly over-familiar dwelling house rooms reach a point where identification reverses and the rooms in all their triviality come forth as somehow alien. Section 4.3 of the present chapter looks further into this aspect of HAUS u r.
Until the displaced Berlin double, the work is largely kept under wraps (Loock 2003: 37/54). On the invitation card to the show, a photo of the room in Rheydt is labelled “Raum UR 3 1988” while a photo of the corresponding room in Berlin is labelled “X Raum UR 3A 1994” [Fig. 4.17].133 On the website, the two photos of the identical rooms are first shown side by side, then individually and both named Verdoppelter Raum [Doubled Room]. The photo of the room taken inside the house in Rheydt has the description:
Room within a room, plaster boards and a wooden construction, 2 doors, 1 window, 1 lamp, grey floor, white walls and ceiling (245x263x243cm (LxWxH))
While the other photo, taken in Berlin, carries the description:
Room within a room, plaster boards and a wooden construction, 2 doors, 1 window, 1 lamp, grey floor, white walls and ceiling (247x332x249cm (LxWxH)).
In other words, besides from being located in different parts of Germany, the room in Berlin is slightly larger than the one in Rheydt. The subtleties continue to make the difference in Schneider’s work, yet with the show in Bern that soon follows (1996), the strategy of doubling rooms elsewhere develops further. For the first time, a number of rooms are copied in another location, and the show also marks a significant shift in that it moves the newly constructed u r 12, TOTAL ISOLIERTES
GÄSTEZIMMER [Completely Insulated Guest Room] [Fig. 4.13], built as an addition to the house in
Rheydt (1995), to Bern for reconstruction in the museum space.
The first decade of working in the house marks the time that it takes Schneider to reconfigure the interior so profoundly that its initial layout is altered beyond recognition, even recollection. The initial house in Rheydt becomes another house in Rheydt, yet the two houses are located on the same address, behind the same front façade, carried by the same supporting walls, one within the other. While Schneider does not publicise the work during this first phase, an interview is made by the Bern show’s curator, Ulrich Loock, and the transcribed conversation provides significant insight into the nature of HAUS u r and Schneider’s thinking (Loock 2003). The thesis returns to this interview below [4.2].
After Bern, Schneider relocates and reconstructs rooms from the house in places such as Portikus, Frankfurt am Main (1997) and Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1998), eventually culminating
133
with 24 rooms from the house rebuilt inside the German Pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001). While the Venice showcase is very important for the recognition of Schneider’s artistic work and career in general, the part reconstruction/part relocation to Italy of several rooms from the house has severe implications for the building in Rheydt which becomes so disfigured that it is rendered largely uninhabitable (Schimmel 2003: 103).134
After Venice, the mobile dwelling house comes to Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2003), where it is on display for a full year. Returning to the fragmented history of u r 2,
ABSTELLKAMMER [Box Room] mentioned above, the catalogue from the Los Angeles show
displays another image of the room (2003a: 98) [Fig. 4.18]. It shows one of the brick walls at an angle to what appears to be a white plasterboard wall yet could be a door. If so, the photo must be taken from within the 1985 room, but what is more striking than the actual motif is the caption below stating, “u r 2, CHAMBER, HAUS u r, Rheydt, 1988 (moveable wall)” – which one is the movable wall and where did it suddenly come from? Schneider’s house responds in this kaleidoscopic manner to attempts to trace its history. It is a house where two rooms can occupy the same place at the same time, yet where one room can also occupy two places with a significant distance between them. The extent to which these doubled rooms are perceived as identical relies on interpretation.