- Artist
- Gregor Schneider born 1969
- Part of
- Die Familie Schneider
- Medium
- Photograph, digital c-print on paper
- Dimensions
- Image: 110 × 160 mm
support: 127 × 171 mm
frame: 198 × 258 × 10 mm - Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by the artist and Artangel 2017. The Artangel Collection at Tate
- Reference
- P20829
Summary
Die Familie Schneider (The Schneider Family) 2004 is a group of more than 176 black-and-white photographs documenting Gregor Schneider’s live installation of the same name that took place in East London in 2004. Commissioned by Artangel, the installation comprised a performance by six actors in two adjacent Victorian terraced houses that the artist modified by building corresponding rooms within the existing walls of each house. Audiences could visit the houses in pairs by appointment only, one viewer in each house at a time, after which the two would switch keys to visit the neighbouring house. Moving through each house, visitors encountered three subjects repeatedly performing mundane activities: a woman scrubbing dishes in the kitchen, a child sitting on the floor of a bedroom covered in a black rubbish bag and a man masturbating in the shower. The performers did not acknowledge the presence of the visitors, their apparent oblivion heightening the voyeuristic nature of the work.
Schneider’s documentation of the original installation through both video and photography strives to capture the eerie doubling of the unsettling living spaces and the repeated, identical actions of the actors in each house. His architectural interventions within the houses become apparent in the photographs through a simple comparison between a shot of the exterior of the two houses, in which a first-floor window can be seen, with the video and photographic documentation of the claustrophobic interior spaces in which there is but a sole rear-facing window in the kitchen where the woman is washing dishes. The sense of claustrophobia captured in the video walkthrough of the two houses is heightened by its installation in a corner space, presented either on monitors or projected, as well as through the sounds of the creaking doors heard in the video as the artist walks through the installation. The photographs too can be displayed in a corner, with shots of corresponding rooms and performers presented alongside each other either in portrait or landscape format. When all the photographs are displayed together, a single photograph of the exterior of the twin houses stands independently of the corner arrangement, serving as a lead image upon entry into the display space. The photographs can also be shown in smaller groups, and the video can also be shown independently, as it was in the group exhibition Risk, at Turner Contemporary, Margate (10 October 2015–17 January 2016).
Gregor Schneider is known for his uncanny architectural interventions within domestic spaces and art museums. He conceives of his architectural works as three-dimensional sculptures, to be walked through and inhabited. His first major project was Haus u r (1985–ongoing), for which he started to construct inner rooms within the existing walls of his childhood home in Mönchengladbach-Rheydt, Germany, creating an ever-more claustrophobic architectural palimpsest. Die Familie Schneider is an important project within his output as it translates the themes of repetition and difference that are at the heart of his practice to incorporate the element of proximity, allowing visitors to experience two identical houses and families alongside one another. While the work is strongly aligned with the subtleties and uncanny nature of his previous works centred on reconstruction, it also undermines the notion of the original that underpins these projects because of the dual nature of the experience, and of its subsequent documentation in both video and photography. This work was also the first time Schneider used actors.
Further reading
Ulrie Loock et al., Gregor Schneider, Milan 2004.
Andrew O’Hagan et al., Gregor Schneider: Die Familie Schneider, London 2006.
Susanne Gaensheimer, Gregor Schneider: Double, Cologne 2014.
Carly Whitefield
June 2016
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