Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Introduction
- PART I
- Introduction: Old and New Studio Topoi in the Nineteenth Century
- 1 Studio Matters: Materials, Instruments and Artistic Processes
- 2 Jean-Léon Gérôme, his Badger and his Studio
- 3 Showing Making in Courbet's The Painter's Studio
- 4 Making and Creating. The Painted Palette in Late Nineteenth-Century Dutch Painting
- 5 14, rue de La Rochefoucauld. The Partial Eclipse of Gustave Moreau
- 6 The Artist as Centerpiece. The Image of the Artist in Studio Photographs of the Nineteenth Century
- PART II
- Introduction: Forms and Functions of the Studio from the Twentieth Century to Today
- 7 The Studio as Mediator
- 8 Accrochage in Architecture: Photographic Representations of Theo van Doesburg's Studios and Paintings
- 9 Studio, Storage, Legend. The Work of Hiding in Tacita Dean's Section Cinema (Homage to Marcel Broodthaers)
- 10 The Empty Studio: Bruce Nauman's Studio Films
- 11 Home Improvement and Studio Stupor. On Gregor Schneider's (Dead) House ur
- 12 Staging the Studio: Enacting Artful Realities through Digital Photography
- Epilogue: “Good Art Theory Must Smell of the Studio”
- Index
11 - Home Improvement and Studio Stupor. On Gregor Schneider's (Dead) House ur
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Introduction
- PART I
- Introduction: Old and New Studio Topoi in the Nineteenth Century
- 1 Studio Matters: Materials, Instruments and Artistic Processes
- 2 Jean-Léon Gérôme, his Badger and his Studio
- 3 Showing Making in Courbet's The Painter's Studio
- 4 Making and Creating. The Painted Palette in Late Nineteenth-Century Dutch Painting
- 5 14, rue de La Rochefoucauld. The Partial Eclipse of Gustave Moreau
- 6 The Artist as Centerpiece. The Image of the Artist in Studio Photographs of the Nineteenth Century
- PART II
- Introduction: Forms and Functions of the Studio from the Twentieth Century to Today
- 7 The Studio as Mediator
- 8 Accrochage in Architecture: Photographic Representations of Theo van Doesburg's Studios and Paintings
- 9 Studio, Storage, Legend. The Work of Hiding in Tacita Dean's Section Cinema (Homage to Marcel Broodthaers)
- 10 The Empty Studio: Bruce Nauman's Studio Films
- 11 Home Improvement and Studio Stupor. On Gregor Schneider's (Dead) House ur
- 12 Staging the Studio: Enacting Artful Realities through Digital Photography
- Epilogue: “Good Art Theory Must Smell of the Studio”
- Index
Summary
Laisse, je travaille.
ALBERT CAMUSThere are people who are really skilled with lines, letters and words, and there are people who build a house.
GREGOR SCHNEIDERIn 2003, the BBC produced a documentary on the work of the German artist Gregor Schneider. The film, entitled House of Horror, documents the work of Schneider in general, but first and foremost Dead House ur, the project with which he had gained international fame. House ur is the name of Schneider's dwelling in the German village of Rheydt, a desolate town in the vicinity of Düsseldorf. Between 1985 and 2003, the artist secretly reconfigured this house from the inside, duplicating and transforming its interior spaces. He isolated rooms with rock wool, foam and lead, copied rooms within those same rooms, placed false walls in front of existing ones, reconfigured the location of walls and doors, made secret hallways, corridors and openings, built rotating rooms, and installed moving floors and ceilings (fig. 3). The list of the delivered works reads as a staccato of absurd architectural interventions, acts and undertakings, and is best cited in its original German:
Wand vor Wand — Wand hinter Wand — Gang im Raum — Raum im Raum — roter Stein hinter Raum — Blei um Raum — Blei im Boden — Licht um Raum — Figur in Wand — Wand vor Wand — Decke unter Decke — Wandteil vor Wand — Kubus in Wand — bewegliche Decke unter Decke — 3 Wände in Raummitte — Fenster zeigt nach Osten — Fenster zeigt nach Norden — Fenster zeigt nach Westen — Pfeiler im Raum — 6 Wände hinter Wand.
Behind the banal façade of a prototypical middle-class German house, Schneider surreptitiously constructed a labyrinthine, indecipherable and highly mysterious architectural tangle. No space was original or genuine: every room turned out to be a kind of copy, a reconstruction, a reconfiguration or a transformation. House ur occupied and secreted the original dwelling with a replica that was actually not one. There was no way to distinguish between the original and its double, between the initial structure and the new construction, between the existing building and the added-on artistic work, as Schneider himself indicated:
The sheer amount that I have built in here means that I can't distinguish any more between what has been added and what has been subtracted.
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- Information
- Hiding Making - Showing CreationThe Studio from Turner to Tacita Dean, pp. 209 - 225Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2013