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Gregor Schneider
Interview

Gregor Schneider
Interview

u r 49 a, Mirrored Room, Museum fur Gegenwartskunst Images courtesy ArtAngel, UK

Ulrich Loock (UL): What is the real motivation behind your work?

Gregor Schneider (GS): There was nothing else could do.

UL: But there are other people who can’t do anything else, and end up doing nothing at all. It is really quite special if a person, unable to do anything else, does actually do the one thing he finds he can do.

GS: I don’t know what it’s like for others. But I do know that I keep having to test the one thing I have committed myself to, keep having to ask myself the question, whether it’s all worth doing, which is why I can sit here now and think about the work again.

UL: Do you really ask yourself whether it is worth doing what you do? A while ago you were talking about the primacy of praxis. That sounds as though you would want to exclude that question.

GS: I tried at one stage not to leave the house for an indefinite period. In my search for immediacy, I myself had become immediate. When that happens, I can’t talk to anyone. But I also seek out other moments, where I stand next to myself.

UL: …and review yourself and observe what you are doing…

GS: I am seeking to get close to things… I am forever being forced to communicate my ideas, to explain myself…

UL: By whom?

GS: No-one is accepted just as they are. You’re always being asked, “what do you do?” But everything is determined by doing. Sometimes I just didn’t know how to answer the question about what I do.

UL: Why is that?

GS: Because I avoided that question. I either couldn’t or wouldn’t speak about it. Nor about whether I could be a painter or a sculptor. Nowadays I just say, I am a painter.

UL: Was that a secret?

GS: Those are the moments when I don’t understand the work myself. There are different layers that merge into one another, that I can’t control as such.

UL: You started making things at a remarkably young age, and also, it seems, quite independently. More independently than others of that age: when you were only thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. You were already putting on exhibitions. Was that the main thing you were doing at the time?

GS: I think it is typical of that age, those doldrums that go with puberty, everyone has them. And that’s why my first exhibition was called exactly that: Pubertare Verstimmung (Pubescent Doldrums).

UL: Did you have the feeling that you were making art?

GS: I think I would have made the same things even if we didn’t call them art. Of course, I was affected by the mood of the time, Beuys. At some point then I heard that people were deeply affected by Beuys’ death. But I don’t think it was fashionable in those days for a young person to be interested in all that stuff. I think the question about art or not doesn’t lead anywhere, isn’t even interesting.

UL: I was actually more interested in how you yourself thought about what you were doing at the time. Because, despite everything, it must have struck you at the time that what you were doing was somehow special. Or did you think that your contemporaries must all be doing much the same?

GS: I did do other things as well. I wanted to be a football star.

UL: And what did you do about it?

GS: I was a centre forward until one day, I ran into a goal post. It didn’t work, that was the end of my career. In 1987, I finished school. I didn’t get into art school. And then I was also exempted from military service. Saved time. Now I had time to myself and I felt a lot better. Mind you, I nearly didn’t pass my final exams because of art. I had a teacher who really encouraged me and so I thought it made sense to take his line of thought a stage further. However, the result of that was that I refused to write or talk about the stuff. He didn’t hold it against me, but he did give me a 6, which was a fail. That all sounds now as though I were still incredibly young, but when you look at other people’s CV’s you find they have trained at something and then continued studying for another five years… and I had been exempted. Exempted on psychological grounds. I was registered as having a perpetual disorder and as being mentally ill, but I had only told them what I was doing at the time. I didn’t lie. I told them that I build rooms, that I don’t perceive a room in a room, or a room round a room, that suddenly a wall is there and then gone again. That I look at a wall and am interested in any unevenness on its surface: the tiniest hole, the slightest protuberance. And so they didn’t let me into the army.

UL: You just said that you didn’t perceive the rooms you had built as rooms. In that case, what did you perceive them as? As pictures? As paintings? As dreams?

GS: It seemed even illogical to me to build these rooms at all. I had the feeling that I needn’t have built them at all. At the time, the experiment I was doing seemed more logical: these involved going into a room, leaving it again, hoping that the experience would linger there and then inviting other people into that room. Perhaps all my works are also a preparation for one day not having to build any more rooms.

This interview between Gregor Schneider and Ulrich Loock was first published in German in the catalogue to the exhibition at the Kunsthalle, Bern in 1996. Gregor Schneider’s first major project in the UK Die Famillie Schneider is currently taking place in two identical houses in London’s East End. Commissioned and produced by Artangel.

Artist: Gregor Schneider lives and works in Rheydt, Germany. He represented Germany at the 2001 Venice Biennale and won the Golden Lion award for the Best National Pavilion.