Gregor Schneider: Eau de Schneider

In a dark, dark house there were some dark, dark rooms and in the dark, dark rooms there were some dark, dark stairs. Down the stairs there was a cellar, and in the cellar unspeakable acts of perversion and cruelty are being committed.

This is not the installation currently on show in Summerhall’s basement galleries. Nor is it the house in Rheydt, Germany where Gregor Schneider grew up and still lives and works, and which he has been recreating in endless labyrinthine configurations since 1985. But Schneider’s installations speak of these dark dungeons only too well. Dank, forbidding spaces with lowered ceilings and compromised access, his works suggest death and child abuse – sordid dens befitting ghouls like Josef Fritzl and Fred West.

Sometimes Schneider’s installations are left empty for the viewer to falter through like an intruder; sometimes they include sculptural bodies lying face down, or real people performing everyday tasks. They’re places we’ve seen on the news, read about in fiction, thrilled to recoil from in TV crime dramas. The reason they’re so disturbing is because of the real-life truths they evoke, and we know that more of these wretched places exist. Many, in fact, have come to light since Schneider has gained fame. 

Known as Haus u r, the subject of the ongoing transformation is Schneider’s childhood home, and he began remaking its rooms aged sixteen following his father’s death. These details only add to a work that’s ripe for dramatisation. Schneider has never divulged any personal trauma and seldom gives interviews, but the question of authenticity is central to the fascination his work holds for us. No matter whether they are his own truths – they are somebody’s. Schneider deals in simulacra, but it’s not the walls and dirty floorboards that we’re afraid of.

More recently his works have shifted to addressing death as an isolated subject. He has caused uproar by stating his wish to stage an exhibition in which a human being will die. His work Black Cube, based on the Kaaba, the most sacred mosque in Mecca, was to be installed next to St Mark’s Basilica in Venice but was cancelled due to fears of offending the Islamic community. Offending people is quite different to upsetting or unsettling them – Schneider’s line has generally been in the latter.

Paul Robertson, Curator at Summerhall, assures me that, having spent hours and hours with Schneider while planning the new work he is showing there, “It’s absolutely not his intention to offend.”

The installation, titled Süßer Duft (Sweet Scent) will be located in Summerhall’s “already dungeon-like” basement. To preserve the impact, Schneider is giving little away, but it will be a series of rooms in different degrees of light and darkness, scent and perhaps temperature. Viewers will enter one at a time and experience it alone. With a black and white symbolism, the work pledges to make “a strong, perhaps controversial statement about racism and slavery.”

“For Schneider to do this as a white man –” says Robertson. “I can’t really think of any other white artists working with these themes.”

Since the furnished rooms of Haus u r, Schneider’s installations have become physically a lot emptier. In a version of Süßer Duft he showed in Paris in 2008, the rooms were superficially bare – of course, the lone viewer’s wandering thoughts filled in the gaps. As with an IKEA store, once having entered, you could only progress and not retreat. Imagine an empty IKEA, only with uncomfortable spaces, more smells, no little wooden pencils and no other customers. Just you and Schneider’s imagination.