Installation & Photos by Gregor Schneider
Essays by James Lingwood, Andrew O’Hagan, and Colm Tóibín
Many of you will remember the ‘Spot the Difference’ photos from your favorite newspaper or magazine. They were usually somewhere in the comic section next to the crossword puzzle and the word scramble. You know, those duplicate photos with just a few differences that you’re meant to find then circle with a pen? With a cursory glance, the photos were almost exactly the same but looking deeper, subtle differences began to emerge – sameness slowly transitioned into deviation.
Die Familie Schneider is an atlas of “Spot the Difference” photos, more than enough to spend the next few days ping-ponging back and forth, jotting down subtle differences. More to the point, Die Familie Schneider documents a recent art installation by the artist Gregor Schneider, commissioned by the London based art initiative Artangel. During the autumn of 2004, Schneider occupied two homes in London’s East End and constructed duplicate interiors to be inhabited by duplicate families. The houses were then opened for visitors to explore in groups of two. Each person was given a key to open either No. 14 or 16 Walden Road and you were allowed ten minutes to explore the homes: walk in the kitchen and watch a woman washing dishes, climb the stairs, peek in the toilet where a man masturbated in the shower, and then descend into the basement crawlspace. After your ten minutes were up, you left the house, switched keys with your visiting partner, then walked into the other house and repeated your exploration.
Schneider’s photos, black and white images laid side by side on opposite pages, document a simultaneous walk through both of the houses. There are a few color shots but, thankfully, he doesn’t belabor a perfectly lit and color corrected photo or create an overly elaborate document of the installation. Instead, imagine flipping through snapshots of a crime scene that has been cleaned. You’re too late and you’ve missed the sequence of events. All that remains are some still stand-ins for an installation that no longer exists and remains only in imprecise memories. Those of you familiar with other installation and performance documentation might appreciate how the book doesn’t try to convince you that this book is the artwork. You might also appreciate that while Schneider’s photos are deliberately casual it is belied by the twinned photo format. The succession of similar yet different photographic pairs transform the previous tone of comforting, effortless documentation into a real uneasiness. Schneider’s construction of exact duplication. combined with the criminal ambience mentioned previously, reconfigures the book as a document into a record of pathological precision and corrupted doubling.
Following the spread of photos are three tangy canapé-sized essays that, in varying degrees, riff off some of the Die Familie Schneider’s aftertastes. Artangel Co-Director James Lingwood very politely takes care of the family-installation introductions. I had the chance to walk through the Die Familie Schneider on two separate occasions and the feeling of haunting and domestic eeriness was palpable and fleeting, I could see it in the stained wallpaper and peeling paint. After putting the key in the lock, opening then closing the door to No. 14 Walden Road, I have never experienced an artwork that so completely cleaves itself, and the viewer, from the outside. Continuing my walk through the house without a host and disregarding the boundaries of etiquette, it felt as if I died and floated through the house. With the tangible sense of dread, and smooth movement between rooms, combined with access to the secrets some of the people are at pains to keep private, you become a ghost. Secrets had been hidden under the rug or pushed into the closets but there was a lingering stench in the air that hinted at what might have happened.
That said, I wasn’t surprised to read Andrew O’Hagan’s essay The Living Rooms and his response to some of the affects and ghosts coursing through the piece. As a participant, you’re drawn into a unique encounter between unresponsive occupants and a space that almost impels you to create a narrative. Contrary to the disconnectedness and emotional emptiness in the houses, Schneider’s work is an encouragement to find something in the space, something to help you understand or a story to explain why the atmosphere has turned so sour. As O’Hagan observes, “[…] a nothingness that one inhabits twice over, and on each occasion you discover a core strangeness about yourself that must be the signature feeling for ghosts. The houses did not frighten me straightforwardly: they made me realize that I myself am capable of being a cause of fear, like the voyeur in the guise of an intruder, like an actor in a nightmare.”
While O’Hagan makes some meaty comments about the installation, he can’t seem to hide an uneasiness with writing about Die Familie Schneider. Although this is a small essay he doesn’t hold back from larding it with sundry references to literary history. We go from citation to citation and the connections he draws are never really unpacked. He drops names—Proust , Dostoevsky, and Joyce—like little bread crumbs to keep him from losing his way through the houses and his own ideas. While there are very distinct narrative spurs running through the work, the Die Familie Schneider installation does not situate itself in relation to specific narratives. Instead, the installation encourages the desire to write, to create narratives that emerge without charting connections to specific authors. Perhaps O’Hagan’s work is haunted, a bit too literally, by the canon of modern literature but it would benefit by accentuating notions of a narrative desire rather than uninterestingly yoking the work to the past.
The second essay, Colm Tóibín’s Two Houses, doesn’t reference Die Familie Schneider directly. It is a fictional-recollection response that keeps the installation very close by, and like O’Hagan, Tóibín begins by opening a door into his personal past with a story about two homes belonging to unnamed relatives that he visited as a child. While he manages to recall plenty of minute details and events, they are paired with memory lapses that fail to make a ‘perfect’ recollection. Caught between knowing and not forgetting, Tóibín accentuates the ineffability of memory, especially as a narrative material. This liminal position of not/knowing adds another form of contested presence to the book, dovetailing nicely with O’Hagan’s ghostly visitors.
Tóibín’s two houses were very different. Bohreen Hill ‘was a serious house where serious things happened.’ It was filled with old patriotic books and magazines, and you can almost rub the dust of the past between your fingers. Munster Hill, on the other hand, ‘was a house of women talking about clothes and holidays,’ a house with a warm, beating heart. Now that they’ve stood vacant for years Tóibín walks through the husks of these homes, touching upon triggers that jog his memory, cleaning out what remains, and advises ‘You are trying also to take photographs with your eyes, to transform the grim tension of dead space into something memorable, useful, with meaning.’ This sentence cogently describes experiencing any performance but strikes at the heart of the Die Familie Schneider book.
After finishing the essays and looking back through the photos, my only guess for putting the essays at the end was to focus on what Schneider’s installation produced. The essays were written and are read in response to the house. That’s a unique take on the catalog format and very refreshing. Still, there’s a lingering thought that think the reason the essays come at the end of the book instead of the front is that Die Familie Schneider was created as a tidy memento for those that have seen the piece rather than an introduction to these strange twins and haunting repetitions.