Gregor Schneider

Talks about artist Gregor Schneider's extension of the original work, a document and exploration of Schneider's obsession with repression, reproduction, and repetition in images and text. Internationally renowned for his unnerving presentation of normality, Schneider's medium is the room - kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, and cellar.

Gregor Scheider's work is about rooms - visible and invisible, doubled and duplicated, labyrinthine rooms within rooms. Rather than following a particular principle, he observes the effects that interventions in the common logic of existing architecture have on our perception. The result is frightening, disorientating and in an uncanny way, magically fascinating. Presented here, on numerous colour plates, are two tours that are characteristic of his work. These nightmarish trips lead us through suppressed subconscious experiences, through 'black holes', familiar yet sinister spaces, oversized, walk-in sculptures with rooms that are doubled or duplicated through mirrors and doors. The perception of time and space becomes warped and the idea of the artistic original is scrutinised by this continual doubling and repetition. This book, the most comprehensive monograph on Gregor Schneider to date, was designed and photographed by the artist himself. Published on the occasion of the exhibition at Museum Abteiberg, Germany, November 2008 - July 2009. English and German text.

This publication presents his video proposal for an unrealized work called Cube Venice 2005, which would have been a giant black cube plonked in the middle of St. Mark's Place, Venice. Along the visuals, Schneider explains that the Kaaba in Mecca inspired his cube, which would have been as tall as the buildings that describe the square of St. Mark's.

"Making is a higher form of thinking," claims Gregor Schneider, who began to make art as an adolescent. So urgent was his desire to be an artist that, in order to pay for the materials he needed to make his sculptures, he even worked as a gravedigger. Introverted, self-effacing and a close observer of human behavior--with a particular passion for the lowliest of social categories--Schneider has developed an all-absorbing identification with his work, living together with it night and day in an apartment he soundproofed from the rest of the world. Schneider has tried his hand at film, painting and sculpture, but most remarkable is the installation he created between 1985 and 1994, in his home. There he built rooms within rooms, walls in front of walls, doors that led nowhere and windows that opened onto dead spaces. When asked about his motivations, he would defiantly proclaim, "I can't do anything else." This monograph surveys his work.

Ensamble Studio is a cross-functional team founded in 2000, led by architects Anto?n Garci?a-Abril and De?bora Mesa. Balancing imagination and reality, art and science, their work innovates typologies, technologies and methodologies to address issues as diverse as the construction of the landscape or the prefabrication of the house. From their early works: SGAE Headquarters, Hemeroscopium House or The Truffle in Spain, to their most recent: Ensamble Fa?brica in Madrid and Ca'n Terra in Menorca, Spain, every project makes space for experimentation aiming to advance their field. Currently, through their start-up WoHo, they are invested in increasing the quality of architecture while making it more affordable by integrating offsite technologies. Their new research and fabrication facility in Madrid, Ensamble Fa?brica, has been built to support this endeavour. Together they are committed to sharing ideas and cultivating synergies between professional and academic worlds through teaching lecturing and research: she is Ventulett Chair in Architectural Design at Georgia Tech and he is a Professor at MIT, where they co-founded the POPlab - Prototypes of Prefabrication Laboratory- in 2012.

How do objects 'speak' to us? What happens to authorship when voice is projected into inanimate objects? How can one articulate an object into speech? Is the inarticulate body necessarily silent? These are just some of the questions brought up by this unique and unusual collection of essays, which presents subjects and categories often overlooked by the disciplines of art history, visual culture, theatre history and comparative literature. Drawing from and expanding upon the 'Performing Objects, Animating Images' academic session run by the Henry Moore Institute at the Association of Art Historians conference, held in London in 2003, this book presents thirteen essays that bring together a multidisciplinary approach to the animated object. Contributions range from literal accounts of magic lanterns, tableaux vivants, puppets and ventriloquist dummies, to the more abstract notions of voice displacement in audio art and authorship projection in writing machines. The contributors come from diverse backgrounds in art history, cultural history, comparative literature, and artistic, theatrical and curatorial practice, and all tackle the issue of 'articulate objects' from a range of lively and unexpected perspectives.

The question of what architecture is answered in this book with one sentence: Architecture is space created for human activities. The basic need to find food and water places these activities within a larger spatial field. Humans have learned and found ways to adjust to the various contextual difficulties that they faced as they roamed the earth. Thus rather than adapting, humans have always tried to change the context to their activities. Humanity has looked at the context not merely as a limitation, but rather as a spatial situation filled with opportunities that allows, through intellectual interaction, to change these limitations. Thus humanity has created within the world their own contextual bubble that firmly stands against the larger context it is set in. The key notion of the book is that architecture is space carved out of and against the context and that this process is deterministic.

Gregor Schneider (b. Rheydt, Germany, 1969; lives in Rheydt) is an influential and controversial artist whose work critics like to misunderstand. Disavowing the art object, he thinks by constructing spaces. In the mid1980s, he sought to pinpoint the idle state of action. He altered spaces by inserting duplicates, demolishing an economic way of thinking. Over the past fifteen years, he has gradually moved toward the field of politics and the public sphere. Schneider's works cross Germany's more recent history with the nonplaces of personal existence; he stages encounters between cultural moments that are alien to one another--for example, he wanted to build a black cube in the dimensions of the Kaaba outside St. Mark's Basilica in Venice (the plan was nixed by the censors). The catalogue aims to present his art as a cohesive whole spanning three decades. More than three hundred illustrations shed light on its stations; extensive annotations by Gregor Schneider himself and the editor and curator Ulrich Loock mark interconnections as well as contradictions within the oeuvre. The book touches on works Schneider created when he was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old (Adolescent Discontent, 1980s) as well as the insertion of spaces into a new venue (Dead House u r, 2001) or the grinding to dust of Joseph Goebbels's birthplace (The Spirit of the Nazi Era, 2015). It offers the firstever structured overview of Schneider's oeuvre in its entirety.