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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 25.3 (2003) 86-90



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Gregor Schneider's Totes Haus ur

Philip Auslander

[Figures]

Imagine a number of houses, each with many rooms in each house, in each room innumerable cupboards, shelves, boxes, and somewhere, in each one of them, a tiny bead. It is easy enough to find the right house, room, cupboard, and shelf. But it is more difficult to find that tiny bead that rolled out today, glittered for a moment, and then disappeared from sight.

—Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares 1

In this marvelously evocative passage, the great Russian theatre theorist Constantin Stanislavski, describes the actor's quest for the right emotion memory. Squeezing through the tight spaces of Gregor Schneider's Totes Haus ur at the 2001 Venice Biennale, feeling trapped, rubbing up against clammy walls, chancing on other adventurers, I felt as if I were engaged in such a quest. Like the psyche imagined by Stanislavski as multiple dwellings, the Totes Haus ur is actually several houses. It is made from parts of the Haus ur (begun in 1985)—which is both Schneider's home in Rheydt, Germany, and his major piece as an artist—and is also an autonomous work. It contains multiple houses within itself that register Schneider's ongoing project of reconstructing the interior of the house; his own description of the project reads, in part: "wall in front of wall, wall in front of wall, wall behind wall, passage in room, room in room." 2 Unlike the orderly psyche described by Stanislavski, in which everything is easy to find until the last crucial moment, this labyrinthine environment felt like a particularly difficult place in which to locate the elusive bead, as if it were an architectural representation of a psyche so turned in on itself that the journey into it leads to dead ends, hazards, and conundrums like windows that open only onto other windows and rooms bathed in light that appears natural but is actually artificial. Or perhaps the Totes Haus ur is not so much the site of a quest as the product of a restless search that involves ripping out, moving, and rebuilding walls, doors, and whole rooms in the hope of finding or creating the place into which the invaluable bead disappeared.

For Stanislavski, emotion memory has to do with discovering an analogue in one's own experience for the emotions felt by the character to be portrayed and [End Page 86] drawing on that memory as a means of depicting the character. The audience never knows what emotion memories the actor is employing; their presence is intuited rather than perceived directly. No matter how compelling the surface of a performance may be, Stanislavskian acting is fundamentally about what is not shown to the audience and is known only to the actor. The resonance and emotional impact of the performance derive from the externally imperceptible presence of emotion memories in the actor's mind. It is clear that Schneider, too, is concerned largely with creating work whose expressiveness and impact derive from that which is present but not directly perceivable:

A whole world opens up with all sorts of things that are not recognizable but which are there and which influence the way we feel, think, and act, how we live our daily lives. . . . Cladding in various materials can alter the effect of a room without you quite being able to say why. Even the smallest protuberances and indentations on the finished surface of a wall can arouse a response in the visitor. And when that happens, the effect is registered separately from the cause. 3

As with emotion memory, an affective state is induced in the spectator, but the means by which it was created remain hidden behind the scenes—in the walls and under the floors.

Schneider's Totes Haus ur, which can be described as sculpture, installation, even architecture, is also theatrical. Schneider conflates two modern theatrical functions by creating an environment that is both scenographic and performative, both a space for...

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