DAY 178

UNEXPECTED ART FORMS

The Dead House

THE TRANSFORMATIONS UNDERGONE BY A HOME

Gregor Schneider made a series of bizarre, illogical changes to his own home in an artistic work known as “Totes Haus u r” (Dead House—Unterheydener street, Rheydt).

Schneider began to transform his home at the age of 16, after his father died. Some consider the Dead House to be a cathartic exploration of the incomprehensible, uncontrollable nature of death.²⁰

The German artist created false partitions, windows leading nowhere, winding corridors, lead-lined walls, and rotating parlors. In the moldy, dark cellar of the Dead House, Schneider hung a disco ball from the ceiling, drawing a macabre association between the inverse mysteries of love and death, Eros and Thanatos.²¹

Schneider stirred controversy by proposing the creation of a public space in a museum “for people to die in”. He was disturbed by modern society’s practice of sticking our dying into sterile, lifeless hospitals far from sight, thus perpetually evading the reality of death.²²

Ironically, I researched Schneider’s work while sitting in a Victorian home-turned-coffee shop. Two tables away from me, a self-congratulatory college student was explaining to his peers that he knew exactly what he would be doing and where he would be living 40 years from now, still psychologically insulated from the unpredictable nature of his own mortality. He would do well, I thought, to become acquainted with the Dead House. —DJS