Bad Space

Abstract

Gregor Schneider’s domestic installation space Haus u r is space gone bad, space rendered alien. The processual installation, which defies easy categorization as an artwork, has since 1985 involved the obsessive deconstruction and reconstruction of the interiors of Schneider’s family home in Germany. Anchored by an interrogation of space as a form of mediated materiality, this article pursues the ways in which space can be languaged. By first arguing that conventional understandings of space reify a spatial anthropocentrism, it then explores the way in which Haus u r makes evident the potential for an autonomous spatial languaging beyond culturally imposed presuppositions relating to space. Through the symbolic disembodiment of its viewers and the repudiation of their perceptual agency, Schneider’s piece deposes the supremacy of the human as a perceiving and meaning-making subject, allowing for the conceptualization of other linguistic and spatial agencies outside of human paradigms of interpretation.