No escape from the Dead House

Perhaps the most striking thing about Apocalypse at the Royal Academy in London is the unorthodox means of entry. Once you pass Richard Prince's joke paintings on the stairs, you come to the first gallery, where German artist Gregor Schneider is exhibiting his Cellar.

There is no obvious way in. The attendants helpfully direct you to an inconspicuous, unlikely looking, awkwardly angled opening, set very low down in the wall on the left. It is about the size of a small kitchen-cupboard door, and you have to bend down and manoeuvre your way through it.

You find yourself heading down a narrow stairway in half-light to cramped, spartan, seemingly derelict corridors which lead you, rather horribly, only to musty, gloomy, waterlogged rooms and dead ends. Pack in just a small number of visitors and it feels unpleasantly crowded and claustrophobic, with echoes of Fred West, the lunatic in The Vanishing and many other horror stories, real or fictional, it is all too easy to recall. Cellar is a detailed recreation of just a small part of Schneider's Haus ur, an actual house in Rheydt, a small town in Germany, which he has progressively modified over a 15-year period into a disorientating, rather frightening labyrinth of rooms within rooms, false walls, dead ends, logic-defying passageways and hidden openings.

This Dead House ur is documented in an exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, in the form of myriad photographs of the house itself and of some of its staged recreations. There is also a video by Schneider, an amateurish, murky, jumpy and exasperating tour that features one or two nasty surprises along the way and will probably leave you desperately anxious to get out of the damned place. Incredibly, Schneider began work on the house when he was just 16 years old, which means he has been working on it for half his life. It was owned by his family and, one visitor reported, its proximity to an industrial estate made it undesirable as a residence. So the young Schneider began to amend the interior as though he were a singularly deranged DIY enthusiast: building walls in front of existing, perfectly good walls, for example.

The underlying desire seems to be to turn the house back in on itself. From inside, what seem to be windows and doors leading to the outside world turn out to be - alarmingly, one imagines - decoys.

He has also obsessively soundproofed rooms, creating one insulated cell that offers no means of exit once you are inside, because there are no door-handles. Sheets of lead between walls and floors mean that even X-rays cannot penetrate the internal spaces. Windows are coated with layers of paint so that natural light doesn't penetrate. Schneider prefers the simulated daylight of halogen lamps, and adds to the illusion by situating an electric fan in an intermediate space to create the impression that fresh air is blowing through a room. He seems, also, to enjoy reinforcing any suspicion we might have that he is some sort of madman. When he describes how, if you open a succession of windows, the last one reveals merely a blank white wall, he notes that visitors at this point usually express the desire to get out, sharpish. He adds: "I'd love to stop someone from getting away some time, but I have never dared to yet."

Even the few relatively autonomous sculptural objects that are included in the Douglas Hyde show come across as being related to the house, like the heavy, suspended Dark Star, its exterior fashioned from a sound-insulating material. The collapsed star, caught at a stage of imploding in on itself, traps huge amounts of energy, a dead object like the house.

Artistically precocious and self-conscious, Schneider's first show, held in his early teens, was called Pubescent Doldrums, and he has remained true to a vein of adolescent negativity. In use of materials, Joseph Beuys is the most immediate influence that comes to mind, and Schneider readily acknowledges his importance. But where Beuys was a Utopian visionary who believed in art as a means to bring about a revolution in human consciousness and society, Schneider comes across as death-centred, inward-looking and anti-social. It should be said, however, that despite the gloomy tenor of his work, he has come out with one or two surprisingly Beuysian utterances about changing the world.

He was exempted from military service on the basis that he was suffering from "a perceptual disorder" and was "mentally ill." This diagnosis was made after he explained at his interview how he spent his time. Not surprisingly, perhaps, if a remark from another interview several years back is typical: "You can stand in front of a wall for hours on end, looking at it. You can do that once, twice, for a whole month or even longer, and then at some point you can tell everyone about that wall."

Absolutely.

The creation of the Rheydt house has led to a hectic round of exhibitions for him, plus the official seal of approval with the news, just announced, that he will represent Germany at next year's Venice Biennale. There, presumably, he will transform the impeccably modernist, minimalist spaces of the imposing German pavilion into yet another incarnation of Haus ur, a gothic nightmare within the modernist dream. For the strange fact is that he is now as much a creation of his house as the house is a creation of his.

"Perhaps," he said, when admitting his ambition to prevent someone leaving, "I am the one that can't get out." And, for the moment at least, in artistic terms, there seems to be no escape from Haus ur for him.

Dead House ur is at the Douglas Hyde Gallery until November 25th. Tel: 01-608-1116