German artist seeks subject willing to die for art
Last Updated: Tuesday, April 22, 2008 | 1:12 PM ET
CBC News
A controversial German artist known for exploring death is searching for a dying volunteer to take part in an upcoming installation: taking his or her last breath while on display.
"Unfortunately today, death and the road to death are about suffering. Coming to terms with death — as I plan it — can take away the pain of dying for us," artist Gregor Schneider, 39, told the online edition of German daily Die Welt.
Schneider specified that that he is not just looking for anyone: the volunteer would have to fully understand the intention of the exhibit and have things in common with the artist himself.
Also, he added that he would seek the blessing of the volunteer's relatives and strictly control the location.
"It would be a private atmosphere with rules about visitors," said Schneider, who has been contemplating the installation for more than 10 years.
He is also looking for a gallery willing to serve as host.
Schneider won the prestigious Golden Lion Award for sculpture at the 2001 edition of the Venice Biennale contemporary art fair with his evolving work Dead House ur: a labyrinth of rooms, secret passages and dead-end corridors based on his childhood home that he continually constructs, dismantles and rebuilds.
Other notable artworks of his have also explored death and engendered a general feeling of unease among patrons.
Schneider won acclaim for Hannelore Reuen, a sculpture of a dead woman, and also created Man Cock, a chilling sculpture of a sexually aroused male corpse half-shrouded in a garbage bag.
In 2007, he raised an enormous metal enclosure on Australia's famed Bondi Beach that encouraged sunbathers to segregate themselves into four-by-four-metre "cells."
A current Parisian exhibit of Schneider's forces individual visitors to enter into a series of progressively smaller spaces until they end up in complete darkness and must find their own way out. The entire experience is captured on film.
