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2007Gregor Schneider 13–20 June 2009
Download education notes (PDF 7pp) Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader. Visit the Adobe website to download a free copy. I wanted to find the point when my art was surrounding me completely but, at the same time, I could no longer recognise it ... My work is not about making you fearful. It is about helping you to reflect upon and overcome your fear. Gregor Schneider in Rachel Campbell-Johnston, ‘Gregor Schneider, the inner space man’, Times, 27 January 2009 My view of outside is broken up, fragmented. Inside too. But, as with a kaleidoscope, the lines of vision retain a certain order, a rational complex shape. As in a panopticon, there is no place to hide. No matter how far in you go, you remain as visible as you were on the outside. Sebastian Smee, ‘Captive audience’, Weekend Australian, 20–21 October 2007 |  In the teeth of the aggressive reassertion of cultural nationalisms, where boundaries may be physical, like mountain ranges or seas, or artificial, like lines in the sand, as real as ghetto walls or razor-wire, or as imaginary as paranoia, artists since 9/11 have made artworks poised between the scars of violence and dreams of hope. With an eye on the political atmosphere in Australia at the time – refugees detained in foreign transit stations, and race riots erupting on the beaches of Cronulla – Gregor Schneider transformed Sydney’s pleasure-loving Bondi Beach from 28 September to 21 October 2007 into a kind of ‘zone’, with a giant cage. Titled 21 beach cells, each 4 x 4 metre cell contained an air mattress, beach umbrella and a disconcerting, black plastic garbage bag (a recurring totem in Schneider’s work). Echoing Guantánamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray, the visitor venturing ‘inside’ was caught between security and surveillance, privacy and exposure, inside and outside. Suddenly Australia didn’t seem quite the egalitarian place, eroding those old certainties in the permanent join between a particular culture and a stable terrain. In June 2009, in collaboration with Herzliya Museum in Tel Aviv, the work was recreated on local Accadia Beach in Israel with the support of the Kaldor projects. Read more about Gregor Schneider. Watch video of Gregor Schneider's 21 beach cells on the Kaldor Public Arts Project website. Gregor Schneider’s 21 beach cells 2007 on Sydney’s Bondi Beach. Photo: Gregor Schneider Courtesy Kaldor Public Art Projects | WORLD EVENTSLabor leader Kevin Rudd becomes Australian Prime Minister Apple launches the iPhone ‘Residents’ of Second Life now more than 6 million Business and government in Estonia nearly shut down by a ‘botnet’ attack First Earth Hour as Sydneysiders turn off their lights as part of an energy-efficiency campaign Sydney covered in smoke after bushfires in the Blue Mountains, west of the city A cavalier (self portrait) by Frans van Mieris I stolen from the Art Gallery of NSW 15th Kaldor project Urs Fischer creates his Cockatoo Island installation on the site of an old convict prison on an island in Sydney Harbour 16th Kaldor project Gregor Schneider creates 21 beach cells on Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach, which in 2009, is recreated on Accadia Beach in Herzliya, Israel | ||
