A Review by Tsutomu Saito
Originally published in Japanese on note.com
July 27, 2025
The Paradox of Alienation in Gregor Schneider’s Work
The art project KOBE 2019: TRANS- that I experienced in Kobe continues to resurface in my thoughts with surprising regularity. Recently, while developing projects that engage with Surrealism, I encountered the concept of dépaysement anew. This technique of creating unease by placing objects outside their proper context seemed to connect with the alienation effects I had felt in Gregor Schneider’s work.
The Expression of Powerlessness
“There was nothing else I could do.”※1 We should take Gregor Schneider’s words literally. This is neither modesty nor evasion. When even the will to express something becomes untrustworthy in our contemporary moment, how is art possible at all? Schneider’s powerlessness represents the most honest response to this question.
Space Manipulation as Experiential Device
The Schneider work presented at KOBE 2019: TRANS- only comes into being when viewers are physically drawn inside. In the installation of consecutive rooms, viewers are forced to pass through what appear to be identical white spaces, one after another. This experience can never be captured through external observation alone.
Part of the installation included doors arranged in the concourse area, positioned so visitors could escape if they began feeling unwell during the experience (photography was prohibited inside each room). As Schneider explains, “You enter a room, exit again, hope that the experience remains there, and then invite other people into that room.”※1 The work’s realization depends entirely on the viewer’s physical participation. However, this participation is not simply an immersive experience.
As viewers move through these successive similar spaces, they inevitably begin searching for differences. Critical cognition kicks in: “What is different from the previous room?” “What does this space mean?” But precisely because those differences either don’t exist or are too minute to grasp, perception loses its frame of reference, and judgment becomes suspended.
The Suspension of Perception and the Provocation of Self-Reflection
In the Goebbels family home project, Schneider “carefully examined the household items and inventory, then thoroughly destroyed the building’s interior and disposed of the debris.”※2 Viewers confronting the traces of this obsessive demolition work attempt to read historical meaning into it. However, the destruction of a building that had “continued to exist as an ordinary house in the neighborhood”※2 for 75 years after the war provides no interpretable historical lesson. Instead, viewers face the fundamental question: “What am I looking at right now?” Are they trying to learn history, seeking an aesthetic experience, or simply watching a video work? This self-reflective questioning becomes the core of the work experience.
A similar structure emerges in Disappeared Reality at the former Hyogo Prefectural Institute for Health and Living Sciences in Kobe. The “entirely white-painted floor”※2 materializes the act of concealment itself. As Schneider points out, this building existed “in the middle of the city, yet no one paid attention to the fact that viral research and biological experiments were being conducted inside.”※6 The white-painted space paradoxically makes this invisibility visible.
Yet what viewers experience there is not the exposure of what was hidden. Rather, the mere fact of concealment emerges with overwhelming presence. What couldn’t be seen remains forever invisible under the white paint, but this very invisibility becomes the center of the experience.
The Paradox of Alienation in Gregor Schneider
When placing themselves within Gregor Schneider’s spaces, viewers first unconsciously “enter into” them. Opening the entrance door, proceeding down the hallway, crossing rooms, turning again at dead ends—in these moments we instinctively try to understand the spatial composition and adapt our bodies to the environment. That is, as “subjects participating in space,” we attempt to position ourselves within it. The viewer’s subjectivity is swallowed by the spatial structure and rather dismantled. There, the possibility for active recognition or judgment is stripped away, and a sensation emerges where the body simply follows the space. This could be called the immersive “sleepwalking experience” that Schneider’s spaces provide.
But simultaneously, we feel “discomfort” in that space. For example, all rooms are arranged to appear without difference, creating a sense of closure that differs from actual buildings. This unease creates “distance” from the space. Viewers cannot help but become conscious that what lies before them is clearly a “constructed space” and a “staged environment,” from which a kind of objectifying gaze emerges. The space suddenly transforms from something “to be experienced” to something “to be observed.”
In this way, both the sensation of immersive sleepwalking and the effect of provoking an objectifying gaze appear to emerge simultaneously. Viewers are drawn into the space while simultaneously maintaining distance from it, invited toward an analytical attitude. This simultaneity of immersion and distancing—the contradiction-free coexistence of “entering into” and “stepping back to observe”—is what I would like to name “Paradoxical Dépaysement.”
Generally, dépaysement and alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt) are concepts that operate through opposite logics. The former brings immersive extraordinariness through disconnection from familiar environments, while the latter secures distance from objects of perception through staging and devices, encouraging a cool gaze. However, Schneider’s spatial installations present these two sensations not as separate, but rather in an intertwined state.
Viewers, while being drawn into the interior of the space, continue to sense that they “don’t understand” it. While the space invites immersion, recognition always maintains fissures, and the gaze somehow recovers its coolness. This inseparable entanglement of “being in the midst of experience” and “viewing that experience from a distance” happening simultaneously is the peculiarity of Schneider’s spaces and the paradox of sensation occurring there. Immersion doesn’t dissolve into presence, and alienation doesn’t arrive at clarity. Both continue to overlap ambiguously throughout, coexisting without resolution.
This cohabitation of contradiction opens new horizons for the concept of dépaysement while revealing that it is neither simple “alienation” nor “fantasy.” That is, it represents a distinctly contemporary paradox of viewing experience—being “absorbed while remaining awake.”
Taking the experience in consecutive similar spaces as an example, viewers are placed in the following paradoxical situation:
Immersive experience: Physically incorporated into the space’s interior, forced to move and pass through
Critical cognition: Attempting to discern differences and interpret meaning
Cognitive failure: Comparison and judgment malfunction because differences either don’t exist or are imperceptible
Provocation of self-reflection: The fundamental question “What am I doing?” arises
Through this process, viewers are simultaneously drawn away from and pulled into the work. Critical distancing and dreamlike immersion occur simultaneously in opposition, with neither reaching complete fulfillment.
What’s important is that this is not Schneider’s intentional strategy. He speaks of “staring at walls, being interested in every irregularity on their surface: the smallest hole, the slightest protrusion.”※1 This action is not performed to discover something. His production, driven by powerlessness, is pure repetition that aims neither for criticism nor immersion.
This is precisely why unexpected effects emerge. The expression of powerlessness ends up disrupting existing aesthetic categories. The alienation effect doesn’t lead to critical recognition, and dépaysement doesn’t bring poetic transcendence. Both remain frustrated and intertwined, generating new forms of cognition.
The Materialization of Unknowability
The curation of KOBE: TRANS- intended to “transform familiar landscapes and ‘leap’ into otherworldly dimensions or alternative spaces.”※3 However, Schneider’s work doesn’t provide a leap into the surreal. Instead, it materializes the unknowability of reality. “People appear to be looking, but actually see nothing,” Schneider says.※6 His spatial manipulation presents this fact of “not seeing” in experiential form. What viewers see in the white-painted abandoned building is the impossibility of seeing itself.
By thoroughly transforming existing buildings and urban spaces, Schneider allows former functions and time to survive only as physical traces. The “meaning,” “history,” and “signs” that should originally be narrated are thoroughly stripped away. Therefore, viewers confronting the work face the paradoxical situation where “the more you try to know, the more elusive it becomes” and “the more you look, the more opaque it gets.”
This unknowability is not simple mysticism. Rather, it crystallizes the structural characteristics of the “invisible” in contemporary society. Hidden history, invisible institutions, forgotten memory don’t simply not exist—they possess the duality of existing while remaining unseen. Schneider’s powerlessness is the most honest response to this duality.
The Persistence of Paradox
Schneider explains: “Even if I wanted to know everything about the external world surrounding me, it would be impossible. Just as I call the external world my ‘second skin,’ I cannot see all of my own skin.”※6 This acknowledgment of impossibility is the starting point of his practice.
Paradoxical Dépaysement functions as a paradoxical device that makes contact with this impossibility possible. It doesn’t aim for resolution or integration. Rather, the persistence of contradiction itself opens new possibilities for recognition.
The peculiar experience of being “forced to search for differences within a lack of differences” throws viewers into a constant state of bewilderment. This ultimate ambivalence—”being swallowed by strangeness while wanting to critique it, yet finding no foothold for criticism”—is the core of Paradoxical Dépaysement.
Production that begins from the point where “there was nothing else I could do” paradoxically possesses stronger intensity than anything else. The concept of Paradoxical Dépaysement is an attempt to theorize this paradox. It is not Schneider’s intention, but rather a conceptualization from the viewer’s side of the effects generated by his powerlessness.
References ※1 Gregor Schneider Interview, Ulrich Loock, https://www.nextleveluk.com/article/interview
※2 Wako Works of Art “SUPPE AUSLÖFFELN” Exhibition Information, https://www.wako-art.jp/exhibitions/gregor-schneider-suppe-ausloffeln/
※3 Bijutsu Techo “New Art Festival ‘Art Project: TRANS-‘ Born in Kobe,” https://bijutsutecho.com/magazine/news/headline/19040
※6 Madame Figaro “Art Using Kobe’s Abandoned Buildings Questions the Relationship Between People and Space,” https://madamefigaro.jp/series/interview/191028-attitude1.html