“Are you boring to yourself after a while?”: Renata Stih and Freider Schnock talk the Past and the Public

by Willy Dintenfass

While working on their 1994 project Bus Stop, German artists Renata Stih and Freider Schnock learned an interesting piece of information about their nation’s history. While doing research for the project—a social sculpture that took the shape of multiple bus stops put up across Berlin for fictional busses that went to different Holocaust sites—Stih and Schnock discovered that the forests in Weimar where Goethe would famously take walks were also the site of the concentration camp Buchenwald. This location, which physically connects events separated by time, events from opposing ends of the spectrum of Germany’s contributions to civilization, is an apt and powerful representation of the ideas Stih and Schnock pursue in their art.

Stih and Schnock delivered the keynote address at the Midwest Graduate Interdisciplinary Conference put on by the Center with a lecture entitled “Memory, Art and Social Sculpture.” Stih and Schnock are primarily concerned with memory as a social function, the calling forth of the past into the present, specifically in terms of public spaces. Several of their projects, such as Places of Remembrance, involve the physical overlaying of a map from a city’s past onto a map from the present, but a similar conceptual overlaying is at the heart of all their work. Stih and Schnock are interested in excavating the social and cultural sedimentary layers of a given location, reformulating these layers into sculpture, and installing them, in the present, in that location.

Functionality is also key to their work, as evidenced by their critique of Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (of which Stih said, “I have my doubts as to whether something abstract can touch people,” and perhaps more on target, “You can’t just look at the Holocaust in a formal manner.”) Stih and Schnock conceive of a range of functions for their work and are very conscious of who their audience is for each project, using whatever techniques and media are necessary to get their message across. They aim to educate, raise awareness, provoke remembrance, and force negotiations with the past, specifically related to the Holocaust. They also clearly delight in the pleasure of making connections within and about their work, and are definitely down for a little rabble rousing.

A brief question and answer session revealed an intense belief in their work, alongside a slight defensiveness towards perceived criticisms of their projects. This led to a few lively exchanges. My favorite exchange took place at the end, when an audience member asked if the artists worried that their sculptures might become routine and begin to go unnoticed after awhile, just as we fail to notice spaces we’re in often after some time. “Are you boring to yourself after a while?” Stih responded. Clearly, Stih and Schnock believe their work is part of a larger project of connection-making, that we live large parts of our lives in public spaces, and connecting these spaces with the past and making memory a visible entity situates our experiences within a history and a context that help reveal not only where we are, but who we are as well.

For more info, check out their website.