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Beach Cells A Dystopian Analysis

Decent Essays

Exposing social convention and its inexorable political control over human bodies Gregor Schneider’s 21 Beach Cells (2007)(Fig.1) reinvents the irony of ‘determined leisure’ found in Realist painter Edward Hopper’s implicitly dystopian work People in the Sun (1960)(Fig.2). The difference in practice and context shows a subtle and vital difference between what each work is saying. Hopper creates irony through the conventions of realism and composition: determined people of the fifties era trying to be at leisure, whilst Schneider through transformative architecture: current people determined to be at leisure. Both works are critical toward normative behaviors of the time through the artist maintaining distance from them.
Planted in the sands of Bondi beach 21 Beach Cells is a culturally sanitized replica of Guantanamo holding cages consisting of 21 4x4m spaces containing a beach umbrella, a sunbed and garbage bag for visitors . Being a German artist Schneider is observer to Australia, thus imparting experiences of the …show more content…

Yet the setting implies otherwise: audiences see beach amenities in each cell and a comforting chance of seeing past the idea of being in a cage and reclaiming it as beach- visitors occupy cells and the space is defeated as the cage becomes volleyball nets, family spaces and convenient borders. The space is overruled by the greater social architecture and leisure seeking- alluding to the ‘reclaiming the beach’ ideations of the 2005 Cronulla race riots. Schneider states it was the influence behind the work and so too Guantanamo Bay’s architecture. The structure of 21 Beach Cells is a grid made from typical local fencing. By virtue of the grid, the work is presented as a mere fragment from an infinitely larger fabric. Thus the grid operates from the work of art outward, compelling acknowledgement of a world beyond the

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