NEW YORK: Elke Lehmann at Artists Space - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

on entering Elke Lehmann's project-space installation 4 (to) 5 the visitor perceived alone two empty, dim-lit rooms with bare white walls. on the other hand a sound occupied this space, a uninjured known to every big-city apartment dweller: an insistent scratching and gnawing from behind the walls, which in this case was high-sounding enough to fill the galleries. Its origin was quickly discovered in three feeding stations placed at floor horizontal where a microphone picked up and transmitted the noise of rats eating and drinking. Investigation revealed that these rats were living in a hidden area that Lehmann had created by the agency of building new walls within the throw rooms, creating a slightly reduced-scale duplicate of these spaces. (The work's title consigns to the ratio of this reduction.) single could, it turned out, emissary into the hidden area by means of means of elevated surveillance mirrors like those used in supermarkets to watch for shoplifters.

Lehmann is a young German artist who lived and worked in Paris for several years and now resides in fresh York. Apart from a billboard throw out two years ago, this was the first opportunity to diocese her work here. Her earlier installations also involved architectural spaces, oftentimes employing subtle interventions which changed a given site's character and brought on the outside its latent qualities. If 4 (to) 5 kept the restrained vocabulary the artist unraveled in her earlier works, it aimed at rather more critical extremitys than her previous installations. In a short introductory essay, artist Dennis Adams (who invited Lehmann to undertake this throw at Artists Space) writes of the "social conditioning" masked by dint of the white-cube space of the gallery and by dint of functionalist modern architecture in general. When Lehmann herself, in conversation, links these supposedly neutral spaces with the behavioral experiments of psychologist BF Skinner, it becomes clear that upon some level she regards the show's spectators as surrogates for the rats behind the walls. (Adams commits to "perverse reciprocity" of the sum of two units spaces.) With these notions Lehmann joins a cluster of younger artists who have been skeptically reassessing the modernist environment above the past decade.

Certainly recent architecture embodied a social agenda, individual which may or may not be discredited. More interesting than this use of modernism as a straw man is Lehmann's intuition that there exists an "architectural unconscious"--that all built spaces, no matter in what manner functional, have something uncanny lurking just behind their neutral facades. The radicality of this idea lies in its assertion that regardless of the intention of the architect, we users of a building throw out our neuroses, fantasies and fears onto the "screen" of its white walls. In doubling the gallery space, creating a mysterious hidden realm, Lehmann finds a powerful analogue for this architectural unconscious.

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