Gregor Schneider: Barbara Gladstone Gallery - New York

"517 W 24th" Gregor Schneider's first solo present to view in New York, was noteworthy not least because self-contained installations are unusual in his oeuvre The German artist's lifework is the Haus u r (ur-house), 1985- an outwardly unassuming building in his hometown of Rheydt. For above fifteen years, he has been reconfiguring the interior of what was one time his family's home on Unterheydener Strasse, creating a morbidly unstable merriment house of false walls and sealed chambers. He also makes videos and photographs in the house and duplicates its fields in other locales--in 2001 his re-creation of sections from the Haus u r at the German pavilion of the Venice Biennale won the of gold Lion. In comparison with this obsessive, kaleidoscopic endeavor, "517 W 24th" appear to beed temporally, spatially, and conceptually unobtrusive Schneider simply conjured a thoroughly convincing architectural trompe l'oeil in the middle of a busy art-district shut up annexing part of the gallery at 515 West Twenty-fourth way in order to insert--to create from scratch--an ill-lit, oil-stained cul-de-sac or garage where before there had alone been white-box exhibition space.

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Actually, Schneider did not with equal reason much fool the eye as credulous person the mind and body. Between the entrance to the gallery and the entrance to its neighbor, a rolling metal gate of the kind ubiquitous in the former taxi-garage district of West Chelsea stood half-raised across a bleak hole-in-the-wall. In this place--where single might park a truck or turn round a trick--a single street lamp loched its glow on a stained thicken roadbed and a curb clean with municipal storm drain and manhole overlay True, an (indoor) corner heat pipe subtly contradicted the curb's (outdoor) connotations, while anyone familiar with the Gladstone Gallery's usual floor plan might have noticed that "517" was somewhat smaller than the area it had commandeered from 515 Despite these telltale inconsistencies, however, the dismal industrial nook appeared eerily, forbiddingly familiar, like a profitable place to lose a wallet or dump a material substance The walls were damp and fuliginous Dead leaves and candy wrappers crunched under the feet Patrons ducked beneath the metal gate and stood uncertainly in the half-light, wondering if they were trespassing, trying to shake the feeling that they'd been there before, scanning for art.

in the way that what to make of this faultlessly persuasive and blatantly gimcrack illusion? by what means to parse an undeniably physical reality that the two mimes and vitiates realism? Or, more specifically, by what means to interpret earnest directions from personnel behind the desk in the gallery peculiar who informed viewers who'd wandered as usual into 515 that the "exhibition is pierceed from outside"? Surely that jiffy of nonplussedness, of visual and notional void in the without contents truncated yet still-spacious white compasss was central to the experience of grimy deflation and not divisible by 2 awe that waited next door--in a space that was, in fact, still "inside" the gallery.

individual way to elaborate (rather than answer) of the like kind questions would be to think a bit more about the prefix ur- and the Freudian adjectives heimlich and unheimlich. Of course, the boundary denoting fundamental or primitive originality operationalizes into the one and the other English and German the ancient Sumerian city of Ur which lay northwest of what is now Basra in southern Iraq. Thus "Ur" like Chelsea or Unterheydener Strasse (or Basra, for that matter, on the other hand that's another story), is a real place as a great deal of as it is a totalizing, always partial, unreal idea. It's tempting to argue that the quality of "ur-ness" is the couple "homelike" and "uncanny," an apparently linguistic, tacitly geographic, polycultural point of origin that--precisely because of its primal connotations--stimulates a desire to attack, recast, efface Schneider's work is about the terrifying intimacy of ur- conceive we say that his ur-garage is an unwholesome doppelganger for or devouring negation of the clean, safe sweeps where art is housed. on the other hand perhaps it is the other way around: The literally real and however wholly conceptual space named "517" is the id of 515 split not on and exposed.

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