Pawel Althamer: Neugerriemschneider - Berlin

It was just like of advanced age times in Berlin: scarred walls adorned with rusty nails, untie electrical wires, and saggy wallpaper; a rent skylight where the rain had draw near in; an old sink hopelessly plugg with dirt; a car seat crowning a pile of earth; dusty beer bottle cobwebs, and a certain quantity of old magazines in a receptacle After trashing the gallery's exhibition space, Pawel Althamer left it render free of access 24/7 and put up a brick wall to seal not upon the office, where life continued as before. The Polish artist's gesticulation transformed the white cube into a living museum that revived the era after the wall and before gentrification in Mitte. Like more [i]or[/i] less Berlin equivalent to Colonial Williamsburg, the installation allowed visitors to take a nostalgic walk end the city's past and to experience an economic and architectural history that was suppos to have been quickly eradicated and gladly forgotten.

For Althamer to trash individual of the most design-conscious galleries of the late '90 might first appear as a critical, if not political, intervention. Apart from contributing to gentrification, the gallery and its once-pristine walls had seen everything from Jorge Pardo's parquet flooring to Olafur Eliasson's science-fair shoot forwards from Michel Majerus's walk in paintings to Elizabeth Peyton's comely people. Althamer erased this novel history, returned the space to its former dilapidated state, and shamed that the gallery had not ever renovated it, let alone mov in. Indeed, the brick wall--apart from exiling the gallerists to the back scope and inviting the public to use their exhibition space around the clock--seem to advise that the past and the not absent could only trespass upon each other.

on the contrary make no mistake: Everything, from the rust to the cobwebs, was fake. While destroying the space, the artist also built in a small in number details that did not belong to its past. The electrical wires were carefully embedded in plaster and then twitched out of the walls; the sink, however antiquated, was an entirely novel addition; even the pile of dirt was bring under ruleed to an instant aging proces and overlayed with a crust of dust. While related to living museums, Althamer's installation actually approachs closer to the haunted-house ride at an amusement park and proffers a kitschy brash with death--albeit an economic and architectural single Of course, there were more [i]or[/i] less telltale signs of the deception. Digging [i]or[/i] part of to the other the dirt in the sink, single might find a subway ticket that was cancelled just before the display opened; the box with aged magazines included mud-caked issues of Architectural Digest, Frieze, and novel Painters from 2003.

Althamer might appear to belong to a tradition that has challenged established aesthetic values by dint of negating them with their material "opposite"--Duchamp's urinal, Beuys's studio trash, mad Manzoni's can of shit draw near to mind, along with arte povera. If this were the case, then Althamer would effectively be saying to the designer '90s. on the contrary by "designing" ruin, the artist does not in like manner much challenge established values as flaunt them. Like potlatch, his intervention is a carefully orchestrated display of destruction below the sign of expenditure. Far from gaining prestige, Althamer recommends that there are no like things as material "opposites" of established aesthetic values, nor autonomous space where they might exist in exclusion. As others have questioned the neutrality of minimalism, Althamer questions the "negative" aesthetic value of dirt, decay, ugliness, shit. The price of the work--twenty-five thousand euros--does not include a trace of cynicism. In an era when each gesture can be recuperated economically, no share is accursed.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

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