Paweł Althamer

It was just like old times in Berlin: scarred walls adorned with rusty nails, loose electrical wires, and saggy wallpaper; a broken skylight where the rain had come in; an old sink hopelessly plugged with dirt; a car seat crowning a pile of earth; dusty beer bottles, cobwebs, and some old magazines in a box. After trashing the gallery’s exhibition space, Pawel Althamer left it open 24/7 and put up a brick wall to seal off the office, where life continued as before. The Polish artist’s gesture transformed the white cube into a living museum that revived the era after the wall and before gentrification in Mitte. Like some Berlin equivalent to Colonial Williamsburg, the installation allowed visitors to take a nostalgic walk through the city’s past and to experience an economic and architectural history that was supposed to have been quickly eradicated and gladly forgotten.

For Althamer to trash one of the most design-conscious galleries of the late ’90s might first appear as a critical, if not political, intervention. Apart from contributing to gentrification, the gallery and its oncepristine walls had seen everything from Jorge Pardo’s parquet flooring to Olafur Eliasson’s science-fair projects, from Michel Majerus’s walk-in paintings to Elizabeth Peyton’s pretty people. Althamer erased this recent history, returned the space to its former dilapidated state, and pretended that the gallery had never renovated it, let alone moved in. Indeed, the brick wall—apart from exiling the gallerists to the back room and inviting the public to use their exhibition space around the clock—seemed to suggest that the past and the present could only trespass upon each other.

But make no mistake: Everything, from the rust to the cobwebs, was fake. While destroying the space, the artist also built in a few details that did not belong to its past. The electrical wires were carefully embedded in plaster and then pulled out of the walls; the sink, however antiquated, was an entirely new addition; even the pile of dirt was subjected to an instant aging process and covered with a crust of dust. While related to living museums, Althamer’s installation actually comes closer to the haunted-house ride at an amusement park and offers a kitschy brush with death—albeit an economic and architectural one. Of course, there were some telltale signs of the deception. Digging through the dirt in the sink, one might find a subway ticket that was cancelled just before the show opened; the box with old magazines included mud-caked issues of Architectural Digest, Frieze, and Modern Painters from 2003.

Althamer might appear to belong to a tradition that has challenged established aesthetic values by negating them with their material “opposites”—Duchamp’s urinal, Beuys’s studio trash, and Manzoni’s can of shit come to mind, along with arte povera. If this were the case, then Althamer would effectively be saying good-bye to the designer ’90s. But by “designing” ruin, the artist does not so much challenge established values as flaunt them. Like potlatch, his intervention is a carefully orchestrated display of destruction under the sign of expenditure. Far from gaining prestige, Althamer suggests that there are no such 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 every gesture can be recuperated economically, no share is accursed.

—Jennifer Allen