Desolation Row  Kafka on 24th Street: Gregor Schneider turns a
white cube in Chelsea into a black hole  A funny thing happened
on my way to review the blind alley Gregor Schneider has
fashioned out of Barbara Gladstone's ground-floor Chelsea
gallery. It was wide open while under construction, so I went
in, twice: once, a week before it was finished, then two days
later. Both times it was chilling. A bare cavern outfitted in
raw plywood and plaster, lit by a lone light, it was a world
apart and unto itself, a dank passageway into an existential
dimension, the Eastern Bloc in the early 1980s, or someplace
haunted. Whatever it was, it wasn't here or now. It was Franz
Kafka writ in wood, eerily familiar yet trashy and scary—a place
bums might go to blow one another. It sent shivers down my
spine.  Then Schneider finished it—I mean he really finished it.
517 West 24th, as it's titled, cuts a 15-foot-wide and 45-foot-
long blunted L-shaped channel from the sidewalk into the
Gladstone space. It is accessible 24 hours