November 6, 2005

It's whimsical -- and you become the fly on the corpse.

I like this art:
Gelatin - also known as Ali Janka, Florian Reither, Tobias Urban and Wolfgang Gantner, 30-something friends who met at summer camp in 1978 - have created a 200-foot-long, 20-foot-tall bunny knitted from wool and stuffed with hay. Since late September, it has lain prostrate at the summit of the Colletto Fava, a nearly mile-high peak above the rustic village of Artesina. It looks cute, all soft and cotton-candy-hued - until one notices that it's meant to be quite dead. The rabbit's (stuffed, colorful) entrails stream out on the scrubby ground; its mouth is open in a wide and surprised "O."

"It's rotting away and the intestines are running out of its side, but it's really sweet," Mr. Janka said. "It has a warmth and a gravity. It's nice to lie on it." It's especially nice if you're interested in the way things rot: grass has sprouted through the rabbit's knitted skin, it's beginning to ooze a brown liquid, and animals have foraged inside. Decay, it seems, is the whole point. "You climb upon the rabbit and feel like a maggot in its flesh," Mr. Janka said. "And then you are so happily transforming into a fly, and floating away."

Then there's Gelatin's other work:
[A] massive icicle made of urine for this year's Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; a nude "human birthday cake" - with candles held in a way that defies description in a family newspaper - for the 2003 Frieze Art Fair in London. And in the summer of 2000 they secretly removed a window on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center, then inched out onto a homemade balcony where they were photographed. On Nov. 16, the group is to take up residence at the Leo Koenig Gallery in Chelsea - and live there, in a box, for seven straight days, making free facsimiles of any object or document visitors give them.

1 comment:

knox said...

The urine icycle not-so-fondly reminds me of the pee snowcone in "Jackass" the movie.