On my cultural hike through London this week with Isabel Legate (The Animal Talk), I managed to stimulate my creative pores which have been in dire need of exfoliation lately. We did an art hike and visited Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre and The Saatchi Gallery - places I've really neglected this year.
Although a lot of work stood out and many pieces/artists have been penciled down and researched, there was one piece of work which inspired me to go home and raid my sister's Beanie Baby collection and really start experimenting again. I didn't photograph the actual piece in question (but its at Hayward if you're interested) and I've since realised that I'm familiar with other works by the artist who are the Vienna based art collective 'Gelitin'. They're famed for their 'Hase' project (2005) in which they placed a gigantic stuffed pink rabbit on a hill overlooking a small village in Italy and it will be on display until 2025. I think that's enough time for a quick fixed-geer bike ride to Piemonte.
(description by the artists)
"The things one finds wandering in a landscape: familiar things and utterly unknown, like a flower one has never seen before, or, as Columbus discovered, an inexplicable continent; and then, behind a hill, as if knitted by giant grandmothers, lies this vast rabbit, to make you feel as small as a daisy."
"The toilet-paper-pink creature lies on its back: a rabbit-mountain like Gulliver in Lilliput. Happy you feel as you climb up along its ears, almost falling into its cavernous mouth, to the belly-summit and look out over the pink woolen landscape of the rabbitàs body, a country dropped from the sky; ears and limbs sneaking into the distance; from its side flowing heart, liver and intestines."
"Happily in love you step down the decaying corpse, through the wound, now small like a maggot, over woolen kidney and bowel. Happy you leave like the larva that gets its wings from an innocent carcass at the roadside. Such is the happiness which made this rabbit."
I think its obvious that Gelitin create situations which encourage people to interact with one another, humorously abandoning 'the intellectual art pout' as they share anecdotes about their favourite stuffed toy as a child. They exercise every use of medium to childlike excess like the performance and installation 'Sweatwat' (2005) which converted Gagosian Gallery in London into a private water park and sauna, with furniture stacked up on the flooded floor which aimed to liberate the inner child and allow the joy and relaxation of everybody through Yoga, dancing, drinking, singing - simple or sophisticated pleasures. It seems a playful, eccentric and ravishing approach to design that scorns the burden of intellect and rattles the imagination and I really wish I could have experienced it!
"I love the rabbit the rabbit loves me."
They've exhibited pretty much everywhere around the big ole globe since 1993 and boast a wealth of work. The group itself is comprised of four artists who first met in 1978 and they've been playing and working and growing together ever since.
http://www.gelitin.net/mambo/
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