Wednesday, June 28, 2006














The May 2006 issue of Tokion has a little article about Austrian art collective Gelitin and their gigantic stuffed bunny.

This is Gelitin's beautiful press release that reads like poetry. It does make me happy!

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 rabbitís 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 love the rabbit the rabbit loves me.


I have a small obsession with Gelitin right now after reading the Tokion article and checking out their website. My first impression was a bunch of boys looking for an excuse to get naked and run around with candles in their butts and say it's in the name of art. Closer inspection has me thinking this collective is actually capturing childhood and that transition to adulthood, which is so succinctly epitomized for me through projects like this bunny and Otto Volante. That wondrous and sometimes frightening and nonsensical whimsy of life through a child's eyes.

So, the bunny will be on display on this mountain in Italy for 20 years, metamorphosing into a rotten carcass and then nothing, just like it's life counterpart. Plenty of time to crest the belly-summit.

3 Comments:

Blogger Trevor said...

This bunny is to what all poetry aspires. I say this with no irony. And, oddly, the more I say, the less true it will sound. Thanks, Ammie, for introducing this wonderful thing to me.

chuishde!
TC

June 29, 2006 at 12:47:00 AM PDT  
Blogger Willard said...

If only I could make a bunny from toilet paper that big.. I could quit my day-job.

hm. Must think about that.

I was thinking about blowing up the pages of the comic I'm penning at the moment huge- like onto sheets of plywood- or maybe have the entire "book" fold out into a giant poster 8'x16'- or something. A lot could be done with a format.

Time to clear outa here. ha ha I am 10 minutes late to work already- and I still gotta drop the kids off at the pool and defoliate and et. cetera.

June 29, 2006 at 6:12:00 AM PDT  
Blogger Unknown said...

Ammie, I'm currently working for the centre for contemporary art... we're organizing a festival of young conceptual art. that's just the object (or installation) in the format of our exhibition ;)) hihi))
we organize exhibitions for such kind of artists, we beg the institutions to give them grants and to pay their trips... waaah, when thinking of all this I want to make such a thing myself))

June 30, 2006 at 7:44:00 AM PDT  

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