Paint me paint me everywhere
Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art / KRAKOW (Poland)
13.10.2014 – 26.10.2014

Is this what’s going to happen here, too? This is the question that Krakovians are asking with growing amazement when looking at yet another album or catalogue of Gelatin, also known as gelitin – the most internationally famous Austrian artistic group.

There is certainly plenty to leaf through. For more than two decades, Wolfgang Gantner (b. 1968), Ali Janka (b. 1970), Florian Reither (b. 1970) and Tobias Urban (b. 1971) have, with their non-conformist, absurd activities – borderline theatre and performance, happening and activism that combine eroticism and sexuality with provocation – been demystifying commonly accepted assumptions about still-taboo themes and phenomena from the worlds of art and everyday life. Gelatin’s spectacular actions, full of panache and not entirely predictable, relate to the human body, the senses and gender aporia as well as to feelings of social resentment and stereotypes with a social and cultural dimension. The Austrians are possessed of an enviable suggestive quality and acrobatic agility. Gelatin’s Bad Good Boys are capable of the ad-hoc deployment of an entire toolbox of studio skills with a rich gamut of feelings and significance, from relaxed to irritated. Their imaginative undertakings are not without a sense of humour and a ludic licentiousness. Whilst engaging with sculptural form and matter, Gelatin usually sport vintage outfits complete with frippery not normally associated with the male gender, whose integral part is sexuality, eroticism and an element of nudity. With Gelatin, nakedness is not so much a theatrical costume, an expression of protest or a synonym for authenticity, but simply a fixture of their working clothes. In their works, form and a lack thereof piles up and writhes as if in a libertine boudoir. The dressing up, along with other aspects of the masquerade, also aim to turn opposites topsy-turvy and introduce a chaos of values; they signal a call to create and recreate again and again the desired shape of reality.

In spite of the provocative entertainment, there is method in the madness of the four artists from Vienna. Rather, the group practises a deceptive Art Forschung, singular artistic research, focused on the Sisyphean task of searching for beauty and the new incarnations of the anatomy of form: lost but not forever, both pure and dirty, low and high, familiar and alien. ‘What matters to us,’ says Ali Janka, ‘is that many things don’t work’, implying that the collective from Vienna has long left behind the rigorous criteria of the modernist canon that still presents ‘its discontents’. Thus, the group’s practices of choice in creating their sculptures or paintings are digging and undermining, rummaging around in the ground, treasure seeking, excavating deep holes and tunnels, constructing hair-raising rollercoasters and ramshackle cabins, painting with their bums (Is this what’s going to happen here, too?), assembling and taking apart old bits of furniture and other detritus, ecstatically emphasising its uselessness. And more: Gelatin, whom critics have described as contemporary hermits, install monumental, apocalyptic landscapes, like the leftovers of a mediaeval battle, made of soggy, black-and-brown mud and put together images of a subliminally wrecked, smiling Mona Lisa, made of plasticine, whether brightly coloured or the colour of vanilla ice-cream. Both these motifs – the landscape and the human face – are about the shaping of the basis of communal space. If some of Gelatin’s actions are visually reminiscent of the ultra-radical Viennese Actionists, this is not so much in order to try again to expiate their sins or to redeem the repressed meanders of history or else to compete with their notorious compatriots in pushing further the boundaries of good taste, but rather so as to generate sensitivity towards art’s existential roots at a time of neoliberal market domination. And if Gelatin does create an impression of liberated shamelessness, this is not to gloat over the fall of the principles of bourgeois morals but, rather, so as to render the atomisation of social bonds and the prevalent modern lack of time not merely bearable but indeed energy-generating.

The Gelatin collective works both in the studio and in public space. In the latter case, the artists usually encourage the public to join in the projects and play an active role in the shared creative process that aims to result in a ‘social plastic’ in the Beuysian sense. The Gelatin artists don’t forget about a sense of harmony and musical quality. They also pamper their audiences with delicious snacks. All in all, the Viennese Jellies are contemporary humanists after a postmodern deconstruction who use multimedia and varied language in negotiating their relations with the surrounding status quo. Gelatin has never succumbed to the temptation of the posthumanist narrative dominant in recent decades.

Battles at cross purposes

Whilst we are on the topic of contemporary humanism, we cannot forget what man is and what makes him what he is, what regenerates or liberates him. In the case of the collective from Vienna, we can, on the one hand, talk about diagonal relationships with the world, that’s to say all that binds them to and separates them from the world, and about the transactions (in the sense that the pragmatist William James used the term), that’s to say the changeable and interchangeable experience. In their case, this experience relates to the process of the creation of art, the experience that artists gain during their performance events enacted with the help of assistants, the public and other artist friends whom they invite to take part in the creative process. One such event was their three-day performance Blind Sculpture at the Greene Naftali Gallery in New York (2011), when the blindfolded artists made sculptures with the help of assistants, who included well-known American artists. Other such events were their exhibition Loch (2013) in the Museum of the 21st Century in Vienna as well as their most recent event Die Tusovka Runde in the Solyanka municipal gallery in Moscow, where, with the Gelatin made their drawings on round, revolving tables. In all these actions what mattered above all to the artists was the visualisation of the communal process of making the works.

According to the artists themselves, Gelatin’s happening adventures echo our unexpressed longings and desires; they draw us into the game while at the same time filtering the changeable impact of the surroundings on our minds and bodies. The goal is to succeed with actions that involve a ‘body in a body’, in the sense that Giorgio Agamben means; the liberated creative force and the potential of the creative gesture manifest as objects that are the material trace of the process.

In Krakow’s Bunkier Sztuki, the collective from Vienna yet again – in the spirit of the humanist tradition – relies on its many years of experience and a fearless resonance with what is alien. This approach towards artistic activity results in creating transactions and interpretations invested with a new quality, ones that turn the status quo relationships upside down and perhaps introduce subcutaneous change. Hans-Georg Gadamer compared change to a disturbance of our horizon, whereas Jacques Derrida wrote about humanism as indispensable deconstruction. Is this what’s going to happen in Bunkier Sztuki, too?

Nude Study in Bunkier Sztuki

What possible changes could take place when the theme of the five-day creative process initiated by Gelatin and entitled paint me paint me everywhere is the communal painting of nude studies of models with the participation of other (mainly Polish) artists in the eccentric studio set up by the collective from Vienna? The space created is an imaginative mise-en-scène of studios familiar from academies of fine art. Will it be possible to effect a change in the accustomed format of the nude study through a deliberate fusion of the social and artistic planes of experience? Will the final product fulfil expectations of the quality expected of a work of art? Will the public find a common plane with the academics? At Bunkier Sztuki, the theme of the artist’s studio where nude acts are painted will be made available for public consumption and, in a sense, voyeuristically mass reproduced. It will be accessible to all interested outsiders; if only through the device of dislocation, the space will entail changes that are at odds with what is considered acceptable behaviour in public. The study of the naked body will be exposed to the consumerist gaze of the public at large. This is a stimulating effect, equivalent to the impact that sculptures or paintings representing the naked human form have on the viewer. For some, this will be art worthy of contemplation; for others – perhaps, indecent pornography, if only because the artists themselves go naked during the individual, intimate creative act.

Thus, the goal of Gelatin’s action in Krakow is not to bring about a sexual catharsis (much less provoke masturbation) but rather to create a sensual and – as the artists themselves refer to it – Cubist-style, polyphonic portrait of the residents of a Renaissance city in which they are strangers. In the hierarchy of artistic themes, the representation of the nude is an honoured tradition and, in a sense, one could add, its public acceptance is a ‘sacrosanct boundary’, the division line separating the sacred from the profane, the entitled public culture from the marginal. This is a boundary to be guarded, transgressed, replaced and from time to time shifted.

As Lynda Nead puts it in her book about the female nude study, in this perspective, aesthetic contact can be considered as an acknowledgement and confirmation of the power relationships within society. In the cultural register, the painting of nudes constitutes a long history of nakedness and shame, of the many traditions of depicting the human body and various forms of carnal desire – from the erotic and sensual thrill to social and political wrangles and negotiations. If the paintings to be created in Krakow are to fulfil the requirements of cultural identity, the creative process of producing representations of nakedness – comparable with the painting of icons – must be accompanied, above all, by a heightened state of meditative attentiveness.

In the hybrid scenery oscillating between an artists’ studio, a collection, an art gallery and an academy of fine art (in broad daylight, as the artists had intended), Gelatin will construct at Bunkier Sztuki a stage equipped with props to be used by the potential models. ‘There will be sculptural settings and set ups for the nude models to climb on, sit on, and hang from while they pose for us. The studio situation will be an elegant, vibrant, informal Gelatin setup, with sofas, tea and coffee, beer and snacks, cakes and cookies, people hanging out and watching. Conversations about what’s next and why not…’ – this is how Gelatin artists describe the atmospheric ambiance of the situation they will create for their models.

On traditional easels, set up around the platform for the models of both sexes, the invited artists will paint their visions of carnality; from these, Gelatin will subsequently construct a panoramic painting with individual segments that can be moved about as desired. This will, thus, be an attempt to shift the boundaries of the symbolic system with the intention of modifying and enhancing the capacity of the categories that already exist in culture, such as individual creation (the loneliness of the creative act) and collective potential, the (immobilised) individual / model and the dynamic group, the private and the public. At the same time, we will be witnesses to whether Gelatin can succeed in transforming the formula of the naked study through its social experience and a discursive interpretation of a work of art using the device of a playful game involving all the other players of this unique spectacle.

Curated by Goschka Gawlik

Credits: Gelatin

http://bunkier.art.pl