Gelitin Never Stops
Balconies, pizza, and potential future war memorials
We’ve written before of artist Michael Richards, who died on 9/11 in his 92nd floor studio in the North Tower of The World Trade Center. The recent exhbition at the Bronx Museum, Michael Richards: Are you Down? showed Richards’ astounding aerial vision.
Richardson’s prophecy is mirrored in the full-on, site-specific conceptual art project by Gelitin (they changed the spelling some time after 2001), where they played with the actual surface of the World Trade Center, removing one of the windows. Here’s how the work was documented in their book, “Gelatin: The B-Thing” published on January 1, 2001:
At 6 o'clock one morning, Austrian art group gelatin suctioned out a window on one of the top floors of the World Trade Center, shunted out a narrow balcony constructed of smuggled building materials, and posed on it while a helicopter flew by and took their photographs. An unbelievable, completely illegal, and fully secret stunt when it was performed, "The B-Thing" is now unbearably surreal, weirdly prescient, and forever unrepeatable.
It’s an immensely weird set of documentation:
When I started researching this art in 2012, I came across this August 18, 2001 article in the New York Times: Balcony Scene (Or Unseen) Atop the World; Episode at Trade Center Assumes Mythic Qualities
I learned earlier this month that I missed a new installation by Gelitin here last year in Chicago: Democratic Sculpture 7. Peep this video of them discussing their community pizza:
“It’s a sculpture that’s only finished when people participate,” says Florian Reither, one of the four artists who make up the Vienna-based group Gelitin. On view at the Neubauer Collegium September 23, 2023 – January 12, 2024, Democratic Sculpture 7 features a monumental pizza with holes through which guests can poke their heads to make toppings. In this new video, the artists share their thoughts on how a work that may seem like pure whimsy was actually designed with a serious purpose: to encourage civic participation. “I think with this pizza you can create a square where people come together and interact,” Wolfgang Gantner notes. “And they have a costume on, so they are more likely to speak to each other.”
Video by Bob (ournameisbob.com).