ART CITIES:Vienna-Gelatin & Liam Gillick

The exhibition “Stinking Dawn” takes the form of the production process for a full length feature film by Gelatin and Liam Gillick. Written and directed by Gillick, the production is developed, staged and enacted by Gelatin. The film examines the limits of human tolerance in the face of oppression, political crisis and excessive self-delusion. Based on the shooting script by Gillick, Gelatin plays the main characters – four privileged young people who grew up at a time of crisis and move through various stages of development and self-enlightenment towards a final of collapse, conspiracy and broken dreams.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Kunsthalle Wien Archive

During the shooting period (4–14 July), all visitors to the exhibition “Stinking Dawn” will be potential performers, inside a sprawling modifiable stage setting designed by Gelatin – a monumental faux-stone toy-block architecture of colonnades, amphitheatres, night-club interiors, and prison. The only permanent members of the cast are the four artists of Gelatin, appearing in homemade costumes to star as of those “pathetic young snobs” who, as Gillick explains, “try to keep afloat in what already could only be called post-leftism”. What initially sounds like the realisation of a socialist pipe dream quickly turns into a sophisticated interrogation of ideals and values that are being eroded before our eyes by the contemporary “post-utopian situation” – a very real set of fears, envy and conformism fanned by the “neoliberal counter-reformation”. The movie script is in part based on “Vivre et penser comme des porcs. De l’incitation à l’envie et à l’ennui dans les démocraties-marchés”, a book published in 1998 by the French philosopher and mathematician Gilles Châtelet (the English translation was released in 2014 as “To Live and Think Like Pigs. The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies”. The titular “pig” is the neoliberal egomaniac whose desires, strategies and projects serve a single objective: to increase the productivity and profitability of his own human capital. Also woven into “Stinking Dawn” is the life of the publisher and active communist Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the scion of a wealthy Italian family who died in 1972 under contested circumstances, having taken direct action against the state. Gillick’s art is informed by his distaste for the demonstrative exercise of authority in any form, and since the 1990s, he has sought to realise his projects in ways that chart a genuinely novel alternative to hierarchical power structures. A key strategy in this context has been working with other producers: what sociologists call parallel play. “Stinking Dawn” is a case in point: the project grew out of long conversations with Gelatin that began in the early 2000s. Like Gillick, Gelatin have always offered alternatives to standard models of art and suggested new ways to create and live. They will continually expand on the script by pursuing parallel narratives to the main drive of the text. After the shooting in July, the artists will move to the studio for the film’s post-production; the exhibition will remain on view, and a succession of (finished or provisional ) edited sequences will be projected on the sceneries in the gallery. Reflecting the process-based and never stringently choreographed quality of the film, the exhibition will keep changing until closing day. The “end” of the presentation will at once be a prelude to the film’s premiere, to be held in the fall of 2019 at an as yet unspecified venue outside of Kunsthalle Wien. Gelatin are four Vienna-based artists. They first met in 1978, when they all attended a summer camp and have been working and playing together ever since. They began exhibiting internationally in 1993. Gelatin’s practice incorporates the codes of relational aesthetics, their invented sculptural language and approach that is anarchic and irreverent. Humour and logic, as well as chaotic precision, are key instruments in the conception of new works. Their art draws a line from the insular and individual to the open-ended and collective, from the overtly erotic to the sublimated joy of togetherness. Often museum visitors become part of their performances, which aim at transforming the audience into a community. Liam Gillick deploys multiple forms to expose the new ideological control systems that emerged at the beginning of the 1990s. He has developed a number of key narratives that often form the engine for a body of work. Gillick’s work exposes the dysfunctional aspects of a modernist legacy in terms of abstraction and architecture when framed within a globalised, neo-liberal consensus.

Participants: Nik Amato, Artjom Astrov, Ines Ballesteros, Michela Brollo, Hugo Canoilas, Oleg Eliseev, Scott Evans, Christoph Harringer, Helmut Heiss, Kolbeinn Hugi Höskuldsson, Lisa Jäger, Chris Janka, Jen Kratochvil, Yukika Kudo, Jenyia Kukerov, Bert Löschner, Cristian Manzutto, Sandra Margeth-Theuer, Maria Metsalu, Josephine Reither, Olivia Reither, Nicolás Rosés Ponce, Manuel Scheiwiller, Kazuto Taguchi, Catharina Wronn, and others

Musicians: Music for Your Plants, Ratkiller, Regret

Info: Curators: Lucas Gehrmann and Luca Lo Pinto, Kunsthalle Wien, Museumsplatz 1, Vienna, Duration: 4-14/7/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-19:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.kunsthallewien.at