Monkeys in a sick zoo

Someone once said that art is in the eye of the beholder. That philosophy is being put to the test in a museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands that is currently exhibiting giant sculptures of dung. The poop sculptures were created by a group of four artists from Austria calling themselves Gelitin who specialize in this kind of “art.” The four artists met in 1978 while attending summer camp.

I’m betting that their parents are wondering if they did the right thing by sending their kids to summer camp way back then just to get a break from the little creeps for a little while.  Most kids go to summer camp to learn how to swim or ride horses or hike the wilderness. The Gelitin kids learned how to make giant poop sculptures.

But, maybe I’m trying to apply my own cultural bias to the Austrian summer camp experience. After looking up one of their camps on the internet, I discovered that I might have been way off base in understanding what Austrian kids do at these things.  

  

According to one website, the camps are “designed for those who want to have fun in the summer and not sit listlessly at home.” OK, that sounds normal enough if not exactly appealing to today’s youth who would love nothing more than to sit listlessly at home. 

Some of the specialized camps include:

•         Horse camp: For all those who love horses and want to learn more.
•         Movie camp: Film shooting, cutting, & a bit of Hollywood.
•         Learning camp: perfect preparation for the new school year.

And then there was this.

•         Austria’s first celiac disease camp: action and adventure await you

Who wouldn’t want to go to a camp where action and adventure await those with oversensitive bowels? It sounds like a camp that the Addams Family kids would attend. I’m guessing celiac disease camp wasn’t available when the Gelitin artists went to summer camp in 1978 since we didn’t know about the whole gluten thing back in the seventies. Maybe they went to syphilis camp instead. That is about the only disease I can think of that would affect your brain in such a way that you would want to create giant statues of crap.

The Gelitin artists practice something called Relational Art which is defined as "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space." What they mean is the artists are making their audience the monkeys in their sick zoo. 

In 2013, they put on an art show in which street artists drew portraits of people seated on a stage at the Teatro Arsenale in Milan, Italy. It sounds normal enough, but they had placed the paper on the surface of the stage in front of their seated model and were drawing the portraits with a paintbrush stuck up their posteriors. Boy, you just don’t get more relational than that. At least they were using paint.

More recently, they exhibited some sculpture in New York’s Green Naftali Gallery that was composed of lumps of clay that the artists had thrust their, uhm, “artistic creativity” into. The exhibit included 40 pieces. One wonders how many bottles of Viagra went into that effort.

I’m not exactly a connoisseur of contemporary art. I think the art world may have taken a wrong turn about the time of Jackson Pollock. Let us be thankful, though, that Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci never went to an Austrian summer camp.