Their work encourages audience participation but sometimes requires the signing of no-fault waivers. For a show in Los Angeles, Gelitin created an elevator that was literally hand-operated, as several well-muscled guys hoisted intrepid passengers to the roof of a three-story building. For a show in Munich, visitors were asked to strip, lubricate themselves with baby oil and squirm down a narrow chute made from other human bodies.
The current project, the Tantamounter, is more modest. Some of the items coming out are fairly straightforward replications. An expensive camera goes in and out comes a matching camera made from a cardboard box with a plastic foam cup for a lens and a handwritten Nikon label. Neat.
More often, the art imitates, comments on and even sends up, the original. I submitted my lunch, a clear plastic container of sushi with chopsticks. I got back a similar container with a careful arrangement of broken eggshells filled with lime rinds and sprinkled with wet tea leaves. I accepted this as a pungent and ephemeral garbage bouquet, though it could also have been a garbagey way of saying, "We find sushi revolting."
The enchantment of most of Gelitin's output lies in the ingenuity and wit of its improvised details. But it is the performance part -- the fact that real but unseen people are just a few meters away making these things -- that gives the show its magnetism. The aesthetic of generosity is infectious. It inspires some nice responses.
A young British artist who had heard about the show came to the gallery by subway. He quickly took off all his clothes and put them in the bin for processing. The turnaround period turned out to be unusually long; the time for his flight home was near. All the other people hanging out chipped in cash so he could take a cab to the airport. Their gift bought him time to retrieve his clothes, and the scroll-like, labor-intensive, item-by-item drawing that accompanied them.
The Koenig installation throws a spotlight on collectivity as an alternative model for how to make art and live a life. It is a model that always seems to be on the verge of taking hold and never quite does. So much in American market culture, which is also art culture, is ranged against it. Yet Gelitin has managed to turn mainstream spaces into alternative, experimental spaces just by occupying them, the way a band can claim and change a space with music.
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