To subscribe to Afterall journal, starting with this issue, please click here.
Alternatively, if you wish to purchase this article individually, you may do so via JSTOR. Please follow the instructions on this page.Everything conspires
To hide the mess of inner living
- John Ashbery1
From mud baths to intestinal-looking roller-coasters made of old timber and furniture, installations by gelitin, the four-man art collective from Vienna, are chaotic, body-charging assemblages of found debris and waste materials. The Shitplex (2006) involved an actual intestinal roller coaster ride: a toilet-cabin, installed with a periscopemirror mechanism, provides the user of the toilet with a spectacular and rarely seen 'rear' view of the action. As if to clarify in writing one of the production themes of their work - that nothing need be wasted - gelitin have rendered an organic-looking typeface from their own bodily waste. Das Kakabet (2007) presents the defecated alphabet in a book that - at last - functions as a type specimen for both typographer and gastroenterologist, though with its excessive coffee-table format it is just as likely to be mistaken for a glossy catalogue of Viennese chocolate letters.
But these calligraphic swirls, in every rubicund shade of autumnal brown, have already been eaten. At least once. Here they are brought back to scabrous life, photographed in situ (to use a term), in the place where shit and language have always responded best to each other: the contemplative, graffiti-inscribed setting of the toiletbowl.
The 'analphabet' is a messy way to remind us that the mouth is not the only bodily orifice from which our communications flow. Our language is also an elaborate means by which the repression of all kinds of waste, including excrement, is ritually organised. Or, as Sigmund Freud saw it, an overly keen sense of distaste produces its anal equivalent in reverse: an obsession
