Luster

Gelatin, aka Gelitin, is an Austrian art collective comprising Wolfgang Gantner, Ali Janka, Florian Reither, and Tobias Urban. The group have worked together since 1993. On more than one occasion, they have used the chandelier as a motif through which to exercise their subversive approach to sculpture, performance, and established conventions. In 2003, the group delivered a series of candlelit lectures at Hunter College in New York and Frieze Art Fair in London, during which they performed as a human candelabra. In 2009, they transformed Galerie Meyer Kainer in Vienna into Palais Keiner Mayer, installing a grand twin staircase and chandelier constructed from discarded furniture and timber, in reference to the gallery’s location at Palais Eschenbach. Luster (2018) is another iteration of this motif, one which reverses the chandelier’s historical ascent to recover its more rudimentary form. Assembled from tree branches, thermoplastic, and household lightbulbs, Luster’s makeshift construction does more to evoke the cobbled simplicity of pre-modern fixtures than it does the elaborate crystal structures which evolved from the 15th century onwards. A string of glass beads draped over one of its branches offers a playful nod to the latter.

Luster’s construction reflects the group’s use of readily available materials across their practice, out of which they have built a world marked by humour, invention and a rejection of given formalities. Their consistent incorporation of familiar, domestic objects into their sculptures and installations lends their work an accessibility that aims at dismantling traditional hierarchies between artist, artwork, and viewer. The process of demystification characterises much of their work. In his essay, A Museum is a Museum is a Home: Gelitin’s Louvre at the Museum Moderne in Paris, Francesco Stocchi writes, “one of the most precious lessons I received in the time I shared with Gelitin is how things are truly simple in their natural state…” He concludes by remarking that the group’s “aliveness comes from a dusting off of idées reçues that surround us and revealing an unseen radiant essence.” 1 Luster functions through this sensibility, unravelling the chandelier’s accrued symbolic value to bare its nascent soul. Its construction is unsophisticated and seemingly fragile. Like many of Gelatin’s structures and performances, its form hangs somewhat in the balance. And yet, the work’s naivety is the very source of its vitality, fervently expressing the group’s enduring appeal for intuition to rule over reason.

1 https://www.gelitin.net/uploaded/PDF/spike_2008.pdf