Is digging a hole an idea?

Photographing The Dig Cunt, Coney Island, May 7 -13, 2007 - Photo: Creative Time

"Is digging a hole an idea? It is. It may be the greatest idea we've ever had" Ali Janka, member of Gelitin - The Dig Cunt interview, Bloomberg TV

I just saw this weeks edition of "The Muse": a weekly arts program on Bloomberg TV. They have a short interview with Florian and Ali from Gelitin; The interview took place during last weeks performance in Coney Island, titled, The Dig Cunt. I can't find the episode online. If anyone finds it, please let me know.


Rabbit drawing, copyright gelitin

Gelitin’s greatest idea, in my mind anyway, was Rabbit, 2005-2025.

" Rabbit - The things one finds wandering in a landscape: familiar things and utterly unknown, like a flower one has never seen before, or, as Columbus discovered, an inexplicable continent; and then, behind a hill, as if knitted by giant grandmothers, lies this vast rabbit, to make you feel as small as a daisy. The toilet-paper-pink creature lies on its back: a rabbit-mountain like Gulliver in Lilliput. Happy you feel as you climb up along its ears, almost falling into its cavernous mouth, to the belly-summit and look out over the pink woolen landscape of the rabbitís body, a country dropped from the sky; ears and limbs sneaking into the distance; from its side flowing heart, liver and intestines. Happily in love you step down the decaying corpse, through the wound, now small like a maggot, over woolen kidney and bowel. Happy you leave like the larva that gets its wings from an innocent carcass at the roadside.Such is the happiness which made this rabbit. i love the rabbit the rabbit loves me." Taken from "Rabbit" Press Releaes (English version).

Rabbit seen from the sky (one person sleeping on its belly), copyright gelitin

"Rabbit" will stay at its current location until the year 2025.

See more photos of the Rabbit here.
See an aerial view of the Rabbit on Google Maps here.

The Dig Cunt, Coney Island, May 7-13, 2007

Me and Florian Reither, The Dig Cunt, 2007, Photo by Jason Covert

About two weeks ago I received an email blast from CreativeTime. I'm a fan of CreativeTime, sometimes I don't understand their choice of projects but I respect their mission (they just celebrated 33 years). This specific email got my attention unlike any other. "Gelitin in Coney Island, The Dig Cunt." The Dig Cunt? What!?!

"Called by the quest to hole, gelitin will set out to dig on coney island beach. mornings we will take the train to coney island equipped with hands, shovels and a mind settled like grains of sand. we will dig for seven hours and in the evening close the hole and return back to manhattan. the next day we will take the train again to coney island and dig a hole and then close it again. the next day we will take the train again to coney island and dig a hole and then close it again." and so on...

Wolfgang Gantner, The Dig Cunt, 2007

THIS IS WHAT GOT MY FULL ATTENTION:
"Repeated over seven days, Gelitin describe the proposed durational work as a celebration of the millennium of the female and the anti-phallus, in effect the artistic reversal of the erect public monument. Part Dada, part Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896), the absurdly poetic act of ritualized displacement, absence and renewal."