Art N' About

Author: Joyce Man

The Italians should be disturbed. From now until 2025, a giant pink bunny will lie prostrate and rotting from the inside out on the Coletto Fava mountainside with its arms, legs and ears flopping spread-eagled at its side, its entrails curling out and its mouth frozen in a tragic, silent scream.

Stretching 200 feet along the hillside, the monstrosity is a wool-knit monument stuffed with hay that is at once cute and extremely disturbing. This is Hase, or Rabbit, the latest project by a group of provocative Viennese modern artists called Gelitin.

Whichever way you approach it, a rabbit fallen from the heavens on the Italian hillside is destined to cause a stir. But surprise, this is not the first instance of giant animal art our confused audience has seen. Bill Heine's Headington Shark has been a permanent protruding fixture in a semi-detached house on High Street, Headington for almost 30 years. Hastumi Ban's enormous anime "VWXYellow elephant Underwear/HIJKiddyElephant" sculptures shocked new Yorkers with their scarily large yet cute trunks and orange ears earlier this year.

And let us not forget Jeff Koons' kitschy pop-art "Puppy," a 43-foot tall over-grown West Highland terrier sculpture made up of 70,000 fresh flowers and 25 tons of soil in a frame with a sophisticated internal irrigation system. Erected once at the Rockefeller Center in New York City, it now sits quietly towering over the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum in Spain. It's cute, it's flowery, but it's also scary and big as hell.

Size doesn't matter to many people, but to these artists, it matters a whole lot. The big is now a big deal - but why?

What's strange about giant animal art is that the artists are using size to form completely different meanings. Gelitin's "Hase" is designed to bring the viewer into a kind of Gulliver's fantasy-land, while Hastumi Ban's diapered elephant's purpose was to magnify anime cuteness on a previously-unimaginable scale. On the other hand, the Headington Shark was Heine's personal monument in commemoration of the 1945 Nagasaki bombing, as it was erected exactly on the tragedy's 41st anniversary.

One thing is for sure. These sleeping yet disturbingly animated giants change our perception of size instantly. Part of the fun, as the press release from Gelitin says, is interacting with the familiar in a completely new way and experiencing that semi paradigm-shift. "This vast rabbit," they write, "[makes] you feel as small as a daisy."

At the same time, however, the fear these creatures produce is elemental and all pervasive. Yes, these are cute, fluffy creatures of children's fables, but they are monstrous. In their shadow, we are minuscule beings crawling between their daunting legs. "Happy in love, you step down the decaying corpse," writes Gelitin to impress the real point behind their work. "Now small like a maggot, over woolen kidney and bowel."

Rabbits are cute, elephants are cute, terriers are cute. When you super-size them, though, you have monumental, scary art.