Once again, Austria’s leading art collective created a piece as magical as it was precise. Having come of age in the era of punk, gelatin (or Gelatin or, sometimes, gelitin)—Wolfgang Gantner, Ali Janka, Florian Reither, and Tobias Urban—avail themselves of provocative attitudes, nonconformist behavior, and gently buffered rebellion to pull unprecedented stunts. They use any means available; gelatin loves cross-references among painting, sculpture, and rock music, between architecture and sports, between performance and fashion, between event and discourse. As a result, they are probably

Blood trickles from a potted plant into a puddle of water lapping at a blow-dryer. A magician’s hat floats above the dryer’s electrical cord, from which razor blades, revolvers, and a bottle of poison rise into the air. Farther to the right, we see a stage curtain, a folding screen, a dark and ghostly creature in an armchair, cockroaches, a sea horse. All these details have been painted in textile inks with a fine brush on various fabrics that have then been sewn onto a large piece of dark-blue cloth; some are fragments of fabric stitched onto the backdrop. This piece, Artist’s Home Studio (all