In Another Room I Am Drinking Eggs from a Boot
Pech, Vienna AT
2 October — 16 November, 2024

In Another Room I Am Drinking Eggs from a Boot

 Hans Richter

What if the moon was essence of quinine
And high heels were a time of day
When certain birds bled
The chauffeur is telling the cook
The antler would pry into ice floes
Swim with a lamp
And we'd be shivering in a ditch
Biting through a black wing
There would be boats
There would be a dream country
The great quiet humming of the soul at night
The only sound is a shovel
Clearing a place for a mailbox

—Frank Stanford

"From the first smouldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around eighteenth-century courtyards and from the mild radiance of these lanterns to the unearthly glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways, it has all been combustion. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish-hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away. For the time being, our cities still shine through the night, and the fire still spreads." —W.G. Sebald from The Rings of Saturn

In Another Room I Am Drinking Eggs From a Boot is the final and paraphrasal installment in a series of exhibitions that began in February of 2024, including Negative Ecstasies, all fish in the night become birds, and Civilization of Happiness. All three prior exhibitions and performances are somehow reflected here in Vienna: lights removed from the ceiling formally relate to previous work staged in Pittsburgh, creating a tone-poem of absence. The sound installation features original choral and musical compositions performed and recorded in Chicago, as well as propositions for what could be called impossible performances. The benches, once part of a church in Lower Austria, are an idea that was edited out of another exhibition, but are here charged with all the energy of their provenance. The exhibition, titled after the eponymous poem by Frank Stanford, I consider to be the most dancerly of three sisters, all philosophical and exuberant in their self-decimating nature. Their work is meant to linger only slightly, on the practice of movement, legibility, post-industrial metaphysics, language, the possible. and the low glow of air before fading away. X M.S.W.

  I
Music for Assembly — Two channel sound installation (24m01s), the box pro Achat 204 WH speakers, church pews ca. 1750, dimensions variable, 2024

  II
Music for the fluorescent lamps of Europe, — Performance object. The gallery's lights are removed for the duration of the exhibition, tied in a bundle with violin string, and placed on pews, dimensions variable, 2024



where indicated, ( ⁕ ) photographs by kunst-dokumentation.com
where indicated ( ∰ ) photographs by Aaron Amar Bhamra
Major thanks to Bruno Mokross for realizing the installation of this exhibition.