Olivia Erlanger at Kunstverein Gartenhaus

Artist: Olivia Erlanger

Exhibition title: Appliance

Venue: Kunstverein Gartenhaus, Vienna, Austria

Date: September 9 – October 29, 2021

Photography: kunst-documentation.com / All images courtesy of the artist and Kunstverein Gartenhaus, Vienna

“In these rooms, your imagined world: you slumber even while you wake. Consumed with desire for a life lost and, maybe, never lived. To be free of the body is to run without a hum, without the worry of a missing heartbeat. There’s no growl of an empty stomach, no ache of a strained eye. There’s no scent of lactic release or soreness from a sprained and twisted spine. There’s no baited breath walking down these halls with fear and confusion. No internal clock tick ticking away.”

-HOUSE’s monologue from Humour in the Water Coolant

Transforming the space of KUNSTVEREIN GARTENHAUS into a complex dramaturgy, Olivia Erlanger’s Appliance is a project comprising a play, an installation and a publication.

Written by the artist and performed on the opening night, the play Humour in the Water Coolant is the story of a woman haunted by the appliances in her new home. Using the play as its starting point, the installation lingers between domestic suburban interior and theatre set. The play’s title references the aqueous humour of the eye and mechanical fluids found in engines, revising the metaphor of a body as architecture to body as appliance. Inferring different attitudes, class and aspirations through object placement and interior organization, the installation unfolds as an archive, a reading room and a space for action. Erlanger presents an environment inspired by Norman Klein’s idea of “scripted space” and informed by historical exhibitions such as MoMA’s Houses of the Future (1932) and Good Design (1950). Here, the gallery becomes a fractured, transparent house offering a psychic isometric view. The layout and function of different rooms of the home are defined by their appliances rather than perimeter walls.

Set during a séance to rid the home of its haunted aura, the play explores the pan-psychic potential of domestic objects. The appliances, now able to speak, express their emotional lives, rife with dissatisfaction, sadness, and ultimately a desire to connect and love. The psychological effects of their declining usage and functionality antagonizes the idea of technological improvement as a positive development, reframing it as a means of escape. What does ageing mean for these objects “born” on the assembly line, whose parts are easily replaced or whose obsolescence is already planned?

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication of the same title, published by KUNSTVEREIN GARTENHAUS’ imprint Wild Seeds. The book Appliance includes five new essays by Erlanger, each focusing on the history of a domestic appliance and how it is constructed in the cultural imagination. The essays weave together anecdotes and personal narratives while examining these appliances’ deployment in art history, cinema, and pop culture. The book also includes Humour in the Water Coolant. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the public is invited to read the essays and play in the space.