Knack

A four-meter long and two and a half meter tall abstract animal stands in the neo-Renaissance Columned Main Hall of Vienna’s Museum for Applied Art. “Knack” has crusty skin made of baked bread dough and its innards are made of 100 kilograms of frankfurter sausage. After a concert by Vienna’s Vegetable Orchestra, 300 guests start to slaughter “Knack”. They tear its skin to pieces and with them wrap its guts. They eat him.

Metalworker Erwin Haidbauer constructs a steel frame according to honey & bunny’s plans (design), which Stummerer & Hablesreiter then fill with sausages. Master baker Horst Felzl coats the animal with thinly rolled, raw bread dough, which is then baked with help of a Bunsen burner.

This performance evidently addresses orgiastic butchering. The guests, among them a lot of teenagers, tear the sculpture to shreds with pleasure and eagerly eat it up. “Knack” is a body of sound, too. Like the Vegetable Orchestra, the crusty bread skin and the luscious sausages produce sensual sounds and noises.