When in love, go to Venice

and bring your wellies, if you intend to visit this most wonderful of laguna cities. Jan and I did not, which is just as well, as it gave me the perfect excuse of purchasing stivali pescatori (fishermen's rubber boots) to splash through the high tide. We bought our wellies in a charming household goods store in the San Polo quarter. This involved walking to the store's little warehouse rooms, where Gianni searched through big boxes to show us the newest wellie models. We then paid for our wellie selection, back at the store.

Breathtaking: the Ca' Rezzonico, Venice's 18th century museum palazzo, remains one of the most beautiful museums I've enjoyed to date (PS: You can look at tons of images of the ex- and interior on the web). It now has a huge collection of 18th century painting at the top, from whose windows you can wonder at the impressive panorama reaching to the snow-capped Alps, beyond the town and laguna waters. Simply wonderful!

Exhibition overload

Since 2009 began, for some reason or other, I have visited a quite extraodinary number of exhibitions. It seems as if curators and artists are only now digesting the last 10 years of post-9/11 securitisation of our living environment (airport security, anti-terrorism legislation etc.) and what it is doing to us, or with us. Let's start with "Embedded Art" at Berlin's Academy of the Arts, which you can take in by taking a 1/2 hr tour with a fake security guard in an arty bullet-proof west, who moves the visitor group through 4 cellar levels, pretending to be rather strict (don't touch this, move on, you can't go to the toilet ...). As you wonder through the make-shift exhibition space, you're filmed. This footage feeds the exhibits in the more formal exhibition rooms on the ground level. The photos from Pakistan, features on electric gun inventors and security gurus and entire wall collages of news footage and the like leaves you exhausted and perturbed. Next in line is "Manson 69" at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, which invited artists of all hues to provide visual inputs depicting "den Schrecken der Situation" (situational shock; the horror of the situation). You'll see Janice Joplin with her face burnt out of the painting, a fantastic installation of military installations, rockets and a nuclear explosion. The artist Elmar Hess used cosmetics products to create the installation. Though this exhibition does not target post-9/11 terrorism and security-craziness specifically, it wants to make us think about the attraction and repulsion generated by 'extremes' - of which suicide bombers are but one example.

Simply overpowering is the contemporary art collection assembled by German industrialist Falckenberg, installed in an ex-factory in Harburg on the outskirts of Hamburg. It's a private museum, open to the public only when they attend a tour. The space has just been redecorated. Bit of a CostCo shopper of ContempArt, this Mr. Falckenberg, who was giving a tour to friends as we toured ourselves. The current exhibit brought together Falckenberg's holdings and those of a Spain-based collector, about to open her own museum. No theme to this exhibit, though some works would have fit perfectly into the art shows I described above.

While I'm at it; if you haven't seen the Paul Klee exhibit in Berlin, you missed a fantastic show. So much to see (250 works), I had to take a break and have an awful coffee in the Neue Nationalgalerie's cafe. Apart from the always breathtaking Kolumba episcopal museum space in Cologne, designed by Swiss architect Zumthor, the Wallraff-Richartz Museum, also in Cologne, offers the visitor a colourful tour of its Middle Ages-to-early 20th century collection: They have just redecorated the rooms, giving the walls a very well chosen variety of colours, which in my view fit the exhibited paintings very well indeed! 'Embedded' PC screens inserted next to the seats allow the visitor to delve into one of the paintings featured in a particular room. This way, I learnt more about Max Liebermann's 'women bleaching the washing on a lawn' (2nd picture down).

Though I humbly admit: I remember far too little of what I've seen. Which reminds me, as a family we took a tour of Mr. Balkenhol's wood sculptures of non-descript people after Christmas, who produced some truly striking, huge 'paravents' - and a very entertaining flock of penguins. 

ThinkBits No.2: Airport smoke

Starting on a light note; this make-shift water capturing device at Frankfurt airport struck me as quite contemporary art-sort-of-thing. Most amazingly, the airport company Fraport clearly considers it essential to document its ownership of the plastic sheating, itself surely the physical expression of a German norm (industrial standard). I just wonder why? (50,000 people work at the airport and roundabouts). 

Moving onto heavier stuff; Inbetween flights I met a chubby man in one of the cosy all-glass smokers' cabins, sponsored by cigarette companies and invariably inadequately air-conditioned. We got chatting, as smokers do. He was just back from Varna, Bulgaria, where he is involved in building a new shopping centre. Of course, I immediately asked: "Is construction still on-going?" and he replied "Yes", indicating that the financial crisis has not hit that particular spot on our planet. He didn't much care for Bulgarians, he ventured, so I asked why. Describing the dirt in Varna's backroads, he also informed me that Bulgaria was a sex tourism destination. "In the Sofia Kempinski, kids are placed in a row like a string of pearls, so the old buggers can pick one". Hardcore porn is standard in all hotels he's been in (No, I did not ask if he liked watching them). Waitresses in a popular restaurant chain called 'Happy' something are forced to wear very short hotpants. We finished our cigarettes and wished each other 'bon voyage'. I was left quite shocked that a new member country of the EU would allow child prostitution to take place, so openly (not that the hidden version is any better).