I'm at Vienna airport using up the free internet and easy access to powerpoints. So far this trip has been a bunch of thrills. Latenesses, over-packings etc.

Not least among them: bumping into Björk and Mathew Barney at Basel airport. Björk sat next to me(!), dressed in the most rad japanese geisha come M.I.A colour scheme attire yet to bless an inter-continental flight. Chasing around her elfine daughter through the swiss chocolate aisles she even acknowleged my rather insistent knowing, buzzed glances with gracious (restrained) smiles and asked me if I knew there had been a delay.


We're acquaintances now.


Then I watched the sun set on Vienna and I almost forgot all the hot tears I shed on leaving my friends in Germany.

So many postcards have been foraged in this year that those not posted, must be hurridly thrust into books and sent in my BIG shipment. I do like the decontextualised, kitschy heights that they reach, all scattered together. Strange conversations they must have. This, embarrassingly, is a modest sample:

List means cunning in German. So in an act of sneaky insinuation and downright laziness- I roll out the week's adventures:


(El)Lor in Basel for Bosch - in the lovely Beyeler Fondation - a modernist space all glass and reflective waters that strangely merged with its surrounds - delicate hills and cornfields.

To Fribourg- my german city's swiss namesake- where we battled extreme exhaustion to the sounds of Fennesz and Dat politics. Our horror at the discovery that bad crowds plague the world over. How can you refuse to edge closer, when Dat politics bid you in excited french?

Then, Gruyere - to eat up all the local cliché food groups and wander through the ancient castle, with its bizarre collection of sci-fi art and severed hands to offset the otherwise movie-backdrop picturesque.

Freiburg - rained, poured and then some. So while I was lucky and got to see Jean Luc Nancy speak (!) - Ella didn't get to blackforest it. We had to make our own fun. Chiefly aided by Randy Newman's 'Short people'.

Colmar - Grünewald revisited. Jamfrenzy.


Leipzig - So hyped, so near Berlin, so not Berlin. But it grew on us slightly - as we began to run into theater groups performing in back alleys every which way, and see the various abandoned warehouses as potential art-spaces- a "Hinterhofkultur". Bach's glorious church, the ever-allusive passages through the city. The leafy flutes of the wedding-cake church that once held those secret resistance meetings heralding the fall of the wall.

MISSING BRIAN WILSON'S SET.


Dresden - returning there to firm up my 15 year old memories of a snowy new year's eve. The Zwinger in all its glory and grand art. Late admittance to the city museum's counterposing of east germans and contemporary russian art. Train pain.

We said a prolonged goodbye over kiddy- art supplies in garden cafe in Leipzig. My last extravagent overseas jaunt with australian beloveds before I return was only the run-up to Ella's voyaging.

This reminds me of an installation that fascinated us in Vienna, a kind of huge hills hoist dominated the space, on which were spaced massive bridal dresses. The whole thing began to spin irregularly, the dresses building up motion until puffed with air they assumed the shape of the woman in absentia. The thing ground to a halt and then jerk, they went through the whole wringer again. As we were there - the textiles staged revolt - one dress shaking itself free from this cyclical violence. Somewhat regretfully, I told one of the attendents that the art was coming undone - i would have liked to see for once the bride strip herself from the art world, rather than be stripped.

I went to Art Basel yesterday. It was unlike anything I'd ever experienced before. Partially a colossal, coming-together of modern and contemporary art. Partially terrifying. It was what I imagine a press junket to be like. Commercial and forced to the extent that you lose track of the autonomy, integrity, context of the art itself. The place stank of wealth and smothered with good-looks. Pulchritudinous young buyers swanned about in their oversized, novelty 80s glasses and severe fringes. I asked a group of rich swedish hipsters selling zines for inflated figures if this was not contrary to their originary, swapping diy mentality They looked puzzled and offered me a cigarette to placate. Obviously I just didn't comprehend the spirit of the Basel Kunst Messe. Let the art be as radical, iconoclastic as it be wont, as long as it's sold by sunday.


I bought a zine. Sickened, and in retaliation I went home and began work on my own collage-come-zine. So good did come of it. I was simultaneously provoked by awful consumption and elated by masses of art.



I tried to take some photos of some of the smaller works, not already documented in the broshures. It was such a rush at the end though, that I didn't get to snap my favorite things. Besides, installations must be moved about in, not nuzzled out by a lens.




Edit: Although there was much mediocre stuff - as evident from some of these pictures - i will fondly remember dabbing my feet into a neon-lit swimming pool while John Cage reverberated through the make-shift enclosure.

Following a bout of feeling myself chained to, cowed by the internet I'll begin to jot down my travels once again.


Berlin and Athens have been and gone. I don't have the romanticizing urge to reminisce right now - but let it be noted that they were both absorbing, wondrous. Cities which respectively mythologise art and make an art of mythology. (disgustingly cute, i know)





The pictures follow a sequential narrative - one of my adoration for city that cruelly nicks off with my possessions, my pain and subsequent recuperation in the seat of the Gods. Done and dusty.

Today, we engaged in an abortive 3 minute sketch-off. Understandably, I'm at a distinct disadvantage working within a skills base, for which fore-shortening is a historical marvel to be wondered at but 'neer attained. Still, dearth of skills aside, each time my pencil tip distorts, smudges and fudges its way through rendering an image, I do glory in a sudden startling (!) awareness of my own radically individual, bodily engagement with the world. The aha-moment of perception, perhaps.
Now: to learn to draw.

I spent the long weekend in Amsterdam with my aunt. 'Twas a truly lovely city, with cutesy sinking buildings, inhabitants sun bathing and chatting in front of their personal canals and Dutch art to fawn over.


It also turned out to be a ridiculously hyper occasion as may day combined with their Queen's birthday weekend. The boost in the arm that this already touristy and excessive city didn't exactly need. Koniginnendag (queensday) was quite the spectacle - masses on the streets, people selling all kinds of garage sale junk along the canals. But the highlight for us, was being put into the draw of a tiny alleyside artist studio's contest to win a hand-crafted, bling-as-all-fuck, enamel and swarovski crystal necklet, made entirely of crowns. One of a kind, clearly. We forgot about the draw only to walk past hours later to cat calls of "You! What is your name!". It was the first time either of us had ever won anything. The distinctly odd jewelery-maker then took a "glamour" (as she termed it) shot of me, startledly "majestic".





Yours, A winner now.

I've been watching a fair bit of australian film - you know, as essential to my deep saturation of the germanic culture here- and I've just happened across these delights:


Picnic at Hanging Rock:


The Year of living dangerously:


Storm Boy:


Even:




Yes, they are amazing Polish posters of Australian films. Surrealist, associative bids to shake off the codes of an imposed socialist realism. Film was apparently a medium that elluded sweeping censorship, well, at least in Poland.

This has been a spur to track done some of the films recommended me by Monika, as representative of her homelands strange brand of post iron curtain humour, because, really, if they can make this from our cultural efforts, imagine what they do to their own!

Spain was a triumph of touristastic endeavour with Ellor as delightful hostess of the day.
Madrid had been bad-mouthed as an drab, not-barcelona. Not having been to that ocean-side splendor, I was free to revel in the grandour of Madrid's facades, the expanses of its formal gardens, the vibrancy of the allotted trendy, 'youth' quarter. But then: the art! I visited three stunningly good museums, but the Prado was supreme. The masters (Titian, Rubens, Caravaggio and Rembrandt) unveiled themselves in some of their most captivating, famed works. Moving from Velazquez and his recurring valorization of doughy-faced Phillip IV, we traced Goya's turn from depictions of a pleasure-park courtly existence to his dark, grotesque war landscapes, modern before their time. To soothe ourselves, we returned again and again to the garden of earthly delights, to plunge into Bosch's whimsical universe of exotica, sensuality and the bizarre. Two days worth in itself. We punctuated the Art with a day trip (Toledo, getting abominably lost through windy, empty de chiroco-esque plazas), shopping (block and blocks worth of the most amazing second hand and diy-wares market evs, sundays La Latina), ogling grand palaces, churches.


Crunching Churros (deep fried cake-sticks dunked in runny chocolate) by day, jostling with the swarming Spanish kids for street space by night, a week of hedonism unrivaled was set upon; a fiesta con chicas y chicos (as the saccharine Spanish twee-pop would have it).

Now second semester Deutschland begins.