Category: museums
MACBA – Barcelona, in Brief
I hosted Maria and Victor, a couch-surfing couple from Barcelona last weekend, and while we were enjoying an afternoon in Ljubljana’s Museum of Contemporary Art, I decided that I hadn’t really done justice here to MACBA, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, with a quick post soon after my visit there in early August 2010. So here’s a slightly expanded version, inspired by and dedicated to, my new friends.
Designed by American architect Richard Meier and opened in 1995, it’s a beautiful building, inside and out, elegantly understated and relaxing. (And as it turned out, a great place to try and come down from an attempted robbery if that’s what your body and mind are looking for.) Much of the south side is glass, allowing ample natural light to bathe the interior. The action in the square outside primarily involves skateboarding – lots of it.
The website, along with exhibit schedule, is here, nearest metro stations are Catalunya and Universitat. A few more shots are below, all Creative Commons licensed for non-commercial use. Feel free to use them with credits as indicated here.
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Twelve Photo Tour of Ljubljana’s Museum of Contemporary Art
Here’s a dozen shots of the Museum of Contemporary Art taken over the rainy weekend when I decided that Ljubljana’s newest museum would become the chief beneficiary in my will.
I don’t remember the exact moment that I reached that decision, only that I felt perfectly at peace after I did. I don’t plan to die anytime soon, nor do I plan to have much to leave when I do. But it’s still good to know where whatever is left will be going. Why here?
I like the space. I enjoy its feel and the attitude it conveys. Its setting, in Ljubljana’s newish museum quarter bordering on the Metelkova City alternative space, is energizing, albeit in a subdued, measured way. And I like its presentation – an understated confidence which suggests that what is on exhibit and housed there is worthy of your time and attention, further exploration, and yes, even a financial investment.
by Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi
MSUM (Muzej sodobne umetnosti Metelkova) finally opened its doors last November, an opening that attracted the attention of even the New York Times. That a new home for Eastern European avante-garde art is housed in a former Yugoslav army barracks that was (at least in part) saved from the wrecking ball by squatters shortly after independence, adds to its lore.
It’s major claim to fame is that it’s the home base for Arteast 2000+, the world’s oldest collection of Eastern European avante-garde art from the 1960s to the present. Slovenia’s Museum of Modern Art (Moderna Galerija) began amassing the works in the 1990s but quickly ran out of room. The Ministry of Culture gave the Moderna another building which eventually became MSUM.
Now Showing
But having a building allotted by the ministry –one that no longer exists by the way– didn’t come with a blank check. Or any check. Which is forcing MSUM to improvise. And recycle. Currently showing is The Present and Presence – Repetition 1 (through 28-October), an expansion exhibit of the first installation that opened the museum last fall. A five-point list of reasons behind Repetition 1 is also part of the exhibit:
- A little more here on a previous Piran Cafe post
- The Museum’s website is here
- And here’s a longer and extremely fascinating read – The Metelkova Case: From Army Barracks to Museum of Contemporary Art, from Manitesta Journal: Around curatorial practices
MSUM – Maistrova 3 (Map)
Open Tuesday through Sunday 10 am till 6 pm.
Closed on Mondays, + 1 January, 27 April, 1 May, 15 August, 1 November and 25 December.
adults: 5.00 eur
students, pensioners: 2.50 eur
groups (adults): 3.50 eur
groups (students, pensioners): 2.00 eur
families: 6.00 eur
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Orozco’s Citroen and a Creative Commons Update
I’ve never been much of a car guy. I have one but the last time I put gas in the tank was in April. Of 2011. I didn’t have my first set of wheels until I was 23, an enormous town car that I drove into the ground on the dirt back roads of southeast Ohio. I later drove a Yugo around those same Appalachian foothills for five years. That remains the only new car I ever bought. And this remains the only car I even remotely covet.
It’s Voiture Citroen DS 19 which sculptor Gabriel Orozco famously trisected and reassembled in 1970. An old friend used to say that I was one of the select few who could actually look good driving a Yugo. She’d no doubt be weak in the knees if she saw me driving around in this.
This was shot at the Airs de Paris exhibit at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in the summer of 2007, one of just under 1,600 photos on my flickr stream that I’ve made available under a Creative Commons license. I only ask that credit is given exactly as specified with each photo. Strictly non-commercial, please. Follow the links if you’re not sure.
There are now just over 3,000 photos on my flickr stream, and they are for the most part grouped in sets geographically, with 20+ countries and nearly 40 bigger cities currently listed. That’s one place to start looking. I’m also fairly anal about tagging, so if your mind works in a way remotely similar to mine (my heartfelt sympathies go out to you), you can also hunt around on the tags page.
For previous updates, check the creative commons tag here on Piran Café.
Anyone have any CC experiences they’d like to share? Good or bad? I’d love to hear ‘em!
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LJ Pic of the Day Hits 40, International Museum Day Reminder
Considering it took me more than five years to manage a period of 40 (!) straight LJ Pic of Day postings, it’s no wonder that this otherwise subdued dude, permanently stationed in front of the Museum of Modern Art, is shouting the news to anyone who’ll listen.
Which reminds me: Friday 18 May is International Museum Day, and all museums and galleries in Ljubljana will be participating as well, offering free admission, special workshops, lectures, and more. Here’s a good starting point for a museum directory. Ljubljana in Your Pocket has a very good, continually update culture and events listing with plenty of museum, gallery and exhibit links.
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LJ Pic of the Day
I selected this fairly mundane shot of the National Gallery of Slovenia as the 25th straight Ljubljana Pic of the Day because like several museums I hoped to visit today here in Paris today, it too is closed on Mondays. C’est la vie. (Operating hours and fees are here. Free admission the first Sunday of each month.)
Cheers,
Bob
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Ljubljana’s new Museum of Contemporary Art to open in November
On 26 November at 8 p.m. to be precise. Excellent news indeed.
From a press release:
Starting in the end of this November, Moderna galerija will operate at two separate locations: the Museum of Modern Art will carry on in the existing building in the city center of Ljubljana and the Museum of Contemporary Art in the renovated army barracks building in the new cultural quarter in Metelkova Street.
The new Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova will house the pioneering collection of Eastern European art Arteast 2000+, devoted to postwar avant gardes from the 1960s to the present, and a selection of works from Moderna galerija’s national collection.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova derives its specificity not only from its geopolitical and cultural position, but also from its orientation which questions hegemonic history through a multiplicity of narratives, heterogeneous approaches to historicizing, resonance between the urgencies of different localities, and reciprocal methods of learning.
In addition to the new permanent display of works from the Arteast 2000+ and national collections, the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova will open with the exhibition Museum of Affects, which is part of a long-term research project of the network L’Internationale*. This exhibition attempts to rethink formal methodologies of academic art history and proposes instead to interpret a selection of artworks from the period between 1956 and 1986 from the collections of Ljubljana’s Moderna galerija, Antwerp’s M HKA, Barcelona’s MACBA, and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven as intensities or affects, emphasizing their performative rather than representational character.
The first L’Internationale exhibition, Museum of Parallel Narratives, is on view until 2 October 2011 in MACBA Barcelona; the third one, Spirits of Internationalism, in M HKA Antwerp and Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, will be staged in January 2012.
*The founding partners of L’Internationale are the Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, the Július Koller Society, Bratislava, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona, the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst (M HKA), Antwerp.
The Metelkova area, Ljubljana’s lively contemporary art and music haven, is also home to the well-known (and somewhat pricey) Celica hostel, where guests can sleep in reconstructed prison cells, and is less than a 10-minute walk from the central train station.
250+ pics of artworks now available via Creative Commons license
This is Nissa Bella, painted by Martial Raysse in 1964, at the Musee d’Art moderne et d’Art comtemporain (MAMAC) in Nice. The heart over her left eye was apparently caused by lens flare, and is not actually in the painting. But I do kinda like it.
I make a point of visiting art museums when I’m on the road, and began snapping pics of art works obsessively about three years ago. They provide a nice souvenir, but also an entirely different way to look at, study and enjoy the pieces afterwards. I’ve been posting them onto my flickr stream for some time, and, as alluded to in a post a few days ago, have now decided to make them available via Creative Commons (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License) to anyone who wishes to use them non-commercially in projects, blogs, wikis, etc. I only ask that you credit the photo with a link back to here – pirancafe.com.
The entire Creative Commons set is here and at the moment includes 256 images, in sizes up to 600×900. Everything (I think so, anyway) is tagged with the artist’s name, the title of the work, and the museum where it was shot. Flash photography and tripods are a no-no at virtually all museums, so just about all of these are shot at high speed ASA and oftentimes slow shutter speeds. Most should work fine for web use.
Some of the museums and exhibits represented:
- Museo Nacional d’Art de Catalunya – Barcelona (Aug 2010)
- EXHIBIT – Cezanne, Picasso, Giacometti – Masterpieces from the Fondation Beyeler – Leopold Museum, Vienna (Sep 2010)
- Musee d’Art moderne et d’Art comtemporain (MAMAC), Nice (Mar 2011)
- National Gallery – Stockholm (Aug 2010)
- Exhibit – MATCH: Otto Dix and the Art of Portraiture, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (Feb 2008)
- Exhibit: Drei. Das Triptychon in der Moderne, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (Feb 2009)
- Cleveland Museum of Art, permanent collection (Dec 2008)
- Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels (Sep 2009)
More will be available when time allows. Enjoy, and tell a friend!
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Vietnam People’s Air Force Museum – notebook
Still quite a bit of catching up to do from my trip to Vietnam in October. Here are a handful of shots taken at the Vietnam People’s Air Force Museum, which sits on the eastern edges of Hanoi. A google translation: All for the protection of the skies of our Vietnamese Fatherland.
There’s a lot here that will be of interest to aircraft and history buffs, particularly the many downright odd-looking Soviet-made copters. It did have a certain appeal.
But what I mainly saw when looking at the tons upon tons of metal rusting and rotting in the heat and smog of Hanoi was the insane amounts of money mankind insists on wasting to wreak havoc upon his fellow man. Below, a few downed US planes.
The museum sits at the edge of the unused Bach Mai airfield, providing ample room for this vast junkyard. Obviously, there were many planes parked here permanently, but I found myself more drawn to the plethora of rusted support vehicles. And their awkward and colorful descriptions, like the one describing the bulldozer below:
Bulldoger No UL-269 – This bulldoger used by 28th air field engineer battalion in building head quarters, missile, radar, shelling fighting battle fiellds, in building secret airfields participating in our airfare and air defense glorieus victories.
I arrived quite late in the day and had less than 30 minutes to rush through the museum building itself. Quite a few of the exhibits focused on the American War and included a good stock of artifacts collected before and after the victory. Here are some Object Collected From US-Puppet Bases in the South on Liberation Day.
Proletarians, Unite! How many of these countries still exist?
Ten additional shots in the slide show below. You can also view them on my flickr stream here.
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Previous posts from Vietnam October 2010:
- 17 Hours in Nghia Lo
- The Priciest Booze I’ll Never Drink (or, a note to travelers even more stupid than me)
- How much would you pay this gentleman to snap a pic of him atop his cross-eyed water buffalo?
- Hoa Lo, aka The Hanoi Hilton: an Abbreviated Tour
- I found the g-spot in Hanoi today
- Would you shop for clothes at a place called ‘Piggie Shop’?
- The Prince of Hàng Bè
- I wanted to visit Ho Chi Minh today, but he wasn’t there.
- Women of the Temple of Literature
- Klimt in Hanoi
- 45 Minutes in Sapa’s Central Market
- Vietnam, Northern Highlands
- Wine (Good for Women)
MOCA-Shanghai
A few quick shots of Shanghai’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), a very nice, if somewhat small, space on the edge of the city’s sprawling People’s Park.
Established in 2005 to help draw even more attention to contemporary Chinese art, my visit coincided with a show entitled Squares of Rome. It was a good exhibit, consisting primarily of photography, giving me the idea to try something similar in Ljubljana. I was however, hoping for something a little bit more Chinese.
Here are a few more shots, and a few more are here.
[Museum website]
Admission: 20 RMB (3 USD / 2.40 EUR)
MOCA-Shanghai 03, originally uploaded by pirano.
Musee du Slip opens in Brussels
This new underpants museum, which opened its doors last month, will surely be atop this guy’s list of places to visit when his troubles in Germany are behind him.
Via WorldHum:
Belgian artist Jan Bucquoy has just opened the “Musee du Slip” (..) which features framed underwear (..) donated mostly by Belgian artists, singers and politicians, and represents a Utopian longing for an equal society: “If you are scared of someone, just imagine them in their underpants.”
He’s planning to take the exhibit on the road to Paris where he hopes the collection will include items acquired from Carla Bruni among others.
Here’s an interview with Bucquoy, in French, explaining the concept, and a Reuters story where he proclaims, “If I had portrayed Hitler in his underpants there would not have been a war.”
Brussels 05, originally uploaded by pirano.
