Wednesday 18.8.2010
Today in lecture we talked about Turks. Lots of names and dates, but if you’re looking for legitimate sources of old facts, you should not be reading a blog. However, of interest, we spoke of the Turks bringing coffee to Vienna. Legend has it the Viennese ventured out into the Turkish camps once they were driven from the city and found coffee beans. They knew not what to do with them, tried feeding them to their horses, and eventually hit on grinding them and pouring hot water through them, I guess. Though apparently adding milk to coffee was a Viennese invention; the Turks only drank it black. The Melange was born. Kathy said that the founder of the Viennese coffee house (the man who founded the first coffee house in Vienna {and perhaps the first in the world? I don’t know}) was named Kulczycki. His coffee house was called Hof zur Blauen Flasche – The House of the Blue Bottle. Supposedly there is a statue of the great man on Kolschitzkygasse, formerly Schlossergasse. Kathy said she couldn’t find this statue, but offered “extra credit” to whomever could. Of course the offers of extra credit are so numerous and vague that I doubt they mean anything, especially for someone taking the class P/NP (as I am) but I am determined to find this statue and pay my respects to the man, as I am enamored of the Viennese coffee house. It is wonderful and I love it. After experiencing the Vienna coffee house, I do not look forward to returning to American coffee. American coffee culture sucks. I feel I’ll never enjoy a coffee outside of Vienna for the rest of my life, after experiencing the best of the best. Maybe I’ll get an espresso machine and make my own. I’d have to find out how to make real Schlagobers though to make a legit Einspänner. And espresso machines are expensive. It might be worth it though. In any case I want to find this statue. I Googled Kolschitzkygasse and it’s near the Südtiroler U-Bahn stop, so it wouldn’t be too inconvenient to go there and look for it. I will do this some time soon, hopefully.
Kathy tried but failed to talk about Biedermeier. Instead we talked about the Enlightenment, Maria Theresia, Joseph II, the French Revolution, and Napoleon. Running out of time, Kathy said she would leave it to Dr. O to talk about Biedermeier, which she did. After class we went to the Naschmarkt for lunch. We got falafel, hummus, and beer. After that we headed to the Belvedere for our museum tour with Dr. O. They have quite an art collection there. We first hit up some of the famous stuff there, like the painting of Napoleon. If you Google “Napoleon painting” it’s the first image that comes up. He’s on this rearing horse, pointing his troops forward, with his cloak flowing about him. He is made to look taller than he was. Dr. O also described the Biedermeier painting and period, which seems to have come about largely because of Metternich, who repressed any kind of change, revolution, or intellectual discussion (the French Revolution was scaring the hell out of all the other European monarchs) and Austrians were encouraged to live a lifestyle of Gemütlichkeit, comfortably home living, raising children, being successful suburbanites, and all the things that I want to run far and fast away from. She said Austrian women were encouraged to abide by the “three Ks”: Kinder, Küche, und Kirche, or children, kitchen and church. I guess some girls who are raised too religiously still want that. Dr. O and I and most of the people in the group seem to agree that there’s nothing wrong with Biedermeier, but it’s not for us. Biedermeier seems like the antithesis of all the goals I’ve ever had (adventurous young student doesn’t want to settle down?) but I agree there’s nothing wrong with people who are drawn to that. I just won’t spend too much time talking to them.
Next we hit up the Jugendstil, or Vienna’s art nouveau. The leader of Jugendstil was Gustav Klimt, who made a career decorating Ringstraße buildings. As it happens Monica and I have been discussing art ever since she got here. She likes Picasso and raves about Guernica. I think Guernica is stupid and that cubism is a waste of paint. Do they even use paint or just pencils and crayons in cubism? Whatever, it’s ugly. Monica says that I like “realist” art, in other words art that looks like something. For instance I like old Renaissance stuff, when art reached its height and artists really knew how to represent scenes accurately. They’d mastered use of light and shadow, da Vinci had illegally dissected corpses in order to learn how to accurately represent the human form, Dürer showed off his ability to paint anything, and art was beautiful. After this point painters realized that art had reached its height (it couldn’t get any better) and started painting ****. They invented new styles and painted things that look very unlike what they should. Most of the new styles are so vague that interpretation of what the hell the artist was trying to show is open to the viewer. So some things can be representative, but only if you have someone explain it to you. For the most part artists of these new styles are just lazy (Monica expressed her intent to kill me when I mentioned this). They can paint something (and not well) and the worse they paint it, in other words the more it looks like a formless blob, the more it is open to interpretation, and any intellectual can come along and say that for them it represents some emotion, or sex, or progress, or politics, or something in the artist’s life, and in any case that it’s a masterpiece. Well, more power to ‘em. The artists make money and the appreciators of the art get to feel artsy and intellectual because they can enjoy something that the lay-viewer can’t. I’d rather have something that actually looks like it does in nature. In the Belvedere today Ben (Adams, Bio-man) and I noticed this painting that was amazingly good. It was some market scene in Africa, but it was so freaking good that it was almost a photograph. The artist had serious talent. However, this doesn’t mean that photography has made painting obsolete, because the painter has the same advantage over the photographer that the novelist has over the journalist: the former can express something in his or her imagination, that is, something that has not necessarily happened yet, maybe a possibility, maybe an impossibility, but in any case can give form to his or her thoughts. So I like realist art, where it looks like something, the artist has skill, and I can tell what the hell the painting is saying.
So needless to say I am not impressed by Gustav Klimt or Egon Schiele. Dr. O says we’ll see lots of Schiele at the Leopold Museum on Monday, but we saw a few in the Belvedere. There is a lot of Klimt in the Belvedere. His famous painting Der Kuss, The Kiss is in a giant glass frame box thing in one room. Dr. O talked about it for a while, and we discussed whether the woman in the painting is enjoying the kiss. I think it would be much clearer if Klimt had painted the figures to actually look like people. Then I could more clearly read their emotions. As is, the painting is open to interpretation by the viewer, which means it means everything and nothing and is lazy ****. There was also an unfinished work by Klimt, which made it clear that he painted his female characters naked (and anatomically correct) before “dressing them” as Dr. O put it by painting clothing on them. To each his own I guess, but it seems kind of pervy and unnecessary to me. And Dr. O talked for a while about how Klimt was a womanizer and had at least 18 illegitimate children on account of all his affairs. Anyway Dr. O likes Klimt and Schiele, and I guess as a lifelong art historian she knows better than me, but she can keep her Klimt. He bores and frustrates me.
One thing that I really DID like in the Belvedere was a large collection of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s famous “character heads” busts of heads making various faces. Most of them are contorted into odd visages. Messerschmidt was the Maria Theresia’s court sculptor. He is a good sculptor and his works actually look like people! Much much better than Klimt or Schiele. Anyway he was court sculptor, but eventually kind of fell out of favor of everyone he knew, fellow artists and critics and the court and everyone like that. Being a little daft and unable to deal with this rejection by society, Messerschmidt retired to some cabin by a lake, where he reputedly tortured himself with by clamping his arms into bruised jelly and horrible things like that in order to inflict pain upon himself. He’d then study his grim visage in a mirror and sculpt the contorted face. Most of the character heads, therefore, show people with twisted faces. Some say that Messerschmidt was exploring the possibilities of sculpting, and trying to sculpt expressions that others had not attempted. Some say he was simply off his rocker. I think both are true. The Messerschmidt character heads collection was my favorite thing in the Belvedere. Messerschmidt, I guess near the end of his life, tried to destroy his character heads by throwing as many of them as he could carry into the river. I don’t know the full story, I guess he was just daft. Anyway he did like 69 total, people think. Some curator came along and sorted all the remaining ones, and he named them all. Most people disagree with the names he gave them. Since Messerschmidt never named any of them, all the official names of the character heads are things this curator thought of when he saw them. Most are them are inaccurate, and the names hardly correspond to the faces, for the most part. Anyway, I really, really enjoyed Messerschmidt and it was pretty much the only thing I liked in the Belvedere, except for this one painting called The Last Contingent which shows a rural village, and all of the old men with their makeshift weapons going off to war. The village (women and children, all the young men presumably have already gone off to war) are seeing them off. The old men are the last possible warriors left, and are going off to save their village where the young men have failed. I liked it a lot. It would never have worked in the art nouveau styles, by the way, such as impressionism.
The Belvedere has a lot of impressionist stuff by Klimt and Monet. The Monets are impressive only because he was famous for inventing impressionism. I like The Scream, but most of impressionism is useless. It was invented as a way to paint things really really fast, so that you could capture a scene in a particular light. If you took the time to paint something well, the light would have changed. However, with photography this is no longer useful. You can capture any image instantly. So impressionism may have once been useful but now it’s useless because photography is better, and unimpressive.
They also have this awesome, famous painting of Napoleon being extremely badass.
After the Belvedere we went to an adjacent beer garden. I got a pretty good dark and some Schinkenfleckerl, which was this Austrian ham pasta thing that was pretty good. It came in a big cube. I guess the non-Austrian food it most closely resembles is lasagna, except that it was pretty much just pasta, cheese and ham. It was delicious. Monica got some Apfelstrudel mit schalg which was also pretty good. Anyway, as always I enjoyed finding good beer and food. Came back and wrote this, and now hopefully some friends and I will got out to a bar, or Martha said she was going to try to find dancing along the Donaukanal.
Also, the Belvedere was the only place I’ve seen penises. Everywhere else the naked men are tactfully covered up by a cloth or leaf or something. But in the Belvedere I saw two statues with tiny classical penises. I wonder why classical and neo-classical sculptures have such tiny penises? Anyway, the Belvedere was built and owned by a homosexual guy (Prince Eugene of Savoy) and it’s the only place the penises weren’t covered. Just an observation.
Later that night a bunch of us felt like going out, so we hit up Chelsea, a bar near our apartment. It’s named after some U.K. football team. Not many people were there but we got drinks and had some pleasant conversations. Some lone guys came in by themselves and ordered beers and watched the girls. It was kind of creepy. We danced. I tried to dance. The music was pretty bad, and for the most part the other dancers were as bad as us. I thought it was funny how the Europeans dressed and danced. Kind of like a poor imitation of Americans (who are themselves not very great). They seemed to choose their apparel specifically to try to appear “cool.” It was interesting to watch. I asked a friend who’d been traveling a lot before the program and he said most Europeans were like that. Anyway I thought it was kind of hilarious.
After the bar some of us went out to get some fresh air and ended up lying on our backs watching the clouds move across the night sky and talking about various things. A couple people came out on the catwalk between apartments to smoke and we called them down and they joined us. Religion seems to be a hot topic of conversation since coming to this Catholic country. We were talking about whether we like Vienna. I really like the city, but it seems some people do not like it very much. I can understand the unfriendly people and the priceyness and the general arrogance of Austrians, but I really enjoy Vienna. I could live here. Bratislava and Budapest, for example, are charming little towns, but I couldn’t live there. I’d get bored after a week. I feel like I could live permanently in Vienna.
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