Kunstmuseum - Bonn

It rained today; perhaps not such a major issue but there was an earnestness about today's rain. It seemed to understand that today was excursion day and that, for the first time since the beyond-freezing-cold of late February, the weather was going to ensure that nothing would be done outside without being terribly and irrevocably inconvenienced.

So I surrendered to those dark clouds and caught the underground to Heussallee and the Kunstmuseum.  This was my first visit to the Bonn's Modern Art Gallery and I have to be honest, I did approach this visit with some trepidation.

In my sad and somewhat Philistine mind set, Modern Art would appear to fall into one of two categories. First, it seems to have been a mistake. I can imagine an artist racing home to tell his partner, 'remember that massive party we had last week and how we spilled paint on a canvas that had fallen on the floor, then we walked and crawled thought the paint? I've been offered a gazillion dollars for it and multiple gazillions if I can produce another twelve. Call everyone back for this weekend and order plenty of bourbon and vodka.'

The second one seems to be an actual confidence trick. As in 'Oh my god! My agent will be here in twenty minutes and I haven't got anything. I know, I'll dribble two blobs of yellow here and then run a six inch wide brush with some black paint on it to give a wide stripe of streaky black between the two yellow blobs.'

Like I said, when it comes to art, I am a Philistine. But at the same time, I have had occasions where art has spoken to me. Like most people, I know what I like. The problem for me today was that I didn't like too much. Perhaps I need help; I did notice several couples sitting and being transported by the setting and the art. They spoke animatedly about form and shape and they gesticulated long and hard as they sat admiring.

I did try but, like Rap music, the art today eluded me.

To top things off, there was a photographic retrospective of Lewis Baltz. Let's not even have the discussion of whether photography is art or not! I did check out his corner of the gallery and was somewhat amazed, to be honest. There were black and white pictures of tract houses and factories, car parks and loading bays from the mid-70's. Having been through a multitude of factories and warehouses in my time, the images could have been eminently forgettable. But Baltz has an ability to frame and capture these mundane scenes beautifully. The black and white images are crisp and clean; almost documentary evidence of an age gone by. The regular shapes of his images become geometrical wonders rather than repetitious images of factory windows and the like.

For good or I'll, it made me look more closely at the streets around my apartment in Bonn. Curiously, I looked and looked again at some of the apartment buildings less than a kilometre from my home in Bonn.

Check out these images (crude by Mr. Baltz standards I know) and see what I saw for the first time in three months.

For example, this looks like just another street in Bonn, right?

But then look more closely at the balconies; Where did these carvings and moldings come from?

These are startlingly beautiful and seem to have just arrived into my state of conscious awareness only this weekend. What sort of mental haze have I been walking around in??

Were they installed in the last couple of weeks? Surely I could not have been walking around so blind as not to see these wondrous items every single day?I walk past many of these buildings every day to catch my tram to the office.



This one exists over a doorway not 500m from my apartment

 

This one has a cheeky face (almost Punch and Judy-esque) on either side of the door

 

 

This magnificent eagle is one of three or four that sit above a small Asian restaurant now

 

After visiting the Baltz exhibit, it was as if a mask had been removed from my eyes. I may not get Modern Art but a visit to the Kunstmuseum has certainly opened my eyes to the beauty around me. Sometimes all you have to do is open your eyes and ears to the opportunity around and life might just astonish you.

Have a great week!