I had a wonderful, epic museum day with my new friend Camila, who I met randomly at a cafe because she noticed that I had The Wandering Earth sitting on the table and actually knows The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, so she struck up a conversation about it. She's a Chilean-German graphic designer who's obsessed with fonts and speaks excellent, fluent English. Amazing!
First we met near the museum for lunch. I'd been wanting to try Phở Tinh and was not disappointed! The decor in this little place is great, and the food is some of the best Vietnamese I've had in Hamburg so far, which is saying a lot, because it's
e v e r y w h e r e
Plus ginger ale full of ginger strips, fresh mint and lemon slices. Approved!
One of the current exhibitions at the Museum of Art and Design - though not the one I wanted to go there for specifically - was " '68 Pop and Protest". They had all kinds of things from the 60's: neat mod dresses and other clothing like this, a video art installation, furniture and other interior items, protest and concert posters..
Here's some of that interior design now! It's impressive, fun, and retrofuturistic, but also makes you kind of sick if you keep looking at it! A woman standing behind me mumbled the same thing we were saying to her husband: "You'd think they could have added just a little bit of blue or green or something to offset it, you know..?"
I unfortunately didn't take a picture of the placard and don't know who designed and/or printed these psychedelic neon posters. There was a lot of that going around that day: we talked, laughed, and joked nonstop, since we're just getting to know each other and were hanging out for the first time that day.
Some of the concert posters, which do not advertise music in which I have ever been particularly interested in but are amazing nonetheless
Oh boy. Freestyle poetry-typography that's actually pretty impactful
From there we went back in time about fifty years to an adjacent exhibition about nationalistic German propaganda from the First World War. This seems very socialist!
Oh boy, okay. Not that socialist - got it!
Well anyway, back to the 1960's! ... Right?
No.. these look older. Upon closer inspection, these bizarre, avant-garde, early sci-fi dance costumes (yes, people wore them, they're not sculptures!) are from the 1920's. They were designed by Lavinia Schulz, a German expressionist.
It's pretty crazy to think that people were dancing around as spacemen and robots that early. I would love to be able to see that.
Well, anyway.. let's head into Art Nouveau. Each wandering into another corridor or series of rooms took us a little further back in time.
This lovely tapestry is by Norwegian textile artist Frida Hansen (1855 - 1931). If you look more closely, though, these angelic figures have really dumb little mouths that make them look totally unamused, and that kind of ruins it for me lol
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Just part of the leg of an absurdly ornate display cabinet
Once again failed to take note of the artist and then couldn't find it later, but hey, we're entertaining and funny, and we jump from topic to topic like no one's business!
.. Oh look, shiny things!
I die.
No wait I'm back, I must be, because I'm in love with these gorgeous pieces
Eh, nope, false alarm, definitely dead
Tried to take a picture of the interesting, old fashioned lightbulb filaments and didn't quite manage it
t e x t u r e
These angelic musicians and dancers are by Parisian sculptor Agathon Léonard.
... and... well, we were looking for the thing I very specifically wanted to see, and we ended up in a massive, beautiful room full of pianos?! So I mean, if you've ever been interested in a piano museum.. this is also the one for you. It's got something for everybody. Action, romance..
This is the same piano as the one above; I decided it was the most ornate one in the room. The lighting was very strange, dim, and yellow, though - I would guess maybe so that it doesn't age or damage the painted surfaces and finishes - so it was hard to take decent pictures. But every single edge, corner, surface, and detail of this particular piano was sculpted, painted, engraved, enameled.. you name it.
This Swiss piano had two of these beautiful candle holders sticking out of it, for reading the sheet music and seeing the keys. People must have gone properly blind pretty early in those days.
Okay, finally: the East Asian collection. At least we're in the right section now.
Ooh, ancient light switch plates. But no, that's not what I came for.
Ooohh, a gorgeous trinket box in the shape of Heian-era woman in her many layers of kimono, one with a cherry blossom pattern, and a few strands of her hair have also been added on top.. but no, still not what I came for.
I came for these! Akihiro Higuchi's lacquered insect specimens, brought to you by (and which I found out about thanks to) the Mikiko Sato Gallery.
Well, anyway.. further back in time we go, to antiquity.
Most of the ancient Egyptian artifacts you see in museums are pretty similar; something cat, something Horus, canopic jars. I haven't been deeply impressed by much of this sort of thing. What stands out most in my memory is the mummified baby crocodile I saw in Hanover.
But, this display room is really, really cool. 10/10 for presentation
We remain in antiquity and slide on over to Greece. Did you know that in classical Greek art the men are depicted as black, and the women are depicted as white?
Me: Oh wow, what are these now, like, Sumerian?
-things are Etruscan-
-makes an ahh, how stupid of me! face and gesture-
Camila: Geeze Courtney, I can't believe you didn't know that!
Me: God I know, I'm so fucking sorry hahah
For real though, Sumer is like 4000 years older and the Etruscans were in modern-day Italy.
Oof
... I mean, to call him "statuesque" is pretty dumb and redundant, right?
I love these kinds of instruments and am unceasingly astonished that ancient peoples figured out how to construct and use them. This is an astrolabe. It's a mariner's navigational tool for measuring the altitude of celestial bodies as they appear above the horizon. You can identify stars and planets with it, as well as your own latitude. How ridiculous is that?
A holiday and other day off calendar lol.
Slightly more arbitrary and frivolous but no less beautiful and finely-crafted.
I don't know what these are - by this time we were pretty tired and punchy, as it was also pretty hot, stuffy, and sweaty in this museum because Europe mostly doesn't have AC - because of the talking and laughing, and because we were rushing through the last rooms ahead of the museum closing.
I mean, this is a peacock. Of that much we can be certain.
Cherubs, yes, excellent; this incredibly ornate cabinetry is much more familiar than those exotic lead-looking doohickeys.
Last but not least for the classical art exhibitions, these Four Seasons displayed beautifully at the end of this hallway lined with sculpted busts are actually not from antiquity, they're Baroque, by one Filippo Parodi. What astonished me was that they're not metal or stone: they're gilded lime wood.
Karl Lagerfeld had just died (but not before growing a beard and clothing Jason Momoa, so it's not like he left a whole lot undone toward the end), and since he's from Hamburg, the museum elected to display a few of his recent pieces. These look like the retro 60's exhibition we started with, but these are from the Chanel pre-fall '18 collection.
And finally, Camila and I had of course seen this massive chandelier-like orb of plastic toys and household items salvaged from the ocean by Stuart Haygarth on our way in, but didn't want to come to a dead stop in the entryway full of people at the time.
The more I follow litter pickers, beachcombers, and artists creating large installations and sculptures like this out of salvaged plastic bobbing around in the ocean, the more deeply impressed I am by its permanence relative to its usefulness. How absurd to go to such great lengths, cost, effort, and personal and environmental risk to extract a finite resource from deep in the Earth and fashion it into things like drink cups that will be used for less than five minutes, or little plastic sand toys that kids are almost guaranteed to lose in the surf.
I wouldn't go so far as to announce that I'm trying to go waste-free, but I'm no longer interested in even buying items in the black plastic containers that Lush supposedly recycles. Even people who work for them don't know and can't find out anything about this alleged "recycling process". I think we all know what that means.
Anyway, along with the Museum of Ethnology - or MARKK as it's now been rebranded - MKG is yet another excellent, surprisingly vast, diverse, and interesting museum here that I would strongly recommend to anyone interested in sculpture, painting, typography, textiles, interior design, history, other cultures, or all of the above.
... oh, and that nonstop talking, joking, and jumping from topic to topic thing that we'd been doing all day? It continued well into the evening at a cafe. It was pretty great.
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