Weekend and Kroller-Muller Museum

This weekend was a pretty low key one.  It was mostly spent doing research and sitting around.  Me and friend did go to the Amsterdam Museum.  It has a really interesting interactive display.  After going I decided I am going to do my project on how museums try to appeal to kids.

We then got lunch.  These are called poffertjes.  Really they are tiny little puffy pancakes.  They are delicious with strawberries and whipped cream.

We decided we needed a little English spoken around us so we went to a movie.  We ended up seeing The Amazing Spiderman in 3-D.  Check out those awesome glasses!  Plus the theater was amazing so we kept taking photos and looked like total tourists.

On Tuesday we had our class session (thank god there is only one a week).  Then a few of us went to the flower market.  This is a market that is on boats on a canal filled with really cheap flowers.  I got some tulip bulbs to bring home for the family.  When I asked the seller if I could get them through customs he said if they tried to stop me just run.  Very comforting.

They also had a lot of souvenirs including this sensitive plant.  I have no idea what that means.  There was also a lot of marijuana seeds for sale, but we didn't think we could get those through customs.

 Wednesday we took a 2 hour bus ride to the Kroller-Muller Museum.  The ride taught me two things.  The Netherlands is extremely flat and it looks just like America with weird license plates when you are on the highway.

 The museum has the second largest collection of Van Goghs in the world.  It has some pretty amazing ones.  I always forget how amazing they are until I am in front of them in person.  Pictures just do not do him justice.

There was a large collection of contemporary artists as well.  These are stacks of paper with dye poured over them.  I stood in front of these forever and got tons of pictures.  I think my mom will really like these.

This piece was my favorite in the place.  It was a wave made out of ribbons tied to a webbing.  The ribbons all had words written on them.  This is one of those pieces I really wish I had thought of myself.

This is a work by the artist Jenny Holzer.  She is part of the feminist artist wave of the 1980s.  Her stuff always has really interesting phrases written in it.  This one just looks like graffiti when you stare at it straight on, but when you step to the side it says, "You are trapped on the earth so you will explode".

She also does pieces like this which are just words scrolling across a screen.  This one said things like "Laugh hard at the absurdly evil" and "If you had behaved nicely the communists wouldn't exist" (which is my favorite).  I could spend a lot of time in front of this just to read everything.

There was a whole room that was an installation by Cai Guo-Qiang, a Chinese artist who also did the cars hanging in the lobby of the Seattle Art Museum.  It was a comment on how man has an unfair advantage against animals because of technology.  The whole thing was these stuffed tigers hanging from the air with arrows all through them.  This work was amazing and disturbing at the same time.

While listening to our professor lecture about the De Stijl movement we found this sculpture of a gold R2D2.  (Ok, not really)

Then we found a guy in a beret.  A motherfucking beret in an art museum.  The only way it would have been better is if he had a pencil mustache and a sketch book.

Next we walked around the sculpture garden that surrounds the museum. 

My favorite piece out there was by Jean Dubuffet.  I called it the Charlie Brown piece.

You got to go inside the sculpture through this tiny little (creepy) stairwell.

Then you got to walk all around it.  It was amazing.  This is exactly the kind of art that I love.  You can play on it and interact with it.  It is art made for the people with a sense of humor built in.  Kids might not know that they are climbing on art, but the beauty will still effect them. 

I didn't mean to end this blog on such a deep note, but on this trip it is easy to get sucked into the bullshit that many artists and art historians spit out to try to make what they do seem super important.  In my opinion people create art because there is something inside them that needs expressing.  You can throw all the theories at it you want, but in the end it is all about how the work makes you feel.  And this one made me feel happy and a bit like a little kid.  It was one I wish I could have shown my dad.