7:00 a.m. We wake up very early on Thursdays for class at Mr. Dunn's apartment.
10:00 a.m. We arrive to find Mr. Dunn with two other students, both musicians. The first we have met before, Stan, a retired violinist who loves Obama. He is very nice, and we get along very easily with each other. The other's name I do not remember, but he was a musician as well, and also very nice!
We finished watching Sleeping Beauty, then continued with the documentary about Shostakovich and Stalin, and the finished with Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto.
After that, we got some toothpaste from a nearby store, and then we decided to go see the museums!
1:00 p.m. We had a snack in Museums Quartier, and then got duo passes to the Leopold and the Mumok.
2:15 p.m. We then spent the next several hours exploring these museums!
2:30 p.m. The exhibits on Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt were amazing. I learned a lot about who they were as people, and I feel enlightened about art in Vienna. We saw so many famous paintings, and one great part of the exhibit on Klimt was that they had collected over 400 of his post cards to his life-long friend, Emily. They were intertwined throughout the exhibit as his life progressed, like a timeline that you walked through. I think my favorite paintings were the lake paintings, and the stormy sky with birch tree paintings that he completed while with Emily's family on Holiday.
4:00 p.m. After that, we went to the Mumok. It was three floors of Claes Olderburg. I saw some pieces of art that I read about in my Art History textbook in High school!
There was the giant fluffy piece of cake, the giant soft electric plugs and outlets... I think it was meant to make me question everyday objects I take for granted, and it definitely did, but it also made me smile. Seeing a vacuum cleaner in an art museum just made me giggle. A lot of the art was very grim and edgy, but some of it made me see everyday objects with humor, and that I loved. On the top floor, there was a main visual theme: Mickey Mouse. An all-American symbol, he used it over and over in his artwork, culminating in a giant walk-in exhibit. It is an oddly shaped black box which has lit display cases filled with strange Americana, fake foods, old products, and also random stuff that doesn't really make sense. There is a second black box you walk into, in which the shape of a ray-gun: basically a sideways "L" is explored, with all kinds of different objects in this shape, also in lit display cases. In your mind, all of these things really could represent guns, but they weren't. They were pieces of wood, toys, metal, a dried-up old gardening glove etc, but any of these could be used by children to play "ray-gun," a long American tradition. When you emerge from the black boxes, you discover that from above, you just walked through an outline of mickey mouse's head, and a ray-gun pointed at it. It was a strange feeling to have that realization. Another strange feeling happened when we saw what appeared to be KKK hoods in the shape of mickey mouse heads, complete with ears.
5:00 p.m. Then the day took a bad turn, Kim starting feeling bad. :( We head home, and had a great nap and watch American Tv shows for the rest of the day, and I actually did my laundry!
So Kim will hopefully sleep and feel better in the morning!
Goodnight!
E
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