Visit to the Essl Museum

Took a ten-minute ride to the Essl Museum, a really beautiful modern art gallery.

B says the guy who founded it is a millionaire art collector who owns the Austrian equivalent of Home Depot.

Visit their website and look at how architecturally striking the space is---I was really impressed with it.

view of the large third floor gallery at the Essl Museum

Three pieces of art caught my eye:

Wall sculpture made of glued-together empty toilet paper rolls.

This piece measures about six feet square. I might make one of these for my house, but I'd want to paint the rolls, maybe run some colorful fabric inside each "pipe" so it would show through the gaps.

The second thing I liked, unfortunately, I failed to get a pic of. But here's what the artist, Alem Korkut, did---he put some kind of vibrating mechanism under a tray, about the size of a cookie sheet. On top of that he put a piece of white paper. Then he started the vibrator and dumped some ball bearings on the paper, each of which had been dipped in black paint.

So as the surface vibrated, the balls jiggled around and lurched here and there and created a kind of random pattern. At any point in the process you could stop the vibrator, remove the ball bearings, and there's your art to hang on the wall. There were video screens showing exactly how the guy did it.

Again, the only thing I would change would be to use different colors on the ball bearings. First black, then the next color, then the next. I might try this at home, too.

Finally, this thing below. It was ingenious, we thought----a bust of David, on which is projected moving eyes and lips, the lips reciting a Hungarian freedom poem, in Chinese, and behind it all a red piece of fabric. When you look at the shadow of the bust on the fabric, you see yellow stars for eyes and a mouth on the shadow "head."

Modern Art at Essl Museum, Austria from John X on Vimeo.

The artist is named David Adamko, and you can check out his website for the full video of the installation.

Thanks to B who helped me find the names and websites here, after I forgot my notes back at the museum!