It's almost 11am and I am still in bed. Could it be because I don't have work today? Possibly. Could it be because I'm just tired? Possibly. Is the most probable option that I've been having nightmares every night for about a week, thereby waking up every few hours, resulting in no good night's sleep ever? Bingo. Last night was clearly a win.
Two extremely disturbing, yet interesting art exhibits attended. Allow me:
1. The museum that is attached to the Eglise Val de Grace. I went there with my friends for class, and nobody else was there. I mean, it was a ghost town. The building that the church is located in is apparently equal parts school, church, and museum. This was news to me. Because we were the only people in the building, the gentlemen who worked there followed us around eventually pointed us in the direction of their museum once we were finished looking at their church. Lucky us.
Well, let's see... The museum used to be a hospital that was primarily used during WWII. Interesting enough? But the way it was set-up was utterly unsettling, because everything was made to look just a little too much like it used to. For example, there was a fake mortuary with actual petrified human heads underneath sheets on beds. The beds were suspended by these gold bars, and when we walked in, there just so happened to be a super creepy employee there... in costume, wearing scrubs. The rest of the museum has exact replicas of what happened to people's faces during the war, (for example, if a man got half his cheek blown out), and the kind of reconstructive surgery they'd do to fix it. It was all very morbid and sad, but the art show I went to last night might top that...
2. Sophie Calle at the Palais de Tokyo. Long story short, Sophie is a young artist and throughout her life, her mother kept asking her why she wasn't ever the subject in her daughter's artwork. This upset her mother deeply, I gathered. So when her mother got sick and subsequently died, Sophie decided to film her mother's death. Her mom, still conscious and not quite done yet, understood that her daughter was finally putting her in her art, leading to the moment before she died, when her final word to her child was "Finally."
So, the footage of her mother's death is at this exhibit, and it's pretty much as charming as it sounds. She enters into rigor mortis at one point, which is apparent when the nurse takes her pulse on both her neck and her wrist. Other parts of the museum included a few photos from Sophie's trip to the North Pole, a journey she took after her mom passed away because it was somewhere that her mother always wanted to go, but never did.
So, it's been a charming few days. I'm leaving for Brussels tomorrow morning. If I hear one more person say "Oh, Brussels is nice, but Bruges is really where you should go", I'll cry. I wanted to go to Bruges all along, but it's hard to convince large groups to go there, apparently. I'm still looking forward to the trip. Maybe we'll even have enough time to take a day trip to Bruges, who knows. Otherwise, I've been trying to research in hopes that our literal 48 hours spent there isn't a total bust. At least we always know there's good chocolate. And beer. Cheers!
No comments:
Post a Comment