We arrived in Koln offensively early on Tuesday morning - when I left London it looked like this:
Dark and misty and cold. And 4.30am. By the time we got to Stansted, flew to Germany, arrived in Koln and dumped our bags the last thing any of us wanted to do was spend six hours at the Ludwig Museum, I don't care how fabulous their Pop Art collection is. Well, OK, I cared. But the point is we were tired and hungry and the last thing we wanted to do in said state was to have to find the energy for rigorous intellectual discussion.
The entire day was a harried, headachy blur - which is a shame as so much of the work we've been looking at this semester was there for some serious in-the-flesh gazing. And all we could focus on was our primordial desire for caffeine.
I can't even remember where we went on Wednesday, Krefeld was one city - two very different collections, one in a pair of buildings by Mies van der Rohe - and then another small city that houses an incredible art collection in an old copper mill. Again, total blur.
Yesterday, we went to Dusseldorf. I was talking to Mum last night and she asked what Dusseldorf was like and I said good, if two museums and a Starbucks is anything to go by. Dusseldorf does have a pretty incredible art heritage though - the Kunst Academy has a fairly dazzling alumni of staff and students that includes Joseph Beuys, Gerard Richter, Nam June Paik, Andreas Gursky and Candida Hofer. Claudia Schiffer didn't go there but she used to live in Dusseldorf too.
Anyway, K21, the major art space there, is housed in an amazing, AMAZING building and features a fantastic collection of German and international contemporary art.
A week before we left for Germany - still wandering stunned from the horrors of all-night essay writing - we were each assigned an art work that we would be seeing on our trip to Germany and that we would have to present to the rest of our groups as part of a marked assignment. We've had to research the artist, their practice and how this work fits into their oeuvre and then, on the day, throw in a curatorial critique of the work in its setting. The point of the exercise (which they've also made us do impromptu in Every Single Museum we've been to thus far) is to get us thinking about curatorial considerations and to teach us to be able to stand in front of a work of art and explain it.
If you thought my ability to talk absolute bullshit before I left for London was reasonably impressive.....
You should have seen me talk about this work by Thomas Schutte.
In truth I rambled - stumbling felicitously at times across gems of genuine intellectual insight but largely, hmm, well I just waffled. But I waffled with confidence damn it and didn't say "kind of". Or "like". Or "sort of". So I feel that ranks as a solid achievement. Or will at least until I get my grade back.
Today was, umm, where did we go? Aachen and Leverkusen. Uhuh. I'd never heard of them either. But probably two of the best exhibitions we've seen all week - painted photographs by Richter and a series of exhibitions by the Dutch group Atelier Van Lieshout and the Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi - who creates these hilariously low-fi chalk drawings on a monumental scale:
I quite liked this one among many many others....
Tonight, as was the case yesterday, we craaaaawled home through atrocious traffic and I then crawled straight into tracksuit pants and bed, where I am currently still residing. Diet coke for dinner might not be the most mature or nutritious option but after a week of feeling totally heinous anyway I couldn't give a shit and am returning to London tomorrow night with a renewed vigilante-like commitment to a healthy lifestyle. Starting with the first of what promises to be hundreds of trips to the gym between now and my return to Sydney at Christmas. I feel like one of Schutte's Grosse Geister's - grosse being big and grosse being, well, just gross.
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