Not much going on here except the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Click Here for Wikipedia overview). The Guggenheim is a modern art museum where the building architecture is as much on show as the collections themselves. The building, designed by Frank Gehry, is a mash up of curves and angles… more like a ship than a land structure. The most striking and distinctive feature of the design is the exterior shell: tiled in sheets of titanium almost like the scales of a fish.
Some of the artwork on display were interesting, though most were just bizarre: I’ve never been one to really understand modern art all that well. Some of the pieces that were cool:
- a 30ft menacing steel spider outside the museum… complete with egg sack! very creepy.
- 3D walk through art pieces by Richard Serra (a Matter of Timer). The shapes look random and ready to fall over, but are constructed from precise geometric shapes (cones, spirals, toroids, etc.) Cool to walk through the pieces then see them from above.
- There’s this crazy Chinese guy named Cai Guo-Qiang (famous for Beijing’s Olympic opening cerimony) who is currently on display on the upper floors… his primary medium for art is gun powder. yeah, that’s right. He creates transient art through explosives in order to demonstrate the “timeless themes of creation and destruction.” Apparently he took to heart the notion that creation comes about through destruction, and that anything man creates will ultimately be destroyed. One of his experimental pieces was to extend the Great Wall of China by 10000 meters though a timed explosive display… alluding to the idea that even something as long standing as the Great Wall will eventually decay and be no more.
- A series of 70 life sized clay sculptures in varying stages of decay and disrepair depicting the strive of pre-revolutionary China… also a work by Cai Guo-Qiang.
- Head On: 99 life sized stuffed(?) wolves careen head first into a glass wall, expressing the dangers of blindly following the social norm (Cai Guo-Qiang).
The only other big thing that Bilbao has is the Airport, which we saw as Carlos was leaving from here to start heading back home. Los: we’ll miss you brah! Hope you had a good trip.
Some pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/richmosko/Bilbao
Click Here to see where Bilbao is on a map of Spain.
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