Day 2: A Wanderer Wanders

My plan for the day was for some sightseeing before the meeting started at 2PM. The hotel receptionist suggested the Kunsthaus Art Museum. I walked through the old part of Zurich, past the shops selling everything from kitsch (swiss army knives) to erotica, with lots of fashion in between, and cafes, kabob shops and discos on the way there. A block or so from the river, you get into the university area, which looks more like a centuries old europeon city. The Kunsthaus wasn’t open yet, so I walked over to the campus. I found the Biological History Museum on the University Campus and took a quick tour to help kill some time. It was pretty impressive, lots of in situ dinosaur bones and a description of how they carefully expose them from the shale. Some of the pieces where massive, having entire 10 ft long swimming dinosaurs embedded within. Spiffy!

By this time the Kunsthaus was open and, lucky me, free for the day. I checked out the “The Expanded Eye” exhibit, which is basically a group of pieces from the 60’s with an optical illusion bent. You know they type; lots of black and white spirals and straight lines that move around when you try to focus your eye on them. There was also a Dali painting which always makes my day. The piece on the book cover is one of the more interesting pieces, from a certain distance you swear you can see a person’s face in there, but it fractilizes out as you approach. The self-portrait sculpture someone had done of their head was truly incredible and downright freaky. I kept expecting it to talk, it looked so lifelike, yet so odd, at the same time. This exhibit wins the Mars Award for Best Exhibit to See with Senses Amplified.

I also walked through the rest of the galleries they had at Kunsthaus. There were some darn good paintings, like the witches stuffing people in chimneys and the many of the Angel/Altar paintings on gilded-gold backgrounds, and they had a collection of modern art with everyone you could hope for: Lichtenstein, Rothko, Warhol and quite a few others. All of this was nice, but what really ‘impacted’ me as art was Alexandria Mir's feature exhibit called “Switzerland and other Islands”. This was a series of giant fantastical maps, usually of Switzerland as some sort of island (a political island, a topographical map) or fictional places like Treasure Island or Manhattan. The sense of humor and playfulness in the pieces really reached me and I found myself cracking up several times. Best of all, it was all done with the scientists best friend: The Sharpie. It turns our Sharpies are made by a Swiss company and they donated 2000 of them to help make the exhibit. Smashing.

Time for the meeting…