Saturday, September 27, 2008

The Jewish Cemetary

this is the cemetary that I am doing my art project on. The cemetary is in a very bad state of disrepair. As you can see from most of the photos
This is one of the larger tombs that has been broken into probably by a homeless person. They proably wanted to sleep in it, see there is a green mattress thingy.
This is the graves of a more prominent family. The fron of the graves have been smashed in, probably vandalism, I dont think anyone could sleep in that space. Also you can see four holes on the top of the first grave, there used to be some symbol (not sure what) that was made out of brass. During the second world war the nazis came into the graveyard and stole allthe metal symbols off of the graves in order to melt down into amunition.
This isn't the best photo because of all the plants, but there is a wall there. This wall actuallycuts into the graveyard. During world war two the nazis dug out the graves that were here and tried to make some sort of bomb shelter. When they dug everything up they didn't let the jewish community take the bodies,they just came in with a digger and moved all the dirt and bones together to another location. Obviously they mixed everything up, and people could try and claim bones afterwards, but it was kind of pointless. The place where they moved the bones and dirt to was wherever there were other holes (from bombs). Now most of the bones are under Westbahnhoff (the west train station) and the part of the cemetary that they dug up has an apartment building on it.
As you can see the cmetary has not been treated nicely and we are trying to ring awareness to the situation through our art piece. If you know anyone that would like to contribute to this (i.e. donate money) please tell me.




Art Openings

Here are some photos from the gallery walk. Again I dont really know the artists, so I'm sorry. But I think they are all very neat.


Sorry about these first two photos, I flipped them and it still loaded them sideways, I don't know why.






Gugging

The gugging is a museum just outside of Vienna. We went there on a fieldtrip with my art history class. The artists here are mentally insane and therefore the work is really interesting and different. I am a horrible person though and don't remember any of the names of these people, so I'm sorry if you wanted to know more about them. I can tell you about the works a little though.
This person was drawing airplanes. He had a lot of drawings that were regular things that he drew in werd ways. I just really like that he drew them different each time.
This guy would just draw and draw until the page was completly black, then he would rip up the paper. So the onlyfinishd pieces they have by him are little scraps of black paper. I really like that the only things they could display were unfinished pieces.
This guy would draw and write at the same time. It would usually be a made up story bout him with some woman. They are also very large, this is just a small piece of the picture. I couldn't get the whole thing because it's lightly drawn, so you couldn't really see the image from far away.
I dont remember anything special about this guy. I just really like the repetitionof images.

This guy went to different cities and collected things that he found on the street and turned them into dolls. The top left is from Tokyo, top right is from New York, bottom left is Gotenborg, Schweden and bottom right is Phuket Thailand.

Piggy


This is a giant piggy bank in the Prater. It made oinking noises.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Coin Operated Boy


This is a street performer in Stephansplatz. When you put a coin in his box he begins to play his violin. It was really great, because he you could tell that he had practiced in order to really look machanized. He had very jerky movements. Also you know when wind up toys that play music start to wind down, and they are still playing the music, but it doesn't sound good because it's too slow? He even got that part down. Point of the story, he is my favorite.

Hundertwasser Haus



We went to the Hundertwasser Haus, this is a picture of it, and of a model of one of Hundertwasser's villages. It was pretty interesting. He was all about curves, and not flat floors because he felt that's how we were supposed to experience the world, and by walking on flat floors we were depriving our feet of experiences.

top this metro link



So in one of the random corners of the U-bahn (the metro system here) there is this window. What is on the other side of the window is a basement of a church. Apparently the church wasbuilt with this huge basement, and was up long enough that they forgot there was a basement. So the church was torn down, but the basement was left because no one knew about it. Then when they went to build the U-bahn they found it. I love that they decided to leave it, and just have this little window and a plaque for it.
Also sorry about the blurry image, it's the bet I could do at the moment.

Beograd


I went to belgrade a couple weeks ago to visit vanja. It was a lot of fun, especially since I happened to be there the same time as the beer festival. Nothing too eventfull happened, but here's a lovely photo I took.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

My Roommate


So I know that I was worried about getting a bad roommate, and talked about it quit abit before I left. I had nothing to worry about. This is me and my roommate, Kaitlyn Breen. Not to be confused with Caitlin Ayer (previously pictured). Kaitlyn is really great, I couldn't of picked a better roommate myself. We have a nice relationship, hopefully it stays that way.

ThirstyThursdays


So there is this school sponsered event called thirst thursdays. All we do is go to a bar that the student council decides. They usually reserve an area for us, and then we drink. Best studnt council event that I've ever been to. If you want to see more pictures, they will be posted on facebook. This is us waiting for the night bus afterwards. From left to right it's Karl, me, Tina, Caitlin and Phill.

Monday, September 8, 2008

Wien Museum 1



This was a museum that talked about the roman city that was here before vienna. The Romans are pretty awesome, all the running water and everything. This was my favorite picture becuse it shows the artifacts and the current day equivelent. Although, that q-tip looks rather sharp