This morning, after spending a ridiculous amount of time on yesterday's pictures and blog, we got going and drove the Opel Mokka around to the local Avis office and turned it in.
Den Gamle By
The Avis chap kindly offered to give us a lift to our next stop, just a half mile away or less. Which brought us to the gate of Den Gamle By (den gam-luh boo, yes really), literally The Old Town.
This is a large (20 acres?) multi-street reconstruction of Danish towns of the 18th century, using buildings disassembled, moved and reconstructed from other parts of Aarhus and other towns.
Most of the buildings are open and have period interiors; in many cases, shops or tradesman's workshops. The candlemaker, the carpenter, the mill, etc., all the workshops with period tools. In some cases the shops are populated by mannequins in period dress, or by videos, but there are quite a few young people around doing period things.
She's weaving a sachet from lavender stems and ribbon.
Carriages circulate offering a town tour for 40Kr each. We opted not to take this because we could see how the unsprung carriages rode on the very rough cobbled streets.
It involved pulling each other across the water channel.
If you are a fan of half-timbered buildings, this place is a feast.
One building contains a superb collection of toys from every period. There are also parts of town furnished in the period 1926, and a new block in the period 1974. The latter features a Hi-Fi Store with TVs and stereos that David recognized. Whoa, that's not history!
All historied up, we had lunch in the tea garden and walked half a mile (in the 80° heat, the heat wave continues) to our next thing.
ARoS
ARoS is Aarhus's fairly new art museum, quite an impressive building. We took the elevator to the top first.
Looking down through the atrium.
Then we went out on the roof to look up at the Rainbow Experience — a circular walkway with glass walls in every color of the spectrum. The artist sold this on the basis that the "experience" was to be inside looking out. We think the art part of it is in the compositions people's silhouettes make from outside.
We stepped into the Rainbow but quickly left; it was quite toasty inside. Back on the roof we looked over the city.
The Domkirke, visited thursday, in the middle distance.
(Insert panorama here... soon. Real soon.)
Then we started down the inside through the galleries, floor by floor. It's not a huge collection but gives a good history of Danish painting from the 1700s through last week or so. One temporary exhibit was "Out of the Darkness", a collection of large works in a series of dark rooms, sort of like groping through an IKEA in a brown-out. One of these was "Your atmospheric colour atlas" (Olafur Eliasson, 2009), a room that one entered with some trepidation:
It was a room—a small room, or was it small?—filled with dense theatrical smoke and illuminated by concealed neon tubes of different colors. Very disorienting.
The museum's best-known possession is "Boy" by Australian artist Ron Mueck.
Original planning maquette and test thumb.
"Boy" is 4.5m (15') high and detailed down to the hair follicles.
"Boy" was possibly not the most unsettling feature at ARoS. Down in the main reception area was an inoffensive white statue of a woman...
But as you passed you realized, oh, that's one of those street performers who pretend to be a statue. Right down to the basket of change at her feet with the hand-lettered sign "Tak", and the jeans and tennies under her robe...
Check the girl on the right...
Finally you realize that it is a statue in the form of street performer playing a statue. Art about someone faking art. Well played, ARoS!
Off to Norway, and Smugmug
Tomorrow morning we catch an early train and by evening we should be in Bergen, Norway. Blog may be delayed.
But you can review all our pictures so far, including quite a few that have not appeared in the blog, by looking at our galleries on Smugmug:
- Copenhagen, 127 pics
- Arhus and around, 112 pics
When looking at one of those galleries, here's a couple of tips. One, you can jump to any picture by clicking its thumbnail image on the left. Page through the thumbnails with the "<" and ">" buttons or the little popup menu at the bottom.
Two, if you just click on a picture on the right, it jumps up to fill the window. Then you can proceed through the pictures using your left- and right-arrow keys.
Or, three, you can click the "Slideshow" button and it will go to full-screen and show pictures in sequence, but you can hit space to stop, and use the left- and right-arrows.
No comments:
Post a Comment