Same Same, but Different

My life is pretty different than it was in DC: I'm a student versus a working professional. I'm a stranger in this place, rather than someone who is familiar with the city and its surroundings. Instead of friends, the people who know me are family.

But some things will never change: I love chocolate. I play tennis. And I go to museums.

A great exhibition that I visited for the second time yesterday is a retrospective of Austrian artist Erwin Wurm. Titled The ridiculous life of a serious man. The serious life of a ridiculous man., the exhibition features humorous and interactive sculptures (among other media) that visually comment on consumption, productivity, thinness, obesity, status, and art.

His "one minute sculptures" only become sculptures when people engage with them -- as shown in the picture below of "keeping a cool head," which I did. These one minute sculptures take banal objects, like a dog house, chair, or a refrigerator, and ask people to interact with them with specific instructions. This interaction creates a fleeting work of art (most positions cannot be held for more than one minute) that is ever the same and also always different.

Another interesting component to the exhibition was a project Wurm did on idleness. He drafted rules for idleness -- watch TV all day, sleep for two months, don't close your mouth when you eat, be indifferent, take a nap on the office toilet, be too lazy to argue, and more -- which were then represented with photographs of him adhering to these rules. Oxymoronically (is that a word? hell, my english is in decline), in his quest for idleness he had to exert a tremendous and laborious amount of discipline and effort.

There were lots of other cool inclusions in the exhibition (like a sculpture of negative thoughts and a fat Porsche), but I'm going to take instruction from the idleness rules and go to bed.

Ciao, ciao.