travel-ology: bern baby bern

made an afternoon trip to Bern to the kunstmusem [art museum] to see the paul senn exhibit, and the "expressionism from the mountains" exhibit. we also took some time after the exhibit to hang out in the marktplatz, have a beer and some snacks at an outdoor table, people watch, and yes... I made fotos. i shot unsuspecting passers-by; and some city and street shots posted here.

bern [for those who don't know] is the capital of switzerland. it was founded in 1191! it's a beautiful old medieval city...with tram tracks, and flags hanging, and fountains and an old clock tower... the sidewalks are covered, like long caves... lots of great 'show windows' in the shops... it's old... but it's totally modern. they're doing a lot of street work at the moment. this is a shot of the main street -from one side of marktplatz- which isn't being worked on

and this is the opposite side, where they've gutted the street... although i do see the tram line and cobblestones down the center...

below are the doors of the kunst museum. they're really massive carved wooden doors. these are just the wrought iron grates over the windows in the doors!

below: posters for each show are outside the museum on the street... the little rectangles all over the posters are the stickers you get [and are to wear while in the museum] when you buy your ticket. the color indicates if you are seeing one or the other exhibits; they say "kunstmuseum bern". people stuck them on the posters when they left and passed by them... even more art being created... on top of art... i like the fact that each 'sticker' is from an individual person; adding to the 'work' in progress.

i've been a big Paul Senn fan for years. i particularly like his fotos of swiss village life; i love old things/antiques, etc. i love the old farm houses and barns here; you still see many of them, especially up in the alps... to see the people, in their time, in those settings... to see their daily life, and the unspoiled landscape, in his fotos, was beautiful... and sad. the alp scenes: the farmers, workers, villagers etc. all such little time capsules. life must have been very hard then, but i think it was probably much better than this soul-less, stressed out, hi-tech, modern age we live in.

Senn was from Bern; he was a home-boy. it was great to see his Rolleiflex camera [beaten to hell and back]-and some of his papers and his passport. i bought a Rolleicord [cheaper version of the Rollieflex] at a 2nd hand shop in Bern a few years back... seeing his camera and the show made me want to start using it. how he made voyeur shots with it -on subways etc- seems difficult, considering the way TLR cameras work- to focus you have to lift the lid, and look, twist a knob on the side of the camera to get the image in focus- and after the shot, roll the film forward. when i compare them -the big box- to my little digital camera, which i try to conceal when making street shots [catching people off guard is the whole point] it seems impossible. then again people probably weren't as paranoid as they are today. i have actually been stopped and asked why i was making fotos [in louisiana] even when i was shooting buildings [not people] many times... and laws today are insane. i've heard of photographers in the US being arrested for making photos in PUBLIC places... that's crazy! anyway, Senn's voyeuristic shots are great.

go to his online archive- http://www.paulsenn.ch/ -and in the box that says "online archiv" click on "alle" to see a lot of his fotos... many which were in the show.

the second exhibit i saw was the one below "expressionism from the mountains"- again the poster and the museum entrance stickers-

i've always been into german/austrian expressionism [and dada ]: mainly otto dix, george grosz, egon schiele, john heartfield, max beckmann---but, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a founding member of Die Brücke [in Dresden in 1905]... so, he's rather like "the godfather of expressionism" ... i've been to the kirchner museum in davos [years ago--- but don't remember much of it] but this was a group show, so i wanted to see it.

this show was from the "rot-blau" [red blue] group... artists who hung out with kirchner -in a sort of hippy commune in davos- and obviously artistically fed each others creative flames. they did many portraits of each other. from a few fotos i've seen they must have been the forerunner of hippies- running around naked in the wild, partying and making art... ETC.
[i have to laugh when i think of any group of struggling artists even visiting Davos these days... much less trying to live there. again... it was a much different -and less expensive- time... ]

the woodcuts were incredible; the time, patience, knowledge and technique involved in doing them is amazing. [they did this stuff by hand! no dremels and/or power tools]--- and most of the drawings were really good, if not great--- but the paintings were [for me] really primitive and garish. kirchner was by far the best of the artists, but even so, his woodcuts and drawings were/are much better than his paintings. i didnt even linger in the paintings sections, but rather power walked through them, stopping only to really look, in depth, at the woodcuts [see some here] and drawings.

below: the bern city jail... just across the street from the kunstmuseum. even the jail is arty.