MACBA: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Speeding)

On October 23, 2012 by Chris With 0 Comments - Christopher

Left the kids at home where they needed to stay after the jangling travel across from the city they loved – Lisbon. Mei not up until after noon and then into the bath for an hour. A pause in the onward rush to the southern hemisphere.

Not really wanting to rush at all, wanting to pause in Portugal for ever …

So we sped across town, past a protest – a dense circle of students, maybe 1000+, chanting, with their fists all in the air: like a ball of baitfish – no sharks, just many police, roads closed, no exits.

Made it to MACB, past the many skaters out the front, all in their 20’s, which seemed a little odd and too old to be loungin’, but the sun was out.

Inside. A large group of students making their own art. They were really, really good. Just a touch of jealousy for their already honed lines and youth. Josie snapped a girl with her instruments a necklace.

I snapped the collections – enjoyed the work.

Outside, smokers with coffee talked over gilles deleuze and felix guattari.

We paused and sped home to kids.

One Last Museum: Museu Nacional do Azulejo VII

On October 22, 2012 by Chris With 2 Comments - Christopher

One Last Museum: Museu Nacional do Azulejo

On October 22, 2012 by Chris With 1 Comments - Christopher

Before we set off for Barcelona we sped to the Madre de Deus Convent, which houses the Museu Nacional do Azulejo – the place where you head to see tiles and some of the most magnificent rooms in all of Portugal.

Kyle & Megan at the Pont des Arts

On October 22, 2012 by Chris With 0 Comments - Christopher

This is Pont des Arts … the foot bridge across the Seine from the Louvre where of late lovers place their love locks and then throw the key in the river. If we had a real pedestrian bridge in Perth, Kyle and Megan wouldn’t have had to travel so far …

Ken was here as well and I include his insights below: we certainly had similar feelings as we stood on the Pont – though we couldn’t help thinking Ken needed a few months in Ladakh to really get his head around civilisation.

“I am standing on the Pont des Arts in Paris. On the one side of the Seine is the harmonious, reasonable facade of the Institute of France, built as a college in about 1670. On the other bank is the Louvre, built continuously from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century: classical architecture at its most splendid and assured. Just visible upstream is the Cathedral of Notre Dame –not perhaps the most lovable of cathedrals, but the most rigorously intellectual façade in the whole of Gothic art. […]

What is civilisation? I do not know. I can’t define it in abstract terms –yet. But I think I can recognise it when I see it: and I am looking at it now.” Sir Kenneth Clark, Civilization, 1969