Miscellaneous Writings |
||
Oslo, Day 1
|
||
|
|
On a t-shirt: "I chose the road less traveled. Now where the heck am
I?" The first day in a new place can feel like that, though in my insecure moments it might apply to my entire artistic track. Robin would say that it’s just an accurate summation of my inimical sense of direction. On the bus into Oslo. The embankments of the roads and railroads are blanketed with purple and pink lupine. Sheets of it, like Texas bluebonnets, only bolder. Forests of fir in dark, cold greens feel like they go on forever, though they’re broken with rectangular fields of ripening wheat and brilliant yellow rapeseed. Precise red farm buildings finish the scene, then a sleek bullet train zips through the postcard. Oslo itself is not the prettiest European city out there. The core is pockmarked with ill-considered modern buildings against the older 19th century material. In Oslo there is not enough of what we go to Europe for—that old stuff. Culturally it feels like a youthful city. People don’t amble here, they walk purposefully. They make eye contact. The cars stop for pedestrians. The language sounds not quite Germanic, too vowelly, with hesitations on diphthong sounds that hurt my gums to imagine them. It’s really like a bad Norwegian accent without the English. There are prettier languages out there than this one. The best irony so far: my hotel is next to an Irish pub. They hold set dances on Monday nights. I’m going to the museums already (there’s 50 of them, I have to get started). At one historical museum were gobs of Viking artifacts, all with that same intricate interwoven motif in Celtic wear of the same era. The three whorled circle thing, among others. There was a lot of traffic back and forth then. Dublin was a Norse suburb. A12th century stave church portal was an intricate, again Celtic, interweave of foliage and monsters, carved in wood. Nearby was the National Gallery and those dour, grim, Protestant Scandinavian 19th century paintings. Nobody was having any fun! In portrait after portrait people stare, defeated, out of the oil. In Christian Krohy’s work all the subjects are exhausted. A mother tires of rocking her infant, and collapses, her head fallen on the bed. Another woman, asleep at her sewing machine. An old fishermen mends a net, he’s been mending the same net for 50 years. His ancient wife glares out at the viewer, the intruder. All of Norwegian art seems to follow this trail, which will not end happily. That’s because it leads to one person: Edvard Munch. His people are cadaverous or mad. Couples embrace in desperation. If they’re in lust, it is shameful. His oeuvre is loneliness, sickness, death, and depression. The man made 50 versions of The Scream, for crying out loud. His sexiest painting he calls a Madonna. Lush bare chest, arms in surrender behind her, hair disheveled, eyes closed in an erotic reverie. A juicy forbidden fruit. Even the landscapes get weird. Norway had a romantic luminist period, just like us, and you could put up a Dahl or a Fearnley next to a Bierstadt or Moran and know they spoke about the same thing. Big, big places that make us seem really little. Norway has the goods for a blow-out romantic landscape, but sometimes it goes all squirrelly in one of these painter’s hands. A Peder Balke made these strange, frightening things of black clouds and white seas that look like William Blake at his maddest, with a dash of William de Kooning for seasoning. The real landscape looks far more benign. The view from my park bench could be Puget Sound. The weather’s exactly like home too—showers and sunbreaks. I’m about to get drenched. Talk later. |
|
| Next Entry |