On our second day in Vienna we picked up where we had left off the previous day, in the Museums Quartier. We visited the Museum Moderner Kunst, or "MUMOK", which had a large exhibition of televisual art, including a lot of works by Andy Warhol (he was a popular guy in Europe), and various other contemporary artworks; in fact, it was probably the most contemporary place we visited, with a lot of very recent work from artists I'd never even heard of.
Heather got a few great pictures of some of the highlights, including this piece featuring several vertically standing neon lights which I have been unable to attribute to any artist (I'll continue to research and hopefully edit with the creator at some point):
She took that from a balcony, which is why they look so small. This picture is a close up of Pietro Sanguineti's "Void":
Here's the whole thing:
Void was one of my favourite pieces, but the place was full of really great, forward looking and slightly confusing art.
The television art section wasn't so up to date, as it was more of a retrospective on tv art generally. One of the highlights was a whole room dedicated to "Andy Warhol's TV", a television show which was shown in the 80s on MTV, as a kind of realisation of Andy's 15 minutes claim. It was pretty amusing; I watched a sketch where a fat woman gets the wrong shoes from her parents for Christmas, so she wrecks the room she's standing in, tipping the Christmas tree onto her mother and screaming swear words before storming out. I also watched a sequence about rodeo clowns, and Heather watched an episode dedicated to boots.
To be honest, I don't remember seeing this particular video, and I can't actually watch it right now because I'm in the library without headphones, but here is a clip to give you some idea:
One thing I forgot to mention about this place was that it was completely free to students! Considering how expensive we thought Vienna was going to be generally, it was great to get in here free; all we had to do was fill in a little form about what University we went to.
After MUMOK we went to Schönbrunn Palace, which was pretty magnificent, maybe a little too magnificent for a couple of student bums. It was a massive place, the "gardens" were more like a huge park, it had it's own zoo... The maze was fun though. We went through the main maze, the kids maze and some other kind of puzzle maze, which wasn't really a maze, just a hedged in windy path. Heather has pictures of these things, but I don't think she's posted them yet.
One other note about Vienna; I think Austrians are pretty much obsessed with sex. Sex club inside an art gallery aside, we saw posters for sex shows and sex shops everywhere, even just outside the palace gardens.
Other than that, that's pretty much all there is to say about Vienna; I think it was my second favourite place on the trip. We had to eat cheaply but there was a lot to do.
Next was Budapest, city of bums!
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