The first pics were taken at the Danish Design Center (Uncle Dan and Aunt Jenny, we thought of you and took many pics of chairs, a folding bicycle, and a eco-friendly pig farm, which we'll post soon). The prehistoric pics are from the National Museum, which offered an excellent rendition of Zealand stone-age to bronze-age cultures. Prehistoric peoples, who worshiped the sun, sacrificed people and objects in the bogs, which preserved the objects quite well. We also went to the National Art Museum, where we tried to figure out what distinguished Danish modernism from its counterparts in other countries. I don't think we quite figured it out. It would have helped if we could have seen the pre-twentieth century Danish art, but those galleries were closed.
Today we went to the Louisiana, a modern art museum 40 minutes from Copenhagen, where the boys worked on craft projects in the three floors devoted to children's act activities, wandered through the exhibits, and watched a film, Flooded McDonald's, by the Danish artist collective Superflex, a group committed to progressive politics. We all found the film absorbing--funny at points--the "Caution Wet Floor" sign floating in water, Ronald McDonald losing his footing and toppling, the floating french fries like mini logs in a jam--and disturbing too as the film screen slowly became a sea of plastic garbage; the film is apparently a commentary on global warming. Here's a snippet of the larger film, which we found on Youtube.
We also marveled at the Audubon-inspired allegorical paintings of American artist Walton Ford. What particularly fascinated me is that Ford found his inspiration for his paintings from texts, which reveal our seeming compulsion not only to anthropomorphize animals but to mystify them. Here is Ford talking about his work:
Tomorrow we'll go to church at Vor Frue Kirke. Thank you, Sarah, so much for the warm socks, which I am wearing now, and, on behalf of the boys, thank you for the geography game, which we're going to play tomorrow. And thank you, Cheryl, on behalf of Walter, for the harmonica, which provides a delightful musical challenge to Walter. And thank you to John and Colleen for the d.v.d which the boys and Grandma loved. (Martha and Bill were making dinner)
Love to all and Merry Christmas,
The Thomas-Patterson clan
p.s. Mom found her luggage and fell in a snowbank, though this sentence does not imply causality.
The design challenge for this chair was to create a piece of furniture for a prison that could not be used as weapon, could not be used to hide anything, would be easy to clean and would not make a lot of racket when banged against a wall. This chair, which is made out of recycled plastic bottles, had the feel of hard felt.
Taken at the National Museum of Denmark.
The Museum of Danish Resistance, 1940-1945
The exhibits: the rose made of chewed rye bread by a Danish prisoner of war; the tattered and carefully mended concentration camp uniform with the Jewish star; the school book for German children teaching them that Jews were akin to fiendish wolves; the label for Zyklon B pellets. The stain-glass window commemorates members of the Danish resistance given death sentences by the Nazis. Below the stained-glass window, I read the last letters home written by the condemned prisoners.
The National Art Museum
The Louisiana Museum für Moderne Kunst, Humlebæk, Danmark
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