Human urine and the shaving of a cactus.
Hamburger Bahnhof contemporary art museum in Berlin.
I’m usually someone who can be in and out of a museum in 20 minutes. I’ve honestly never been an inquisitive person. I don’t ask a lot of questions. I take things as they are. I don’t really need to read long paragraphs about a suit of armor or listen to an audio description over why a particular chair is important. There’s a chair, it’s pretty, move along.
So museums aren’t always my thing. I like them, but get bored easily.
What I do love is contemporary art. Give me a canvas painted white and I’ll think it’s the most brilliant thing ever. That’s not to say that I have any clue what an entirely white painted canvas means or that I even care to read about what it means. But I can stare a little longer.
So this love mixed with the new mindset that I really have no where else to be meant I spent an entire afternoon at the Hamburger Bahnhof on my second day in Berlin.
It was the kind of place where you could enter a room full of Keith Haring’s and Andy Warhol’s.
Or enter a room where you aren’t quite sure if it’s still an exhibit or some back room work area. And aren’t quite sure if those are jars filled with human urine.
Or enter a room where video of someone shaving a cactus is playing. Which I swear is the best thing I’ve seen in Berlin. Or maybe even ever in my entire life.
Or where you wonder how a security guard can stand being a room where on one side is a video of a cat walking across a piano, on the other side is a video of Jimi Hendrix on autotune and in the middle is a fast motion video of stringed together youtube videos. (and trust me, he is going insane, when I worked as a museum security guard, and yes, I once worked as a museum security guard, I was in a room once with a looped audio of someone saying the name Nathan in different voices and I almost threw the audio player across the room.)
It was that kind of place.
And yes, yes I did fly all the way to Europe to look at contemporary art.
