Art of the Dorf

Dusseldorf's K21

We’ve been planning a visit to K21, Düsseldorf’s top notch contemporary art gallery, for a while. The K20, its sister gallery, gets a lot of the attention for its collection of classic and modern German art, but K21 is an interesting visit for those ready to brave the occasional strangeness of contemporary art.

Full disclosure, I’m not a big contemporary art nut. 

Sometimes I'm impressed with it. Other times I wonder if a six-year-old could have done the same thing. I don't hide my ignorance about it. I try to appreciate the artist for coming out and doing something that wasn't done before, which is the barest minimum we can all do when looking at art.

K21 is big for a contemporary art space. And it's a gorgeous old building too. Usually you don't see that, but Düsseldorf was Joseph Beuys’ hometown, so there must be a civic bias for absurd, contemporary artsiness. 

Side note, Beuys is famous for a few things, like his tin cans, but after a visit to his exhibition at Ottawa's National Gallery, my favourite Beuys is a cross with a sausage hanging from it. 

Anyway, back to our K21 visit

We wandered into an exhibit with a light show in a mirrored box. In another, we approached what we thought was a red rectangular screen, only to reach out and discover it was an optical illusion. It was actually a room with a curved back wall lit by red LEDs. The curved wall, without corners, tricks your eyes into thinking your looking at something without depth, like a screen. Clever, tricky Contemporary Art!

K21's biggest draw is a creation by Tomas Saraceno: an elaborate web of steel cables suspended above the building’s atrium. Visitors put their belongings into a locker, don coveralls and hiking shoes, and walk or lounge on the steel cables, looking four floors down onto the atrium below.

It’s amusement park-esque, but there is a typical contemporary art explanation about how people’s actions affect other people. That's actually not bullshit. When you walk along, especially if you're a clumsy bag of bones like me, other people have to steady themselves as the web shakes and strains and shifts beneath them.

Walking along Saraceno's wire web at K21.

Wandering through a contemporary art exhibit sometimes leaves me wondering what I just saw, it's also nice to know that contemporary art can also surprise and delight me too.

Labour Day's True Meaning

During my university days, a beer company launched an advertising campaign that included a petition calling for a public holiday in June. Their reasoning was if May, July, August, and September had public holidays, June should too. 

The petition collected thousands of signatures, but hit a snag when no one figured out what occasion the public holiday should celebrate – other than a brewery's desire to sell more beer.

They could have called it June Day and no one would've minded.

May's holiday is Queen Victoria' birthday, although it's not celebrated on her birthday (May 24). Instead it move arounds to fall on the last Monday of May, so people have a long weekend in the spring to open the cottage, drink beer by the case – or two-four, as they're called in Canada – play with fireworks, and visit hospitals to reattach blown-off fingers

July 1 is Canada Day, and is always on July 1. It's the only summer holiday they don't shift around to make a long weekend. People get grumpy about that.

The first Monday of August is a public holiday because it's Civic Day, which I'm not even going to pretend means anything.

The first Monday of September is for Labour Day. On paper it has something to do with organized labour and celebrating the 8-hour work day. In practice, it marks the end of the summer, when people close the cottage, quit drinking beer by the two-four, put away the fireworks, and make up a less embarrassing story to tell people about their new prosthetic fingers.

When you start moving public holidays to create long weekends, people tend to forget what the holiday is about. Labour Day is a great example.

Canada once celebrated Labour Day on May 1st, along with the rest of the world. This day honoured the gains of the organized labour movement, especially the 8-hour work day. The unions would march in the streets, call for better working conditions, and then spend the day with their families. 

Of course, workers in the streets attract considerable police attention, and nothing calms large crowds quite like a massive police presence. Riots were common. In 1886, someone threw a bomb at police during a Labour Day march in Chicago. Police responded by firing indiscriminately into the crowd. 

Labour Day became a day of remembrance for that massacre, which invited larger rallies and more clashes with the police. The Canadian government switched its Labour Day to the first Monday of September, hoping to avoid working class commotion on May 1st. It worked.

Today, the first of May is just another work day in Canada, while September's Labour Day is another day to sell barbeque accessories and beer. 

In Germany and Hungary, there are still marches on May 1st. The anarchists also join the fun, so there is occasional rioting. The far right groups organize demonstrations on the same day against immigration and, so brawls tend to erupt between the two extremes.

I've never seen a march in Canada on Labour Day. And many people I know work more than 8 hours a day. Some often work weekends. Most struggle balancing work with life. 

Beer companies can ask for all the public holidays they want in June, February, or whenever, but it doesn't make a difference if we’ve forgotten how hard it was to get the time off we deserve.

How to Make Easter Epic

Hiking down the hills.

If you're not careful, Easter can become April's blah long weekend.

For some lucky folks, we see the family and eat a decent meal. In Canada, there’s the Friday off, and a Monday too if you work a cushy government job. 

For many, it doesn’t always feel like a big deal. The weather in my corner of Canada can still be downright Arctic-esque. A lot of people just aren't religious. And still others don't know how to make the most of a long weekend.

The only folks who might appreciate it are the young ones, who crave the Easter chocolate, and the university students with late April exams who crave the studying… or partying.

Maybe there’s the lesson to be learned here: Gather the family for a good meal. Hide eggs all over the place for the kids (and remember where they are, unless you want to find a melted chocolate egg between the couch cushions in July). Hit a patio on Good Friday and pour one out for JC. 

After all, it’s up to you to make Easter epic.

In Europe, we get both the Friday and the Monday off, so if you don't get off the couch on Friday, you can rise and redeem yourself on Monday. It's also easier to catch a flight to wherever. 

And people take advantage of these two precious extra days. They go home. They go somewhere warm. They hike. They get day drunk. They make Easter epic.

This year, we escaped to Hungary – the land of smoked ham and boiled eggs this time of year. Along with many fine family dinners and many deep conversations with toddlers in my broken Hungarian, we also made off to the hills for a 25km hike (my calves are still recovering from this glorious ordeal).

The route, planned by Kata’s dad, took us up and through the hills in the north of the country where we wandered through Hollókő. This small town is like walking into a time machine. It’s been preserved as it was hundreds of years ago with its traditional wooden houses and its residents decked out in their traditional costumes.

There’s an Easter tradition where the boys say a poem and splash the girls with cheap perfume or a bit of water. Because boys are involved, this tradition easily goes off the rails and men spray entire crowds with buckets of water, or soak one girl in particular. We arrived just in time for a man on stilts in traditional costume to do the former.

We walked through the crowds of tourists, up a hill to the castle that overlooks the valley, and back into the forest and hills.

By the end of such a long hike, your feet are tired, your calves feel like they're on fire, and your pace has slowed enough that you can drink in the sights, sounds, and smells of the forest. It's a natural high on nature.

The next day, with my calves still burning from the Hollókő Hike, we ventured down from the hills into the Great Plain of Hungary – by car, not by foot – to visit more family. 

The day after that, we rode on Budapest for a haircut, sausage-shopping, and lunch and still crammed in a visit to Lake Velence to see Kata's brother's new house before catching our flight back to Dusseldorf.

Easters doesn't need chocolate eggs or spring weather or Jesus to be great. Take a note from the kids, the university students, and the Europeans: make your Easter epic.

The folklore girls look on as the man with the stilts and bucket of water recites his poem to them.

The leader of the hike and the castle... and a sword fight in the background.

The traditional time machine to olden times Hungary.