July 23-24 - Graz
In retrospect allotting one only night to Graz was a mistake. I know travel always takes longer than you think it will, and we arrived in Graz from Salzburg long after all of the sites had closed. It was a gorgeous train ride into Styria, though, a cloudy, misty day.
Interesting house I saw walking to the hotel.
The rather Spartan hotel room, which, ironically, was the only one the whole trip that had air conditioning.
We had to check out the next day at noon, as we had to leave for Vienna that night to catch our planes back to the States the next day. Unfortunately, Spartan also means that they don’t keep the reception desk staffed at all hours, so we had nowhere to put our luggage. Mike volunteered to wait with the luggage while I went out to see things, which I think was actually a relief to him as he isn’t really one for museums or architecture or any of that pretentious shit that I like. So I was able to walk around Graz, if only for a little while. The clouds had burned off from the day previous, but it was still cooler than it had been most of our trip.
A castle in the distance.
Across the river Mur.
Tree-lined path along the riverbank.
I happened upon the Kunsthaus (art house), which has a very distinctive architecture, and decided to visit. Ironically enough the subject of their current exhibits revolved around ‘landscapes’, and most of these landscapes were of the American Southwest. The first exhibit was moving landscapes, or, to put it more simply, movies and the like.
One of the exhibits: literally, called “a heater warms the thermometer on the wall”. It’s exactly what it sounds like. I confess I don’t ‘get’ a lot of postmodern art (or, rather, I ‘get’ what there is to ‘get’ and refuse to pretend it’s something else or deeper).
This entire movie was narrated in a whisper. I get the aesthetic (unobtrusive narrator, or it’s the earth whispering or something) but my immediate impression was one of pretention. Half of the movie was a film of Bangladeshi people moving bags of rocks and sand to create a floodwall against a cyclone. Many were staring at the camera as though wondering what this obviously moneyed first-world crew was doing filming them hauling bags, like they knew fully well the crew would use the footage to make a self-righteous film to show other progressive socialites and feel like they Made a Difference. Okay, maybe I’m being disingenuous. It’s a showing of the immediate human impact of global warming, in a very tangible way, and a way to get people to empathize with the faceless minority is to show them their faces.
My favorite exhibit by far (which I did not get a photo of) was by Qiu Anxiong, and was an inkbrush animation of a changing Chinese landscape with industrialization, Japanese occupation, and the Communist revolution. It was gorgeous, flickering, and looked just like a painting. I was able to find it online: Minguo Landscape. It’s lovely.
Graz from the roof of the Kunsthaus.
The bridge into the old city. Those locks are the new ostensibly more eco-friendly way of carving initials into a tree. Couples scratch or paint their initials onto a padlock and leave it on the fence. I hope they all broke up.
I walked around the old city for a little while, didn’t really have time to go into any other buildings. I found a small specialty gummy candy shop and got Mike a birthday present, and went back to the hotel. On the way I crossed this lovely church:
The front
The courtyard
Behind the church, view of apartments