Lucerne

Sept 19, 2012

About 60 years ago, I remember my Dad reading a book to me. It started much like this:

Susan Amantha Cottonwood
Was a little girl who was always good
When the sun shone.
But when it rained,
She would press her nose to the windowpane
And complain
And complain
And complain.
One day, she went to her grandfather's farm.

Why, you might ask, am I mentioning this in a travel diary??

Well, it is pouring outside. It rained all night, too.

Which pretty well put the kibosh on any hikes that we might have planned.

So we decided that perhaps a museum visit would be in order.

We had seen something that looked like it might be a museum, but when we got there, it had a more concert-auditorium-type of feel to it. But there was an art gallery on the top floor. So up we went.

And found ourselves in an interesting mixture of contemporary and middle ages art.

The middle ages part was showing restorations of some wooden panels by Martin Moser, 1500-1568. They pictured the Day of Judgement, The Rich Wastrel and Poor Lazarus, and the grisliest of the three, Herod's Feast and the Beheading of St. John. Here is a website on the project.

The rest of the gallery was contemporary, featuring various artists, and some unusual art.

The best was a room that we avoided at first, because it looked like some renovations were occurring there. Later, when I read the brochure, we learned that it was "live art". From the brochure:

...one person paints a room white, while a second person paints the same space black again at the same time. The painters follow one another in a clockwise direction, each painting over the work of the other. The comedy of the situation recalls the slapstick humor of a silent film, and the action is also a telling artistic metaphor for the eternal return of life, for the redundancy of human activity, for death and life, good and evil, yin and yang. At the same time the work can also be seen as a reference to an idealized exhibition space.