Day 6

Today was a really fun day!! Yesterday I got home sick and I don't like the days when we don't have much to do for a long period of time, then you get bored and you want to go walk around, but then you end up spending money or getting lost...:) But, today was a good day.

We were going to go to Padua today on the train and were going to be gone all day for that, but right as we were gathering at the door to leave, Matt noticed our dates were wrong on our tickets to see Giotto's frescos. We will go next Wednesday instead.

The Ladies (most of us) outside the entrance

The famous Marino Marini sculpture

Loved this.

So instead...we went to see the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. That was pretty awesome to see, and is one of my favorites so far. For the more well-known artists, I saw Jackson Pollock, Vasily Kandinsky, Picasso, Paul Klee, Salvador Dali (awesome in person!), and Max Ernst (also awesome in person and my favorite from the collection). There were plenty of artists. There was also another gallery across the courtyard that was part of Peggy's collection. It consisted of works by Jeff Koons, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, and Cy Twombly (loved the drawings). We could take pictures of the outside and of the courtyard but we couldn't photograph any of the works :( That was a bummer but it was still pretty incredible to see all of these artists' work in person. I definetly gained an appreciation for some, and then there were pieces that even being a foot away I did not connect with at all.

Ok, after all that...we went right next door and saw a collateral event for the Biennale. This sculpture is massive, living, interactive, and amazing! It is by two brother artists named Mike and Doug Starn and the work is called "Big Bambu." It first showed at the Met in New York and they have re-created it here in Venice. They hired a crew of 11 rock climbers to come build this thing in Venice, and they basically work from the ground up. They tied these pieces of bamboo together to make (what I felt like was a giant honeycomb or something) a large, living sculpture. Living in the sense that it becomes "alive" when people enter it, walk on it, and interact with it. It is also ongoing and the climbers will continue to add more and more until the closing day, when they will begin to take it apart. The coolest thing is our group was the first to go to the top! We went up one level and then they barely opened it up to the public so we got to go in! It was a pretty amazing experience, but kind of scary at first. It was safe, but if you looked down as you were scaling up the 50' pile of sticks (that's what it looked like), you would probably freak out. The bamboo would crackle every now and then and they only had one layer of bamboo as the walkway. This is what Doug Starn said about the work:

"We have a philosophy of chaotic interdependence; of how every complex thing grows and evolves (animal, social structures, etc...), and Big Bambu actually physically represents it, it is a philosophical engineering. Everything depends upon one another and the loads are distributed throughout, the interdependence is natural and fluid. There is not too much wieght applied to any one thing."

After the Big Bambu, we grabbed some lunch and headed over to San Pantalon to see the Fumiani ceiling paintings. We weren't there for very long but it was still nice to sit in there and look at it. The painting is the largest ceiling painting in the world ( I think), and it is MASSIVE. I did some sketches of the architecture and some objects while we were in there, but, we could not take pictures of course. On our walk over to San Pantalon we spotted signs for the New Zealand national pavilion for the Biennale. There wasn't much too it, but it was interesting to see. We will be seeing a lot of these pavilions around the city.

On the way back to the apartment, Emily and I got some mousse (delicious), and stopped at a little flea market. I'm not sure if that's what they call them in Italy? We picked up some cute antique items, then kept walking. We came across a liquor store where we both bought bottles of meloncello and mint candies to take back home. I also found a skirt that I can wear around in another little shop. It was a mild shopping day on the way back but we find some cute things, and a nice area to hang out in where the Italians are a little bit nicer.