The Kunstmuseum

Yesterday I visited the Kunst Museum – Bonn’s museum of modern art. It didn’t really do it for me. There was very little information written on the art labels, and all of it was in German. So I had trouble putting things in context.

Probably the most impressive part was the building itself – a spare, clean design with complex entrances, secret passages and windy staircases. The only problem was that it was desolate. As I made my way from room to room, I realized that I was all alone, except for one or two museum attendants who stood up as I entered, then proceeded to stare at me and shadow my movements. I began to get a sense of paranoia as my heels clicked across the long, wooden floorboards. Maybe I was the art! Maybe this was all some bizarre experiment in human behavior, a kind of highfalutin version of “Candid Camera” where they let people loose in a tangled maze of architecture and highly abstract art, to see if they can tell the difference between a doorway and a conceptual rendering of our culture, manifest in small rooms with walls made entirely of beeswax.



Then I though maybe the museum attendants were the artists! (The work was current enough that this could have been the case). And they just wanted to see how people responded to their work – how they approached it, and what they did and did not like. But as I made my way into the early 20th Century room, I realized that the attendants would have had to have had a lot of plastic surgery for this to be true. And there were even some other patrons in these rooms. Clearly my solitude (along with the all the mirrors and reflective surfaces) had gotten to my head.

For lack of a better conclusion, this was my favorite piece: