When I was planning my trip to Europe with my sister last year, I asked a professor of mine from UC Davis what he recommended I see while in Paris. He gave some great suggestions, including a Moroccan restaurant that makes
amazing couscous, a bakery that makes
amazing pastry, and a number of must-see paintings that, unfortunately, I didn’t see, lost as I was in the Louvre. Next time, maybe? Anyway this same professor, teaching a class on Realism (poetry/painting) made a really memorable joke about sculpture, that it’s "the thing you accidentally back up into while you’re trying to look at a great painting." Haha…and in the Louvre painting galleries, I saw what he meant and could more or less agree. But the thing that left the greatest impression on me last year in the Louvre was actually the Venus de Milo—another excessively reproduced yet completely awesome-in-person surprise of the trip. Seeing it, I really experienced the inexpressible art thing about it, maybe even something like its aura.
But actually I’ve always liked sculpture a lot and even dabble with it (albeit very inexpertly) from time to time. So when I came across a really strange sculpture garden near the footbridge over the Neckar on the path going into town, it almost immediately became my favorite thing in Heidelberg. It’s got a cool, post-industrial, rummaged-parts aesthetic that’s a little bit eerie and dystopian, like
Things Built with Remains of Abandoned Civilization as genre. Tall grass has grown into an old shopping cart and around the base of "Fantasie UFO 2," and ivy between the wheel spokes of old bike tires; various plants and scrap metal fill a keeled-over phone booth. I also really appreciate how the cranes from a nearby construction site hang in the air over the sculptures—the city in process and constant rebuilding gives funny context to the appropriated, anthropomorphized junk used in the sculpture garden. It is so great!
On a nice day I brought my camera on a run and took some pictures:
I dig the sculptures. Neat!
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