My Favorite Things: Vienna

Café Central, an historical coffee house frequented by the likes of Freud, Leon Trotsky & Vladmir Lenin, Theodore Herzl, Adolf Loos, and modernist poet Peter Altenberg. Though all mentioned were regulars, Altenberg frequented Café Central to the extent that he gave it as his home address! He is honored to this day by a statue of him in the en, you can see him on the left side of the panorama above. 

Yum! Cafe Central has delicious coffee and pastries. And every day they have live piano playing. It's such a pleasant experience to sit and enjoy the day there. I especially love to read history in such a historical place! 

Dali! My favorite! Kunsthalle Vienna had a fabulous Salvador Dali exhibition! A great collection.  He is one of my favorite artists of all time. They even showed him appearing in videos from his real life, like throwing a party/ fundraiser in the woods and appearing on a game show 

Dali Atomicus, the best portrait I have ever seen. 3 cats, suspended furniture, and countless buckets of water, and 28 takes. Thank you, Philippe Halsman!

(more Dali love.)

This is an incredible piece of work I stumbled up. It is a photogram, the most simplistic form of photography, of a very modern object to make a abstract form that looks beautiful. To me the abstracted objects nearly resemble flowers. They are graceful and quite lovely in person. This snapshot does no justice. Any guess to what the object it? 

The photograms are of different cellphones receiving calls! This is the brilliant work of Christoph Fuchs and Gregor Hofbauer, 2003. This yellow one is titled "Jakob Calling, Siemens L55" (2003).

One of my favorite parts of traveling is to see different perspectives and approaches, to life, art, everything... Fuchs and Hofbauer took the simplest form of photography, which is often forgotten and disregarded as such, and applied it to modern and relevant subjects to make a beautiful and new way of seeing our everyday objects. That is beautiful art to me. 

This image is lovely but strange. It is unlike any other I've seen because it is not "normal photography" but in fact an X-ray! Cool, right? It's a great reminder that images come from many tools, not just those we deem "artistic" or "fine art." I love that something this delicate and creative came from an imaging machine (a camera) that is usually used only pragmatically. (Anonymous, Untitled, 1930s, X-ray.)

Above is one of the most intense sculptures from antiquity I've ever seen. Look at those faces and fists!

Hundertwasserhaus, Vienna was designed by artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser as an organic living space. For example, the apartment building has 250 trees growing inside the building and the floors and walls undulate like rolling hills. People currently live in all of the apartments.