A few museums to entice you….

One of my favorite museums to take people to when they visit, is the quirky Museo Xul Solar, Laprida 1212, Recoleta. It’s a very modern styled home that was originally several apartments, including one which belonged to the eponymous artist, Xul Solar, and his studio space. It’s all been opened up and now displays a large number of his works. He’s got a strange, enticing style that I enjoy. He was also, I gather, a bit nuts – not being a particularly sociable person, he invented a couple of his own languages that no one else could speak (panlengua & neocriollo) that involved what he felt to be an easier phonetic structure, and also incorporated music and color into it (he also created a musical notation system that involved color, and there are a couple of the pianos he had built just to play the music he invented), and, his own religion, and a series of games that included a sort of three-dimensional chess. Quirky, as I said.

Museo de Arte Moderno, Av. San Juan 350, San Telmo – three story museum taking up about half a city block. Generally three or four exhibits going on at a time. As long time readers know, I’m not much of a modern art fan, so honestly, two of the exhibits I just kind of walked through in a matter of a few minutes, seeing nothing of any real interest to me. I was really there for the Tomas Saraceno exhibit, which I’ve heard much about….

I had some trepidation heading to this exhibit. 7000 spiders have spun what’s purported to be the world’s largest spiderweb collection (seems a dubious claim – I mean, in how much space, where, etc. – I’m sure that where these were created, in the Ecuadorian rainforest, there are more extensive “sculptures”). But what if there were still a few of those spiders around (okay, I know, logically not, this exhibit has been traveling around the world), or it attracted some local ones, or…. my mind went to sci-fi movies of the 50s and 60s, even Lord of the Rings. In the end, though, it’s a fascinating exhibit (as was the process of creating them, by placing different numbers of spiders inside different sized plastic cubes and changing the orientation of the cube every now and again), and I took a lot of photos, and one video (until I was told to stop, apparently you’re not allowed to video it – they could have just told me that upfront when I went in). Weird as the concept is, if this exhibit travels to where you are, don’t miss it. (Apparently there was also one of ant habitats until recently.)

As long as I was right there, I went next door to the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Buenos Aires, Av. San Juan 328, San Telmo – A much more modern, gallery-esque space, with ramps between floors, shiny concrete walls, and the art spaced out in a way that leaves the place feeling a tad empty for a museum. Again, not really my cup of tea, but at least some of the “abstract graphic design” was colorful and pretty….