Unexplorable

On Wednesday morning, we woke to more chats with Roger, and shared some smoothies and juices with him.  He’d concocted a pretty delicious juice of apple, lemon, ginger, avocado and banana, which he called “the elixir of youth”.  He looks pretty good, so I’ll take his word for it.

We jumped on the metro tube, which took us to the Munchmuseet, the art museum that primarily showcases the work of Edvard Munch.  They were currently holding a show that compared his works, in all their scope – from pastels, to prints to oil paintings – with those of Vincent Van Gogh.   During art school, I had heard the two artists mentioned in the same sentence numerous times, despite the fact that their paths never crossed.

The show was very well curated, though you’d expect that for a gallery showcasing works by two of the most famous 20^th century artists.  I should mention the ordeal you go through to enter the museum.  There’s no photography, which makes sense, so they warned me of that when I walked up, camera strung around my neck.  Then we had to take off all our belts and things and walk through a metal detector – airport style – before we entered.  Once in the gallery, we walked through two more sets of scanners.  The Munchmuseet has had a couple of thieveries, I think, so I guess it makes sense that they’re so stringent about security.

Anyway, the museum was pretty fantastic.  Entry isn’t super cheap to get in, but it’s worth it for how cleanly and well executed everything is.  Also the work is excellent, but that goes without saying.  Nicholas seemed to favour the Van Gogh stuff by a mile, but I was more torn.  I wasn’t particularly familiar with Munch’s work before the museum, except for things like The Scream and The Madonna, because Expressionism usually doesn’t do a whole lot for me.   When I think of Munch, I actually think of a boy named Nicholas – not my Nicholas, but another – who emailed me shortly after I began university.  He’d found some of my artwork showing at the GoMA at Brisbane as part of Creative Generations, and was writing an essay comparing my works with those of Munch.  At the time I didn’t really get it, but I really got it when I came face-to-face with some of his prints and etchings.

In one part of the gallery, it showed part of a manifesto he had written, that spoke of grass and flowers and death and decay.  The series of works that The Other Nicholas had contacted me about were significantly influenced by Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, particularly this section:

And this section:

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken
     soon out of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old
     mothers,
Darker than the colourless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths
     for nothing.

Upon reading Munch’s manifesto, which I am unable to find online, but followed along an eerily similar vein, I hoped and hoped and hoped that I had communicated the significance of the poem (the work in question was titled These Houses and Rooms are Full of Perfumes) to The Other Nicholas.

That’s completely irrelevant to Munch, our day, or our time in Oslo.

From the Munchmuseet, we charted a course to the Vikingship museum, on the island of Brydoy on Oslofjord.  Brygdoy has a range of museums all over the island, but we were most interested in the huge, purpose-built museum that housed three Viking burial ships.

The ships themselves were like nothing else.  Can words describe how big and smooth and commanding they were?  (answer: not really) 

However, there were also lots of bits and pieces found inside the burial ships, from tapestries to sledges to crampon-like attachments for horse hooves.  These had been treated with alum 100 years ago when they were excavated, and were now rapidly deteriorating from the inside.  They were currently 3D scanning them, which some people seemed to think was a pain, but I thought was interesting.

After we’d soaked up as much Viking knowledge and power from the old, reassembled ships, we head home for a very late lunch.  Roger was just coming back to prepare his loungeroom for a psychotherapy session (did I mention he’s a volunteer psychotherapist?  Well, he is), and we needed to be out of the house for it.  We decided to get the Metro up to a place called Holmenkollen.

Holmenkollen’s main tourist attraction is a huge ski jump that lands you in an arena filled with snow.  It wasn’t particularly snowy up there now, but the structure is huge and ridiculous-looking (when I first saw it from the roof of the Opera House I thought it was a giant sea monster sculpture… typical) and there’s a fantastic view of Oslo from up on the hill.

The train ride took us almost directly uphill, past turf-roofed houses and sections of dense forest.  It was almost 5 when we sped past Holmenkollen to the end of the line, where there’s a very short hike that takes you down to the ski jump and back to the station for the return journey.

By the time we returned home, the sun was still high in the sky, so we had some dinner and made another trip out to Vigelandsparken, to see the sculptures at sunset.  There were less clouds than there had been lately, and the sky was a milky wash of blues and pinks, so it was the perfect weather to wander the garden, take pictures and – my favourite activity – dog-spot.  We didn’t leave until after 11pm, and the sky still hadn’t fallen dark.  I’m excited to head further north and experience the midnight sun!

The following morning (this morning) we had tickets to pick up, errands to run and more of our trip to organise.  Between all these activities, we managed a quick visit to the Historikmuseet to enhance our Viking and Sami-culture knowledge before we head into Fjordian and Arctic Norway.  It was a bit of a strange museum, but the exhibition about the Inuit peoples was pretty interesting and enlightening.  It’s a bit of a shock that people still live like that, though.  I’m sure that sounds very sheltered… but it must be very cold and hard.

We’re currently packing our bags up and getting everything ready for a very early morning tomorrow, when we head off into the strange Norwegian lands that house sea monsters and trolls and all other array of creatures currently unknown to science!