Mid-way through my $400 journey across Europe, I was invited to a Viennese apartment that invoked a paradigm shifting cultural shock. I found the apartment building and entered a metal-gated stone vestibule, revealing an ornate staircase that clashed with the harsh fluorescent lighting. Four triangular flights later, I entered music, laughter and the first of many astonishing rooms. Wallpapered boulders climbed up the 3 meter walls and across the ceiling with only the white crown molding interrupting the climb. To my left, a mangled, fist sized hole in the wall birthed a thin metal wire across the entryway. A Lego man inside a 10cm red gondola rode whimsically along the wire, and I passed underneath him to enter a room with a recently installed 2 meter plywood ceiling.
I gravitated toward a cut-out in the plywood and found a staircase leading to an upside down room, complete with a table and four chairs hanging off the original plaster ceiling. Fighting the inquisitive temptation to venture up the stairs, I headed toward the kitchen.
The kitchen looked like a kitchen: a sink, an oven, friendly people, the original 19th century shower, and a pot of goulash. The difference between this kitchen and kitchens elsewhere (other than the shower) was a video of water dripping onto a garbage bag. The fast-motion projection reflected off a mirror onto the opposite wall. As I left the crowded kitchen, cup of goulash in hand, I came across black and maroon hexagonal prisms balancing precariously upon one another, perfectly fitting my mental image of modern art. An Austrian, correctly identifying my wide-eyed cultural shock, explained that several artists transformed their apartment into an art gallery for 5 days.
He led me around the corner where a pile of furniture obscured a mural of birds taking flight amidst 6 cm holes punched in the plaster. A deranged pig smiled with piece of rusted metal in his hooves. This metal resembled a gun, and the pock marks in the plaster were little piggy rusted metal bullet holes.
Completely smitten with this artistic expression, I entered the final room through a slit in folds of clear and black plastic. I was hunched in a stifling, red, 1.2 meter plastic bag with post-modern music. As my guide entered behind me, he shouted in my ear, “THIS is REAL VIENNA!” I could not have agreed more. I realized that none of this was possible without Vienna’s history of supporting art for art’s sake. Before this party, you could have told me Vienna’s art scene was enthralling, but nothing prepared me for the shock of realizing that government subsidies for artists would incite such creativity. American culture stresses work and making money so much that the idea of creating an art gallery out of your apartment is completely foreign. I guess it took a trip to an apartment in Vienna to show me how different our cultures can be.
