Work, Weird Russian Art, And Gorky Park

Septmber 12th

Today after a huge breakfast at the hotel, I walked 30 minutes to the Pushkin Museum to work. The Pushkin is comprised of three museum buildings and our show was in the one shown here with the big yellow crate in front. We got a chance to peek into the building on the left and view the vast treasures of European and American art from the 20th century. If you ever get to Moscow, THAT is worth seeing.

After work, two other couriers and I attempted to get lunch at a Georgian restaurant. It's hard to describe how difficult it is to find food in a country where nothing is written in the same alphabet and things are over the top expensive. Suffice to say that even with some English on the menu, I wound up with the most disgusting soup of mystery meat, pickles, and olives (if you know me at all, you can feel me shudder) and my co-worker got a huge plate of melted cheese but no bread or crackers.

After paying close to $30 for the inedible soup and a diet Pepsi, I took a photo of this lovely shadow box thingy that was next to our table. Be sure to click and enlarge this photo. There's a lot going on in there.

Since we were free all afternoon, the three of us made our way over to the New Tretyakov Gallery. The main exhibition in this modern portion of the museum centers on Russian art of the 20th century, and encompasses everything from the avant-garde and constructivist canvasses of the 1920s, to the garish Stalinist kitsch of the 1930s and the "new wave" underground art of the 1960s and 1970s.

It was housed in this Ikea looking building.

Outside the museum was the "Graveyard to Fallen Monuments." Basically, they collected Stalin era sculptures pulled down by the public and dropped them in this neglected overgrown muddy park.

The park was desolate, but in a weird way, it worked in favor of the sculptures. I really enjoyed wandering around this bizarre chunk of the city. You can see many photos of this park and the rest of my day here.

For a few moments I pretended I wasn't a registrar who knows better and snapped this photo in the museum. I was excited to see this monumental propaganda art in person.

The third floor of the museum offered a great view of the controversial Peter the Great sculpture sitting smack dab in the middle of the Moscow River. I was amazed as well as horrified by this thing. You can read a little more about this work here. Do not dismay. I took plenty more photos of this in the endless Moscow days to come.

After we'd had enough museum time, we decided to walk across the street to Gorky Park. The park was created by the amalgamation of extensive gardens and covers about 300 acres along the river. The park has become known in the west as the title of a novel by Martin Cruz Smith that was later made into a movie.
But we found out that before we could explore the park we had to traverse an underground passage of bad bad bad art for sale.

Anyway...

Gorky Park has an enormous rust bucket ferris wheel, lots of scary looking rides and one of the mock ups from the Buran space shuttle program.

They even have a tiger. Behind a little chain fence. Right.

After traversing the empty spooky park, we walked a long way back to the hotel. Moscow is certainly a strange city. You can see the juxtaposition of the old and new if you really look for it.

Stray DOGS Of The Day!

These guys were really happy to see this bag lady coming across the street. She must feed them on a regular basis.