We decided to celebrate Mila’s nine-month birthday by subjecting her to another grueling trip to the center for a weekend afternoon. We have finally worked out the best ways to get a stroller into and out of the subway, and believe that all of us really benefit from getting out of the neighborhood every once in awhile.
Our goal was to go to the New Tretyakov Gallery by Gorky Park for the last day of a highly-touted show around that featured three or four works from a consortium of European museums. To get there, we took the subway to Barrikadnaya, and since switching trains can be grueling on the best of circumstances, I came up with the bright idea that we should get out there and take the bus along the Garden Ring to get around to the museum. We caught the 79 bus, which did not behave as we had been led to believe by our city map, but eventually got dropped off at Park Kultury, where it was a quick walk over the bridge to the museum.
Just as we stepped out, it began to rain. So we bought some blini and waited under an overpass until it let up. That was when we noticed certain mob activity in the area. Every branch of the security services apparently gets a day to celebrate themselves. On their designated day, the army, border guards, customs servicve, school crossing guards, or whatever get donned up in their old uniforms, go to Gorky Park, and get scandalously drunk and wander in packs singing very loudly and harassing every schoolgirl and young woman that doesn’t get away fast enough. July 29 happened to be Navy Day, so there were mobs of men in the distinctive blue and white striped matroskin shirts and sailor caps roaming about.
Luckily, none of them were particularly interested in visiting an art exhibit, so after we scooted across the bridge during a break in the rain, we got to the vast contemporary art museum on an embankment along the river. It is a vast, marble rectangular box – the sort of soul-crushing late Soviet building that hangs around unloved and underused. It is strange to see facilities so big that its inhabitants are lost as to how to use the space -- it shows how wasteful and inefficient too much planning can be. The actual exhibit itself was a bit of a miss. The works that were sent were not really blockbusters, and by its very nature the exhibit was a weird mish-mash.
Outside, in the back, is the sculpture garden, which is famous as the place where all the Soviet era monuments were dumped after 1991. I’d been there before, in 2003, and it seemed much smaller than I remember. I believe the moment for campy socialist nostalgia may have come and gone.
Our goal was to go to the New Tretyakov Gallery by Gorky Park for the last day of a highly-touted show around that featured three or four works from a consortium of European museums. To get there, we took the subway to Barrikadnaya, and since switching trains can be grueling on the best of circumstances, I came up with the bright idea that we should get out there and take the bus along the Garden Ring to get around to the museum. We caught the 79 bus, which did not behave as we had been led to believe by our city map, but eventually got dropped off at Park Kultury, where it was a quick walk over the bridge to the museum.
Just as we stepped out, it began to rain. So we bought some blini and waited under an overpass until it let up. That was when we noticed certain mob activity in the area. Every branch of the security services apparently gets a day to celebrate themselves. On their designated day, the army, border guards, customs servicve, school crossing guards, or whatever get donned up in their old uniforms, go to Gorky Park, and get scandalously drunk and wander in packs singing very loudly and harassing every schoolgirl and young woman that doesn’t get away fast enough. July 29 happened to be Navy Day, so there were mobs of men in the distinctive blue and white striped matroskin shirts and sailor caps roaming about.
Luckily, none of them were particularly interested in visiting an art exhibit, so after we scooted across the bridge during a break in the rain, we got to the vast contemporary art museum on an embankment along the river. It is a vast, marble rectangular box – the sort of soul-crushing late Soviet building that hangs around unloved and underused. It is strange to see facilities so big that its inhabitants are lost as to how to use the space -- it shows how wasteful and inefficient too much planning can be. The actual exhibit itself was a bit of a miss. The works that were sent were not really blockbusters, and by its very nature the exhibit was a weird mish-mash.
Outside, in the back, is the sculpture garden, which is famous as the place where all the Soviet era monuments were dumped after 1991. I’d been there before, in 2003, and it seemed much smaller than I remember. I believe the moment for campy socialist nostalgia may have come and gone.
This shady dude is Felix Dzerzhinsky, the father of the Cheka, who in all of Soviet history is remembered as the most cruel, shifty, and evil of the lot -- and that's just what his fans say about him. This particular statue was the one that was yanked out by the neck by a mob and a few cranes from its place outside KGB headquarters on Lubyanka right after the August 1991 coup. As you can see from the base, he still has his fans.
The park gives you the “best” view of the stupidest f-ing thing on earth. Seriously, you could travel the world and not find a dumber piece of public art anywhere. It sucks so much that it is actually physically impossible to properly capture its shittiness with an ordinary camera. I tried hard, but the abundance of cheesy details in something of such depressing scale (this damn thing is in the same size category as the Statue of Liberty) was too extraordinary for our SureShot. This is supposed to be a triumphal statue of Peter the Great, riding on a tiny little pirate ship atop a giant pillar. As I recall, the people of St. Petersburg refused to allow this thing anywhere near their city center, in which they take great pride. But as Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov is buddies with the ‘artist,’ Zurab Tsereteli, he had no qualms subjecting this waste of metal on the people of Moscow.
Afterwards, we took a walk around the neighborhood, which is a relatively unscathed part of the city that can be pretty quiet. Mila allowed us to have dinner at a Yolki-Polki on Klimentovski Pereulok across from the Church of the Roman Pope Clement, which is one of the last great unrefurbished churches in the city. It has a certain sad decrepit charm because of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment