12 september 2018
With no class on Thursdays I spent the day visiting Arken, a museum outside of Copenhagen. The first task was buying a ticket and tackling Copenhagen Central Station. After figuring out which zone I needed to travel to I attempted to buy a ticket at one of the many automated ticket booths around the station.
Obstacle One: the machines don’t take North American cards.
In an increasingly automated world, I wandered the station trying to find a place to buy a ticket in person and eventually found the ticket booth in the back of the station.
Obstacle Two: not exactly knowing how to pronounce the station I wanted to go to.
I tried to pronounce it, spell it, and eventually settled on saying I was trying to get to Arken, which did the trick. I bought a ticket there and a ticket back, spent too long looking for the right platform, and got on the train to Ishøj.
Ishøj is a roughly 30-minute train ride outside of Copenhagen and Arken is a 6-minute bus ride or 25-minute walk from Ishøj Station. I was planning on taking the bus, but when I arrived the next bus wouldn’t come for 20 minutes so I figured might as well walk.
While traveling alone has the drawbacks of not being able to share the experience with someone, there’s the advantage of being able to stop whenever I find something interesting. On the route to Arken I came across a picnic table sitting next to a field of cows. Because I was alone and it was sunny and 65 out I sat for 45 minutes.
I finished the walk to Arken, had a nice chat about how far from home I was after showing my Iowa State ID to get the student discount, and spent several hours going through the exhibits. Like many of the other museums I’ve been to so far, Arken is a very manageable museum with three special exhibitions and a couple smaller displays. The big draw right now is a Van Gogh exhibition, the first time in more than 50 years that Denmark has been able to present a large body of his work. In conjunction with the Van Gogh exhibition, Arken displayed pieces from their collection in a show called Starry Nights which show connections to nature.
Willows at Sunset by Vincent Van Gogh
The second special exhibition shows pieces by Danish artist J.F. Willumsen who is known for his intense color palettes.
The final exhibition in this list but the first one seen when walking to the museum is an installation by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone called vocabulary of solitude (to my English major mom, the title is supposed to be lowercase). It is a room with 45 life-sized human figures dressed as clowns sprawled about the floor. Each figure represents an action a person does over the course of 24 hours.
There were also three smaller exhibitions with pieces from the museum's collection. One room was dedicated to Damien Hirst pieces, a room with pieces by Anslem Reyle, and a video project titled Candice Breitz: Love Story which documents the stories and experiences of 6 refugees.
After the museum I walked around the beaches near Arken. The water was very blue, only a few other people were around, and fittingly everything kind of looked like a Van Gogh painting.
