Page 7 of 10
Copenhagen, Denmark
Speak to me and don't speak softly
You can’t go to Denmark and not go to Copenhagen, and I mean that literally. All roads, rail lines, ferries and planes are all going to end up with you standing in Copenhagen sooner or later, so why resist it and why not just go ahead and embrace it instead? A walk down the Stroget? Check. A stop by the palace? Check. Walking all the way over to see The Little Mermaid statue despite the inherent disappointments that you know await? Check.
Standing within sight of the Swedish shore (you can tell which direction Sweden is since literally all of the cannons are still pointed that way), Kronborg Castle is less than an hour north of Copenhagen and is famous for someone who kind of never lived there. The anglicized version of Helsignor is Elsinore, and it’s where Shakespeare’s Hamlet thought really, really hard about what to do next. The truth is that there was never a guy named Hamlet (apparently the answer all along was not to be) and even if there was a guy named Hamlet, the castle that stood here during fake Hamlet’s time burned down and was replaced with this one. Still, this is the castle that stood in Shakespeare’s time and Hamlet (the play) has been performed here many, many times. So while there may be something rotten in Denmark, chances are that it’s probably not Kronborg Castle.
The Copenhagen slides may have started kind of slow with complaints about a defenseless mermaid statue and way too many forced Shakespeare references, but it’s setting up to end strong with three good stories and three good pictures to go right along with them.
First up is Tallet 8, a housing complex designed by Denmark’s own Bjarke Ingels, the guy with the funny Arnold Schwarzenegger accent who designed that temporary maze at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC and the pyramid on West 57th Street and the West Side Highway. Tallet 8 (or House 8) looks like a great big number eight in plan, but that’s not the interesting part of the building. Starting at ground level, the building has a looping exterior street (mostly ramps) that circle up, around and through that great big eight. Residences are then located along this street with little front yard terraces lined up all over the place. As a visitor, the effect is really fun and the extended journey can actually be kind of thrilling, although I’m not all that sure it would be all that great a place to live. First off it’s pretty far away from the CBD, it’s at the last stop of the Metro out in Orestad. Second is that as awesome as it may be to walk up, around and through the building as a visitor, I imagine that route might get pretty tired pretty quick, especially in bad weather. And third is because of people like me. Visitors are tolerated but not welcome at Tallet 8. Hours are restricted to midday on weekends, and there are additional restrictions like keeping out of residents’ terraces (which is easy) and not taking pictures or staring at any residences or residents (which practically gets a little harder).
What the hell is this? it looks like a stream with a massive boulder, with two guys in the distance kind of hanging out with some type of massive roof structure above. But of course that’s only half of the story.
I intentionally went to ARoS and Arhus and Denmark to walk through a specific rooftop installation by Olafur Eliasson, but it was luck and fate that brought me to another Olafur Eliasson exhibition. My trip coincided with a major show at Louisiana, an incredibly influential art museum located about a half hour north of Copenhagen on the shore of the sea. The show featured some films by Eliasson (he should stick to the art and leave films to someone else to be honest), an Eliasson model room exhibit (wonderful) and this piece: “Riverbed (2014).” Eliasson took over an entire wing of the museum and filled it with rocks (lots and lots of rocks) and a stream. Visitors enter the museum galleries and walk anywhere that they want to, all the time both admiring and questioning the art. The galleries have a natural elevation progression, you start low and go up some stairs, but all of the rocks exaggerate this, creating rooms with low ceilings and doorways that you would need to crawl through to pass. And since walking the galleries is loud and kind of messy, a full time caretaker with a small spade is there to make sure that the water doesn’t stop and that a river always runs through it.
If you want to see this once in a lifetime exhibit, it’s not too late. “Riverbed (2014)” runs right into 2015 and closes on April Fools Day. But remember that if you go there specifically looking for this giant boulder, you’ll be out of luck. That big rock is no larger than six inches across and the river is really a pretty small stream. The picture was taken with my trusted point and shoot (a Sony RX 100 M2) only inches above the artificial ground and almost right inside the river.
Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground. Four more views of “Riverbed (2014),” which exists now only in memories and pictures and legend.
All of these pictures were taken during the course of one day. I woke up at the hotel in Arhus, took a morning train to Copenhagen, left my bag in a locker at the train station, bought a ticket to Helsignor, walked around Kronborg Castle, took a train to Humlebaek, walked through the Danish wood to Louisiana, spent a long time at the museum and at the riverbed, took a train back to Copenhagen, picked up my bag, walked over to my hotel (a weird place called Cabinn City), then headed back out to Tivoli to wait out the sunset and watch the lights go on. September is the tail end of the Tivoli season, in fact the week I was there was the last open week of the year, not counting special hours at Halloween and Christmas. There wasn’t all that much happening inside, although all of that was forgotten once the lights went on.
