"It Is Not a Potato…It’s a Bubble"

“It’s not a potato…It’s a bubble,” said Klaus, as we stood outside the Kunsthaus Graz, a futuristic bubblish looking building that sits beside the Mur river. It’s an enormous museum filled with art you don’t understand…but that’s okay, you simply experience it. This building dates back to the 1800s and is made of cast iron. That’s one side.

But the bubble side contains the weird art they call contemporary. Where to start? There is a little house in here with a fax machine. Artists fax in sheets describing how to make this house unliveable…suggestions pour in every day, such as ‘hire two men to sit in a car outside the house all day’ or ‘rip out all the water pipes and electric wires’ or ‘burn down the house.’ In another exhibit a man sat inside a counter and offered to make amulets for anything you were afraid of, such as over eating, drunken partygoers, getting sick etc.

It’s called the ‘friendly alien’ and it is indeed a strange new world in here. At night one-foot pixels light up in patterns programmed by artists, so all night long there is a 200 foot artshow that the whole city can see. It’s a computer generated blob that was commissioned in 2003 when the city was Europe’s cultural capital, and built over a former parking lot and dilapidated old stores. To get up inside a moving staircase, sort of an escalator without steps, wisks you up into the darkness. After that you’re on your own to try to understand the high concept art that awaits.