Category Archives: Architecture

The Art of Cairns

Leave a reply

When you are caught by a veið, or a plane of gaping energy, that can devour you without a trace…

… where everything (and soon you too) is thrown, or strewn, around without sense…

… it’s best to create memory, and sense, or you will be lost, literally. Cairns like the one below are the Parthenons of Iceland. Don’t touch.

And don’t make more! That would be like destroying Shakespeare.


Even if the highway-building crew starts it, please resist translating cairns, energy gathered from throws to make wide space close, into an image of yourself as witness. This isn’t magic or art. It’s architecture and language. The path to history through them should remain open. If not, why go to Iceland?

~

Images from between Hafragilsfoss and Dettifoss, as well as on Highway 85 to Vopnafjörður.

Beautiful Raufarhöfn

Leave a reply

This graveyard in a part of Iceland rarely visited fills me with joy. The church, like so many, is an imported thing, steeped in nationalism, colonialism and paternity, but the graveyard, ah, that is 1100 years living all at once.

And in a way that has no words, at least not yet. To date, it exceeds the capacity of the literary writers of Reykjavik, far to the southwest, but I like to think that some kid, alone here just below the Arctic Circle, is living the moments right now that in a decade or two will give it voice. What a day to look forward to!

 

Having Fun keeping Warm with the Fairies in the Icelandic (Oh Not Really) Cold

Leave a reply

Six years back, these ads for warm weather clothing were all the rage.

A melancholy bunch, but they appealed to visitors of European heritage.

Who just want to go where it is cold and to be warm there, or at least are willing to let their bodies remember all that.

Of course, the ads were made in New York.

But their appeal was solid.

Today, the ads are still about superhuman melancholy, about prowess in conditions that would slay most others, but with adventure. No longer is being bodily present in Iceland enough. You have to be an airplane.

And of course, at the same time still be a vulnerable waif, even with a bit of fear and disdain.

Ah, Iceland, still playing with fairy lore after all these years.

Imagine if the Icelanders just got up one day and redefined the human myth instead! I’m waiting for that day.

Perhaps new glasses first?

Reykjavik’s Wall Against the Cold

Leave a reply

Why does Reykjavik build a wall to separate itself from Iceland?

To keep back the sea, perhaps. On an island, this may be the way: one is always blocked by water. It can be comforting. As things evolve, however, blocking behaviour become internalized, and then when your colonizers give you cars, why, you can always drive around, right? There remains no price for blocking … or does there? Or does “driving around” still not untie an old, old knot?

The Hunt for the Best Art Gallery in Iceland

Leave a reply

Is it goofing around with a culvert at Grandatorg?

Or lunch at the Kjarvalstaðir gallery?

Or goofing around with shop windows on Laugavegur?

Or just goofing around at Laugarnestangi as the sun comes up over Viðey?

Or a goofy farmer’s field on the way to Dettifoss?

Or a whole town goofing off at Kópasker?

Or an aluminum smelter buying allegiance with a pretty thing on Sæbraut?

Or doing more with less on Laugavegur because you need more with your less?

Or just goofing off with a little bit of security magic on Frakkastígur?

 

Or the painting amusing themselves at Kjarvalstaðir, because everyone has come to lunch with old friends, and the paintings are certainly old friends.


Or outdoing Mondrian in a sheep farm in the Fljótsdalur?

Or some weird kind of planting flowers to give children hope in front of some everybody-comes-to-Iceland-with-spray-cans-now-that-the-building-sites-have-been-abandoned-after-the-financial-meltdown, because what else?

Or politics? Is it an art gallery, too?

It’s the cigarette tin, right?

No, wait, it’s the riding stable signage in Akureyri!

No, wait! It’s spilled paint and a stick on a parking lot!

It never ends. Icelanders are a pretty serious looking bunch, even Björk, and they write about gruesome murders and stuff, and their novelists kill off all their heroes and heroines just because, but don’t believe it, because they’re always goofing off, with a straight face. Do you think the horses taught them about this, in those centuries of isolation?

Well, maybe not the straight face part.

Everyone Can be a Faded Polaroid at the Harpa and Dance with Yoko Ono Now

2 Replies

There is beautiful light in Iceland…

.

… and I mean really beautiful light …

… but tourism survives on images, so the great opera hall, the Harpa, allows anyone to view others as if they are in a faded Polaroid shot from the 1970s …

… or an Agfa shot from the 1960s.

This retro thing, this notion of quoting the landscape in the very moment one observes it, is something the Icelanders learned in graduate school in New York, London and Berlin. It’s charming, but remember …

… every wave that goes to sea in Skagafjörður leaves behind a space for beautiful light. It’s like the sun is right there, you know.

Hólar in the Spring

It is.

In Iceland, Everything is Hay

Leave a reply

When your sheep are starving, you will feed them old twine, your family Bible, the shirt off your back, anything, because without sheep there is nothing. Of course, most Icelanders are no longer intimate with sheep. For them,  they hay thing has been updated, all modern and tip top. In Reykjavik, anything, anything, even an old couch or an old barbecue made out of paving bricks, is a window.

Hverfisgata

But, of course, that’s the beauty of it.