Dead goat looped and other Swede delights

I  have misguidedly decided to walk from Stockholm’s National Museum to the Modern Museum, and it is starting to feel like an eternity. Almost as if I were walking the very time-line from Rembrandt’s self portraits to Rauschenberg’s combines. Twenty minutes into the walkathon and I reach a bridge reflecting a creepy orange sunset. Great. Shades of Munch.

I’m in the Swedish capital to cover a travel mart organized by the Philippine Department of Tourism (DOT) and the Philippine Embassy to Sweden for The STAR. I spend my free time the day before visiting comic-book shops (where I spotted KISS masks and not-the-usual Star Wars action figures such as Nunas and Wampas) and bookstores (where the attendant reminded me of the guy from Black Books who says in one episode, “I’m a quitter. I come from a long line of quitters. It’s amazing I’m here at all.”). I also took pictures of churches that are the architectural equivalent of Vincent Price.

Stockholm is an amalgam of the modern and the medieval. At the center are places such as Gamla Stan (the Old Town) and Riddarholmen, two islands that make up northern Europe’s largest and best-preserved medieval city with a history dating back to the 13th century.

That morning, our group took the Stockholm Sightseeing by Boat tour with London-based actors Junix Inocian and Monique Wilson. Monique teaches at London’s Royal Academy. Junix was recently cast as a gay ex-sumo wrestler in a movie. The guide passed around blankets and a bitter liquid to keep away the cold.

Gamla Stan is where the Royal Palace is. From the boat, we spotted towering churches, winding alleyways and imposing sculptures. The districts of Norrmalm, Södermalm and Kungsholmen boast buildings from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Stockholm also has lots to offer cosmopolitans. There is the entertainment hub of Stureplan and the exclusive Östermalm district, which has sprawling department stores, gourmet restaurants, nightclubs and galleries.

Our friends at the Embassy took us one night to the Absolut Icebar, the world’s “first permanent bar made entirely of ice.” As customers enter they are made to wear anti-freeze outfits and are allowed to spend only an hour inside. Ice everywhere: walls, tables, bar, sofa, and sculptures — all made of natural frost from the Torne Älv river in Jukkäsjarvi. Even the shot-glass is made of ice — undoubtedly the best jigger for a shot of Citron. I half-expected the Ice Queen to emerge from the bar to propose a toast with George the Abominable Snowman.

Sweden really has everything from ice bars to medieval towers, from Ikea stores to two of the best museums I’ve ever seen.

At Södra Blasieholmshamnen (which was a quite mouthful to tell a cab driver) is the National Museum, which houses works by Peter Paul Rubens, Francisco Goya, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and Paul Gaugin, as well as Swedish master Carl Larsson. But it is in the Rembrandt room where I could stay for eons just studying the Dutch master’s technique. (But, heck, I have a better chance of starting an airline of flying pigs than learning how to properly apply chiaroscuro.)

On view at the National Museum is “The Language of Flowers” exhibit featuring symbolic still lifes and abstract blooms by Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Georgia O’Keefe and Andy Warhol. “Welcome to the garden,” says the brochure. Hmm, reminds me of some galleries in Manila that are starting to resemble flower shops — “petal art-traction,” indeed. Even bees would be fooled.

Speaking of Warhol, the pop artist’s cow wallpaper decorates the interior of the Moderna Museet at Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, which I finally reach after walking the earth like David “Caine” Carradine in Kung Fu or Solomon Grundy, one of the enemies of the Justice League who’s always grumpy.

All the walking is well worth it, though. The museum is home to Marcel Duchamp’s world’s most infamous urinal, Pablo Picasso’s “The Spring” and Salvador Dali’s “The Enigma of William Tell,” as well as major works by Bacon, Munch and Pollock, among other artistic titans (who, for me, are on the same iconic pantheon as John Cage, Charlie Parker, James Joyce, Jean-Paul Sartre, Igor Stravinsky, Led Zeppelin, Jerry Seinfeld, etc.).

I spot Warhol’s pink “Electric Chair” print and his portrait of Elizabeth Taylor. Say what you want about the American artist portrayed in movies by Crispin Glover (The Doors), Guy Pearce (Factory Girl) and David Bowie (Basquiat). Call him the Paris Hilton of Modern Art if you will. But Warhol’s prints are truly evocative and are a source of rumination like all great art should be. It’s like standing inside The Factory with Candy Darling, Sugar Plum Fairy and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Altogether now: “Holly came from Miami F.L.A.”

Factoid of the day: Bob Dylan once swapped one of Warhol’s “Silver Elvis” paintings for Albert Grossman’s couch. That is, after using the artwork as a dartboard. Warhol was appalled, according to Uncut magazine. Rumor has it that the artist is whom Bob refers to in Like a Rolling Stone as the “diplomat on a chrome horse.” Andy found it puzzling. Many do.

Also on view at the Moderna Museet is “Robert Rauschenberg: Combines,” featuring “The Goat,” among other freestanding or wall-mounted objects that are part-painting-part-sculpture in which “non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations.” Well, to art geeks, the goat combine is known as “Monogram,” which was bought by the Moderna Museet in 1964. 

The artist spent much time sifting through garbage bins and secondhand stores to gather materials such as Coca-Cola bottles, rubber tires, pinups, newspaper cuttings and, yes, stuffed animals. Rauschenberg bought the goat for $15 in an antique shop in 1955. After washing it, he painted the animal’s face to cover damages to its muzzle and put a tire around its midriff.

So explains the pamphlet: “The title alludes to the artist himself and the relationship between the goat and tire is similar to the way in which initials are intertwined in a monogram. The work went through several transformations before the artist was satisfied with the composition as a whole. It was finally placed on a pictorial surface, a collage, repositioned from the wall to the floor, a move that was inspired by Jasper Johns.”

Rauschenberg, who exhibited his illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy at the Moderna Museet in the ’60s, is an important forerunner of Pop Art. He is still an inspiration to many of today’s contemporary artists. One of my favorites among the 50 or so pieces at Moderna Museet is “Coca-Cola Plan,” three boxed Coca-Cola bottles with wings.

Come to think of it, Stockholm actually is like one of Rauschenberg’s combines: many elements making up a conceptual one. Reminds me of a line from the guy who sang about lands of ice and snow, and the hammer of the gods: “When all are one and one is all.”

I walk out the building and into the cold Swede evening. All locks, Stock and two smoking nostrils.

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For comments, suggestions, curses and invocations, e-mail iganja_ys@yahoo.com.