Truly strange juxtaposition: Giger in Gruyères
We made a little day trip on Saturday and one of the places we visited was Gruyère, home to the cheese with which you might be familiar. There's a very well-preserved medieval castle village up on a hill (810 m) in Gruyères and it is a very popular tourist destination. The counts of Gruyère occupied the place from 1050 to 1554, at which time the last count ran into financial trouble and had to abandon the family home. The castle building was constructed between 1270 and 1282 though a huge fire in 1493 destroyed most of it and it was rebuilt. The castle changed hands a couple of times before the canton of Fribourg (Gruyère is a district in Fribourg) bought the building and opened it to the public as a museum.
There are a couple of oddities about the place, but the one that I have most trouble getting my head around is the Giger Museum. H. R. Giger is a Swiss surrealist, best known for his design work on the movie Alien for which he received an Academy Award. As far as I have been able to determine, he has no connections to Gruyère (he's from Canton Graubünden, on the other side of Switzerland from Fribourg) other than the fact that he was invited to stage an exhibition of his work in 1990. He was very taken by the place and when one of the buildings was put up for sale, he bought it and made it into his museum. We didn't go in there or in the related victual establishment opposite, but I took this photo and since it fits in with the theme of old and new I've been doing, I thought I would share it.
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6 comments:
Oh I would have gone inside, I love Giger's work - the alien stuff and his album cover for Debbie Harry etc - not so keen on some of his landscapes - the ones with babies heads are a bit euch!
H. R. Giger is a Swiss surrealist. With apologies, I never heard of him. I guess I am too old and not familiar with the modern movie trends. However, I found your photo and comments very interesting and enjoyed following your links to his museum.
I also wanted to thank you for visiting my blog.
this is amazing - quite creepy too. The canopy reminds me of those used in traditional Parisian metro stations.
Hi z, I posted a comment here a couple of days ago (or thought I did) but it didn't seem to appear?
Mountainboy: I don't think my gut reaction to Giger's work is altogether positive. As you say, euch!
AL: I was actually quite surprised to learn that the album cover for Emerson Lake Palmer's Brain Salad Surgery (1973) is one of Giger's creations. I had seen the image, but never knew who the artist was.
Blueboat: I made the same visual connection with the Art Nouveau station canopies in Paris!
Richard: Hm, I've had similar problems at other sites when I've been the one leaving comments and I thought that that had to do with the character-recognition thing, which I don't have. I wonder how many comments Blogger has gorged itself on.
Interesting and, I suppose appropriately, surreal
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