Category: Slovakia

As some of my more astute friends have realised, and perhaps quietly judged when they wanted a white wine spritzer, I like a craft beer bar and I was pleased to arrive at Damian Beer Garden especially as it took me a few minutes to find it. It was well reviewed on-line and I did wonder if it would be quite busy on a Friday night, although it transpired not to be which seemed more unfortunate.

I went inside to the bar area where there was a friendly welcome and it was apparent that they prefer table service and so I actually went outside which I thought was brave of me. It was a sheltered courtyard and there didn’t seem to be any pests about (as in insects, I don’t mean English stag groups).

I like a simple food menu, less faffing about choosing.

The bar’s menu is on Untappd and I had my eyes on the Joe in the Garden gose, but that ran out when they tried to pour it. But, that’s the excitement of craft beer bars, they’re always changing and there’s something new and decadent around the corner.

The beer is the Danny Boy 16 from the Barn Beer Co who are from the Czech Republic, this hazy NEIPA was hoppy with tastes of stonefruit, perfectly agreeable. I’m not sure how big the Slovakian craft breweries are, but there’s certainly a lot more emerging from the Czech Republic. I clearly made a mistake here in not ordering a beer from the brewery itself, I’ll have to fix that omission at some point in the future.

The food was one of my favourite things, a perfectly proportioned meat to bread ratio of pastrami with sauerkraut and gherkins underneath, along with some inoffensive Swiss cheese. I’m picky about melted cheese, but this behaved itself and let the other ingredients have their moment.

While I was still admiring the structural integrity of the sandwich, a new beer appeared on the menu from CRAK brewery in Italy, a country dominated by wine but with a fast emerging craft beer scene. It’s the Giant Guerilla CRAK the Rules, a double dry hopped DIPA which was 8% ABV and was creamy, hoppy, smooth and really quite fluffy. Juicy, refreshing and decadent, this was a really decent beer.

I very much liked this bar, this is the kind of place that every city should have more of. The service was friendly, the beer list was well curated, the surroundings were clean, the atmosphere was relaxing and the food completely met my expectations. I hope that the venue is doing well as it was quiet when I was there, locations such as this deserve to prosper by focusing on high quality food and drink rather than verging towards generic rubbish.

And another artwork by Peter Kalmus at this gallery and they note that:

“Peter Kalmus is primarily known to the public through various media reports (pouring red paint in the bust of Vasil Biľak, throwing mud on Tiso’s memorial plaque, etc.) The collection of yellow postal delivery notices (from the courts, police, NAKA, etc.) here becomes a symbol of his tireless determination to fight for his principles.”

These seem a rather nice thing to collect if you happen to get plenty of them and I like the creating order from chaos element to this. Without verging into the area of Slovakian politics that I know nothing about, it seems that Vasil Biľak is now widely seen as an enemy of the people, so I’m not sure chucking red paint proved to be overly controversial. As for Tiso, I’m not sure anyone would defend him outside the world of far-right politics. I rather like this artwork though, there’s something about standing up for your principles and being proud of that. I’ve never seen an artwork like this and it’s certainly a creative way of continuing to make a point for his past protests.

There wasn’t much activity around the rhino enclosure at Bratislava Zoo, either from visitors or the rhinos themselves. Trusting people not to jump over the wall, which wasn’t relatively very high, it meant that visitors could get very close to these animals. I’m aware there’s a school of thought that all zoos should be closed, but I take the view that they perform educational and breeding benefits to the wider community, not just a leisure facility.

It’s quite pointy. I’m not sure that I’ll be the new David Attenborough with these type of observations, but it is factually correct.

The zoo had two rhinos, or at least, it had two rhinos that I actually saw. It seems that they’re both female and one of them, Tootsie, is from Lowestoft (more specifically Africa Alive in Kessingland) so she’s had a dead exotic upbringing. I did wonder how you go about moving a rhino, but here’s a video of Tootsie being moved.

And today’s fun fact is that they have no real predators, just lions and hyenas which might attack the frail, young, stupid or sick. I’m not sure how these things have evolved to be able to run at up to 50 kilometres or so an hour, that’s quite some pace. And as another quick fact, black rhinos and white rhinos are both grey, it’s just that someone couldn’t translate the Afrikaans word ‘weit’ or ‘wijd’ which means ‘wide’ and not ‘white’.

I’m more positive about this artwork by Peter Kalmus than a couple of others he has created that are displayed in the gallery. The text by the exhibit reads:

“The collection of parcels that Peter Kalmus has been assembling since 2005 continues to grow. The artist orders them for various reasons and from diverse sources, but if a parcel is neatly packaged it remains unwrapped, thus becoming a “time capsule” whose contents remain a mystery.”

It doesn’t say this, but I assume part of the purpose of the artwork is to note that many purchases aren’t required, that buyers might even forget what they’d ordered now it is so easy to acquire things. It’s an intriguing artwork though, just rows of things addressed to him that have never been opened although it feels a slight shame that a seller took such care to package items that were never going to be seen again. I can imagine there’s an argument that this isn’t very positive for the environment, ordering things that are never opened, but compared to the wedding of Jeff Bezos, I can’t think that’s a major concern in the greater scheme of things.

I liked the theme of the gallery about order, the transience of things and how that relates to artworks. I wasn’t sure about this one initially, although it didn’t annoy me like some of the other exhibits, but I rather like it now. It’s by Marek Kvetan and the display reads:

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, Marek Kvetan collected food wrappers and turned them into white plaster casts. The result is a silent scene of an emptied city that bears traces of personal and collective experience. Each cast is a frozen moment of the everyday – a memory that brought us together.”

The exhibit feels minimalist until there’s a thought about how much a discarded wrapper or container can say about a moment in time. The snack taken between Zoom calls or the packaging from a food delivery. With them in white plaster, there’s now no branding, colour or context other than the shape, so it feels almost like an archaeological residue. And it brings up the question of whether we needed all that packaging, as well as it being something of a shared universality.

I often overthink these things, but I liked the quiet understatement here.

I’ve muttered about one work by Peter Kalmus that gave me the impression that he and the gallery were almost mocking those without wealth by destroying books. This work is also muddled, although partly brilliant in terms of its collation of a period of transience. These are all posters from the time of Covid, the gallery notes that it’s a testimony of the “unexpected silence that reigned in places” at the time. This seems a useful exercise in recording and keeping a snapshot of that period, a reminder that Covid threatened everyone, regardless of their wealth.

Then the gallery goes further, it talks about how the collection was “appropriated” and was a “subversive capture” arrangement. If this means that signage to reassure people about Covid was removed to make some sort of point, then the privilege and wealth almost drips from the gallery into the street. The suggestion that the gallery can take what they want, regardless of how those with little will cope or manage. I rather hope though that the gallery means that the posters were taken when they were no longer in use, collated without the knowledge of the owners to form part of an archive that only the artist was aware of. Recording transience is positive, there sometimes should be order after chaos.

I like a bit of medieval and Renaissance religious art, namely because there’s something intriguing about something that has been revered by generations. This painting shows St. Jerome (or St. Hieronymus as he’s also known) looking like he’s a Cardinal, although he wasn’t as they hadn’t really been invented at that time. The word invented probably isn’t the religious way of describing the evolution of the Cardinal process, but I like it. The book shows he likes writing and I’m not sure why he’s holding a miniature church, I assume that’s because he founded them rather than he likes making them out of matchsticks.

The gallery doesn’t know who painted it, it’s just attributed to a central European painter from the second half of the sixteenth century. It’s also not known whether this would have been in a church or used as a private devotional painting.`As an aside, the gallery also note that it uses tempera which isn’t really in keeping with the date they’ve given to the artwork, but perhaps it was a bit of an artistic backwater that oil paints hadn’t yet reached….

On the theme of transience, which is what the museum had an exhibition about, this is a thought provoking artwork from 2023 which is simple in its intent. It’s simply a load of dead mayflies glued to a bit of paper, but these are special and arguably unfortunate insects which die within a day of mating. This does fit well with the theme of the gallery, the focus on what is the point of such a short life? The answer is obvious that it’s simply to ensure another generation of mayflies, but it doesn’t give much space to the development of the individual and is something of one of nature’s plot twists. Bearing in mind I was standing there staring at a load of dead insects glued to a bit of paper thinking about this, I’d suggest that the artwork achieved one of its likely aims of being thought provoking. Take away the thought of humanity being just of fleeting relevance, I rather liked this arrangement and I forgave the artist for sawing a load of books up.

There are a number of other installations in this museum by Peter Kalmus that are thought provoking and intriguing, but I’ll come to this one that was created in 2014. However, this one is about cutting books up and trying to make a statement. There’s only one statement to me, that the gallery is privileged, fortunate and is mocking those who don’t have access to books. It’s like a gallery that uses food that they leave to be destroyed claiming it’s showing the transience of the art form and claiming that they are drawing attention to some sort of issue, oblivious that they’re the problem.

For me, and this is obviously just my view as it’s my blog, the career of Kalmus is one of radical inclusion, but I don’t like this artwork due to the messages that come from it. But, I’ll be more positive about his other stuff now I’ve finished this rant….