Worked Up So Sexual

Departing from chilly, misty Innsbruck, we took a daytrip to one of the area's more curious attractions. Roughly twenty minutes outside of Innsbruck in Wattens, Austria, is the founding home, factory and headquarters of Swarovski Crystal and their "amusement" park (if you will). It was here that we were given our first in a series of lessons about Austrian strangeness.

The beauty of the lands surrounding the head of the great giant, like the crystals inside the mound he protects, cannot be overstated. Inside were many rooms featuring a collection of art pieces commissioned by various artists, using crystal in new and inventive ways. The first room of the exhibit featured crystallized copies of famous art pieces, original sculptures, the world's largest and smallest cut crystal, and a living, breathing chandelier that moved above the room like a crystal jellyfish. It wasn't until the second room, and the unsettling 'Mechanical Theater' by Jim Whiting, that things took a quick turn toward the bizarre.

Portions of body parts -- lower halves and upper halves -- "perform" different movements as crystallized shirts go whirring by on a snaking, overhead track. Tables spin and shadows dance, an iRobot looking stripper performs a catwalk to bad, 80's synthesizer music (think, Kraftwork) that's meant to be seductive, and a male mannequin body -- an Adonis -- is raised above the room and then dissected into many sections, revealing the black crystal inside his skin. As odd as I could try to make it sound, even with a thousand pages, I could never fully capture it. It was like an 80's robot, Red Light District, snuff show.

Another room of strange note were the crystal recreations of landmark structures, each with a video of people in white on a black screen on the ground floor of each statue. Two dancing girls and a creepy jack-in-the-box in the base of the Taj Mahal, a half-naked blonde girl screaming mercilessly at the sudden appearance of a man in a monkey mask within the Empire State Building, an angry, Freudian figure berating you from the bottom of Swarovski's own headquarters, and man eating another man's heart, while the latter shakes violently in the depths of the Giza Pyramid.

I could go on and on, and on and on and on, as there were about fifteen rooms within the place; each one providing a new capture of surrealism to mock the eyes and torment the soul. The whole adventure was like some acid trip gone horribly, horribly wrong and we both walked out of there with the same flabbergasted look of 'what the ****?' that was plastered to us from 'Mechanical Theater' onward. It was awesome, in a way I never knew awesome existed, but we had more pressing matters to attend to. Chiefly, the quaintest little city either of us have ever seen, and a continued journey into strange Austrian humor and the obsessive iconization of one man, worthy as he is for it.