Culture with Vermut: Antoni Tàpies, Bruce Conner, Tekla Aslanishvili

Irene found an exhibit of some of the video works of Bruce Conner here in Barcelona at an event called "Autumn Vermouths" (in English).  It's at the Antoni Tàpies Foundation building, just a 17 minute walk away. When I looked it up, I realized I'd walked past the building in 2017 and wondered about it: on top of this ornate building was a mass of twisted wire, screen, and rebar; I couldn't decide if it was construction, demolition, or art.  

In the context of artist Tàpies, it makes sense: he celebrated found objects, every day objects, and largely pioneered the movement in connection with Duchamp and others. And today, we got to visit it and check out the art inside!

The building itself was gorgeous inside, mixing wide open museum-style spaces, industrial iron, and a beautiful wood-and-glass-encased library for researchers.

For only 10€ we got a guided tour of the Antoni Tápies exhibit "The Fertilizer that Feeds the Soul". I didn't know anything about him, but he was a pioneer in treating everyday objects and found objects in the context of art. Our guide was enthusiastic and knowledgeable but unfortunately, we didn't understand much as she gave the guided tour in Catalan; totally our fault, and we contented ourselves by reading the English labels. 

Afterwards, there was a reception on the attractive roof deck, where we could see from behind the mass of wires on the façade, as well as a sculpture of a giant sock -- a recurring element in his work, it turns out. And of course the promised vermut with snacks of potato chips and anchovy-stuffed olives.  

Irene worked up the courage to tell her we didn't understand anything, and this broke the ice to a conversation (in our stilted Spanish) about Tápies, Bruce Conner, and modern art in general. 

After the break, we went downstairs to check out the Bruce Conner exhibit "Light out of Darkness". I've been interested in Conner since 1987 when I saw a piece of his at a collector's shop in Georgetown DC, obsessed over it, and finally purchased the lithograph. I've been fortunate to see a lot of his work including films, assemblages, mixed media, and prints in DC at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn and Katzen Arts Center, and in San Francisco at the SF MOMA and DeYoung Museum. Our guide indicated this was the first time Conner's video work has been exhibited in Barcelona. Some of the pieces I'd seen before, including early (MTV-era) videos for Devo and Talking Heads, but also films focusing on the atomic bomb tests and Kennedy's assassination set to music by Terry Riley. You can see how he pioneered the fast cuts, video overdubs, and other techniques we now take for granted. If you blow up the text in the second image about his video for David Byrne and Brian Eno's "Mea Culpa", it's pretty damning: 

"Although copyright reasons prevented Conner's films from being played on MTV, the film techniques he employed -- the jump cut, flash frame, flickering, reverse editing, fast cutting, double and multiple exposures and the use of found footage -- had a formative influence on just on the experimental film-making of his age, but also on the pioneering phase of the MTV music video"

I'd never heard of the third artist, Tekla Aslanishvili from Georgia but really enjoyed her documentary video "A State in a State". It draws a connection of communication and solidarity between railroad workers from major transport lines including Azerbijan, Georgia, Turkey, Belarus, and Ukraine, before and after the breakup of the USSR. It winds up in the present day with workers agreeing to sabotage lines critical to Russia's current war effort. Her style reminded me of Werner Herzog's documentary work a little, and I was surprised how much I enjoyed learning about conflicts and places I'd only heard about on the radio growing up. 

This event has whetted my appetite to get out and explore more culture, especially modern art, in this rich city.

Our Ship's Come In! (where do we put it?)

We came home late one night and found this sign and tape in front of our apartment building: finally, a notice that said our moving truck would deliver our goods -- 12/11/2022 (November 12) between 08:30h and 14:00h. This was ten days hence, what the city requires, but fell on a Saturday which seemed suspicious but our moving company, Flippers.es, confirmed it. 

We had already taken apart one section of the sofa that came with the flat: it was too big to fit in the elevator, fortunately the remaining section came apart with simple bolts so we didn't have to hack at it like the previous piece. The living room looks quite large now, it should easily accommodate our furniture... right??

Just before 9am, the movers arrived. The contract was to "unpack, and put everything on any flat surface". We thought that meant they would put all the individual items on surfaces, but realized there was simply no way the contents of our 67 boxes would fit on the horizontal planes of the house. We neglected to get photos of the truck or guy(s) down below unloading and loading the elevator, but our guy unloading the elevator gave us boxes, unsealed them, and we frantically unwrapped and put individual items wherever we could find a space -- we were barely able to keep up.  The first item to arrive was my bicycle; the wheel would arrive a couple hours later. Then everything else started coming up quickly, in random order.

Stuff was strewn all around the flat, waiting for us to give them order. By 12:30, the final piece was brought in, the Brazilian sofa as one massive paper-wrapped item -- it barely fit in the elevator. For the first time since buying the apartment years ago, we finally had a comfortable place to sit and relax.

Sadly, two of the artworks suffered damage. This was especially disappointing because we'd paid to have custom wooden crates made for both. A large framed lithograph by Bruce Conner had cracked glass, which grew to span the entire frame in 24 hours, and risked cutting into the artwork.

The other piece I bought from artist Marcia Fry at Artomatic 2012. It's a rich assemblage of "found objects": the top spire was broken off, and the library of miniature Shakespeare books was tossed asunder. 

One of my VMPS speakers had an adjustment knob sheared off which prevents me from tuning the sound to match our new room, but this probably isn't that big of a deal. I had insurance on the shipment and have already filled in the claim forms, and am waiting to hear back. I hope they'll pay for a good framing shop to provide UV-blocking non-glare "museum glass", and I'll ask Marcia for her suggestions to fix "Saint Germain". 

We've gotta find room to hang all the art work, and only have one non-glass wall in the house. Most of it is black and white, or shades of gray, or very muted tones, and we've got one very large intensely blue and yellow canvas Bethe Bronson painted years ago. It'll be a bit cramped for my aesthetic but we'll make it work.  

We've moved from a 16x27 foot kitchen (with 106 drawer and door pulls) into a space that's quite small (by our standards), with cabinets that were designed for style rather than function: there are no drawers and very few shelves. To provide home for most of the stuff strewn over our table and cooktop, I started with the four wall cabinets.  These came with 2 shelves each, evenly spaced, which held very little and couldn't even accommodate some oversized wine glasses we have.  

We learned something from designing two kitchens that I never see mentioned about shelf spacing: to provide accessibility, put short things at the bottom, tall things at the top -- this seems counter-intuitive but we find you can grasp the bottoms of the tall things even if they're high up.  I made some estimates and figured we could add 7 shelves to the existing 7. We'd moved the existing dish drain board down directly over the hole in the cabinet bottom so we could drip dry delicate things that would be damaged by the dishwasher (my parents' wedding crystal with a silver rim would be eaten by detergent). We made another trip to FUSDEC with a drawing of what I needed: the cabinet widths were not uniform so I spec'd a couple of different widths; he told us they'd be ready "tomorrow morning". Seven shelves for under 7€ a piece, with laminate edge banding on the front -- a very fair price.

I spent the rest of the day determining heights based on contents, marking and drilling 5mm holes for mounting pegs. We picked up the shelves and 32 support pegs and got to work, iteratively adding a shelf, populating it with glassware, plates, etc, and repeating until we had accessible locations for everything.

We repeated this for the remaining 3 cabinets and now are able to hold our glassware, cocktail shaker, coffee pots, prep plates, platters, and my parents' wedding china (which we use daily). Everything's accessible except for rarely used items at the very top -- very acceptable.

 

Next up: we've gotta add drawers to the two door-front cabinets to hold flatware, knives, kitchen tools, utensils, spatulae, and all the other paraphernalia needed by us avid cooks.

2015-08-01 Arrival in Barcelona

The first stunning image we got was the drive from the airport to Barcelona. There is a cliff face on the north studded with crypts,  punctuated with tall slender Cypress trees -- so ancient. They used to overlook the sea, but now the view of the dead is of a massive shipping port with containers and gantry cranes.

We checked into our AirBnB on Rambla del Ravals, a wide avenue with an interior space where restaurants and bars set up tables and chairs. There's a mix of kabob places and Islamic carnicerias, as well as new hip bars and restaurants.  We're right above them, and -- happily for crazy cat people -- right above the tail of Fernando Botero's "Big Cat" sculpture. It's big enough that children climb on it like I did with Trixy the Triceratops in front of the Smithsonian when I was a kid.

We chose this place specifically because it has a roof terrace that's quite large. We'll be living here for a month, and I'll be working, and we need some outdoor but private space. The view is of the tree-lined Raval.

We hit a cafe on El Raval which had elderly Spanish-speakers and had our first beer of the day before noon; an Estrella Damm, not our usual cup of tea, but after a long flight and longer day, it hit the spot.  Sandwiches with sausage and ham, and a couple cups of espresso and we were ready to start pounding the streets. We like to stay up for the day and get our body clocks in sync with local time, and being out in the sun's the best way we know.

We're only a 5 minute walk to the fantastic Mercat De Sant Antoni, which last we saw it felt like a slightly smaller version of El Boqueria. It's currently under a massive, multi-year renovation but they've moved the vendors into a giant tent that stretches the length of the block -- just like they did in DC's Eastern Market.  We picked up some fine dried sausage, some dried cod roe, a dozen brown eggs -- under 10 euros. We were very tempted by the various jamon, but will have to wait for another time: it's a local speciality, really a national treasure.

On the way back, we found a small wine shop that had a variety of wines dispensed directly from casks, so we picked up a Rioja at under 5 euro for a liter; it's a bit sweet but at a cool refreshing temperature, it's a perfectly fine table wine. We found some (disappointing) bread at a bake shop, and chilled out a while on the terrace, and somehow managed to consume 0.5 liters of the wine and the entire sausage.

We headed out before dusk to Las Ramblas which -- as expected -- was mobbed with tourists and perhaps even some locals strolling in the beautiful evening. It's a bit too crowded for us so we headed off into El Barri Gòtic where we took in some of the ancient and modern architecture. It always fascinates me to see layer upon layer of history seeping through the heavy stone and brick like a masonry palimpsest.

But it's just part of the landscape, like the setting for this place that seems to fix cars.

I've fallen in love with Barcelona's distincitive modern architecture, which starts with modernista design akin to the Art Nouveau movement but has what I think of as a mathematical angle to it similar to the Viennese Secessionist movement. 

There's fun art work all around, some quite jolting.

We had to have a cava at 4 Gats, started by and for modernista artists and architects; it was early so relatively empty, but felt a bit cold.

We continued our aimless wander hitting whatever bar took our fancy, including a cave-like place whose name escapes us, until we hit Bar Celta, which our friend Ann took us to on our very first visit. It was as good as we remembered, with a stunningly good meal of octopus, razor clams (navajas), sausage, and a bottle of rosé wine for a ridiculously good price. Highly recommended.

Finally we headed back towards our flat across town, and stopped in at Ambar just down the block, where we had a couple cocktails; they had an interesting selection of amaros. We first tried a local artisanal vermut (vermouth, but rich and flavorful, unlike the insipid Martini and Rossi), then  I had a Punt e Mes and Irene had a Negroni, then we had another pair before shambling back to our door. The view from the roof doesn't reveal the hubbub below of happy night owls.