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Culture>
Festivals and traditions>
Mercè Fest
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| Opening Speech of the 2000 La Mercè Festival |
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| Robert Hughes |
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Until your mayor invited me to give this opening speech, I would never have imagined that I would have the opportunity to speak under this roof. Therefore it is a very emotional day for me. I feel honoured and pleased, although I am not sure that I will be worthy of the occasion. The Americans are capable of bursting into tears when they enter Capitol Hill in Washington, the English have a more phlegmatic reaction before the Parliament in Westminster, and, as far as I am aware, no Australian has ever cried at the entrance of the Government headquarters in Canberra. We can do all this closer to home in a McDonalds restaurant.
But the Hall of the Hundred is different. No one who respects democracy could sit here without feeling moved. This hall is the symbol of Europe’s oldest and most profound democratic movement. I do not want to bore you with history lessons you all know, but I remember clearly my surprise when I discovered this. Those of us who are not Catalans tend to assume that democracy was born at the end of the 18th century thanks to the ingenuity of American politics. And this is true as far as national government is concerned.
But on a local scale, the roots go back further: to the year 1274, when Barcelona was the reigning Gothic city of the Mediterranean, and Madrid was little more than a few churches and a group of mud huts. In those days, the principle organ of city government was run by a group of one hundred people, who did not act solely on behalf of the nobility and upper class traders: for the first time in the world, artisans and workers had more or less the same influence as landowners and bankers. The Hall of the Hundred was the most ancient proto-democratic organ of Europe. And consequently it is much more than a medieval relic. It evokes numerous associations relating to the major issues of Catalan self-determination in particular, and cultural independence in general.
Since I first arrived in this country, in the sixties, Barcelona has had qualities that I have not stopped admiring. They even impacted upon a foreigner who did not speak a word of Catalan, and Spanish with some difficulty. The most important of these qualities is that Barcelona has always been a city of the citizens: a city where capital negotiates with manual labour, where the nobility does not act with arrogance to the people. As far as your ancestors are concerned, everything they did was through contract and not through divine right. This spirit, as you all know, is summarised in the words "Otherwise, no", from the unique and famous swearing of allegiance of Catalans and Aragonese to the monarchy. "We, who are just as worthy as you, swear before you, who are not better than us, to accept you as king and sovereign lord, as long as you respect all our laws and our freedom, but otherwise, no." Even today, when we think of the monarchy as a kind of decorative and essentially inoffensive fossil, these words maintain a sharp and striking tone of political truth: they evoke a group of people who have no doubts about themselves. Or perhaps my enthusiasm is due to the fact that I come from a country where the head of state is still the queen of a foreign country, Elizabeth II, located 20,000 kilometres away? You, the Catalans, have always had the ability to consider royalty in the right perspective. On the façade of this building there is a statue of a 15th century trader called Joan Fiveller. In the 1850s, his portrait replaced the figure of Hercules as a symbol of civic resistance. Why? Because in his role as councillor he forced the cortège of the first Castillian king of Catalonia and Aragon to pay taxes to the city for the cod they ate. What a hero! It would have been a good thing if we had done the same when President Clinton and the thousands of men from his secret service visited Australia!
When the Catalans from the 19th century wanted a title, they simply went to Madrid and bought one: this is the democratic way. Barcelona has never been impressed with the hidalgo mentality, the obsession with bloodlines and lineage that foreigners find so ridiculous and which affects the rest of Spain so much. There is no church in the world that defines itself so clearly and intensely as a church of the citizens as Santa Maria del Mar, and every time I go there, which is often, I look at the sculptured stones at the base of the altar and the small bronze figures of dockers nailed to the oak doors, which depict the workers of the Ribera neighbourhood carrying their load. The church’s homage to the men who built it. I remember how the Catalans were fervent trade unionists during the era in which the majority of Spaniards bowed before the throne, and I deeply admire the courageous and firm reality the city transmits.
When I first arrived here, in the sixties, the majority of the people I knew in New York and in London believed in the imperialist model of culture. In other words: in any period, the world of art, architecture, etc. has a centre, a place that monopolises energy and invention and distributes it to the surrounding provinces. The centre and the periphery. The centre transports the new proteins of talent that usually arrive from the margins. It ratifies the talent. Anything the centre is not worthy of ratifying is provincial. It may be more or less interesting, but it is not nearly as important.
In the 17th century, the centre was Rome. You were not considered a trained artist unless you had worked there, studied its monuments and understood its norms. According to Nicolas Poussin, if they did not go on a pilgrimage to Rome, all French artists were condemned as being strapazzoni, dilettantes.
Towards the 19th century, the centre shifted to Paris. Not being familiar with Paris was inadmissible. Feeling indifference to it was artistic illiteracy, a form of suicide. From the era of Ingres and Velacroix to that of Degas, and subsequently to that of Picasso and Georges Braque –approximately from 1800 to 1950-, the supremacy of Paris as a breeding ground and judge of culture was accepted as a fact. Later, towards the sixties, the centre seemed to shift definitively to New York. And thirty years on, there is no centre, except in the sphere of the art market. The intensification of communications has worked: we think of the art world as a network of connected points, not as a centre surrounded by provinces.
This is a highly schematic interpretation, but it reflects, quite accurately, how these places have been perceived as cultural condensers. The idea of an international style, created at the centre but applicable everywhere, was felt in a general way. It is the benign cultural version of the idea of a transnational economy that ignites such passionate debate and staunch criticism. Imperialism creates provincialism. Provincialism arises when people begin to think that what they do, what they produce, the images they find to describe it, has no value until it is judged by those who live outside of their culture. The anguish of provincialism is constantly wondering: "is this novel/play/symphony/painting really any good?" and is condemned to not finding a reliable response in its own terms. The best cure for this anguish is to realise and affirm that there is not one culture around us, but several, and that what means little to some may mean much to others. All great art, in its roots, is local. It originates from specific places and its value arises from its authenticity as a specific experience, never from complying with an imaginary international standard.
In principle, I was aware of this when I was young, but Barcelona confirmed this for me and allowed me to apply it as a writer. Barcelona was one of the places that liberated me, in order to trust in my own experience.
The great debt I owe this city is that it spared me, a provincial Australian, from believing excessively in international culture and, as a consequence, condemning me to the sensation of constant cultural inferiority, of marginalisation.
It must seem strange to you that I say this of a place in which I have never lived, of a country with a language I could not speak at the time, and which now I am only capable of reading, with a culture I knew so little about when I arrived. How can a place like this give a person like me the necessary confidence as a writer?
I’ll explain.
In 1966 I came to Barcelona for the first time. I was living in London, where I had just met the man who now, 35 years later, is the friend I have known the longest of all those still alive, a friend who I love more than my brothers, since I come from an obstinate colonial Irish family, the members of which almost all detest each other like scorpions in a pit. This man was the sculptor Xavier Corberó.
How is it possible that we have accumulated all these decades, all this mileage, you and I, Xavier? It would be a miracle if we were both still young. But, as I heard said to a sceptical Catholic priest about the pious orgy of beatification and canonisation in which the Polish pope takes pleasure: "A true miracle is worth two miracles". The true miracle is that, after our behaviour when we were young in the Barcelona of the sixties, Corberó and I are still alive, at least for the time being.
Then, it was easier to imagine that we would be dead than that we would reach sixty, and I had as much idea about Barcelona as I did about Atlantis. The only thing I knew about the city was that thirty years before, in the name of the Republic, it had resisted Franco and it had paid a very high price. That George Orwell, one of my literary heroes –as he is the hero of any English essay writer- had written a book called Homage to Catalonia, and that it was the city of a very peculiar architect called Gaudí, acclaimed by the French surrealists, who had designed a huge expiatory temple apparently built with melted wax and chicken innards. And that was all. If the sum total of my knowledge of Barcelona was insignificant, I can only say in my defence that it was no worse than the majority of Europeans, not to mention Australians. Not only lacking, shamefully lacking. So shameful that we did not even feel ashamed of it. In the city’s 1,500 years of existence, only five names came easily to mind. There was the cellist Pau Casals, the architect Antoni Gaudí, and the painters Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso, who had become a kind of honorary Catalan because he had spent some years of his youth in Barcelona and used the city as a springboard for his leap to Paris.
We had heard people speak of Gaudí, but since we knew nothing of his deep Catalan roots, his obsession for artisan culture and his extreme religious devotion that was so right-wing, we were totally mistaken: we thought that he was some kind of extravagant surrealist. On the other hand, we would not have recognised the name of an equally important architect, Domènech i Muntaner, and we would not have dared to pronounce the name Puig i Cadafalch. We had no idea how that singular utopian planning project that is the Eixample district had come about, or who its author was, Ildefons Cerdà. The few architecture guides of the city published in the sixties were, alas, rather unreliable, incomplete and never in English. There was practically nothing about Catalan art from the middle ages until the Renaissance. No foreign visitor, except the few specialists that knew Catalan, could familiarise himself with the great writers and poets in Catalan history, from Ramon Llull and Ausiàs Marc in the middle ages to Jacint Verdaguer, Joan Maragall and Josep Carner. Almost certainly, some of Barcelona’s best writers will never be mature because their work is either too extensive or too local, or both. The great Josep Pla, one of the best European prose writers of the 20th century, was one of these writers. But how many people nowadays would want to learn Catalan in order to be able to read Pla?
Corberó’s friends -writers, artists, budding economists, incipient politicians, architects without clients, psychologists without an accredited clientele of disturbed upper class women- hoped to change this situation. What did they want? They imagined, time and again, that Barcelona would become the centre of Mediterranean culture. They wanted to help Barcelona recover part of the glory it had half a century before they were born, around 1880: an era which, in 1966, almost everyone had forgotten, except for the Catalans themselves. Most of them had Marx in their genes; two or three were actual Marxists; none were communists. In retrospect, we can say that if they had been, this would have prevented the qualities that saved Barcelona as a city and as a culture from coming to light: a firm belief in the social responsibility of the Government combined with an equally strong conviction that cultures are not produced by following the orders of an ideology. It was the generation of Catalans -little known at the time as the following generations always are- that would change the city.
And God knows that Barcelona needed to be redeemed. It had continued to deteriorate throughout the years that Franco governed Spain and during which his deputy, Porcioles, was its mayor. It bore the burden of what was possibly the most intellectually inert and historically unaware government in the city’s history, certainly the worst since the era of Rius i Taulet, the end of which witnessed the culminating festival of modernity of the 19th century, the International Exhibition of 1888. Barcelona had become a kind of sleeping princess, undervalued and overlooked. It was a huge ashtray. It was covered with a cloak of dirt and sand. It had earned the nickname of grey Barcelona. The buildings that had made it famous were choking and decaying. Even the great Christian monuments, such as the Cathedral, stood alongside repulsive modern office buildings, blocks of concrete that expressed disdain for and contradicted the religious devotion of the Franco regime. The supreme insult to the city and its urbanistic qualities was Avinguda de General Mitre, that enormous unsightly cleft. What was done to masterpieces of 19th century Barcelona architecture would never have been permitted in buildings of the Renaissance or the Middle Ages, since the former were considered valuable and historic, while it was mistakenly thought that the latter were old-fashioned or grotesque.
And the stimulus to all this was the uncontained and opportunistic greed of the property developers, who all too often act within the fabric of the city, not as artists, not as surgeons, not with the spirit of reconciling profit and necessity with the imperatives of memory, without which no civilisation is possible, but as amnesic butchers who at the same time play the role of loving parents. Was all this the result of a deliberate and reasoned policy? The answer is no, no but...
No, but decadence is a very powerful force, and so is amnesia. No, but it is difficult not to see the progressive deterioration of Barcelona during the years of Porcioles as the result of a vindictive desire for entropy. Barcelona had resisted the Caudillo and now the Caudillo was looking to prescribe the worst kind of remedy. There would be money –there would always be money- to construct concrete buildings on the outskirts of the city. But there would not be money for projects such as the restoration of the great emblem of Catalan national spirit, the Palau de la Música, where every brick and every mosaic reflects romantic independence from Madrid and an equally romantic relationship between northern Europe and the Catalan spirit, and which in all cases is associated with Maragall’s anthem to Catalan identity, El cant de la senyera.
But this time the good guys won. When the ignorant Americans, for whom the term "liberal" is an offensive one, signifying utopian fantasies and lost hopes, ask me with an air of superiority and mocking whether the generation of 1968 ever achieved anything serious in the field of humanity on a large scale, I tell them that one of the first places on my list is the reconstruction of Barcelona by the successive administrations of Narcís Serra, Pasqual Maragall and now Joan Clos.
I sincerely acknowledge that when I say this I am not being impartial. If it had not been for Maragall I would never had dared to write my book on Barcelona. One night, in 1988, I was having dinner with Pasqual Maragall and Margarita Obiols just behind the City Hall. I was lamenting and complaining about the almost total lack of information about the city in English. Why didn’t Barcelona have a cultural biography in a language other than Catalan? They both smiled. "Write one yourself", they told me. "No, no way. I don’t even speak Catalan." "It doesn’t matter", they replied. "It’s a very easy language".
Easy for you, damned Catalans, I mumbled, envisaging myself being skinned alive by a furious crowd of Catalan nationalists for being a pretentious and ignorant foreigner. But the idea stayed in my head and my friends helped me. I’ll tell you a secret. We writers do not write a book once we know everything about a subject. We write it because we know nothing and we want to know. This is why, with a bit of luck, writing will never die. Curiosity and a fear of revealing one’s own ignorance will keep it alive. With a bit of luck.
In any case, in the eight years that have passed since the Olympic Games, Barcelona has frequently been present in foreign newspapers, even though I sometimes wonder if the extent and success of its transformation, and above all the respect and sensitivity for its true history, are fully understood outside Spain. Perhaps not, but it should be understood. In Australia, my country, the past is scarce. When I was little, most things were either incomprehensibly ancient or annoyingly new. On the one hand, you had the landscape, and the almost geological antiquity of the aborigine culture, the paintings on the rock that are situated at the dawn of human imagery, 25,000 years before the bulls of Lascaux.
On the other, extending kilometre after kilometre are boring novelties and a complete ignorance of the way in which buildings and places become spaces of collective social memory.
So when I started coming to Barcelona, 35 years ago, the links between the past and the present of its fabric were, by contrast, most vivid for me. They created a wonderfully rich texture. Part of the success that Barcelona has achieved in recent years has been to increase this richness, to make it more explicit.
Barcelona has experienced three major spasms of building, separated by long recessions in which very little was produced.
The first was the middle ages, when the Ciutat Vella was created, to a large extent financed by the church and the citizens’ councils.
The second took place between 1870 and 1910, when the plan and the contents of the New City, Eixample, mainly financed with private capital, were drawn up.
The third occurred in 1975 and was financed with public money. Its major success was to clarify and make more visible the first two cities, and to create what has been called a new functional infrastructure. We judge it not with the criteria of singular buildings -even though in the last quarter century many outstanding ones have been- but in terms of the function of the city as an organism that is more or less rational. Not just as a tourist spectacle -even though it certainly is- but as a more habitable and more human place for all the citizens. In my opinion, this third Barcelona is the best example in the world of what can be done in the fabric of a city by combining public money and individual imagination. It contrasts sharply with the type of emblematic and superficial thinking that has offered us pointless absurdities such as the London Millennium Dome –that monument which matches the policies of Tony Blair, a huge waft of hot air.
In short, during the period in which the American conservatives did whatever they could to eliminate public spending on art: by withdrawing public subsidies for public radio broadcasting, for theatre, for the restoration of architectural heritage, for cinema and art, and for anything that came under the heading of culture. So, while these acts of ignorant self-castration took place -since with all the money they saved the American taxpayer could only manage to buy half a helicopter-, I thought of what the well-meaning men and women had achieved in Barcelona. People for whom, in spite of what the Catalan conservatives say about the "true Catalans" being from the country, whatever nostalgia each may have for folklore, botifarra and the hearth in the ancestral home, these things are fundamentally dreams. Well, perhaps not the botifarra. We also know that the Catalans are so prone to nostalgia that they may experience this exalted emotion for things they have never abandoned, or for those they have only heard talked about. But we also know that in the last century and a half, since modernism began, the city and not the country has been the major driving force and condenser of culture, and this is how Barcelona has served not only Catalonia, but all of Spain too. Whenever Spain has been willing to listen. Culture, always self-critical, in perpetual debate with itself, is not the butter on the bread of life, but the bread itself, and in Barcelona this has always been recognized as a fact, and this is another reason why I feel so close to your incomparable city.
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© Barcelona City Council
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