Miros of the Spray Can

16 May 2009
Spain seems to have given its vertical public spaces (of about twice human height) completely to practitioners of graffiti. There does not seem to be a single space left unmarked and unsigned. Any road, even slightly off the tourist track will have these profuse expressions of hombres at large. Although we did see some graffiti on vertical surfaces of such height that would have required rappelling skills!

Many are artistic in the fashion of the Miros of the spray can, although most are (probably) gang related territorial markers. The most vibrant and colorful graffiti that we saw was on one bank of the Guadalaquir leading up to the Alamillo Bridge in Seville.

Techniques also vary- a new form used stencils- leading to some fine work, and also work that could be replicated quickly, challenging the one off aura of larger, elaborately sprayed neighbors. A lovely one was in English that said 'Lost your (image of a) button'.

What makes graffiti a truly citizens art in Spain is the possibility of protest. Since every wall is fair game, exhortations/protestations indicate the contemporary climate. There are CCTVs everywhere and official indications to that effect. That has not stopped, probably encouraged a large graffito: 'Videosurveillance NON!' Others we saw said 'Securidad Muerte!' 'Free Catalonia' and my personal favorite- 'Errata, Ergo Sum'.

Retro fit and Retro fit

There is a refreshing nonchalance in the additions to the older buildings in Madrid. The obvious public example is the addition of the elevators in the Reina Sophia Museum. A pair of slick hi-tech glass and stainless steel towers are appended to the outside of the older palacio for easy access to upper floor galleries. Visiting the Guernica deserves such a rite of passage, I suppose. These glass boxes overlook the beautiful plaza that fronts the museum, justifying the use of the scenic elevators. The words Reina and Sophia are etched large on the towers evoking memories of the fad for super-graphics in the early PoMo day of the eighties.

The point is that contemporary inserts into historical spaces are not always a bad thing. Contrast this with Raphael Moneo's addition to the Atocha Station- another building evoking the eighties and some of the horrors that Botta and Bofill were up to at the time. The interior spaces are interesting specially the train platforms themselves, which are a delight. But I am not sure how the drum-like central circulation space and the cuboid clock tower sit with the fabulousl19th century glass and iron station.

On the subject of retrofit, the last word surely goes to the lift installed in our tiny B&B- the Hostal Luz on the Arenal. Fitted in (the perhaps two feet three inches wide) stairwell of an older four floor building, the elevator is exquisite in its modernity- with all the fittings- the stainless steel and glass that made the Reina Sophia's what it is. Wide enough to accommodate me, but not me with a rucksack, making me feel like a mujera in a tube top, traveling in it made up in style, elegance and convenience whatever it lacked in volume.

Slick!

Random Tweets from Madrid

8 May 2009
I am writing this on a high speed train from Madrid to Sevilla (AVS), watching the rolling flatness of central Spain speed by.

In one evening, we were able to see Picasso's Guernica, Dali's The Great Masturbator, Lumiere's Employees Leaving a Factory (1896), Velazquez' Self Portrait with the Meninas of Felix II, Durer's Portrait of the unknown man and Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights and the Haywain. That must amount to something.

I finally concede that there is a difference to looking at a great work of art in a book or even a high def image to standing in front of the real thing. Contemplating the Guernica- there is so much in the painting that just doesn't register in a reproduction, especially gray on gray. The delicate and harsh brush strokes of Dali need to be looked at with your nose at a distance of six inches from the naughty bits. So up yours- Baudrillard and Walter Benjamin!

The Museum of Reina Sophia has a series of photographs of Picasso's painting in various stages of completion, and the many morphs it went through, fascinating. As are the several paintings called Postscripts to Guernica. Picasso's Hombre with Goat is also a delight leading to a wistful wish- the Great Hombre himself should have made more sculptures. The twisting goat about to spring out of the man's grasp (who holds the beast almost in a wrestlers grip) is reminiscent of the twisting Laocoon.

Nothing quite beats taking the long(ish) walk from the Atocha past the Botanical Gardens and reaching the Prado to find that the entry was Gratuitas.

Our gracious landlady at the Hostal Luz is surely the reason the late Wren and the equally deceased Martin added 'onomatopoeia' in their chapter on Figures of Speech in their unlamented text on Grammar. She spoke no English and made up for it, quite successfully communicating in a mixture of machine gun Castillian and a wide variety of sound effects (Phut-pht-pht-pht!! bole to turn right)

Mario Miranda 's Bar Lady

Mario’s Bar Lady
The moon presents itself above Bergstrasse,
disentangling from its wobbly twin on the Rhine.
White glory showers. Work worn customers
trudge in like obligatory raindrops beneath
a dim archway. A spark flies every time-
clicketyclack! Heels connect with shiny stone.
A bearing swift, but in all her speed, never
a drop spilt.

Six gullets quenched by six massifs, delivered
vice like. She moves, mugs close to breast,
mugs that can hardly compete with her enormity.
White apron flashes, paling the moon.
She makes her rounds: ‘Was willst du denn?’
A return order: everfoaming kegs with an aperitif-
a smile.

The brash customer mellows. Dependent on
deepening dimples, empties jealousies and terrors
with beer. Her nods advise, a heaving chest berates
whatever scratches her sensibilities. Empty flagons
raise groaning feet, propel them homewards, yet
in passing, a Mark is pressed with a wan grin:
Danke schon, Maria. ‘Bitte, libeling.’ She returns
to beckoning bar, ready to gush forth every time:
‘Bier, bitte?’

This poem was inspired by Mario Miranda's very lovely drawing posted here. This dates from March 1984, when some of his drawings from (I think) Germany in Wintertime were featured in Midday. I had cut this one out and ensconced it safely until today when I scanned it and put it up here for all to see. This is really from way back when- Indira Gandhi was still Prime Minister, and the back of this clipping retains part of an advertisement for a cola, now defunct called 'Do it'.

Rediscovering Mario Miranda

On a recent visit to Goa, I had the opportunity of visiting a work in progress- a museum to house the works of the cartoonist Mario Miranda by the architect Gerard da Cunha. Apart from the delight of seeing a building at the bare bones stage (a delight for any architect, as any fule kno), it was the rekindling of association with the lines and forms, the crosshatching and the subtle colour infills of a cartoonist and illustrator whom people of my vintage 'grew up with'.

We knew Mario before we knew R.K. Laxman. Mario's illustrations filled our English textbooks- the venerable Bal Bharati. Right from 'This is Tim. This is Mini.' from Standard I to the later and deeper poems of Walter Scott (Kenilworth), we negotiated the byways of language mainly because of the illustrations that went with them. Mario could be funny, caricaturish but also dark and noirish as needed, and we absorbed this all. Mario's illustrations are now part of the visual vocabulary inside me and there is always a frisson, a kickback of nostalgia when I encounter (now rarely) his work.

His cartoons and illustrations were all around us too in the seventies and the eighties- mainly in the now defunct (and missed) Illustrated Weekly of India and several newspapers including the Times and Midday. These were of course contemporary and political, although Mario could, on occasion delight with full page spreads teeming with more characters that Michelangelo's Last Judgement but identifiable as people around us. Mario is from Goa, but for us Mario was quintessential Bombay- with buses, beggars, big bodied and bare bodied Bombayites teeming in Boribunder and Bhendi Bazaar. The word 'buxom' may have been coined specially for Mario's women- from the society ladies of Bombay to the fisherwomen of Goa- all bulging impossibly fore and aft.

Although Gerard da Cunha's museum is yet to see a single drawing installed, the architect must be commended for the monumental archive of Mario's work he has put together for a single book- 'Mario de Miranda', published by Architecture Autonomous and Art India. It has over 2000 images of Mario's work (sadly no Bal Bharati reprints though) from all the decades of his active life and it is a delight to possess. I have been immersed in it for the past few days and have no immediate need to emerge from it sometime soon. I can heartily recommend this book to anyone who knows his work (or doesn't).

Mario's work is also an architect's delight. In his later illustrations are single drawings of Goa, New York, Paris and Portugal, detailed and evocative of both time and place. Mario's work put together is a sociological document of many decades of work. You only need to see the New York suite to know that this is the city from the early Scorsese/Taxi Driver days and not the post Giuliani/post9/11 present.

                         

Gerard da Cunha has also put an extensive exhibition of Mario's ouvre in the Cymroza, which I have yet to

see. Fortunately it is still up for a few more days.

...and in the end the memories of the Bal Bharati days still most vivid are Mario's renderings of hands- open and clasped, fingers extended and expressive, that speak to me across the years. Yes, they are all there in the book and are as evocative as I remember them.

The illustration by Mario displayed here is of the coming of the Konkan railway- 

a wish fulfilling event about a decade ago for most of its denizens.

Memory is fickle

Memory is fickle, as any fule kno.

The internet, particularly broadbanded, has been a great resource for retrival - for the remembrance of things past. Music, images, snatches of culture, bits of film, the books, comics the quirks of childhood and middlehood all bob about together like so much flotsam, allowing one to wallow about to heart's content. It is a life kept alive and enriched.

After four and a half decades, this trackback is oddly reassuring. One can go arm first into the mulch of the world wide web, feel about for an hour or two and come up trumps. This assurance is satifying. Saving to favorites and occasionally downloading allows the retention of these snippets of one's past in much the same unorganised manner as the protagonist tattoos information about himself on different part of his body in Christopher Nolan's Memento.

This blog is another way to tattoo for the short term memory challenged. Keeping the mundane day to day alive for no other reason than to wallow in later. I have never had much truck with keeping a diary. But going headfirst into the blogworld is another kettle of fish, as any fule kno.