A scant dozen of children gather on the floor before a painting at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. Behind the kids, barely aged 6 or 7 years, some twenty enthusiastic parents, mostly well into their forties, squash up together. A smiling museum guide sits in the lotus position before a scattered crowd raising arms and legs, flapping up and down, making a phenomenal noise in the white, hallow galleries.However, the employee nor the parents give the slightest sign to the young visitors to lower their voices. Every shriek, every stumble, every pose by the kids cause the parents to smile and pull back even more exaggerated faces, or look at each other full of satisfaction and tenderness inspired by the magic of the moment. It is only when the kids decide to start abating that the employee addresses them.
-Alright, alright. Can anybody tell me what do you see here?
The fact that the employee, a young man wearing vintage spectacles and a week’s stubble fails to articulate 4 out of 7 vowels of the Catalan language doesn’t seem a hindrance for mutual comprehension. A blond child wearing a piggy tail and a Che Guevara t-shirt that reads “Hay que mojarse” (“get involved”) impulsively raises his hand and, before he is given the floor, he babbles something unintelligible in a somewhat farcical gesture. His parents, a couple dressed in loose, colourfoul cotton clothes, proudly smile at each other, closing hands in hope.
-‘Very well’, answers the employee, ‘I want to remind you that this is no competition. It is only about everyone speaking out his mind. Who else?’
The workshop on modern art implements on the ground all the values of antiauthoritarian pedagogy: non-competition, participative democracy, respect for others’ opinions, parental involvement, meaning construction. With acts like this, the City Council pampers as well its popular grassroots, giving educated, progressive-minded professionals a glimpse of genius out of their kid’s naïvity. Other creative, rather manual Sunday-in-family gamut of alternatives include a visit to the strong show organized by the City Council in the Passeig de Gràcia under the brand “La Barcelona Social” in PSC-types and colours, including clowns, juggling and several carefully planned leisure and entertainment activities, as well as exhibition pannels explaining the social activities offered by the City Council in its several boroughs.
Everything has been planned so that everyone has a great time: old and young, families and singles, rich and poor, locals and foreigners. On a more traditional note, folklore takes up a casual style: the traditional representation of the nobility is performed by cavallets wearing salwars made in India, and the ball de bastons is performed mostly by women drumming two wooden sticks instead of the traditional stick & tin shield dance carried out by men. After every performance, the inner city bunch celebrate their catalanness: “O-le-lé, o-la-là, ser del Poble Sec, lu milló ca hi ha”.
For those wishing themselves a more genuine Sunday, in the carrer del Bisbe two dolentot-looking peasants animate with timbal, flabiol & sac de gemecs some sort of natural product minifair, including the same cheese and espetec you saw in the medieval market of Vic and boiled bee honey at about 20.- € a kg being sold as the paramount of Pyrenean lifestyle. Southern French visitors hastily grab their purses, praising the quality of the product.
This reminds me that I had a long-awaited lunch appointment in a modern restaurant at El Raval. After meeting my friend and sitting down in awe in the wanna-be-restaurant bistrot, I’m delighted to find, at least, familiar carpaccio in the menu.
-Would you like a carpaccio as appetizer? I hope you like raw meat.
-No, read again.
Damn. I had skipped de carbassó. Weird. But that’s not carpaccio, is it? Carpaccio is raw, thinly chopped beef with parmigiano; or cod, or tuna with pepper or nutmeg, all in olive oil.
-No, carpaccio can be anything cut in very thin slices. Like courgette or cucumber.
-I’d rather not, then.
The mandatory Sunday rice becomes a sad, thick risotto paste boiled in fatty cream with defrosted shrimps from some Southeast Asian mangle forest. An utterly depressing prospect, where it not because I’m glad to meet my friend. We talk i.a. about the workshop at the MACBA, with parents and their children dressing alike, the pleiad of colourful outfits, beards, glasses, rainbow socks, wool bags, high-spirited comments, artistic encouragement, parental Angst.
-'I think the Museum guys are doing a remarkable job', points out my friend. 'Don’t you wish they would have done the same thing with us?'.
I had to mind back the quasi-divine reverence paid to local watchwords modern art, abstraction, imagination, participation, meaning-construction, incultured to the junior powwow. How some of the children, completely confused at the task of characterizing a mediocre, facile handful of random brushstrokes, would insistingly stare at their parents, scrutinizing them in search for certain answers. The parents would instead beleaguer back, anxious about their kids seeming clueless: "Come on, just use your imagination", "what do you see?", "What does it inspire to you?" once and again, afraid of having failed to awake their kid’s uncut geniality in the critical years. And how, in the end, everyone was right, without having to justify their vision. No truth, then, just façade.
-Absolutely -I owned up, pouring my coffee.
1 comentario:
The thin, subtile, nearly brittle, and definitely “Barcelonian” (sic(k) line of parental ‘progre’ criticism drawn by Alcinous is maybe too thin for my more uncompromising broad paint taste. But, still, I guess I endorse it, corregida y aumentada.
The “progre parents” conform yet another socialdemocrat plague. As such, someone can expect Barcelona being one of their strongholds. The image of any given PSC father negotiating with his 3 years old kid the colour of its outfit for the school today is sad and, to some extent, depressing.
Even though there is a lack of consistent studies on the matter, received wisdom is that this kind of “modern” raising is likely to enhance increased ratios of drug addicts, sexual pervs and puerile behaviour among teens by 2020.
The good news is that, from those not indulging in drugs (possibly even in a part of that group) the ratio of conservatives and ultra-conservatives is likely to be higher than average as well.
Despite the fact that, when compared to the self-made ones, this kind of reactive (ultra-)conservative is least likely to either maintain sound principles and make good contributions whatsoever (all while having some hearty good-nature merry laughs/slightly rogue behaviour along the lads in the pub) we can still count on a small -yet sizeable- tract of them to be at least ok.
Actually, since so-called “modern raising” became increasingly organized already back in the early 90s, this could be already happening by now (cf., for instance, contrarevolucionariscatalans.blogspot.com).
However, we can only hope that the next round is much more street-savvy and much less inflated and pretentious; otherwise, the whole thing is a fiasco and must be countered at once.
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