EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALDecember 29, 1998
Bilbao
Every time Rich goes to the car the man behind the desk wants the room
key. Rich hasn’t yet learned the phrase for "I’m coming right back" so
he has to give the man the key. Then he goes to Alfi in the underground garage and gets an
orange, or a map or whatever it is we need in the room and then he has to ask the man for
the key.
We have rented a house in Southern Spain, beginning next week. My
parents arrive next Friday and will stay until the 2nd of February. My brother
James flies to Madrid and will take a train to Seville next weekend. David and Megan will
join us for two weeks in the middle of the month.
We have rented the house with the help of my old school friend, Mariam
Shambayati. Mariam and I attended York House School in Vancouver together. Mariam was born
is Iran, lived in Paris as a child, moved to Vancouver just before high school and then
returned to Paris to study architecture. Now she lives and works in Seville as an
architect with her husband Carlos Infantes.
This morning I speak to the booking agent in Seville. Nacho deciphers
my Spanish and helps me out with a little English. The house we have rented is a 17th
Century former ecclesiastical retreat near the town of Galaroza, an hour or so northwest
of Seville. The house is called Cortijo Huerta de Santa Maria.
The Guggenheim
It’s Tuesday after Christmas and the Spaniards are on holiday. The
Spaniards want to see the Guggenheim. We stand at the end of an interminable
lineup. The wind picks up. Now we are back at the Dingle Peninsula and not in Spain at
all. The wind bites cold and we stand for an hour and a half.
The Guggenheim Bilbao is, incidentally, the most inexpensive
museum we have visited. The tariff is 800 pesetas and that’s not the student price.
There is a comprehensive Rauschenburg retrospective. The museum’s
four floors trace thirty years of solvent prints and combine paintings and found-object
sculptures, silkscreens and theatre costumes and a handful of actual painting attempts. He
never draws. He takes photographs and appropriates newsprint and other photos and prints,
and collages and prints and transfers them. I like the gluing. He glues clothing and
tablecloths and ropes and paper bags. The experimentation is inspiring.
There a small group of ropes hanging from the top floor to the bottom
floor. When someone pulls a rope, it lights a series of coloured bulbs on the top floor,
and makes a sound like an Alp Horn. Each rope corresponds to a bulb colour, and the tone
emitted from a metal box. All day people pull the ropes and it makes a soundtrack for the
exhibition. Rauschenburg is, in one period, interested in the marriage between engineering
and art. Works are interactive, "existing" as art, only when spectators are
present. Some plexiglass silkscreens require noise to turn lights, which reflect a series
of images. Quite often the artist collaborated with builders and papermakers and
electricians to realize his mechanical and aesthetic ideas.
His colours are unsophisticated. He starts each period in grayscale,
and then chooses a palette of commercial dye-type subdued hues. Several hundred prints
later, he throws in a pure, transparent magenta or cadmium orange middle. There’s
very little palette-play.
We’re starving and hit the museum’s café, which is a tapas
bar with a crowd of standing, talking, drinking anchovy eaters. Rich orders our café
solos and when the bartender puts them on the counter a woman in very tight jeans and
a mass of curly hair pours sugar and begins to stir, all the while with her back turned,
moving her lips, and hauling on a heat-seeking cigarette. I’m down the bar a bit, in
order to escape asphyxiation. Rich looks at the cup, the woman, me, the cup, and the
bartender. The woman hasn’t noticed that her café is not her café and continues to
stir. I’m laughing and Rich is waiting, and then attracting the bartender to request
more coffee. Rich wants to know what the Spaniards talk about all day long when they are
stirring other people’s cafe and standing and smoking and moving their lips.
