Vicenç Altaió (VA): Blanca, it was Jacques Dupin, the poet and great biographer of Miró, who in Mont-Roig, the year of the centenary, told me: "people, to understand Miró's work, should observe how Catalan peasants work the land and how poets do it". It took me thirty years to understand exactly what he was saying, but of course, I understood two things: one, that poetry works the land, as Miró works the matter, and that poetry is not an idealism, but that it is...
Blanca Llum Vidal (BLV): ... something ingrained.
VA: ...totally rooted, physical, and at the same time universal. We are all subjects in history, and together, anonymous subjects; and Miró wanted to get rid of the overweight of the psychological subject to go in search of the creative impulse in the anonymous. A struggle in the human condition that breaks with the everyday and the easy communicative consumption, and goes beyond. And this he finds in poetry. It was during his formative years that he learned from the poets, from the poets of the rupture and the sensibility of Salvat-Papasseit, as a friend, or Apollinaire, from outside. And when he began to paint in Paris with the friends of rue Blomet, he discovered that there was no distinction in revolt, that of the spirit and that of matter, just as there is no distinction between art and poetry. It was necessary to reach poetry in order to make art.
BLV: I find what you said very interesting. This thing about the peasants and the poets, I mean. In the conversation that Miró and Raillard had, which much later was translated into Spanish and is entitled El color de mis sueños, there is a moment in which Raillard asks Miró about his relationship with the poets and poetry. Miró explains that they were the first to understand him. And at that moment he speaks, not of the peasants, but of the artisans, of the artisans who are considered to be the summit of perfection in terms of the relationship between art and matter. When the poet and poetry appear, a peasant or an artisan appears. It is very beautiful. Very powerful, the parallelism. There is a type of work with matter, with the physical thing, that Miró finds similar in the poet and the artisan. And this has a great impact on your work, doesn't it? It is the conjunction of these two elements, I think.
VA: There are many artists who when they go to the studio read the newspaper or have this clear awareness of the concern of the environment to make their own work and give a response to the world. It is curious because Miró, he always explained it this way, observes this small and big world, from near and far, the micro in the force of nature and the macro in the universe, and establishes an interrelation in all the systems of nature that are expressed in a particular and illegible writing. In Miró's painting, things are born by themselves and, after all, his painting is nature: energy and creation. Dynamism and poetic communication.
BLV: Yes, and I would say that this tendency to go towards poetry is also related to what he says he asks of the spectator. And what does he ask? The learning of freedom.
VA: Exactly.
BLV: I think that's why it clashes in such a fluid way, so naturally, let's say, with the whole world of poetry, of surrealism.... There is something that goes beyond, that does not go against the intellect, but it does go beyond.
VA: Towards the world of the sensitive.
BLV: Yes, yes, of the sensitive, of emotion, not of feeling, that this, this difference, Miró emphasizes it a lot. What he intends is to shake emotions.
VA: Regarding poets, Miró made 109 books with poets. Most of them with poets of the French school (Tzara, Breton, Éluard, Dupin, etc.) and a small part, but no less significant, with Catalan poets. And of the group of Catalan poets, each one has a very different role. For example, J.V. Foix is his twin brother in the sense that they make the same search: they go forward going backwards, towards the most primitive language. This is a lot: words like stones. Of Salvat-Papasseit, Miró confesses in George Raillard's book that he is the poet he likes the most, because the anarchist avant-garde and popular poet is the poet of emotion - and Miró does not paint with his head, he paints with his heart. Miró has this sharp, rebellious, nonconformist sense of poetic language, and in this Brossa is very similar to him. Foix-Salvat-Brossa mark an orientation in Catalan avant-gardism. And then we must add that he interprets Mont-Roig as a religion, a place away from the industrial revolution and the great capitals of art. And hence the geographical proximity to Perucho, poet and art critic, ends up signifying the relationship between place and history, and language, Catalanism as a matter.
BLV: I didn't know that he had said this about Papasseit.... And now this makes me think that it is still strange to talk about Miró in certain terms. Obviously we are dealing with a great artist and, therefore, we have to talk about him, although he himself, in conversations with Raillard, explains that he has always been against histrionic statements by artists. What he means is that Miró's positions, his political and ethical stances are different and have a different nature: they are the brush, the stain, the drip. That is why I am not surprised that he said that about Papasseit and that he saw in him that authenticity and, at the same time, that simplicity. Because, in addition, I would say that in Papasseit there is also a conscious will to avoid virtuosity. And that in Miró is basic. He says he admires and loves Picasso, but his choice is different. If I followed the path of La Masia I would have ended up becoming a virtuoso, he says. And he didn't want that. What moves him is something else.
VA: He also has another very curious thing that you can see here, in this exhibition, which is his way of working: how he took very close material and used it in an experimental way. Now here in front of us we have, for example, four works: the support of this first one is not a traditional canvas, but an unfolded hat box that comes from the store of his great friend Joan Prats.
BLV: Ah, yes...
VA: It is a major work. There are two more with the same support. One of these, also exceptional, is in the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. And in this we see Miró's extraordinary capacity to give continuity to a spatial frame, which is the square with this multiplicity. He moves from one sheet to another and another and another and another, painting a scene in each of the delimited spaces and continuities in all of them. He works the idea of the fragment and the whole. It is the same thing that is done in a poem with units of verses and stanzas of a whole. The physical support conditions him as the structure of a poem and frees him. Here we see clearly a landscape, abstract at the same time, and a scribble like the movement of the wind, and a ball-spot that is a stroke of rhythm that musically marks the landscape, or rather, the poem. He is writing visually... and listening to the music of the eye.
BLV: And the splash music, right?
VA: ...the splash, the full and the empty, that is, what is part of contemporary poetry: that the pause, the silence, the sketch is as or more important and expressive than the dominant excess of the figurative word, all of it semantic content. Here our brain sees in the spots -by free association- a woman dancing. It is surprising how Miró manages to give movement to something so static. This is also typical of the great obsession of poets, to make that which moves be still. To stop the time of reading in order to provoke silence, so that the word is silent and speaks in its echo? Here we see how he gives continuity to a stanza towards another through the flight of a bird... Everything is full of writing and gestures, of broken syntax, of continuities and ruptures, of the search for greater expressiveness.
BLV: I would also say it is a bird. Although Miró warns that it's not necessary to constantly look for a correspondence between the line and the figurative forms... Because we have this tendency to say: "this is, this is not"... To establish correspondences.
VA: Pantheism is a worldview. And things are.
BLV: And they are also very concrete.
VA: They are very concrete. A tree is a human person.
BLV: Now you have reminded me of the moment in which Miró explains how abstract ideas make him back down. So you think it's spectacular that Miró says this. He, who is not the festival of figuration either, is he? But look, the material he starts from, the figures that appear, the energy that appears, is real life, concrete life, isn't it? And even the material, physical, sexual needs... It's all very rooted, really.
VA: It is very rooted and it is also shock. Onomatopoeias prior to the word.
BLV: Yes.
VA: Of impact. One of the distinctions between prose and poetry is that prose is sequenced in time, and in cinematic time. Poetry, on the other hand, has something like synthesis and shock, a word he used. As when he clicked his tongue to affirm without having to speak.
BLV: Yes, he used it a lot.... "The clash of forms inside the head," he said.
VA: Poetry and the universe through rhythms, through the movement of sound. Look, here there is also another work that is very curious, a real find. All these works are museum pieces! Like everything that comes from Miró. It is a very curious work, like a fragment of the universe painted on the roughness of a wooden board. Then Miró paints the specificity of each planet with a different color, and he does it with the phonetic diversity of the vowels, giving each vowel a color. This comes from Rimbaud, who gives each color a group of significant correspondences. Here we have blue, yellow, red, green, black... they are the elements of nature, the humors of the human body, the minimal divisions of things in nature. This is how Miró creates a landscape of the universe, as one who writes a poem, as one who sings it, as one who discovers it. And at the same time Miró dignifies this poor material through art and poetry. Here he draws a line above. In the minimum expression we see...
BLV: The horizon, what do you see?
VA: ...is the line of the condemned to death, it is also the line of the horizon, it is also a line of continuity and music. There is another work with another material: it is the wooden lid of a box in which the engraver sent him some artist's proofs. The nails are still there, and he takes advantage of it to make this extraordinary painting where he contrasts the violence of the support with a central gesture of silence, a sign typical of Japanese calligraphy in the middle of the figuration of a maternal character-vulva.
BLV: A character sir or madam, yes.... I really like what you say about dignifying poor material. Yes, dignifying it and giving it value. This is one of Miró's great strengths. As well as the way he positions himself and acts without making a fuss. Miró will not shout that museums should be burned. His way is to get down to work and move on from the official culture. He is above proclamations and he is doing it in a very honest, very simple and very powerful way.
VA: The surrealists, who are key for him as a collective life experience, propose a new and revolutionary approach: poetry is a revolt and makes possible a way of being and doing in a completely different world. They are in favor of a revolution of the spirit, and art and poetry become a politics. They are moving away from the machinist technified revolution, aren't they? It is a crisis of modernity against a technological modernity. Miró lived a century, practically the whole of it, marked by two wars. The great inhuman disaster that was the First World War marked him enormously. So much so that Miró, like many of the artists and writers of his generation, will forever distrust the principle of reality, aristocratic art and bourgeois art, and therefore, one has to fight outside reality. They tear the poem and the image of the represented reality and with the fallen pieces in the random-dadá create something out of the reality of perspective. They look for innocence in children, in the insane, the insane and the enlightened; and in poets. And then the Civil War and the Second World War. There we find Miró when the Nazis occupy Paris, in the deepest night of humanity. Outside, in nature, in a small, remote village, he paints hope in the night of the page of the universe. Miró invents a new language, a new vocabulary, and paints it on pages of a small notebook, like a poet: the "Constellations".
BLV: The fact that we find ourselves here today with Miró, with all that is happening, is strong. Very big disasters, not so mediatic, always happen. But it is very good that we are here today because I think it is a moment that will require a great reflection on what is the role of art and beauty in relation to politics.
VA: Miró has a clear conscience... In the fundamental book that has just come out now by Josep Massot on Miró and Francoism, you realize that everyone tries to use the Miró brand, both to justify the art made in the Dictatorship, and in the liberal line that comes from the U.S. and MoMA....
BLV: Very clear.
VA: Always in favor of freedom.
BLV: It's so diaphanous... So diaphanous! There is a moment when he is asked about the eternal debate: Do ethics and aesthetics have to go hand in hand? And Miró answers emphatically yes. Man, excuse me, I think this is beautiful, very important... And that ethics and aesthetics go hand in hand does not mean to start making pamphlets, it is enough to look at his work?
VA: This suits us very well because within the art system, in many of the international art biennials, a history of art is built on the conflict of the relationship between politics and art, on the subordination of art to politics. Or in the art market, the other way around, art over politics. And Miró is a clear example of a whole art that proclaims its principle of freedom, and that is naturally linked to an awareness of ethics, even of politics, but that is very careful that the institution of politics does not eat it.
BLV: Politics in the first sense of the term, yes, obviously. Besides, I think it is very interesting that just today, in this project of the Mayoral Gallery that you started to formulate, we are trying to create the conditions for a debate between Miró and some Catalan poets who are writing today...
VA: The Mayoral Gallery proposed us to make a bridge of dialogue not so historical, but more open to contemporary poetry and the turn towards current poets, of today, who are also temporary, but that...
BLV: ... but they live, they beat.
VA: ... poets who are writing at this moment. And that's why the gallery was clear, first of all, that it should not be a unique vision, and that's why it invites two poets from two different generations to talk about Miró and to involve ten other voices of the many that could be here as well. Moreover, from this point of view we have to remember that in 1964 an exhibition was organized in three galleries in Barcelona that simultaneously presented Miró's work, especially graphic work, and a booklet was made in which there were poets of the time and Miró's environment. From J.V. Foix to Brossa, but also Perucho, Teixidor and Cirlot, and some critics very close to poetry as, for example, Cirici or Santos Torroella himself. Here the idea is to be able to put a work that is temporally historical and timeless together with poets who are temporal and at the same time ahistorical. Like art and poetry.
BLV: Here I think it was interesting that, at least, there were at least two voices, right? In any case, I wouldn't say that what we have been asked to do is to make a selection of poets. I, at least, have not felt that way, and it is not a place I like to occupy. It has been, rather, to reach out to a number of people who write today from different places and who relate to Miró in different ways. I invited a few poets to write a text or to choose one they already had, reread from Miró's eyes, from this heartbeat, from this angle. I liked this very much, to see the different paths that the authors followed to send us the poem. Enric Casasses, for example, already had a fragment in which he spoke of Miró, but Joan Navarro has written a new one, which is also wonderful. Maria Sevilla has also written a beautiful one for the occasion. And Mireia Calafell, too? Pol Guasch and Maria Callís, on the other hand, have selected a poem that they had already written and it has also been a very special approach...
VA: The difficulty itself.
BLV: Yes, it is very interesting as well.
VA: That one cannot express with mimicry, or with equivalence, but has to move. This happened to Miró himself.
BLV: Maria Sevilla told me that she had wanted to write about an aspect for a long time and that Miró was the lever to get into it. She felt like it, and the poem, she explained to me, has a lot to do with Miró read from Perejaume.
VA: There is also something I like very much, and it is this sense of continuity with the rupture and the ring. In the study book on Miró i els poetes catalans I anthologized ten poets who collaborated with Miró and each one writes a moment in history: from the first avant-gardes to the second, and from these to realism, and finally to classical avant-gardism, which is Pere Gimferrer's. He is the only living poet, the link, and he opens the reading with a poem about stone. He is the only living poet, the link, and he opens the reading with a poem about stone. We give continuity to a fact that Miró liked, reading poets. Miró collaborated from a very young age with the drawings of the first books of a very young J.V. Foix, in Gertrudis and KRTU. In the same way that later he was always very willing to collaborate with the poets from here. Pere Gimferrer is an essayist on Miró and a poet, the last one with whom Miró collaborated in his last illustrated book. In his poem he speaks of the stone, and we return a little to the beginning: this stone as a physical object is fully significant, it signifies everything, from a star, to a woman, everything. But it is a stone. He touches it and smells it.
BLV: A physical object and also an object that can have a point of primitive violence. Not in the sense of violence against someone, but in the sense of a hard, fierce, brutal thing....
VA: Full of life.
BLV: Full of life. And it is curious because in Miró it is true that there is this shock, this violence, this collision, this impact, but death, look, death is practically absent. They are works full of life, yes, they don't start from death...
VA: Between eros and thanos, Miró is, indeed, a person of life but always with a clear conscience?
BLV: From the life cycle, yes, or from the universal cycle...
VA: Of the life cycle. That is to say, it is not death that comes, as in the case of Foix, the unknown, but he, emperor of dreams, moves away from it... from death as the end, that is to say, he moves away from the fatality of biological life, he moves away completely. Instead, he gives space to that which is the germinative force in nature, the cycles of poetry. I place everything on the same plane. Even plastic violence.
BLV: It is very present in this work. It is true that it is a very original violence, very remote, very primitive.
VA: It's because when we look at the universe, and Miró has looked at it a lot, everything seems perfectly harmonious. The night sky as if it were a papyrus. On the other hand, if you use the painting in an active way on the sky, as physicists have taught us today, you realize that between the knowledge of civilizations and everything that is happening above, in macro...
BLV: ... there is more conflict.
VA: ...there is a lot more conflict than meets the eye.
BLV: It is also quite interesting that we are doing this now with Miro.... Now that they say that the stars are quite altered .
VA: Also, did Miró touch you a lot?
BLV: Yes... It has touched me a lot. It is one of the works that have touched me the most, but curiously, not in an obvious way. There are some literal traces, some explicit text about Miró in Els homes i ocells, or loose quotations here and there. One of my great bedside books is El color dels meus somnis. It is simply spectacular. For what I was telling you at the beginning: for the reflections on ethics and aesthetics, for the way he talks about his works, about matter, colors, history, poets and artists. It is true that he has a lot to do with poetry, but then he allows himself to be more specific and talk about individuals and say I with this poet this, with this poet that, with this poet that? When he talks about Dalí, for example, I find it beautiful. And not because I like him to sing his praises, it is not that simple, but because his problem with Dalí, besides ideological, was of another order. Virtuosity separated them. Dalí was a virtuoso and Miró did not want virtuosity to swallow the spontaneity of the creature, so to speak. I do have a book, unpublished, that ended up touched by Miró in an evident way. It is a book entitled Pau revolta, which is a long poem that revolves around Mallorca. The subject is not the island itself, but things come and go and are thought about Mallorca. And suddenly, Miró and those conversations with Raillard in Son Boter, with the radio waiting for the announcement of Franco's death, ended up being the axis of the whole poem. For me that island is also Miró. Perhaps this is the moment in which the presence of Miró is most clearly seen in what I write. In any case, I would like to think that Miró is often there and that he gravitates a little in everything. In your case, a lot...
VA: Yes, very much, very present because I have carried him inside all my life. When I visited J. V. Foix for the first time when I was seventeen years old, I already knew, we knew, that by visiting him you had Miró inside him. Among other things, because in his house there was a work by Miró, very present, by Federico García Lorca, also by Dalí, and by Obiols. And when we, in the seventies, all so subversive, we commented to Foix that we were so Miró, how lucky he was to have known him...
BLV: What did it say?
VA: He would put his hand to his mouth [touches his mouth], so that no one could see his lips or hear him, he would come close to your ear and whisper: "read Dalí". Foix made us realize that we had to look at and read Miró, but we also had to read and look at Dalí. Foix was one of the few who taught me the complementarity of opposites. Reading Dalí was something clandestine. For the group he was an outlaw. When I mentioned it to Brossa, or explained it to Tàpies, or it came up in a conversation with Oriol Bohigas, they looked at you very badly. And how interesting Dalí's literary work and systems are! It has been enormously exciting to live with the tension of the two poles, one in space and the other in time. But, without a doubt, I was very close to Miró, not only in that moment of self-education and link with the avant-garde, but above all when the activities committee of the Fundació Joan Miró invited us, through the people who were part of it -like Brossa and Mestres Quadreny-, to program the experimental space. Miró did not want to make a museum, he wanted to offer the city a place where art, music, poetry, dance and other disciplines could meet. He had to procure the birth of the artists of my generation: Perejaume, Duran, Colomer, Plensa, Riera, Abad and a few others. Years later, in 1993, the Miró Foundation asked me to take care of the centenary, and I tried to make a display that would offer the whole of the Miró of the parts and would be projected again here and internationally. And I have culminated this curiosity and permanent learning with a new contribution: Miró i els poetes catalans. To end this experience of culture, I must confess that one of the most relevant experiences I have lived was when, having to undergo emergency surgery for cancer, I suffered an internal hemorrhage and I was left without strength, I lost everything, the language? everything, and on the second day of being in the ICU, a messenger arrived, an angel, and brought me a book, a link to the Fundació Joan Miró, on behalf of Rosa Maria Malet. It took me a few days to open it. It was a book about the collaboration between the poet Paul Éluard and Joan Miró. I did all the recovery of the language through that relationship between a poet and a painter. Then I realized that Miró complemented and did not illustrate the other, but that they made a simultaneous path of creation. They spoke of freedom and went to the most elementary level, as is contemporary poetry. Music in the eye. I realized that Miró was a poet and that he germinated and repeated each time the process of life and death of language.
BLV: How nice... Yes, he was a poet. And I would add that a poet of the human being, a poet who looked at humanity and looked at the concrete man in front of him in a very special way. Miró, who hardly spoke about himself, or who did so through another language, listens to Raillard, his interviewer, very attentively. At one point he says to him, and I imagine him staring at him, "You have torn my skin off". It seems to me a precious homage to dialogue.
Mayoral Gallery, March 7, 2022
May 3, 2022
