For the sake of art?

It is good to see that Spanish officialdom is still alive and kicking.

Today I went into Barcelona to continue using my ArtCard which gives me access to six or seven cultural venues in the city for the bargain price of €20. As it was a Monday virtually everything was closed, but not the museum of contemporary art. Contemporary art; not Modern Art. MNAC – the temple of both the old and the relatively new in Catalan art was closed so contemporary art was the only thing left to me.

Now you have to realise that I have defended André’s bricks in The Tate with the sort of tigerish intensity which is only found in someone who argued vociferously against the return of the Elgin Marbles to the Greeks while drinking in a taverna in Athens. I have championed Claes Oldenburg while others scoffed at his soft typewriters and his giant lipsticks. I have defended all of these (hardly contemporary I admit) artistic causes, but if I am honest, then much of what passes for contemporary art in our major museums leaves me cold. And believe me that adjective is the mildest that I can think of.

My experiences in the museum today have not changed my attitude.

Barcelona is cursed by being the home of La Fundación Antoni Tàpies which exists to laud the art of Antoni Tàpies – an artist, in my view, of almost limitless fatuity, but who is de rigueur in any self respecting cutting edge artistic institution. And sure enough there was an award winning (sic) piece of pretentious rubbish by Tàpies: the usual things, a metal bed frame screwed to the wall, various poles draped with cloth, a collection of chairs screwed to a terrace; metal ribbon linking some of them and . . . I can’t be bothered to go on wasting words on an uninspiring and essentially depressing piece of self indulgence.

The building is striking: full of open space and clean white lines; extended sloping walkways and stark plate glass.

I can’t help thinking if you come out of an art gallery and start talking about the building, then the contents have failed in a fairly major way!

However, there is another and perhaps more convincing way of judging a gallery: what’s the food like.

And here Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art suddenly became the place to visit. After a first course of spaghetti with marinated salmon mixed with black olives and sliced gherkins washed down with red wine laced with gaseosa, I was treated to a large and luscious fillet of cod with marmalade caramelised onions and peas. The meal was completed with ice cream topped with walnuts and honey and a cup of strong, bitter coffee. All for ten quid.

It made the art bearable.

Just.

But officialdom (you’ve forgotten the opening sentence haven’t you?) is what will remain with me from this gallery going experience.

Although the art did not merit a photograph, the building did. I took various shots of the outside and then took a few more inside. It was only when I was taking a shot through a downstairs window of the gallery of graffiti daubed building opposite that the heavy hand of curatorial displeasure descended.

A stern lady in an unflattering uniform gravely shook her finger at me and indicated by eloquent hand gestures that photography was forbidden. My plaintive justification that my shot was actually of another building outside merely earned me an extra scowl.

I was glad to leave.

Outside, in the sort of plaça in front of the building workmen were constructing the scaffolding for a stage being watched by a motley collection of exhausted skateboarders (ultra modern buildings usually provide a rich landscape for skateboarders) equally tired art gazers and a bewildering collection of vaguely disreputable passers-by. All were watching the efficient efforts of the construction workers as they assembled what looked like a giant mecano set for some unspecified performance. The men were mostly an undistinguished bunch with fags artfully placed in exactly the right corner of the mouth at precisely the most effective angle.

But one worker, stripped to the half, seemed to have stepped out of a canvas from a ‘real’ art gallery which had classically inspired Renaissance paintings of well built saints! At one point he helped support a prefabricated arch with a metal pole and he looked (apart from the clothing!) like a character from the brush of Michelangelo.

Then one of the people sitting next to me on the marble wall of the building lit up

so I left.