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CAMPAL, BOSO, CASTILLEJO:
Writing as idea and transgression
Fernando Millán
To talk about the sixties is not fashionable. In fact, letting our
speech be carried away by a certain radicalism, it could be said that
“the sixties” have never been in fashion, although those
years were heavy of an undeniable concern for the public thing, and
of an almost obssessive vocation for the world of comunication. But
radical and transgressive layouts can only be accepted by public opinion
in as much as they cease being so, in as much as they are integrated
or exhausted. And then, sensu stricto, they can’t be in fashion.
For, let us not deceive ourselves, “opinion designers”,
media owners, very well learned during the seventies that those ideas
or histories which don’t favour the stablishment are not to be
given publicity –not even in the negative sense-.
Let alone the ideas which are contrary to the stablishment.
Abiding to objective facts, we are bound to agree that the most innovative
and transgressive contributions of the sixties remain “active”,
and that only partially have they been asssimilated in these last
forty years. A simple glance to the histories of Spanish Literature
which have been written these years will show us that the vertebrating
idea in official poetry is that of “realism”. At some instances,
a realism with appended adjectives; in other occassions, even some
forms of antirealism. But realism nevertheless, with all its implied
ignorance of the paths XXth century poetry has gone through in its
most productive authors. And, toguether with this “realist vocation”,
its opposite, alternative or sometimes complementary, the intimist
line, subjective or romantic (of which, by the way, surrealism is,
up to a certain point, an extreme version, but still a version.)
The few scholars that study the phenomenon of “avant-gardes”,
or of some of their authors –gathered in projects such as Dau
al set; or in “isms” as Postism, since they take as point
of reference French Surrealism (that in Spanish should be translated
by “sobrerealismo”)–, are also lost in the sterile
debate of the relation or dependence between language and reality,
as much in what concerns poetry, as about painting or any other manifestation.
This permanence of the “realist vocation” and of the subjectivists
tendencies (rational or irrational, it makes no difference) proves,
no doubt about it, that the fundamental contributions of the sixties
have not yet been consumed, therefore exhausted, except on their most
superficial levels, as we will have the opportunity to observe. This
is particularly true in the field of culture, and even more specifically
in art, poetry and music, whereon the sixties made its more fertile
contribution.
I go one step ahead to answering a possible objection: In as much
as the sixties did not reach their more or less utopian goals, they
did, in fact, pure and simply fail, you could tell me, with flawless
logic...
We could, of course, think that whatever doesn’t succeed, fails.
But there is another interpretation that can be applied to revolutionary
or utopian layouts: their success or failure should be measured by
their permanence, by their capability for no being discarded... And,
in this sense, the sixties, as had the twenties, have kept on vivifying
European societies up to present days. Despite the fact that –on
both instances– there have been biased spokesmen which have anounced,
once and again, their death.
The sixties, or its variant “the prodigious decade”, have
been mainly defined by their capability of innovating, of change,
of renewal in every sector of society. I, nevertheless, think that
it would be more appropiate to use the term “transgression”,
in order to understand its meaning and its scope.
“Transgression” in the sense of rupture, or nonobservance
of rules, norms and codes, obviously. But even more so in the sense
of surpassing, of laying out a ground plan, of building afresh other
rules, norms and codes. Every time I hear avant-garde mouvements of
the sixties being described as “destructive”, I feel compelled
to remind that, notwithstanding a few isolated cases, we are not confronted
to nihilist, purely negative or adolescent behaviours. Quite the opposite:
the destruction, the transgression which took place during the sixties
and early seventies was immediately followed by a reconstruction,
an elaboration of new methods. Some was destroyed, of course, some
centenarian structures (obsolete and useless, mind you) were demolished;
but the purpose was to rebuild again at once in the liberated sites
other, newer, buildings, more suited to the sensibility and the needs
of the time.
Focussing in our present field of interest, we see that ever since
the appearance of symbolism, in late XIXth century, poetry had been
confined to the universe of language. To underline this new approach,
Mallarmé went as far as saying that “poetry is made with
words, not with ideas...” The First avant-gardes delved deeply
into this concept, and amplified it, liberating the constituents of
speech and writing: Free words, phonetic poetry, dadaist collage etc.,
are all prominent signs of this fundamental change.
In the sixties and seventies, this liberation was made whole, and
was extended to every field. And the idea of language was complemented
with that of writing, not in the sense of vehicle or translator, but
as an autonomous and self-refering organisation, a system of signs
for culture, power, religion... And the “idea” as fundamental
constituent of any exposition or creative production was recovered.
Although, obviously, it wasn’t the idea in the sense of contents,
as according to old schemas, but in the sense of form, of one more
part in the self-refering whole.
Indeed, from the latest years of Second World War, “writting”
in any of its possible –and often impossible or inappropiate–
forms was covering all the traditional fields of creativity. The importance
of mouvements such as “letterism”and concrete poetry or
“Fluxus”, and of figures such as John Cage, has not stopped
growing in these last decades, and it still maintains considerable
attraction and strenght.
Against what the official versions of history repeat –from ear–,
the sixties were not years of continuation, imitation or epigonism.
I usually make a comparison to explain the relationship between the
avant-gardes of the twenties and the mouvements of the sixties: Futurism,
Dada, Surrealism, etc. discovered a new continent; after the Second
World War the continent was being explored, and during the sixties
it was peopled and colonized. During the sixties and early seventies,
were settled the basis for a radical, deep change in which we are
still immersed, and we will, no doubt, remain in it for the next early
years of the XXIst century. When a while ago I said that the sixties
are not in fashion and they have never been, I was not refering to
its non-topicality or lack of influence. Quite the opposite: In spite
the relentlessness of the laws of La Société du
Spectacle, the lines of rupture and transgression of the sixties have
not ceased being present in every field.
The three authors I will talk about in this conference are, despite
being Spanish, three distinguished members of the neoavant-garde of
the sixties, at the same level than other French, Italian or Belgian
contemporary writers and artists. And, though what they have in common
is not more than what individualizes and separates them, they belong
to the same history. And, up to a certain point, to the same generation.
The three of them are, mainly, “writers”, though not in
the traditional sense of the term. They are writers in the sense the
term takes from the layouts of Letrism and Concrete Poetry and the
different rationalist or structural currents, and from the irrational
tendencies which give rise to the birth of the happening, Fluxus,
etc. In other words, they belong to what, in time, has been known
as “conceptual art”, in the sense that they are authors
who see in writing a concretion or materialization of ideas, and,
at the same time, an objective instrument of transgression, change
and innovation.
What Julio Campal, Felipe Boso and José Luis Castillejo have
in common is that they phrase the writer’s status from the radical
point of view. Each of them, starting from a coincident tradition
(that of the First Avant-gardes), a differentiated training and an
ideology in not few points diverse, arrives at a common ground, where
they defend postulates which unveil a new era, a substantial change
in XXth century history.
On the one hand, we have the rejection or questioning of the prevailing
symbolic elements in writing ever since it first appeared, and the
restating of its relations with “power” and with the different
forms of transcendence prevailing in western societies; on the other
hand, the acceptance of objective random mechanisms, experimental
practices... Up to the point where writing becomes a “liberated
field”. Campal, Boso and Castillejo bear witness, each one his
own way, of this unprecedented experience in Western history. Experience
which, in their case, was started from our own culture, but which
kept in harmony with the great lines of change and renewal from other,
more developped countries. It is what could be called “writing
as idea and transgression”.
The three of them (though more so Boso and Castillejo) share another
noticeable characteristic: they are authors exempt from the trail
of surrealism, at least in the works we know them up to the present
moment. (Maybe this was due to their foreign training). And this is
exactly the opposite to what happens with most avant-garde Spanish
authors of the sixties and seventies, in which the irrational components
let see through the unmistakable trace of surrealism. In one way or
another, and from materialist or idealist positions, the three of
them bet on rationalism. But it isn’t a monological and realist
rationalism; it is, indeed, nearer to the forms developped by the
scientific structuralism in psychology, anthropology and linguistics.
Avant-garde’s avant-garde
Julio Campal has, in the best XIXth century tradition, been qualified
by history manuals of “cursed poet”. His somehow bohemian
life and, above all, his accidental death when he was 35 years old
have helped to fix this image.
To those of us who knew him and dealt with him, though recognizing
the peculiar and selfdestructive behaviour he had for a while, what
we recall of him, what individualizes him, is his lucidity and his
intellectual generosity. That is, a way of approaching culture as
a living and vital organism, capable of changing both humankind and
the organization where humankind lives and evolves. This is the point
of view shared by Avant-gardes’ most respectful men and women.
And that, in the Spain of the sixties, was not only a very attractive
novelty, but also an opportunity for the youngest to get out of isolation
and lack of information; it meant, in short, an occasion to escape
the cultural misery that surrounded them. A priceless opportunity
to find out somebody who inspired respect and admiration, in a time
when figures with credibility and intellectual attraction, after postwar
exile and persecutions, were alarmingly sparse.
To those who did not live that oppressive, grotty atmosphere of the
sixties, it will not be possible to fully understand what an attitude
such as Campal’s meant. Even for those of us who did live through
it, the passage of time has blurred our memory, somehow distorting
it, and only through a considerable effort we manage to really remember.
Campal, to justify his behaviour, used to say that, in Buenos Aires,
he had been disciple and heir of the Spaniards exiled after the Civil
War, and that he had come back to Spain to give us back this tradition,
this way of approaching and constructing culture and society.
We have to admit that he used this argument so that his Uruguayan-Argentinian
nationality was forgiven in intellectual circles, where many tried
to discredit him for this one and only reason. Campal, who from a
progressist ideology considered himself “a world’s
citizen”, could not understand it. And suffered it in silence.
This same avant-garde mentality, of intellectual and human generosity,
brought him to neglect the publishing of his own work. It was not
that he din’t consider it worthy. Quite the opposite, he devoted
much care and attention to it. But his idea of culture –therefore
of poetry– as a collective organism, made him put his information
and promotion activity first. (For this, in fact, he was qualified
of “divulger”).
To Campal, the relationship between theory and practice was essential.
Although in the time he arrived in Spain coming from Paris –early
sixties– the prevailing model of a poet (both for the left as
for the right, let’s not deceive ourselves) was that of “the
romantic”, he had no objection to introduce himself as a specialist,
a critic and designer. He was, for instance, a thorough expert of
Juan Ramon Jimenez’s poetry, and had dictated various conferences
to defend it, calling him, at the peak of “anti-Juanramonism”,
“the most important poet in the century”. There is no doubt
whatsoever that Campal showed, from the very first moment he got in
touch with Spanish culture, the vocation of an agitator, fearless
of scandal.
Nevertheless, Campal’s main work, what has undoubtedly had a
greatest echo, is his Problemática-63. That lecture room was
created in 1962 by a group of young artists in the headquarters of
Madrid’s branch of Juventudes Musicales. In that basement of
San Bernardo street (a building which at the time housed the Music
School), Campal organized his agitation base. He started to publish
a mimeographed magazine, where he edited basic texts of the first
avant-gardes, along with the work of many poets. Among them, a translation
by Manolo Viola of several of Joan Brossa’s works.
Apart from this magazine (of uncertain periodicity), Problemática
worked as a seminar that, once a week, carried about a public
act, be it a concert, a reading or a conference. In 1963, few days
after his death, Problemática held the one and only act in
Spain in memoriam for Tristan Tzara.
In 1965, after connecting with the Brasilian concrete poets, and with
Pierre Garnier, Campal started a work of information about and promotion
of the neoavant-garde mouvements of the sixties. It is his best-known
and publicized period. During the following years, until his death
on the 19th March 1968, Campal devoted himself to the study of new
layouts, to make them known through conferences, auditions, films,
articles and collective exhibitions. And, at the same time, he lived
an intense creative evolution, during which he produced his combinatory
poems, followed by his calligrams.
Calligrams were the product of a very conscious experimental layout.
The relationship between gestual or even calligraphic components of
writing, besides (or in front of) typographic writing, and, particularly,
the typography of a given newspaper. Everything related by the objective
random practice.
Just before his death, not even a month short of May 68, Campal was
going through a very productive period, in every field. Apart from
his creative works, and from the project to create a centre for experimental
art, he was leading –-toguether with Eusebio Sempere, and with
Cristobal Halfter as host– a project for IBM to design an “art-producing
machine”. He was thrilled about it, because it meant to have
an exceptional opportunity to put into practice ideas such as that
of the audience partake in art, the objective productivity of sign
systems, etc. His death meant the definitive failure of such project.
Campal’s poetic and plastic work, what we usually call “creative
work”, has in itself the
significance and strenght to keep it alive and attractive. Nevertheless,
we should not isolate it, separate it from the rest of activities,
ideas and proposals of its author. This principle, which should be
applied to every XXth century artist, is particularly suitable for
the men and women who betted on avant-garde and experimentation. Because,
even when defending the material nature of writing and speech (“in
substance there is only form”, it is said), we can’t properly
talk of formalism. At the inaugural conference of the exhibition “Poesía
de vanguardia” held in the gallery Juana Mordó (Madrid,
June 1966), Campal defended his point of view saying that “The
art of our time will be made by the union of all our efforts, never
individually.”
I think that, with this brief revision of Campal’s life and work,
it stands out that he was not in the least a “cursed poet”.
Far from it. Although his death was, indeed, a curse for avant-garde
poetry.
In spite of the 32 years gone by, the recognition of Campal, of his
work and his ideas, is still on the waxing. Many of us were his immediate
heirs, many more have been and still are, because his inheritance
was the legacy of freedom. Some of us have recognized this debt, and
we are prepared to pay it back, within our own limitations. Others
have denied it, insulting, on the way, the desappeared poet, with
the hope that his insults will disguise their own lack of human and
intellectual quality. They have not succeeded in it. Because, fortunately,
Spanish society has been walking in these last years towards behaviours
which more and more demand the existence of sound ethical bases. Campal
would be happy, because, to him, the avant-garde was, above everything
else, an ethical commitment. It was his way of being in avant-garde’s
avant-garde.
To call a spade a spade
Felipe Boso was the name that Felipe Fernández Alonso, born
in Villarramiel de Campos (Palencia) in 1924, who died in Bonn in
1983, used for his literary work. Apart from poet, he was translator
and critic.
Felipe Fernández Alonso graduated in Geography and History
in Santiago de Compostela, and studied Philosophy in the Complutense.
Afterwards, he went to Germany to take a doctorate in Geography. There
he got married, had three children, never finished his doctorate,
and never came back to Spain except for holidays. Pushed both by his
need of money and his vocation, he devoted himself to cultural journalism
and translation. He translated as many German authors into Spanish
as Spanish authors into German.
In 1970, the publishing house La isla de los ratones (The Island of
Rats), in Santander, published his book T de trama. The backcover,
written by Felipe himself, states: “After long devotion to investigation,
he abdicates it and gives free rein to the most persistent of his
vocations: writing.”
At that moment, he was 45 years old and had a good social and professional
position. From then on and up to his death, in 1983, he devoted a
considerable effort to his vocation of writer, besides promoting Spanish
and German authors he met or admired.
In a way, it could be said that after Julio Campal, Boso was, from
his German residence, a fundamental designer of avant-garde poetry
in Spain. His untiring activity, and his good nature, made possible
the carrying out of common enterprises, beyond differences, arguments
and discussions that, on the other hand, are only to be expected in
an activity that prices, above everything else, freedom (particularly
of opinion). Boso was, up to his death, a steadfast reference for
all of us who had kept on working, as well as for the new generations
which were increasing the lines of poetic experimentation. His disappearance,
again as that of Campal’s, was a real disaster, an irretrievable
loss. Boso had never been a lider, a ruler, but from friendship he
knew how to join wills, and how to work for everybody’s benefit.
Felipe Boso, due to his long residence in Germany and his proficiency
of learned languages, he was first hand acquainted with the work of
the German genitors of concrete poetry.
In this sense, his poetry always kept some of its concrete flavour.
Nevertheless, his evolution was very quick. From the discursive though
very synthetic poems collected in T de trama, which joining lyricism
and experimentation shape out an unmistakable Boso’s line, up
to the plastical productions of the eighties, where semeiotic components
have been interiorized and depurated in extremely effective structures,
his path is the archetype of experimental poetry.
Nevertheless, in the whole of his works, Boso makes a constant use
of revealing mechanisms: as much in discursive as in ideographic poems,
in emblems as in semeiotic texts, he introduces, with an intelligent
turn, a subtle shift that colours everything under a new light (the
light of poetry, we usually say). And, indeeed, I’m not
talking about ingeniousness full stop, nor about humour, though these
also appear by means of parallel mechanisms; for, to avant-garde,
poetry is not limited to the “lyrical poetry” of romantics.
Let us recall, as an example, his poem about rain, which consists
only of an inverted “i”. By the way, a new internet entrance,
“Inicia”, has copied the idea.
Boso exemplified this procedure in one of his “poetics”
by saying:
“To call a spade a spade: spade”.
Because he considered that languages, as in general every system of
signs, are full of contradictions –he called them “improperties”–,
and that the poet’s job has always been to discover them, to
underline them. A brief poem will illustrate, better than my words,
this idea:
Tu yo / es tuyo / su yo / es suyo / mi yo / en cambio / no / es /
miyo / ¿de quién / será / mi yo?
(Literally translated: Your I / is yours / his-her-its I / is his-hers-its
/ my I / on the other hand / is / not / mys / whose / will / be /
my I?)
Geographer by training and writer by vocation, Boso joined both his
worlds in a series of works. The best known of whose have been collected
in his book La palabra islas (The Word Islands). In it, he faces a
difficulty deliberatedly chosen. We have to bear in mind that
in avant-garde, particularly in experimentation (in whose layouts
Boso believed, though with some reservation), the subject, the contents,
is something to be suspicious of, something almost demoniacal. The
principle that “the meaning follows the form”, based on
semeiotic studies and on the experience of XXth century art itself,
has been for a long time a motto about which nobody has dared to argue.
In spite of it, Boso chooses the islands of planet Earth as poeticizable
material, through the relationship name(word)-typographic image, and
physical image (profile) or icon of the islands. With this very basic
elements, “...he sets up an adventure neither imaginative nor
descriptive, but textual”, as it is said on the backcover of
the book, published little before his death.
Another book, published posthumous, collects a fundamental part of
Bosos’s work. I’m talking about Los poemas concretos
(The Concrete Poems), of which I prepared an edition in 1994. By then,
when more than ten years since the death of its author had gone by,
I felt in debt with him, in an increasingly painful way. There was
an idea that I couldn’t take out of my mind: “ If I had
disappeared, I used to say to myself, Boso would have undoubtedly
published some of my many unpublished books.” This was the reason
why I abandoned my self-imposed exile from public life, freely chosen
the same year Boso died.
I have to say in my defense, that if I had waited eleven years to
publish this book, it was because, somehow I was sure, particularly
at the begginning, that Boso’s poetical weight, sooner or later,
would compel somebody to publish his books. This will give you an
idea about the great extent of idealism and innocence that in the
eighties –the stupid decade– I still kept.
Los poemas concretos is not properly speaking, in spite the title,
a book of concrete poetry. Though possibly the most “concrete”
book of Spanish author, it is a very personal and nontransferable,
therefore heterodox, mixture of discursive poems, ideograms, emblems,
tautologies, semeiotic texts…
Edited by a peculiar publishing house –peculiar up to the point
of not giving the impression to care about selling its almost
3.000 printed copies–, Los poemas concretos is an almost
invisible book. As happens with so many important books of the last
forty years which, convicted by the stablished powers of culture and
by La Société du Spectacle’s own dynamics, live
in a particular hell. Fortunately, infernal flames keep up the heat
and brilliance of Los poemas concretos, endowing it, years gone by,
with an ever increasing colourfulness which only adds to its initial
attraction.
The unwritten writing
José Luis Castillejo is José Luis Fernández de
Castillejo y Taviel de Andrade’s more frequently used pen-name.
A diplomat (he held the grade of Embassador of Spain), he was born
in Sevilla in 1930. As Boso, Castillejo started his public life as
a writer at the begginning of his maturity, in 1967, when he was 37
years old.
As he himself admitted, it was thanks to Juan Hidalgo, whom he met,
that he began to write. Hidalgo, who in 1964, toguether with Walther
Marquetti, had created the group Zaj, was for him a “discoverer”,
or indeed a “catalyst”, who made him become aware of where
to direct his component as a writer.
Indeed, though Castillejo, throughout his life, has been mainly interested
in philosophy, which has brought him to elaborate a complete theory
of writing and comunication, although he has exercised as contemporary
art collectionist, and in spite of the fact that as critic and essayist
he has published essential texts about the history of art in Spain,
he considered himself only and solely a “writer”. In a limited,
almost utilitarian sense: he is “the one who writes”.
As other artists and writers of the sixties, Castillejo works within
a constant interrelation between theory and practice. But, in his
case, the practice, or more exactly the “experience” of
writing, is decisive. It is this act that gives rise to the theory,
and not the other way around.
If in XXth century art, literature and music, the personal course
of the author is a defining and indispensable source to know and analize
his/her production, in the case of Castillejo this principle becomes
paradigmatic. Castillejo’s originality has to be related to the
originality, the difference, of his biography; apart from the intrinsical
components, purely personal, which we usually define from concepts
such as sensibility, intelligence, insight…
From 1959, when he was appointed Embassy Secretary in Washington,
he spent most of his life out of Spain. By then he had already lived
several years in France and in Argentina, toguether with his father,
a political exile, and had studied in France, Germany, England and
the USA.
During his Northamerican years, he initiated into contemporary art:
influenced by his friend, the painter Manolo Barbadillo, he started
his art collection with the adquisition of a piece of work by Antoni
Tapies. Next step was that of art critic, which he practised for several
years from the Northamerican magazine Art International, where he
published essays about Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, or the Spaniards
Tapies and Genovés. In 1968, these works were included in the
book Actualidad y participación, published by Tecnos, which
was directed by Enrique Tierno Galván.
The essay that gave the book its title is, at the light of those thirty
years elapsed, the most lucid, clarifying text that any Spaniard has
written about contemporary art, particularly about action as a new
form of art. Although, in function of his own artistic and intellectual
evolution, the author has repudiated his text, time gone by has not
in the least diminished its potentiality. Every time I have the opportunity,
as it is the case now, I recommend its reading, in order to understand
something of what happened in the sixties.
By this most emblematic year, I’m refering to 68, Castillejo
had already published his two books belonging to the Zaj period: La
política (1967), and La caída del avión en el
terreno baldío (The Plane Crash On The Waste Land) (1966).
The former is a book in prose that, even within the reduced world
of avant-garde and experimentation, has remained in nobody’s
land, in some sort of critical limbo. This situation reminds me of
that of my own book Prosae, that I consider my most rounded and elaborated
piece of work, while there hasn’t been a critic or historian
wanting to say a word about it. Possibly, as Castillejo himself would
say, in these latest moments of modernity, experimental prose makes
us feel uncomfortable, because it doesn’t leave us room for dilettantism.
La política is the book that most relates Castillejo and Gertrude
Stain, his great literary love and first source of his particular
idea of writing, which he specified in La escritura no escrita (The
Unwritten Writing), finished in mid-seventies and published in 1996.
The period of Castillejo’s adherence to Zaj was his most active
in the public sphere: he took part in happenings and was present in
international events. In 1966, in London, he attended The Symposium
About the Destruction of Art, managing to escape from the police,
that was hard upon artists coming from America and Europe, thanks
to his diplomatic contacts. And, in Cologne, he witnessed how Num
Jam Paik literally destroyed, scissors in hand, the shirt of “master”
John Cage. About it he would write that the Corean artist din’t
understand the meaning of the new rituals of happening “...maybe
because he came from an underdevelopped country, when he thought that
everything was permitted...”
Even though, formally, Castillejo never ceased to belong to the group
Zaj, he recognizes that from 1968 and onwards, Juan Hidalgo had turned
him off its activities, due to the differences arisen about the meaning
and evolution of contemporary art. Because if there is something which
Castillejo has always been keen on underlying is his withdrawal from
any form of absolutism, fundamentalism or literalism. Quite the opposite
(and this I say it) to Hidalgo.
Castillejo’s emblematic work is El libro de la i (The Book of
i’s), published by the author in Switzerland, in 1969. In the
following years, he published another two books, which can be considered
the development of the form of writing concretized in El Libro
de la i.
From then, his evolution is carried on, and it leads to what he starts
to call “the unwritten writing”.
“I started wanting to find writing and I discovered so many things
which could not anymore be accepted as such, among others writing
itself (unwritten writing). I arrived at an improper writing (displaced
writing), but not at the void, not at Mallarmé’s idealist
white page, bu at the foundations of writing, at the stain, the graphism,
the material and at the unwritten, at what it isn’t writing anymore.
Or rather, at what it doesn’t seem so...”
Castillejo, following whom he considers his teacher, the Northamerican
art critic Clement Greemberg, considers that artistic productions
have a specificity that is historical and cultural, but not methaphysical
or absolute. That is why he calls himself “writer of books”.
In La escritura no escrita he makes a persistent call to relativist
analysis, as a criticism of dogma, the absolute, the nihilist, but
also the transcendent...
But Castillejo is far from falling into any sort of pyrrhonism: He
accepts the knowledge that comes from experience, and the possibility
for reason to interpret and translate it. No excesses, though: “Idealism
believed in the pure page in white, in the return to an originary
innocence. But our innocence cannot be simple but laborious, earned
by an effort...”
La escritura no escrita, as the author himself acknowledged, was written
to give a theory foundation to his Un libro de un libro (A book from
a book), which he considers difficult to realize, for “Given
the little capability for symbolism in our era, the latter would be
wrongly interpreted and even mistaken by a minimalist or fetish object.”
Fortunately, José Luis Castillejo is still in full production.
He has been a pensioner in the Diplomatic Corps for a few years, and
spends some of his time in USA and some in Madrid. In 99 he published
a new book: El libro de la j (The book of j’s), and has written
various essays about language and writing, of an exceptional analytic
fineness.
Goals
I hope that the goals I set to myself when I accepted the invitation
to prepare this conference, have been fulfilled, at least partially.
The first, and most important to me, was to talk about this
three writers, relatively well-known in some spheres, but with some
of their work still unknown, unpublished in more than a few
instances, despite their intrinsical interest and their potentiality.
If for them this is a great injustice, for us it is an authentic disater.
I hope to have, at least, stirred your interest about them.
My second goal is related to the need everyone who really is interested
in contemporary art has, almost compellingly, to untangle misunderstandings,
to dynamite trites.
In 1925, in his famous –though less read than pretended–
essay “La deshumanización en el arte” (“Dehumanization
in Art”), José Ortega y Gasset pointed out that “...new
art has the masses against and it will always have them. It is impopular
by essence; even more so, it is anti-popular.”
The truth is that, about this point, Ortega was acting only as a commissioner
for oaths of given current events, particularly visible in the case
of so reactionary a society such as that of the twenties in Spain.
His interpretation was biased, but at first glance seemed well-grounded.
Nevertheless, he went further to justify his statement: “...
what characterizes new art”...”is that it divides the audience
into two types of men: those who understand and those who don’t.”
Next, Ortega exposes, once again, his well-known theory of “mass-men”,
unable to understand, in this case new art, “...which is an art
of privilege, of noble nerve, of instinctive aristocracy.”
Obviously, the one who didn’t understand new art was Ortega.
Or maybe he did, but he wasn’t interested in understanding it,
only in using it. Mind you, it wasn’t a matter of intelligence,
comprehension or sensitivity. His problem was the “point of view”:
He remained immersed in a traditional world, based on codes
of traditional transcendence, power and values. He couln’t
understand that new artists were not putting forward a new form of
art, but a new form of life.
Seventy-five years have gone by since Ortega wrote his essay, and
the way of valueing, analysing and even telling the history of avant-garde
mouvements has gone through different, quite opposed, phases. And,
nevertheless, the remoteness and incomprehension shown towards contemporary
art from the widest part of society still holds; if it has not, indeed,
grown. Of course, this cannot be put down to one single cause, and
less so be considered anybody’s direct responsability. Unfortunately,
we have to admit that, in most cases, only us, the artists ourselves,
are to be blamed for such a divorce. We haven’t been capable
of “another way of living”, and of the new ideas we have
only made ours the shell, its most superficial layer.
One of the most distinctive marks of Julio Campal’s avant-garde
layouts, which he, indeed, shared with the most prominent writers
of concrete poetry, was his defence of the simplicity of poetry, as
opposed to traditional poetical “metalanguages”, included
that of the so-called “social poetry”, which by their own
intrinsical characteristics –he insisted– cannot be understood
by the masses to whom, according to their authors, it is addressed.
Instead, visual poetry, more synthetic and direct, coming from the
codes that mass comunication demand, could be received by the vast
majority...
The central matter of XXth century art, poetry and music is that of
suppressing, or at least diminishing, the trancendental components
of traditional societies. That is the reason why avant-garde’s
fundamental utopic proposal, initially expressed by Rimbaud (“poetry
has to be done by all”), underlines the creative potential of
all human beings, defending a democratic, levelling ideology. Quite
the opposite to Ortega y Gasset’s option of making it aristocratic.
“Professionalization” of avant-gardes took place as of the
appearance of surrealism, and was firmly braced during the fifties,
with the support from USA and Western countries to the different forms
of what has been called “abstraction”, the image of the
“artist of genius”, and the “mythicization” of
art by critics through the development of jargons fluctuating between
scientific and mystical etc. It was this process that drove public
opinion to the convincement that the most advanced art can only be
understood by a chosen few; or, simply, that it din’t mean anything.
And, with that, some avant-garde artists have, somehow, come to share
Ortega y Gasset’s point of view, leaving avant-garde itself in
an incoherent, senseless position. Though, fortunately, not all of
us have given up the conviction that art, poetry and music are within
everybody’s reach.
Campal with his defence of poetry’s knowledgeability –as
oposed to the postulators of the romantic poet, subjective and inspired–,
Boso with his insistence about the absolutization and concretion of
language, and Castillejo by his delving into the limits of writing,
have widened our world, enriched our perception and, above all, showned
us the importance of freedom in our lifes. Where others thought there
was only emptiness and insignificance, they have built polysemic constructions.
Where tradition applied scales of non-operative, empty values, based
solely on authority and custom, they helped to make a clean sweep;
and starting from scratch, they have bequeathed us with new scales,
more efficient and more apt to the experience of each of us.
My last goal –the most important and fundamental of this conference,
in fact– is to give you the occassion to approach the books of
these authors, some of which can be found in the bookshop of this
Centre de Cultura Contemporània that so kindly has welcomed
us. I’m no fetishist and I prefer the personal touch, whenever
possible. But let’s not deceive ourselves: books have the peculiarity
of behaving as autonomous individuals; that is, as persons that both
talk to us and enquire us, that enlighten us and, at the same time,
question us. That is why, as human beings do as well, they ask from
us the necessary availability and open-mindness to stablish a fruitful
relationship. On the other hand, the works of Campal, Boso and Castillejo
are not easy to be found, because they suffer from the stigma of lacking
market value (a stigma that has been launched and fed by the same
people that prevent media from talking about, commercializing or introducing
them).
To conclude, I would like to refer to my own individual, personal
and nontransferable experience. My relationship with each of these
writers and with their work has been peculiar, sharing one and only
coincidence: its intensity. I cannot specify on what point or on what
fields they have influenced my way of thinking and of seeing things,
my availability in the face of events; in short, my way of life. But
what I can say without hesitation is that had I not known them, if
I had not have the opportunity of meeting them and becoming acquainted
with their work and their ideas, my life would have taken a very different
course. Certainly, I would not be here in Barcelona today, with all
of you, talking about them; and I would have missed, no doubt about
it, an extremely gratifying experience.
________________________
Fernando Millán (Jaén, 1944) has been one of the most
committed personalities in the movement that in the sixties and seventies
looked through and expanded the historical avantgarde proposals. He’s
a visual poetry author -Textos y antitextos (1970), Mitogramas (1978)…-
and he’s also considered one of the most prestigious theorists.
He was co-author of the anthology La escritura en libertad (Alianza,
1975). In his projects he’s worked intensively on the three
authors the conference is based on: Boso, Campal and Castillejo.
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