Dreams and Visions

I have decided that a little bit of my blogging energy needs to be redirected towards my degree. It is my final year after all! Anyway, for the moment I am not ready to give up the blog so you will just have to deal with posts with a slightly more limited theme. Nevertheless I can't help the distractions and inadvertences which naturally come after hours of study. So the links between what I write and my degree will sometimes be tenuous, perhaps exciting.

Women, bird and snake in front of the sun, Joan Miro

I've just started my work on a new paper, Medieval Dreams and Visions, and I have been reading a lot of dream theory and a lot of debates about the relationship between dream and art, truth and fiction. I can't help thinking back to Joan Miro in Barcelona. Beginning in 1925 Miro painted around a hundred dream paintings in an attempt to represent the unconscious.

'Dream is something quite separate from reality as experienced in the waking state; one might almost say it represents a hermetically sealed existence, divided from real life by an unbridgeable gulf. It detaches us from reality, erases normal recall of the same in us, and places us in a different world and in a quite different life-story, which deep down has nothing to do with the real one.' Hildebrandt

The Surrealists were constantly trying to expose deep, hidden meanings in their art by using methods such as automatic writing and the 'Exquisite Corpse' which involved choosing words at random from the dictionary. Miro's dream paintings reduce the world to symbols and archetypes; stars, women, birds, fish and animals drawn together in a constellation of representation.

The question in the medieval period was whether any truth or prophecy could be extracted from the unstructured images of the dream. This question still seems relevant in Miro, beyond the poetry of his canvases is there any higher wisdom being communicated? What can the dreamer, the viewer of Miro's painting, bring back in to the real world? A sense of beauty, a thing close to comprehension perhaps, but not the full knowledge of the thing.

The other question (which I might have to answer today in my seminar) is whether there can be art about an insignificant dream? Doesn't the pure communication of it make it significant? If you have a dream and tell no one, it is more than likely that it will disappear, when you try to recall it at the end of the day you find that it has dissolved. But if you repeat the dream, the articulation of it usually means that it resists that dissipation for a while longer.

Chaucer reading to the court

Chaucer is not quite as abstract as Miro, perhaps his meaning is easier to read.

ARTchitecture for the Art Gallery

Perhaps it is just that my eye has only recently become interested in architecture, but the space in which art galleries were housed in Barcelona amazed and excited me as independent works of art.

Eventually the old streets of art shops and restaurants spilling out on to the pavements opened out to the Placa de Angels, an open space of art and a clear white light. MACBA is the Museum of Contemporary art in Barcelona and commands a whole square of converted spaces. Richard Meier was the American architect responsible for the main building, famous for his rationalist designs and his use of white, this is a blinding construction.

'Abstraction allows architecture to express its own organizational and spatial consequences, it permits the creation of space without confusing its volume with any superimposed system of meaning or value.' Richard Meier

I spent forever in awe, circling and encircling as I held my camera up to the sky and framed new shapes, discovered hidden geometries. The building frames and channels light, patterning, creating and distorting, utterly absorbing. Its great white surfaces obliterate the sun and draw everything towards it. I was genuinely captivated and wonder if it is that I have never seen architecture like this before, or that I have just never noticed it?

Here is an amazing video, which expresses the detailed abstract qualities of the building:

Here are some of the other impressive gallery buildings I saw.

Crowned by a barbed wire sculpture, Antoni Tapies designed the building which now hosts his gallery himself. The wire called 'Cloud and Chair' is supposed to adjust the difference in height between the Foundation and the buildings which surround it.

In 1975 architect Josep Luis Sert completed the building for the Joan Miro Foundation and modern art gallery. It was conceived as an open space and the white surfaces, broken by courtyards, do open up spaces. The highlight is the low roof which is open to the public to explore the sculptures which spill out of the museum.

When I went nobody seemed to be going out on to the roof, but I pushed through the tinted doors and escaped in to the sun to explore. Nobody stopped me and it felt liberating!