“A Barcelona daily, very establishment.”
“It did occur to him, though, that if he sent the photocopies tout court, they might reject the entry, as it was clearly stipulated that the award was for drawing, so no matter how open they were to modern materials and attitudes, there always had to be a minimum of drawing. Rather than take a chance, he added a few light strokes with Faber Castell pastels and Alpino pencils. For the first time he had had to face the question of the purity of the artist, and for the first time had decided that if a bit of self-corruption (vis-à-vis the aesthetic ideas he was under the sway of at the time) in the use of pencils and pastel meant that his work was to be contemplated by thousands and perhaps even receive an honorable mention (he didn’t so much as dream of an award), then a bit of corruption was worth his while. He ended up in eighteenth place, which he considered something of a success, despite the repetition of the frustration of the previous year, not even receiving a mention. Fortunately, he was able to show a series of his photocopies in the Granollers Art Show.”
“Granollers is a city close to Barcelona with an outstanding country inn and restaurant: La Fonda Europa. .”
“As a result of his participation in that Art Show, his name appeared (along with those of the other thirty-eight participants) in the review that appeared on the art news page of Serra d’Or. He immediately bought a plastic folder with transparent compartments, labeled it press clippings, and filed the article away in it, taking great care to make note of the name of the magazine, the number of the issue, and the date on which it had appeared. Right about then he learned about a series of scholarships for art students sponsored by a well-known brand of sparkling wine from the Penedès region. He applied. Doing this had entailed composing a resumé, a primordial step in the life of an artist, the successful completion of which required both a great command of the written word (to shore up weak spots and gloss them over) as well as considerable restraint (so as not to appear self-important). The years proved him to be a master.”
“He sent it off, with great anticipation, together with a year-long project to study art in New York. He had vacillated between New York or Paris because, despite his realization that New York had been the center of the art world for decades now, Paris had, shall we way, sentimental appeal for him. As his mother said, ‘We Catalans think of Paris as our second home.’ In the meantime, he continued working in photocopies and extended his field of interest to photography (non-realistic photography, of course). He had been particularly interested in Polaroids, which obviated the whole bothersome development process, and which seemed to him — in a certain sense, regrettably — to be one-of-a-kind pieces. Unexpectedly, one day they notified him that he had received the grant, and that the official award ceremony would take place at the Barcelona headquarters of the renowned brand of sparkling wine. He was so overcome with joy that he got drunk that night (for the first time in his life) with the friend whose father had a bar in La Sagrera, with whom he still maintained a solid friendship. Not everything was a bed of roses, though: Humbert’s mother was disconsolate at her son’s imminent parting, which (in conjunction with the recent decision of her daughter, Humbert’s only sister, to live with a group of friends in a commune) was the partial cause, it would seem, of her having a nervous breakdown. Despite his attempts to convince her of the benefits for his career of a sojourn in the capital city of contemporary art, the woman would suffer a relapse every time she was reminded that his destination was, of all places, New York! (Her notion of which had been formed by the films of the forties and fifties — which was when she had gone to the movies — and, more recently, by television.) What’s more, she couldn’t quite get it through her head that he could have preferred New York to Paris, Paris being, as it was, a second home to Catalans. Despite all these obstacles, at the age of twenty-three the young man had landed at an airport which he had had a good deal of trouble discovering how to leave. He had jettisoned his job, his studies, his family, and a girlfriend he had been sharing with a classmate ever since his year at the Llotja.”
“Before he knew it, the year was over. He had studied a little, met few people, and mostly spent his time wandering around the city. When his scholarship was about to run out, he thought about his next step. After long sleepless nights weighing the pros and cons, he decided to stay, not only because since his move to New York they had cited him twice on the arts page of the aforementioned Serra d’Or without his having done a thing, but also because he knew — and he wrote a letter to this effect to his sister — that if he went back to Barcelona he would miss New York very, very much. When the scholarship was down to nothing, he found a job as a dishwasher in a Greenwich Village restaurant. The mental confusion that his collision with American art had produced was so great that, ever since his student visa had expired (and he had joined the ranks of the illegal aliens), he had stopped painting. How could he — a stranger in the metropolis — make a place for himself? And how would he know what one ought to be doing at any given moment? From one year to the next, ideas changed, and one pattern of behavior was exchanged for another. . One day, up in arms, a painter friend of his (an ex-conceptualist who was currently a hyperrealist) told him about a book he had read on the so-called modern arts by the most prestigious practitioner of New Journalism. Humbert bought it and devoured it. He found it extraordinary. Where his friend had seen only a sterile send-up, Humbert discovered a critique of a variety of errors; where his friend had found ‘facile ironies without alternative proposals,’ Humbert saw a healthy study of certain excesses, laudable for opening the way for others — perhaps himself? — to correct them. It was apparent to him that if, from the early seventies on, galleries had ceased to sell as they had in the sixties, and if Americans had been basically unimpressed by the whole minimalist thing, the next step was to break away from all that. Confusion notwithstanding, he hadn’t shrunk from the task, and only once (after consuming a whole bottle of Kentucky bourbon with a stranger on the Bowery) had he considered abandoning painting and devoting himself to the jazz trumpet.”
“Video also fascinated him. He had seen a video camera at the Barcelona Institut de Teatre. Here, though, it was being used in a much freer way. Video’s the art of the future, he had declared in a letter to his parents, by way of justifying his third year in New York with his interest in this new medium. Through specialized journals he kept track of the activities of the foremost American video artists. At the end of his third year (now he was making his living as a busboy in a Soho bar), he decided he would just stay and, with the help of a lawyer friend of a friend, he initiated the process of getting permanent residency. At the same time, after all the qualms of those years, he began to paint again and, even more to the point, to paint on canvas. For two years he painted and painted every morning, and on Sundays from sunrise to sunset, before going in to work at the restaurant (the fifth year he had advanced to being a waiter in TriBeCa, which led him to believe that if he continued along this path, working in restaurants farther and farther south in the city, the following year he would be working at the World Trade Center, the year after that he’d sink into the estuary, and the year after that he’d surface in Staten Island. .). When the Mary Boone boom took off and everyone started talking about New Expressionism (or new wave, or new image, or maximalism. .), Humbert saw that he had not been mistaken in returning to the canvas. He studied the work of those artists. Schnabel seemed perfectly mediocre to him, a total bluff. And the rest of the pack were just more of the same. . He feverishly devoured the articles on postmodernism that appeared in the city magazines and newspapers. . He took notes. He made lists in order to derive needed constants. He knew he had to be patient. He thought: ‘It was logical for the canvas to have made a comeback.’ Wary of futile optimism, though, he knew that the return to the canvas must be undertaken with prudence, mindful of the advances achieved in other mediums. That was why he had begun to work again with all kinds of materials and diverse techniques, even when they seemed to contradict one another. He used fabric, wood, photographs, videotapes, cassettes. For the first time he tried his hand at sculpture. And once in a while, out of nostalgia, he would do a photocopy. Even though he had been told time and time again that using all those mediums, so different from one another, would seem tasteless and lacking in style, Humbert defended himself from such accusations by declaring that it was precisely that lack of style that constituted his personal style. How agents had loved to reject him! They had criticized him with the same ferocity with which now they were hitting themselves in the head for not having had the insight to see that in that ‘garish clutter’—as one gallery owner had dismissed his entire oeuvre — was the key to his style. How blind they had been! Impetuous, unprejudiced, pragmatic, and with a keen nose for the new, Humbert Herrera had sensed that an artistic moment in which — among many other trends — Jack Goldstein of the Metro Pictures gallery could get away with barefaced plagiarism, and take pride in it, was not only an interesting moment artistically, but also one in which things could happen. In Italy, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, and Sandro Chia were emerging. In Germany, Rainer Fetting, Anselm Kiefer, Helmut Middendorf. .”