About Jordi Puntí

Writer

The albino gorilla in El Poble Espanyol

Kitsch BarcelonaKitsch Barcelona

Author: Anna Pujadas

Barcelona City Council

Barcelona, 2016

Everything that tourism touches turns into kitsch. This may be the inevitable conclusion to be drawn from a reading of Kitsch Barcelona.

The book, published by the Barcelona City Council and edited by design theorist Anna Pujadas, sets out to be an exhaustive catalogue of the most emblematic expressions of kitsch which, consciously or unconsciously, also form part of the city’s personality. Pujadas, who offers us an introduction to this phenomenon, asks us to see it not as something to look down upon, but as something to celebrate. In this vein, some thirty different designers, architects, anthropologists and writers have curated and illuminated a collection of our very own home-grown kitsch.

Possibly, the most obvious success story is Gaudí’s mosaic, used everywhere and elevated to sublime levels at a McDonald’s on Passeig de Gràcia. Then we have examples of historic kitsch that are worthy of vindication as they are part of our tradition, and which range from the Poble Espanyol to the Lady with the umbrella sculpture to the church on Tibidabo. Another group, including the statues on La Rambla and Claes Oldenburg’s sculpture of giant matches, is proudly being reborn from the ashes of Olympic Barcelona. We can even consider our recollections of the albino gorilla Snowflake as a kind of kitsch memory game, even though what is really kitsch is the fact that the gorilla was given his very own national identity card. And how about our memories of the banana splits at the 7 Portes restaurant? What is clear today, however, is the fact that some of the visual milestones of our childhoods are now in the hands of an absolutely ruthless tourism industry and have consequently been trivialised by the masses and distanced from our personal experiences of them. Whether you call them kitsch or just plain cringeworthy, some things such as the Lladró ornaments shops or adverts for Crujicoques are so universal that they attain a kind of meta-kitsch status (a bit like the works of Carlos Pazos, born with kitsch intentions).

The second conclusion we can draw from this book is that kitsch is, above all, a subjective way of looking at things. Such subjectivity can be found in the attempt to put some kitsch into Barcelona’s image as a tourism destination for “foodies” (such an irritating word), with glorious examples such as the Toc de Mar bar and the depictions of Montserrat mountain’s rock formations by the Brunells pastry brand.

What gives here is the fact that everyone puts their taste threshold at a different level, and maybe that is why you get the feeling that some selections have been included just to be criticised, as they are either naff, old or simply annoying. It is hard to understand, for example, why the Hotel Camper or the Casa Planells by Josep M. Jujol sit side-by-side with the Arenas shopping centre, the Drummer Boy sculpture and the barracks at El Bruc. Or why the Eixample neighbourhood should be considered the kitschiest neighbourhood of all because it is “a democracy that is fed up with noise and pollution”. In more than one case, the lack of context means that banal and gratuitous selections that should not be there are indeed there.

This elitist sense of irony is also a typical Barcelonan attitude. It makes me think that the kitschiest thing one can do is to write a book on Barcelona kitsch. A kitsch anthology of kitsch for commercial purposes, intended to attract the tourists that we can still just about put up with, the ones that are able to distance themselves from the phenomenon and laugh at it. The hoteliers will be over the moon.

The Marsé passport

There are fictional cities that seem livelier than real ones. Few authors have erected a Barcelona so much anchored in popular memory, so present in the collective imagination.

For eight years I lived a stone’s throw away from the Alaska bar, on the corner of Passeig de Sant Joan and Carrer del Pare Claret. The Alaska was one of Carmen Broto’s haunts. The story goes that Broto, a prostitute and plaything of Barcelona’s high society, lived on the other side of Pare Claret and very often, on returning home in the wee small hours, would have a nightcap in the bar. In January 1949, three men murdered her and abandoned her body on waste ground in Carrer de la Legalitat, in one of the most talked-about and most covered-up crimes of the early post-Civil War period.

Like many people, I became acquainted with Carmen Broto’s blonde hair and killer perfume when Juan Marsé portrayed her in The Fallen (1973), a novel that visits his childhood and war scenarios, mingling personal memories and aventis [tales]. Marsé turned the spotlight on the Alaska bar, a meeting point for subversion and low life, and around Carmen Broto he wove a web that played out in the neighbourhood streets, in the cinemas, in the dark backrooms of shops and on the trams that gave off sparks. That first read was my passport to Marsé’s world, a simultaneously true, realistic and mythical map of Barcelona.

© Manel Andreu

© Manel Andreu

Novelists create bonds of affection with the settings they choose for their books. It is never a random choice. The city that they invent and the streets and houses they recreate lie at the core of their characters – they mark them – and go on to become an important part of the reader’s memory. There are paper cities whose realism is more vivid than the real ones. In the case of Juan Marsé, this identification is particularly intense. Few authors have created a Barcelona so anchored in the popular memory, so present in the collective imagery. In fact, the urban essence of Marsé’s novels lies in his interest in characters who live on the fringe, who can change classes like one who moves to a new neighbourhood, or for whom the unfamiliarity of unknown places is like an escape valve. La oscura historia de la prima Montse [The Dark Story of Cousin Montse], Ronda de Guinardó, Un día volveré [One Day I’ll Come Back], Lizard Tails… Each new title extends the map, while also detailing familiar streets. From the hovels of El Carmel to the dark Red-Light District, from Plaça Rovira to the Ritz hotel, the Tibet Restaurant to the protective shadows of Parc Güell, the Roxy cinema to the Delicias bar…

I could continue to plot the place names of the Marsé map, but clinical list-making leads nowhere. I am more interested in the figuration of a literary city that is shared by other narrators – and which eventually forms a personalised topography in each reader’s memory. I will give you an example. I am thinking about Últimas tardes con Teresa [Last Afternoons with Teresa] (1966), which is perhaps the novel where Barcelona’s presence is most decisive. Talking about Pijoaparte’s character, Marsé writes: “He has just left the house, which is part of a beehive of hovels located under the last turn, on a platform hanging on the city: from the road, on approaching it, the sensation of walking towards the abyss.” At that moment my reader’s memory flies to El carrer de les Camèlies [Camelia Street], by Mercè Rodoreda – also published in 1966 – on the day Cecília Ce shacks up with Eusebi in the shanty town: “The hut only had two brick walls; the other ones were made of tin, with pieces of wood and sackcloth stuffed in the chinks.”

The same operation would serve for other cases: Marsé is echoed in Blai Bonet, who is echoed in Vázquez Montalbán, who is echoed in Sagarra, who is echoed in Josep M. Planes, who is echoed in Vila-Matas, who is echoed in Josep Pla, who is echoed in Enrique de Hériz, who is echoed in Marsé… They are different takes, even opposing ones, but the mystery is that they are all mirrored in each other, because the city is a huge kaleidoscope.