Oscar Tusquets talks with Sandra Ollo about the book Pasando a Limpio published by the publishing house Acantilado

Sandra Ollo
To start, let's talk about the t title of the book, Pasando a limpio, which gives us dio some head-scratchers. Putting este such a wild gerund, without any explanation, hurt a bit from a grammatical point of view, but it made all the sense in the world. That's why, as with so many other things you've always raised, I'm not going to say that I'll compromise, but in the end I'll join them, because they all have a meaning. Although sometimes you try to dress them up with eccentricity and ingenious ideas, they all end up having a very serious m reason and they are formulated in a way that justifies the decision. Although you explain it quite clearly in the introduction, why does este book, and not others, "passando a limpio"? What exactly does pasar limpio mean to you?

Oscar Tusquets
HAY two reasons why it is titled Pasando a limpio. One of them is that I like to say that, although it is difficult cil to define, an artist is "a person who happens to clean". The feeling that a madeleine reminds you of childhood is algo that thousands of people have had, but solo one of them decided that this could be ser an artistic material, that it was worth writing and that este a feeling ser was shared: Marcel Proust happened to clear a shared feeling. The case of Proust ser was the m of course, but I think it works in many cases, like, for example, in the painting of Caspar David Friedrich. The second reason is that I'm at an age where I think it's time to start getting clean. HAY scattered ideas that should already be specified in a text. For example, what hay on the cover of a book? A photo where there are drawings made by hand, not from a computer, paper models mach is, a pie de king, a fantastic model made of wood. What for? To get to making the teapot of a game by t is what I designed for Alessi ; let's say that this is what comes out on the cover of that clean pass; that is to say, in este case the sketches, plans, las models, etc. This is the reason for the book, which then touches on other topics, but the whole book tries to pass clean.

SO
With this premise, do you consider that what you expose in these articles, in these essays, is a distilled m thought? Pasar a limpio is to distill a little, to elaborate a lot.

OT
Yes, my text is trying to pass clean, let's say. Make understandable even some muy architectural topic, like ser can talk about Benidorm, the Malaparte house or a perspective topic, questions in a certain sense quite professional, but which I pretend are of interest to non-professionals.

SO
Starting from this idea , we delve into the book in a content that, as you put it, I liked very much from the beginning. I think we both always saw it like this: introducing great themes, although in the end I think you hide a little and make a selection. For example, you are looking for an excuse to talk about the Malaparte house, about Antonio López, about paintings that have accompanied you ado and that haunt your thoughts throughout your life to talk about great topics. I really liked the choice of the sections that head those topics and that summarize them, the choice of las quotes and authors that make up your vademecum, who are your intellectual, artistic, architectural lighthouses, and also that dialogue you establish with them, and the dialogue that some of them establish with the others, and even for las contradictions, las paradoxes and las jokes that we find. I would like you to explain a little about this compilation, and si you also have the feeling that you are giving voice, that you are hiding behind all these great characters, because you even put yourself among them, you camouflage yourself among them to talk about the main themes of the book — beauty, construction, life, art — m as far as what we could consider m as anecdotal: a picture, Benidorm, a building...

OT
Yes, this is because, in a folder on my computer, I was placing various suggestive quotes. He has reached an age where I don't want to be convinced, but I do want to be suggested. I don't have to agree with all las quotes — hay some, like MIES van der Rohe's, with which I absolutely disagree—, but what algo would suggest to me to be able to answer. Once I had all the las quotes archived, it seemed to me that they could set a theme in motion and allow me to have a dialogue with the authors — from Socrates to Groucho MARX — because they all seem muy relevant to me, they have suggested many things to me. LAS quotes focus on memory, creativity, art, beauty..., topics that are then developed in concrete examples, obviously.

SO
Let's start, for example, with beauty. We found one of las phrases that m likes, by Jorge Wagensberg that says: "The beauty looks like the truth, it does not exist in an absolute version, solo in its valid version". This is muy good!

OT
HAY several quotes from Wagensberg. Although he m was in the field of science and I m was in the field of art, we were both very interested in the other discipline. His loss is irreparable and it is true that in the book I had to censor a little, because there were m quotes from him that interested me. This quote is really fantastic.

SO
Among las quotes about beauty, hay another from David Hockney, another of your references, who says: "A lot of people, artists in particular, hate las pretty paintings, but I've never met anyone who doesn't like a pretty face." Why do the 20th and 21st centuries seem to fear beauty so much?

OT
When I say that I despise contemporary art — algo that now muy little I've heard Fran Lebowitz say, another referent despite not hay making any reference to him in the book —, I always think that I can't generalize that much, because David Hockney, Antonio López, Lucien Freud and Gerhard Richter are very interesting to me. I like what David Hockney paints, and also that he likes painting. He is a contemporary painter who likes painting, which is not muy usual, and who has written books about the m ágica lantern and a lot of things m ás. And yes, this quote is muy good: contemporary art despises beauty.

SO
Why is it scary? HAY a wonderful poem by William Carlos Williams that says that men fear beauty m rather than death. Why?

OT
Beauty has a tremendous force, it is a fundamental reason for life, not solo for a cultured muy class, but it manifests itself in all las arts, or in different bodies, in different people, in a vital and captivating way. Beauty can be observed in the fiesta de los toros—to put another conflicting theme on the table—, in a picture, in a book, in a person, in a dance, in a collective event, in a landscape. Regarding the last este , I think that in the book I show that the beauty of a landscape is a cultural fact; that is, until the word 'landscape' was invented, which is relatively recent, and artists began to be interested in it, nature was something to live by, to exploit, but not algo for aesthetic enjoyment.

SO
And in architecture, is beauty a premise, an end for you? In his works of architecture or in the design of objects, the architect has to combine many things...

OT
In reference to design—architecture is design, design of buildings—I am often asked what I prefer, use or beauty, and I answer that the question is wrong, because neither architecture nor design are sculptures: they are an object or a building in use. SI the use of este object becomes unbearable, si the teapot burns, si returns the coffee or the t is and stains the tablecloth - makes the drip, as the Italians say-, or si is unbalanced. SI the house is wrongly oriented, si the hot sun enters from the west, and not from the east, I'll finish odi walking. Therefore, beauty is linked to its use; in this I am muy traditional. The photogenicity of an object, of a house, is one thing, and beauty is another.

SO
I am not particularly good at architecture, although I like it, I follow it and I try to understand it, but it seems to me that we are in a time when there are a lot of sculptor architects, or who pretend ser m to be sculptors than architects. I know that t you usually go in the opposite direction...

OT
I am directly descended from José Antonio Coderch and, therefore, something that does not work, even if it is photogenic, does not satisfy me; neither does si age badly, because the dignified aging of architecture seems to me to be a very important virtue. I think that the drunkenness of formalism, what we used to call "formalism" when we were young llam , form for form's sake, died a few years ago with Zaha Hadid and people of style, because they cared little how people lived in their buildings. What mattered to them was that the renderings or las photographs would go around the world. But hey, I've become muy a bit apocalyptic. They are equ evocos that happen, and also the hay in architecture.

SO
A chapter of the book deals with art, life and science. Before another quote from Wagenberg, hay one from Aristotle in which he says that, according to the intention of an artist, hay three options, three vital postures: deal with what reality is, what reality looks like and, finally, what reality owes ser . And then Wagenberg comes and says: "But I've never met someone who doesn't like a pretty face; the greatness of science is ser capable of understanding without needing to understand and the greatness of art is ser capable of intuiting without needing to understand". I think that this statement is as suggestive as it is true, and I think that t ú conjugas in architecture — a discipline that I think is on the border between art, technical t and science — all of them in a balanced way that reaches excellent heights. What is it that you love m ? You are muy intuitive and este the book is proof of that; your intuitions almost evolve into theories, or have you prioritized m the knowledge of what intuition has to do without?

OT
Knowledge can be acquired, and studying helps; instead, intuition does not. When you receive an architectural commission, you encounter a location, a landscape and a pre-existing architecture, guidelines that limit you, but in design you are often so free that, to have this intuition, you can spend days and days going over it and never finish. It's not about working m as. That's not how las ideas are passed down; este is the creator's challenge: no por mucho trabajar will reach it. Pablo Picasso already said it: " SI bequeaths you the muse, the inspiration, that catches you working".

SO
And in writing?

OT
Well, the truth is that I didn't start writing until I was fifty. For m í, writing las memoirs of the projects was torture. I loved drawing, but writing was quite a sacrifice. When I was that age, meditating on why vacationers toasted in the sun and instead civilized people had built civilization in the shade, I wrote a good article, a chapter entitled "Elogio encendido de las sombras". I showed it to Beatriz de Moura, the manager of Tusquets Editores, who told me dijo : " SI stay for este camino, we publish you". From then on, I write because I want to win friends (they say this phrase is from Gabriel García M árquez, but I say he copied it, because I said it one day in Bocaccio many years ago). They tell me that reading me is like going to dinner with me. Because of the books I edited and sold, I had to go to dinner with about 50,000 people! It's not bad!

SO
I think you were muy intuitive when writing, when developing las theories, and that you even suffer a little. When we were preparing the book, at some point we said: "Oscar, this is great, dale a turn m ás, don't be afraid". From the initial intuition until you formulate it in writing, do you have to work on it much?

OT
This is a defect that Eduardo Mendoza—the proofreader of mis primeros libros—always made me notice: that I present quite complex ideas in a casual way, which seems good to me, but also a little accelerated. I try to correct myself, work on it m ás, always thinking that the reader has no reason to know things, that I have to give him clues, that he has no reason to know who, for example, the Australian architect Glenn Murcutt is. This is algo that the young people already have it solved, because when I give a lecture and say, for example, that the last architect who dijo important things was Louis I. Kahn, I see a few m candles light up in the room, they type in Louis I. Kahn and they already know who it is, algo I think it's great.

SO
Worse ser was that they wouldn't even want to know who he is.

OT
I am an absolute supporter of Wikipedia. I would like that in mis texts there was nothing like hay in Wikipedia, that they were an alternative. Nothing is wrong with cil , because the purely informative nowadays can be found very easily. Making a purely informative book—that is, a purely informative text about who Antonio López is—doesn't make much sense, but it does explain how he is in intimacy, how I met him, his hobbies, etc.

SO
In your essay you explain many things about his way of painting, the perspective, the difficulty of painting from memory and there you did an extraordinary job of explaining complex t aspects to readers like me.

OT
Here I'm a bit against Antonio López and David Hockney, who are two references for m , but when I met Antonio again, he wasn't angry. He makes it appear that he hasn't read the book, but I believe that my text has everything: from a scientific point of view fico : overcoming the conical perspective—as Antonio claims—is contradictory. For this I had to introduce in este the plan and drawings chapter that I made with the computer; it's a little complex chapter. Architects are interested m in these topics. Miguel Usandizaga has done an analysis of the perspective in LAS Meninas de Velázquez, and Lluís Clotet and I have gone there contradicting things and reaffirming others; He has collected these comments and published them, including a summary in The New York Times. SOLO an architect could unravel ar las mistakes of great historians about LAS Meninas.

SO
But do you think that such an in-depth analysis is really needed to enjoy the picture?

OT
It is not essential. What I don't care about LAS Meninas is who is such an infanta and who is the pensioner, what the guides explain. How much is the picture worth, who did it belong to or who are its characters, I don't care at all. However, I am interested in how the luz falls and how the door that opens at the bottom cannot be ser real, because in the plan of the building you can see that there hay is a staircase and that door could not be there. Why did Velázquez put it there? Obviously, discovering the internal structure of a book or something else doesn't unravel why it excites, but si you're immersed in similar projects este intrigues, it's nice.

SO
HAY a phrase from Winston Churchill about innovation in art, because he was a painter...

OT
...and he wasn't doing so badly.

SO
I have not seen his paintings, but I have read his books on painting.

OT
I painted landscapes.

SO
He painted landscapes and, in addition, prescribed painting as algo almost mandatory for health and mental well-being. With such tremendous vehemence, Churchill said: "Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd, and without innovation it is a corpse."

OT
In the book hay a series of sentences beginning with that of MIES van der Rohe, who says, m more or less: "You can't go forward looking back", to which I reply that so much art has been made looking back, starting with Marcel Proust and Francis Scott Fitzgerald; also in architecture, in painting and in other disciplines, but I put this quote from Churchill; I was glad that it was from him.

SO
Poor Churchill always shows up. In any matter, always hay someone who quotes Churchill. On the other hand, I would like us to talk about the chapter "The king is effectively naked and muchos niños lo vemos así" and about contemporary art, although I don't know si if you like it, because I know that the topic especially annoys you. I find it wonderful that you try to unravel ar in such a cold way what is going on in the art market.

OT
The book became radicalized towards the end. T you suggested that the last chapters be titled "Things that annoy me". As always hago fall to mis editors, well they spoil me and they love me, I did such a thing. SI we consider contemporary art this way, Jeff Koons and Haruki Murakami annoy me. I'm with Tom Wolfe when he writes about contemporary art, and recently I saw the series of interviews with Fran Lebowitz by the film director Martin Scorsese. At one point, Scorsese asks her si hay some art, some work of art that makes her nervous or doesn't interest her, and she thinks about it and says that contemporary pl hay art algo worries her. When hay has an auction and they bring out a painting by Picasso, everyone is respectfully silent, but when the auction goes up and it comes at an exorbitant price, everyone starts applauding; that is to say, they applaud the economic value of the painting, not the painting itself. How much is a Koons worth today? Bullfighting can be attacked for reasons that I respect, but it is the only art in which si one is fraudulent and one's life is at stake, because in the first long shift at the exit of the bullring the morlaco would impitonar Koons and send him to las stands. This is a respectable art.

SO
We are already in the "Things that annoy me" section. They annoy you las ill-conceived hotel rooms, although I understand that not all, and also the lighting of historical monuments, air transport...

OT
All air transport. I dare with Ikea, although hay a part that m interests me quite a bit from a literary point of view: spending two hours in Ikea.

SO
It's almost an Ikea user manual, isn't it? How to enter a couple and that the couple survive. The epigraph of the chapter "Phobias" that I love is "Signaling for those who already know".

OT
ESTE chapter begins with a sign that was on Avinguda Meridiana—I don't know si still exists—that said "to Nena Casas on Via Favencia", and I thought that for someone arriving from Stockholm, este was the first thing they would see when entering Barcelona. "Llobregat", "Besós" is for quienes ya lo sabemos. In the case of Venice, which is diabolical, there was a project on how to signal the city, which, like everything Italians do, began with a learned analysis. That has ended in papers that say "A Rialto" with an arrow that shopkeepers stick with rubber tape, because they are tired of tourists entering las shops to ask how to go somewhere.

SO
In another of the headings of "Fobias" appears the bike lane and a phrase that says: "The problem is that we need imaginative solutions". Are we talking about este topic?

OT
I wrote an article in the newspaper La Vanguardia entitled "Traicionando a Cerdà" which already touches on the este topic. M later, on a radio program they locked me up so that I could fight with someone from the City Council, one of those people I like muy a little. However, I think that Barcelona has a great virtue: the Eixample, a plan in which, against all the architects of the moment—and their monumentalist, Haussmannian projects, with perspectives like las from PAR ís—, Cerdà made an American project, a neutral project, where all las streets are the same, all las sidewalks are the same, all have trees and five meters wide and, then, you can put the church next to the lupanar, algo what Mario Gaviria said referring to las advantages of Benidorm. I think this is a huge advantage of this city, an advantage that we are charging based on specializing las streets, a tremendous mistake in my opinion. As far as imagination is concerned, I am talking about an urban planner, Cerdà, who proposed to mix everything in a plot. I propose: speed m maximum 30 km/h, with all left turns allowed, all with double direction, that bicycles and pedestrians can circulate, like in India; with the specialization of the bike lane, the pedestrian, the handicapped, they cannot do it; best mixed. We already know that the average speed in a city does not exceed 20 km/h; por tanto, let all the world go slowly, but all the world mixed up. I think that today Barcelona is on a totally wrong and painful path. For example, my sister-in-law has been unable to paint for almost a year because she was hit by a bicycle on the sidewalk, and her leg was injured eca . They say that these accidents count little from a statistical point of view; It may be so, but obviously these are frequent accidents and not being able to walk calmly, I think it's a step back.

SO
To finish, what a good thing you say about "tolerad mi intolerance" by Jules Renard!

OT
A friend recommended Renard to me and I was dazzled. It is the pinnacle of freedom of thought and creativity. In the book hay there are quite a few quotes from Renard, another character I had to censor so that m wouldn't appear in the quotes, because they are all very good... "No hay anything m is bourgeois that has the fear of appearing bourgeois". Anthological! I ask that you tolerate my intolerance, please.

SO
I think it has become very clear why hay has to read Pasando a limpio.

OT
I really have to thank how the book is edited. Editing with Acantilado is a delight, since the style correction, which is done with much tolerance, because cada one has his way of writing. The only criticism tica would make of you is that you don't publish it digitally, but we would get into another topic... Attacking the paper book in a book from Acantilado is really a pike in Flanders. A pleasure.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]