| Joan Brossa Novel·la (Novel), 1989 |
| Sculpture | Mixed media |
| 40.5 x 176 x 46 cm. |
 Almost all of Brossa’s objects have a literary content, sometimes explicit, sometimes latent. It is no secret that many of his poems, both visual and verbal, play with language (letters, if not phonemes; the alphabet, certain homophonies…) or with literature. Here, the reference to one of the dominant literary genres, the novel, is or appears to be explicit, although Brossa never worked in this particular literary form. The poet had already played on at least two previous occasions with this same highly specific reference, the substantive ‘novel’. In 1965, in collaboration with Tàpies he made an artist’s book that recounts the life of a character, one of the missions of the classic novel, but it was based on a series of official documents (from birth certificate to death certificate) that were not filled out; in other words, it was a novel without narrative content whose hero was absent from the text, for all that the hypertext framed him. (Ten years after the appearance of the original, Edicions El Mall brought out a small-format facsimile edition.) Later, in 1970 Brossa also made a poem-object entitled ‘Novel’, one of a series of Habitable Poems, which was also in the form of a book, in this case with blank pages, though these bear the traces of sentences written in pencil that have then been erased. In this poem-object from 1989 Brossa once again plays with the text and the hypertext that determine the historical reading of the novel and the semantic field in which it is inscribed. But we can say that here, in contrast to those earlier works in book form, in the conventional physical medium of the novel, the image is tensed by the artist’s intention. Brossa, lover of puns, metaphors and the traces of lost meanings, makes a very literal object, the figurative sense of which can easily be missed. Or not? The work is simple in layout, a helix with a bird in the middle. Surely the immanence of the image and the overlay of the two images are aiming at something in particular, perhaps an allegory of the flight? The helix looks like an aircraft propeller and the bird is in flight. But like his much admired Joan Miró, the titles of many of whose works do not so much explain as subvert the pieces, Brossa contrasts the sculptural game with a title that both suggests and restricts the meaning of the poem-object. A novel? We might suppose that while in the two books Brossa made with the title ‘Novel’ he sought to question the essences of the genre, the ontology of literary narrative as such, in this case there is a double game: one of these is oriented towards the novel proper, the adventure story, and in this possible sense the artist’s enthusiasm for the cinema would not be foreign to this possible sense; the other game seeks to raise a doubt in the viewer. Here, the title and the visual content of the piece would have only a discordant relationship. And Brossa would laugh mischievously at the confusion caused by his piece. Joan M. Minguet |
