SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT



We have always been told that an image is worth a thousand words, but whoever f irst uttered this phrase did not take into account the thousands and thousands of paintings, dra-wings, photographs or films that inspired each of them. Words, words, words... 

By: Carlota Suárez García 

@carlotasuarezgarcia 

Foto: Marco Govel 

In Rod Stewart’s version of these seven words – a picture is worth a thousand words – ‘Every Picture Tells a Story’ – ‘I couldn’t quote you no Dickens, Shelley or Keats / Cause it’s all been said before / Make the best out of the bad, just laugh it off / didn’t have to come here anyway, so remember / Every picture tells a story, don’t it?’ –, the lyrics say that he couldn’t quote those authors Dickens, Shelley, or Keats. Because music, like painting, photography, or cinema, is nourished by stories, which will then be covered by chords, pigments, or light, but what is the basic unit of those stories, but the word. Word, word, word ...

Most of the artists I admire, know or whose work I have studied are self-taught, but if they had been trained in the Faculty of Fine Arts, someone would have listed the six disciplines that throughout history have been defined as ‘arts’: architecture; sculpture; painting; music; declamation; and dance. This list must be memorized and it becomes part of the exams. The teacher would add cinema to that list for students to write in their notebooks with tight lettering, and it is possible, that someone would speak. Word, word, word... 

This sensitive student, a future academy artist, would ask about the concept of ‘declamation’ as art, and the teacher, more theoretical than ever, would answer that declamation encompasses poetry. I could broaden this explanation, adding that music includes theatre and then I wonder: doesn’t literature make literature one of those fine arts that strive to count as seven? I count eight, I give you my word as a word collector. Word, word, word... 

But I’m just a humble writer who knows little or nothing of numbers, so I’m going to leave aside the fact that the arts are now reduced to such an inaccurate figure, and I will just claim the suppression of the ‘and’ in that title with the subject name that is ‘art and literature’. On the one hand the image, the music, the volume, the light and on the other, the word. Word, word, word... 

I remember a study trip I took with my classmates to Madrid in the mid 1990s. I was at that age where the plans behind the teachers’ backs weigh more than those that they carefully programmed to feed our young minds. It was one of the latter, howe-ver, that brought me the most stimulating experience of my life on that trip. I refer to an exhibition at the Prado Museum, entitled The Literary World in 19th-Century Painting. It goes without saying that I concealed my interest, not wanting to look like a nerd to those companions who made obscene gestures before Rubens’ nymphs or who consulted the clock every two steps. 

Years later, I would regret looking at the paintings out of the corner of my eye or having made a vertical reading of the texts of Carnero, Peláez or José Luis Díez that completed the collection. Nevertheless, out of it all, I captured the fact that a dizzying increase in the daily press in the nineteenth century, as well as the mass translations of literary works, made it possible for artists to know the work of their foreign colleagues, inevitably influencing the works of all of them. From here, I learnt a message that has been with me ever since. Words are bridges and a source of transformation. The word is art. Word, word, word ... 

I conclude this brief tantrum, asking for the inclusion of literature in that list of seven, assuming it as the eighth art, if not the first, and thus ignoring that ‘and’ curse that separates literature from art, as if that were possible. I cease here, for today, my defence of the word. Word, word, word ...