Juan Tallón lies, by Pau Arenós


The writer Juan Tallon lies. I tell him when I meet him one morning when it rains in Barcelona like in Santiago de Compostela, but without knowing how to rain. I let go of him abruptly and with a familiarity we don’t have: “Juan: you’re lying and I’m going to tell you about it in an article.” To which he, with his umbrella closed and his trench coat open, replies: “Well, I’ll write a letter to the director.”

The point – serious writers start like this: the point – is that I’ve read ‘Masterpiece’ and it seems to me that the title responds to the content. I say it now and here, before a notary, without having consulted a bookmaker, which is the new oracle: It is one of the books of the year and, great and uninhibited, I also add that of the decade.

The kaleidoscope that the native of Ourense has put together to narrate the (impossible) disappearance of Richard Serra’s sculpture of syncopated title (‘Equal-Parallel:Guernica-Bengasi’) and intimidating weight (38 tons divided into four pieces) is highly complex, both in terms of rhythm and content, in which a piece out of place would have given a blurred, splintered image.

The case is, in addition to being mysterious and shocking, disheartening because the Reina Sofía museum, which was the one who commissioned it and where it was exhibited, used public money to acquire it, that is, from everyone and no one, and I do not think that waste is the minor matter in the gigantic operetta. Transferred to a warehouse –and forgotten by that bureaucracy that manages our pasta and that perhaps would be more careful if it were theirs– one day it went ‘poof’ and was never heard from again.

A series of voices, some real and others imagined, serve Tallón to explain this history of artistic escapism and gives them all the same plausible tone thanks to the the journalist’s job as a mole and the writer’s as a miner. He tells Serra, the cold passion for steel, and he tells the police, junk dealers, dealers, metallurgists, the museum staff… And also the abracadabra history of Macarrón, what a name, the company to whom he left it in deposit and who never paid to guard it.

Driven by the force of the novel, I take advantage of a trip to Madrid to go to the Reina Sofía, mainly because it’s close to the hotel: don’t let Tallón think I’ve tried too hard either. And where there should have been an empty room –that would have been an impressive work of art: nothingness– ‘Equal-Parallel: Guernica-Bengasi’ is inserted. Not the original, which is still missing, but the one that Serra did later as a replacement. That is why I affirm that Tallón is lying (the diligent reader will understand that it is a trick) because the work is there, although I would have to say that the one who hides it is the museum.

On a small sign on the wall: “Equal-Parallel: Guernica-Bengasi. 1986. Hot rolled corten steel”. This murky, solidly murky affair, doesn’t it deserve a clarification? Shouldn’t they explain what happened? What is the point of hiding something that is public, with the 38 tons unaccounted for since 2006 and perhaps turned into razor blades?

I have another question: doesn’t Serra’s act of creating a second ‘original’ rip the word to shreds? Original is not only one and the rest are copies? Doesn’t the simultaneity of originals devalue the creation and leave the viewer with a fool’s face? I insist: it is more honest to expose invisibility.

The room is huge and I am alone. Serra thinks his works considering where he will plant them, so blocks and windows harmonize. I spend a little time to show that I’m interested. Meanwhile, an Asian couple and a European couple: they drive fast, not like me, who I play the expert because I have read a 320-page novel. Disappointed, I thought fans would line up to touch this Serra that doesn’t exist. Analyzed in those terms, I am facing a miracle.

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I take photos, I wander, I listen for the steel to speak to me, I observe the rust stains on the ground, demonstrating the integration of the sculpture in the space. Are these stains an extension of the artistic object, do they have a price, can I step on them? I leave with tons of bewilderment.

I reach the end of the text denouncing. Now, Juan Tallón, protest if you want and write that letter to the editor.


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