I don't have any skill or talent for art but my relatives do or, at least, they did. As a scientist I prefer science but I enjoy art, any kind of art. Really, I am an exception because almost all the members of my family have been artists.
Most people don’t understand modern art. Modern art is something that is red and smells like blue. Do you know how the colour blue smells? If you know, you probably understand what modern art is. Nevertheless, here are some tips to identify modern art. If it hangs on a wall, it’s a painting. If you can walk around it, it’s a sculpture. If you have to finish the script, it’s a modern piece of theatre. The best way to tell if a modern painting is finished is to touch it. If the paint is wet, the work isn’t over; if the paint is dry, it is. Anyway, it’s simple: you only have to enjoy it.
I like going to art events with my family. For instance, I like to go to music concerts with my grandfather. He knows a lot about music. When he was young, he was a composer of contemporary music. He met Philip Glass and others such as John Adams and John Cage. He wrote a lot of works, like “Catastrophe, an Epic Poem for 60 Bagpipes and Cello”, “Concert for Typewriter and Orchestra in C minor” and, his masterpiece “Poem for 25 Tenors, a Big Mezzo-soprano and a Chorus of Cats”. Really impressive. But it was never understood.
My mother is an artist, too. When she was young she lived as a hippie. She listened to psychedelic rock, practised the sexual revolution (with my father, I guess), and used drugs such as cannabis, LSD and mushrooms to reach what she called an altered state of consciousness. She also participated in lots of happenings, especially in those that required nudity. As you know, a happening is a performance where the public participate in an active way and there is not a boundary between the artists and the audience. You know how the thing starts but not how it is going to finish. Even today we continue practicing this type of performance art at home: we have family happenings very often.
My father was a silent poet. His entire world was inside him and, for sure, it was a colourful one. He never spoke much. I remember a conversation with him, probably the last one, when I was a child and he was painting at the edge of the river, like the impressionist painters used to do, watching the ships pass through. I asked him ‘Dad, how do boats float?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. I then asked, ‘How do fish breathe?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘Why is the sky blue?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘You don’t mind if I ask you all these questions, do you?’ ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘If you don’t ask questions how will you ever learn anything?’ He was a wise and a silent man. When he passed away we didn't notice until dinner.
I am very fond of opera because of my aunt. She was a very famous soprano singer. As you know, opera is that kind of theatre where someone gets stabbed in the back and instead of bleeding, he sings. My aunt looked like a Picasso model, she had a sardine face and crossed eyes, her nose was long, thin and crooked and she was flat-chested, but she really sang very well. She had quite a range at the lower end of the scale. Because of that she was known as the deep C diva.
Finally, I’ll talk about my uncle, the fastest author I know. He wrote a five-hundred-page novel in two weeks about the place where he is living now. He did it by using a technique called automatic writing, used by James Joyce in Ulysses, for instance. The work turned out to be a success, especially for students of psychology and psychiatry. They all are very interested in my uncle's experiences; he is the oldest inmate in the asylum.
If I had had talent enough, I would have liked to be a musician. I love music the most, especially 70s and 80s music. Unfortunately, as I have said, I don't have any skill or talent for art. By the way, last night I had a strange dream about this. I had died and I was on a stage where a lot of instruments were set up. A door opened and Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, John Lennon and Otis Redding came in. All of them picked up instruments and started to tune them up. I walked up to Jimi Hendrix and asked him: “This is heaven, isn't it?” “Heaven?” Jimi said, “Do you think you are in heaven?” And at that moment Karen Carpenter came onto the stage, took her seat at the front and said, “O.K. guys, let's start with Close to You, one, two, three…” I woke up in a sweat.
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