Grau-Garriga and the Maverick Virtue
Sociological Comments on Valverde's Question
In 1976, Howard Becker, the most influential American sociologist of art, elaborated a typology of the social profiles of artistic creators, distinguishing between the figure of the integrated professional and the maverick. Integrated professionals were those artists who had absorbed the various formal and informal, practical and discursive conventions of the art world in which they operated, turning them into personal skills useful for functioning and gaining recognition within it. In contrast, the maverick, the nonconformist, was a creator who, having fully integrated the knowledge and capabilities inherent in established artistic practice and having achieved a good position within the personal and professional networks that structure the field, soon embarked on a creative course that confronted the universe of conventions on which this field was based, resulting in their progressive marginalization 1. Becker suggested the example of Charles Ives, a legendary early 20th-century American composer, orthodoxly trained at Yale and well-socialized in that prestigious environment of the North American music world, but whose markedly experimental production soon challenged some of the most basic conventions of the musical world of the time, both discursive and material. The resistance and hostility that his musical experimentation immediately aroused in the established musical world condemned his music to ostracism for decades, strongly marginalizing him until his music was recovered and celebrated as visionary toward the end of his life.
Grau-Garriga fits well into the figure of the maverick. His training at the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts ensured his assimilation of the skills of the artistic trade. His trajectory during the subsequent decade, until the mid-sixties, when his French learning experience with Lurçat and his innovative commitment to the artistic renewal of tapestry attracted the main Catalan artists of his generation, reveals his full integration into the artistic medium of those years. The following decade actually overflows the usual profiles of the maverick figure, for in the context of the great boom tapestry experienced at the time, Grau-Garriga became an international reference for that movement, achieving significant notoriety. His work and proposals found resonance with the main Spanish artists of the time, from Picasso to Miró and Tàpies, who were also seduced by the tapestry renewal that he championed, and he also received significant professional and institutional recognition (participation in three successive Lausanne Contemporary Tapestry Biennials and the São Paulo Biennial, incorporation into significant galleries in Paris and New York, a retrospective exhibition in Houston and subsequently in Los Angeles). But shortly thereafter, his visibility began to rapidly decline, ties with galleries were lost, and his artistic practice was persistently marginalized. Despite some limited and occasional recoveries in subsequent decades, mainly abroad, the visibility of his work would not truly recover until the last years, after his death.
The marginalization Grau-Garriga suffered for decades, especially in Spain, and his current recovery find their most natural explanation in the radical loss of centrality experienced by textile creation in the contemporary art world at the end of the 1970s and its dazzling revitalization and revaluation in the last decade. But in his case, marginalization is not solely explained by the general shift of attention in the artistic world toward other realms and creation styles; it also significantly responds to the specific nature of his artistic practice. It is the ostracism typical of the maverick: the estrangement resulting from questioning established conventions and the rejection this elicits in the artistic medium.
As highlighted by American curator Elissa Auther, the international textile renewal movement of the 1960s, known as Fiber Art, with its common practice of hand weaving, questioned one of the most fundamental dichotomies of the modern artistic order: the opposition between “art” and “craft” 2. This was one of the challenges it posed and one of the reasons for its exclusion from the Western canon of contemporary art. But in the specific case of Grau-Garriga, his most characteristic transgressions proved even more disruptive. His artistic practice, intersected by textile, questioned several other well-established boundaries and orders of great practical significance. The origin of his textile practice, to begin with, stemmed from the tradition of tapestry, in which there was a well-defined code of elaboration patterns and a clear division of labor between artist and weaver. The disruption he initiated of this scheme, assuming the material creation of the artistic object and transforming it, violated the codes of the craft practice of weaving and simultaneously dismantled the traditional formula of artisan-artist collaboration. Like Charles Ives, who introduced sharp dissonances and snippets of popular music, or strange polytonal developments in his works, Grau-Garriga integrated into his tapestries the most diverse materials and garments, or turned them three-dimensional. And just as Ives composed for unusual instrumental ensembles, challenging the organization of the musical world, Grau-Garriga created his tapestries himself, or with his assistants, making the standardized work of the weaver and the merely designing intervention of the authoring artist obsolete. Moreover, Grau-Garriga's creative imagination did not respect boundaries between tapestry and painting. His textile inspiration always transited between these two genres in both directions, deconstructing and hybridizing them at the same time, radically. This is his second characteristic transgression, a transgression of similar significance to the previous one surely, but still very little recognized and appreciated.
The subversion of ingrained conventions in the artistic world leads to the rejection and marginalization of the maverick, and this effect is accentuated when it concerns conventions regarding the classifications that structure that world. Because taxonomies are always the most powerful and sacred conventions in any social medium, as sociology and anthropology have argued since Durkheim's times, they serve to underpin the values of things and the positions of different groups. Their questioning or violation elicits the deepest rejections and often gives rise to public purification rituals 3. To the extent that Grau-Garriga progresses in his transgressions, he encounters the incomprehension and disdain of the artistic medium, which ultimately results in his exclusion from the institutional canon. His strictly textile explorations, when they go beyond the classical parameters, provoke the reticence not only of traditionalist tapestry artisans but also of a part of the innovative-oriented artistic sector, which feels comfortable maintaining the dichotomy between the weaver's instrumental facet and the artist's expressive and authorial facet 4. As for working within painting parameters, as it increasingly became contaminated with textile elements, it similarly led to a spiral of perplexity and reserve, well reflected in Valverde's critical consideration of the taxonomic problems often surrounding it, hindering its proper understanding and evaluation.
But the distancing implied by marginalization can also be positive, in the end, for it has the virtue of liberating the artist from the multiple constraints entailed by accommodating the expectations and demands of the artistic medium, which exert intense pressure on the integrated professional to moderate their impulses for change and exploration. The maverick, on the contrary, can delve deeply into their creative commitment and thus radicalize their innovative contribution. It is the virtue of the maverick, the one that characterized Charles Ives, and the one we can also find in the case of Grau-Garriga.
Arturo Rodríguez Morató
Professor of Sociology of Culture and the Arts at the University of Barcelona
1 Howard S. Becker. Art Worlds. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982.
2 Elissa Auther. “Classification and Its Consequences. The Case of 'Fiber Art'", American Art, 16: 3, pp. 2-9. Fall 2002.
3 Mary Douglas. Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Pelican, 1970.
4 As an example of the official endorsement that scheme receives at that time, which can also be seen as a public ritual of purification, it can be observed that in 1980 it is the weaver Carola Torres, who had created a large number of tapestries and carpets from cardboard designs by Saura, Tàpies, Chillida, Feito, Guinovart, Caballero, Millares, and other various artists who were friends of her husband, the influential art critic of Triunfo, José María Moreno Galván, who receives the National Prize for Plastic Arts for the "creation of tapestries," this being the only occasion on which this type of award was granted.