Conference paper, Saturday, October 20th, 2007, 6 p.m.
Miguel Hernández – Invisible Peripheries: Spanish Art, Multiculturalism, and Topology
In this text I will analyze one of the most pressing problems of contemporary Spanish art: its lack of internationalization, its practical absence of place in the global system of art. I will observe some of the typical arguments developed by Spanish criticism, and later, enter into problems more general which pertain to the actual functioning of the global system of art. The idea shall be to use the Spanish case as a model demonstrating the maladjustment of global art. Such a model may serve to show us the blind points and shadows of a system that is not as neutral or transparent as it seems. A system such as global art may not deny a modernist consciousness. This particular case illustrates the fundamental problem with Western theories of the subject as being the fact that in all of these, theories define and delimit difference perfectly, even where hybridization occurs, which is nothing but an aggregate of differences. The problem is that we think of periphery in topographical terms. It is rather necessary to examine it in topological terms, to think of a non-Euclidean space, which can take into account the blind spots, the shadows, the slips and the residue; a space where zero is a value. Thinking about the periphery in topological terms would abolish the dichotomy between the One and the Other, or between the One plus the Other. It would take into account weaker identities that are antagonistic in themselves, though without ‘“fissuring” the intercultural map. Likewise, it would reveal the synchronic and the diachronic in the same space, while answering the need to introduce temporality into the negotiation of antagonistic and contradictory elements. Only through a möbian pattern of thought will we be able to find new ways of approaching the relationship between the center and the periphery.
Culture of Complaint
The question concerning the lack of internationalization of Spanish art has become one of the most worrisome problems for Spanish criticism. In fact, criticism has all but formed a philosophy of complaints focusing upon this problem. These complaints or demands concentrate not only on artistic practices, but essentially on the system of art, the Spanish system of art. In 1997, the first of encounter series to reflect on the problematic situation of the Spanish art system took place in Catalonia. The title of this encounter was significant: Impasse (no way out). What was clear to the majority of the critics from the beginning was that the failure of Spanish art on the international scene is not due to a question of quality, but rather to manifest incompetence and the ineffectivity of existing platforms for its promotion and circulation. In accordance, they identified four centers of tension:1 – Museums and art centers:
Their programming responds to certain paralyzed criteria that do not take into consideration the recent advances in historiography and in which “stagnation and stultification are palpable,” above all in the lack of promotion of our art abroad.
2 – Art galleries:
This is a sector that “hobbles”, since it seems Spanish galleries have not figured out how to find a space for themselves in a competitive international market. In most cases, this is because of the incompetence and “lack of aesthetic education” of the people running them, i.e., people who are incapable of sustaining a strong artistic discourse.
3 – Education and fine arts schools:
They seem petrified and stagnant in a system dating from the 19th century, removed from the art theory that they abhor, with little international exchange and an overwhelming lack of interdisciplinary studies, which are essential to produce and understand art these days.
4 – Art criticism:
This sector is lacking solid venues and above all suffering a theoretical and analytical weakness. “To begin with, the level of the critics and the commentators leaves much to be desired;” because of their ignorance of the surrounding reality and because of the obsolete critical procedures they use, unaware of works as essential for contemporary art thought as those by Foster, Owens, Bhabha and many others.
In some way, one could say that with the onset of the new century the situation has begun to change, at least in the last two points, education and criticism, as well as in the emergence of networks of cooperation, though not in the case of cultural policies (which tends to get worse) or the art market. Apart from this, an improvement in the situation at the university can be perceived. A few professors who have studied abroad or who have a wider perspective are now starting to teach classes. Art criticism, too, seems to have taken an important turn for the better. Certain essential works of international criticism have been translated, and a few figures in Spanish criticism, like José Luis Brea, Juan Vicente Aliaga, José Miguel Cortés, Fernando Castro, Estrella de Diego and Anna María Guasch, to mention just a few, hold their own in their arguments and positions when matched against theorists of the stature of Foster, Jones, Krauss, Crimp or Kuspitt. This new optimism, as José Luis Brea points out, is above all due to “the peripheries and the work of their multiplied unities from which a secondary process of auto-genesis will arise, with enormous potential, grown up not in the success of checkbook politics (…) but rather in the work of articulation, criticism and independence that has been feeding the underground rhizome that little by little has been inducing its own entropic quality.” It is in this context that a project like CENDEAC – the center I direct – can be understood. This is a center created in the periphery, removed from the habitual systems of power. A center that somehow forecloses almost in a radical way the former patterns of Spanish thought. The essential idea is that before the impasse caused by the lack of coordination, the only possibility is to bypass, to jump. CENDEAC supports the theory and critique of international art. Cendeac tries to know and to make theory act in real time. Our essential aim is a process of synchronization, of timing the critical and theoretical budgets to approach the complexity of art. Now, and in the same way as CENDEAC, other institutions are being born in the peripheries, directly boosting from there the developments of international art. The system, thus, is somehow healing, recovering. And increasingly it is becoming more difficult to blame the limited success of the Spanish art in the global system upon this system. I am convinced that it is necessary to look for the reasons in another place. In other places. And I find two essential questions that we need to focus our attention on. In the first place, I would like to underline the denigration suffered by the Spanish language in academia, and secondly, the dislocation and lack of place of Spanish art within the contemporary art field-system. Both of these are elements of disconnection.
