Miguel Hernández-Navarro
is participant at
Where is Art Contemporary? The Global Challenge of Art Museums II
Abstract
Invisible Peripheries: Spanish Art, Multiculturalism and Topology
Spanish art has not played a dominant role in recent decades. But neither has it played the subordinate part in the sense of radical alterity. By reason of the time lag caused by the period of Franco’s dictatorship, Spain has always been totally out of step and particularly so with respect to international art. Like Achilles who never manages to catch up with the tortoise in Zeno of Elea’s famous paradox of motion, Spanish art never got to place itself in the emission situation on time. Yet, as a result, neither has it been in the place of the other, of the subaltern’s. Hence, Spanish art is neither ‘one’ nor the ‘other’, and for that reason it is repelled from what Homi Bhabha calls the “third space”. Today, contemporary art seems to unfold within that intermediate space. The big biennials and the art discourse of our present in general attempt to place it in the third space, one which exceeds the sphere of nationality. But in this new central space, those who are neither one thing nor another have absolutely nothing to say. Those who do not occupy these predominant roles, are rejected from the intermediate space where a sort of marginalization of peripheral centrality takes place. This particular case shows that the fundamental problem with Western theories of the subject is the fact that in all of them difference is perfectly defined and delimited, even in hybridization, which is nothing but an aggregate of differences. The problem is we think periphery in topographical terms. It is necessary to do it in topological terms, to think of a non-Euclidean space that 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 without ‘fissuring’ the intercultural map, revealing the synchronic and the diachronic in the same space, answering the need to introduce temporality in 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 centre and periphery.
