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supermarket and kiosk as channels for circulating its
brand. The launch of this international style franchise,
somewhat in the style of Benetton or Taschen, deploying
a major publishing campaign to nourish it with this
silly little game, had a few surprises in store. The curator
of the project himself was amazed that all the curators
contacted had not hesitated to agree to take part in
the competition. Many of them work towards a critical
culture, but it seems that this proposal, so light-hearted,
came as a relief from the seriousness of their more
formal approaches. This was an invitation to a party
and clearly outside working hours, so it did not seem
a moment for antagonism and controversy. Moreover
the party promised succulent dishes that had to
be tried some time. It seems that among the artists
selected, over 130 in total, there were some for whom
the game was a little facile. They were to be included
in a recreational, informative archive, a manual for
art professionals. And yes, there were some artists
for whom the invitation seemed a rather mundane
exercise and if they were not accustomed to accepting
invitations to the embassy, commercial receptions or
the privileges of officialdom, what were they doing
at this party? As far as F.X. Archive is concerned the
invitation came from Víctor del Río, with whom we were
working on a project at the Museo Patio-Herreriano,
and we all had the feeling that we were gatecrashing
a party that was not, of course, for us. A certain
intellectual laziness – curricular requests, advertising
explanations, door-to-door sales, etc. – usually keeps
us at a distance from this kind of affair, but on this
occasion banality beckoned us to play.
That was how F.X. Archive decided to let all those
art curators into our own Files. Particularly this group
of curators, in gratitude for the effort they were making
to help advance the work of radical artists the length
and breadth of the world. The problem was to give
these Files a certain entity, since however much the
entries of F.X. Archive share a logic of meaninglessness,
a little like How I Wrote Certain of My Books by
Raymond Roussel, it is still ruled pathologically by a
certain regime. The game principle, finding homophony
between the iconoclastic image or event and the
meanings of the term or entry that was to name it
from the broad field of the modern aesthetic project,
had to be fulfilled to the letter with that paranoid drift
that is peculiar to it and without which its taxonomy
could not even enter the realm of ‘non sense’. A first
recommendation seemed to take us down the road
of political commissars, since many of the images
and events of political iconoclasm in Spain, especially
those close to the war and revolution of 1936, are
peopled with that martial figure: the political commissar
confiscating the belongings of a church, the political
commissar reproving a group of anarchists pillaging
an ecclesiastical archive, etc.
In a book by Giuliana di Febo, Ritos de guerra
y de victoria en la España franquista, we found the
keys in which our taxonomy would develop. In a way
the iconoclastic event had mounted the propaganda
war in our civil conflict to such an extent that those
practices had been legitimised as elements for
constructing a theology of evil. The mutilated wooden
figures, the churches blown up with dynamite, the
forbidden rites were more important in the war of
clashing ideas than, for example, the murder of Catholic
priests or the different ways in which the practitioners
of the Roman religion were branded. This theological
scandal brought us a chain of reparatory acts, of Marian
enthronements, of restorations of spaces for worship,
which made it a fundamental element of the political
ritual of the Franco regime to make its victory a crushing
one. Weeping for the dead priests had some element
of mourning, and however much God had recompensed
them for their martyrdom with a comfortable sojourn
in heaven, it was not with funerals that their triumph
had to be celebrated. And although in the ‘bible’
of the Historia de la persecución religiosa en España
1936-1939 by Bishop Antonio Montero Moreno less
space is given over to what the author calls the
‘martyrdom of things’, in the real propaganda war
the victimisation of the nationalists took very different
paths. Amongst other things, because the working
classes, to whom this advertising rhetoric was
addressed, found the popular figures of Christs and
Virgins extraordinarily pleasant, so closely linked were
they to ritual celebrations of pagan origin and popular
culture that went far beyond the laws of official religion;
far more so, of course, than did the priests and other
soldiers of God, who bore a long history of curses and
suspicions on their shoulders. The historian Francisco
Espinosa has shown how in lower Andalusia, where
the civil war was little more than a coup d’état lasting
a few days followed by a brutal repression where the
absence of an armed opponent turned it into a bloody
concentration camp, the religious images destroyed
in the few days’ resistance that followed the military
uprising on 18 July served as a symbolic compensation
for the thousands of murders committed in the
repression against leftist elements, the ‘reds’ who were
systematically eliminated.The current debate about
the historical memory continues to fluctuate in such
a way that the abundant accounts of deaths and
murders, the huge figures that accuse the fascists of
ever greater crimes of repression, are compensated
by the fact that in this or that village such and such
a Christ of the Waters or a Virgin of the Greater Sorrows
was burned.
Perhaps before we begin to point out the kinship
between that reparatory ideology and the practices
of art curators, who are called ‘commissars’ in Spanish,
we should mention the complete list of art experts
who came to swell the entries of F.X. Archive, especially
to show that in the photo captions that went with
the name of each of them and the corresponding
photograph that this is not an isolated incident and
that the intellectual operation of redemption took many
forms and had many causes. The list that follows gives
the entries in italics together with the corresponding
text that describes the image: a complete set of samples
of reading files that give us some idea of the
phenomenon.
Adriano Pedrosa, Religious and military emotion
of the procession of the Corpus in Aguilar de Campoo.
A felony put right and arms surrender to God. Agustín
Pérez Rubio, The children of Serrano Suñer, with the
standard of the Heart of Jesus: ‘I shall reign in Spain.’
Antonio Zaya, The Falangist capuchin, father... who
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