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consecrate Spain to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a
typically French devotion, eagerly fostered by the
Jesuits in the nineteenth century and flourishing
between the two Vatican councils. The monument,
erected at the geographical centre of Spain, fourteen
kilometres from the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, thus became
the symbol of the militant, politicised Catholicism –
sectarian, partly because of the sectarianism of its
enemies – of Spain in the first third of the twentieth
century. At the outbreak of the civil war the monument
was demolished by the militias, but the nationalists
reconquered it during the march on Madrid; the ‘Red
Hill’, thus christened by their enemies, was the field of
the first battle of the raw XII International Brigade
and the object of several attacks by the Líster Brigade;
in his memoirs he has the good taste to call the hill
by its real name. But the amputee hill would remain as
a nationalist advance party until the end of the war.
Yu Yeon Kim, Restoration of worship and political
propaganda were exponents of the religious content
of the ideological confrontation during the years of
the Republic and the war. Yuko Hasegawa, But the
soldiers of Spain did not take long to arrive and hoist
the Spanish flag on the rubble of the monument to the
heart of Jesus destroyed on the Cerro de los Ángeles.
Iwona Blazwick, 7-4-1939. Madrid. Via crucis on Good
Friday. The Christ of the Victory of Wonders is carried
from the church of San José to the Puerta de Alcalá, for
a pontifical mass before the ‘altar of the Fallen’.
Of course the taxonomic operation was carried out
in that dreamlike state where chance blends with the
limited data arriving from reality. The little or the lot
we knew about those art professionals did not yield
enough to people a field of the modern radical project.
The inclusion of many of these names was due to the
dynamic of the game itself and their agreeing to take
part in Files was the game that opened its way into
F.X. Archive Later, once the final work exhibited in the
book Files, published by MUSAC in 2004, had been
seen, the rules of the game themselves were confirmed.
The radical nature of the works shown had a clear
iconoclastic intention – pornographic hymns, violent
accusations, a taste for the grotesque, convulsive
gestures, textual provocation, etc. – which F.X. Archive
obviously did not escape. As the art historians José
Hernández Díaz, Antonio Sánchez Corvacho or Manuel
Sánchez Camargo did in their day by placing themselves
at the service of that artistic ‘otherness’ signified by the
mutilation of religious images or the profanation of
places of worship, the work of the contemporary art
expert consists of legitimising and redeeming those
same practices so that they will emerge from the dark,
marginal space where they are done and enter the
sacrosanct space of the museum. That experience of
redemption does not necessarily require identification
of the mediator with the work and its message. Whether
with the aim of constructing an archive of evil or a
critical museum, the epistemological relation with
the works is the same and it undergoes a process of
semiological re-education which adapts it to the new
space where it is to be shown. These operations use
the same instruction manual whatever the technology
applied. In this context of redemption the circulation
of these works fails resoundingly, since in the expectation
to which they are reduced any utility is lacking, any
common use these productions might be given. The
effect they cause is religious, it needs spectators who
are believers or are prepared to believe in this new
church. Sacrality understood with the old ‘Bataillean’
concept of the accursed comfortably occupies the
ground of a new kind. So we are talking about his
curatorial activity as a kind of priesthood. If we take
Giorgio Agamben’s text on the Museum in relation to
the spectators, we are emphasising the work of the
priests who administer these temples. It is a rather long
text, but it is worth transcribing here before pursuing
the argument: ‘That is why, in the Museum, the analogy
between capitalism and religion becomes evident.
The Museum occupies exactly the space and the
function that in other times were reserved for the Temple
as a place of sacrifice. Corresponding to the faithful
of the Temple – or the pilgrims who travelled the earth
from Temple to Temple, from shrine to shrine – we have
the tourists of today, who travel tirelessly around a
world estranged as a Museum. But, in the end, whilst
the faithful and the pilgrims took part in a sacrifice
that, separating the victim in the sacred sphere, reestablished
the precise relations between the divine
and the human, the tourist holds a sacrificial act on
his person which consists of the distressing experience
of the destruction of all possible use. If the Christians
were ‘pilgrims’ i.e. foreigners on the earth, because they
knew that their homeland was in heaven, the adepts
of the new capitalist worship have no homeland at
all, because they live in the pure form of separation.
Wherever they go they find the same impossibility of
dwelling that they had known in their homes and cities
multiplied and taken to extremes, the same incapacity
for use they had experienced in the supermarkets,
malls and television shows. For that reason, insofar as
it represents the worship and the central altar of the
capitalist religion, tourism is now the first industry in
the world, mobilising over six hundred and fifty million
people a year. There is nothing as surprising as the
fact that millions of individuals venture to try at first
hand what may well be the most desperate experience
possible: that of the irrevocable loss of any use, the
absolute impossibility of profaning.’
Well, for the modes of profanation to disappear,
for that irrevocable loss of all use to occur, someone
has to deactivate the profaning charge involved in
these linguistic operations – I am referring to works of
art. This activity, quite common in the world of culture,
also involves staging this domestication every so
often so that this continuous return to the iconoclastic
gesture is a need, a law that will guarantee in the
new temple the absolute impossibility of profaning.
Nobody should be surprised, therefore, by the lengths
gone to by our artists in their struggle to constantly
surpass themselves in the waters of abjection. The
machine that deactivates the political power of all
this material needs the repetition and the circus effect
of the yet more difficult to fulfil its function.
The same social redemption operation with which
these scenes of redress and sacramentalisation
functioned took place in the early years of the Franco
regime in the plan for the rebuilding of cities and urban
areas after the war. Reconstrucción, precisely, was
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