English Texts

At some point he told it like this:
In 1977, Georges Perec wondered if the destruction and
burning of churches carried out by the Spanish anarchists between
1900 and 1939 might not be the most important work of art
of the century. The question was naturally provocative, so much
so that it seems like a double of that photo of ‘Benjamin Péret
insulting a priest’. So much so that it seems like a play on words,
an echo of the same statement, some years earlier, by Benjamin
Péret: ‘There is no greater work of art in the twentieth century
than the destruction in Spain of saints and churches.’ Plays on
words, provocations, but not devoid of interest. In a way they put
their fingers on the revolutionary sore that had made the whole
twentieth century bleed, from politics and from art. Robert Hughes,
a visitor to Barcelona since the sixties, writing precisely about the
events known as the Tragic Week, answered, without disdaining
the aesthetic character of the question: ‘In reality, and as far
as the history of art is concerned, these are only special effects.’
Not that I intend to answer Perec’s question, but of course
I do intend to rephrase it. As David Freedberg has suggested,
idolatry and iconoclasm are two extreme aspects of the same
phenomenon, the one that invests the representation of images
with the certainty of reality. That appears on both psychological
and sociological levels, in a host of aspects that range from
patriotic symbologies to fetishism, from the candles of the
votaries to the ‘burning’ of the figures, from miracle cures to
the anthropometry of design. Both are based on the radical
separation of images, which we understand as art, from reality.
That separation,which has its origins in platonic idealism, is the
essence of the Western way of understanding the work of art,
whether as a representation of nature or some higher truth.
Only by understanding that separation – and the ones that follow
it: between artist and spectator, between art and life, between
terror and rhetoric, etc. – as the foundation of Western art in
our times can we understand the work of F.X. Archive, inevitably
confronting historicist procedures.
Can we take it that when someone is looking at the image
of the Almighty – a face that owes as much to the carver’s skill
as to the smoke from the candles over three centuries – they
are looking at a work of art and not the face of God on Earth?
At the outset the project was associated with the idea of the
‘end of art’, indeed it was presented that way, F.X. Archive on the End
of Art. At some time you even quoted Agamben: ‘According to the
principle that states that only in a burning house is it possible to see
the fundamental architectural problem for the first time, so art, once
it has reached the end of its journey, allows its original project to be
seen.’ In what sense do you use the term ‘end’? Does it have anything
to do with the impossibility of representation after Auschwitz and/or
Hiroshima? How is the time frame established, how is it bounded?
‘End’ appears in the twofold meaning of finish and also of
purpose. The ‘end of art’ as one more sub-genre of art. A genre
that is related to the others in the same way that the vanitas
painting was related to the painting of still lifes. For many years
I was preparing a project which reviewed all the movements of
meaning, which ranged from the cornucopia to the vanitas, a
project that never saw the light of day, unless its expression is
this F.X. Archive. In the relation with those materials, I discovered
an obscure, forgotten character who fascinated me. Giovanni
Morelli developed a method of observation of the world, which
I recognised, like no other until then, as close to my work, to
what I was trying to make. His systems of signs, which at first
were nothing more than an auxiliary tool in the system of
attributions of works of art, has become a main tool for art
history (especially in the wake of Aby Warburg), anthropology,
semiotics, psychoanalysis: they even enabled the development
of the political sciences, which have led to the current system of
domain in the form of the panoptic. This method, which I discovered
in Ginzburg’s books and which came to be called micro-history,
was present in the two projects – both unfinished, Utopian to a
certain extent – which I have found most interesting: Walter
Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne. Both
required their authors to work for so long on marking out their
spheres that when their artificers died they remained unfinished.
The tension confronted by historical time in both of them, while
the idea was to explode it, I found absolutely fascinating. Both
projects emerged, in a way, as a response to the totalitarian visual
models of fascism and capitalism, which was why they needed a
mechanism that included both finite historical frameworks and the
way of dismantling them. In that sense, if in their ‘finish’ they assume
the time of history, in their ‘purpose’ they are political projects.
For those of us who assume ‘the end of the arts’ as almost one
more genre, like ‘history painting’ or ‘still lifes of vanities’, the
burning of churches can be set in a special modality within that
same genre, striving too hard for effect for some, but definitely
effective. In The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov seems to be
speaking ironically when he makes the devil say: ‘The dark paintings
that adorn this room are full of figures and stories, they are black
from the soot of the fire from which they were rescued, they are
black because the whole world is compressed in them, in such a
small space.’ A culture dominated on the one hand by the popular
idolatry of mass spectacles, the universal exhibitions, television
or the internet, and on the other by the cultured iconoclasm of the
connaisseurs, the genius loci, conceptualism or cyberspace, will
have to stop and look at what happens when those parallel spheres,
apparently with the same goals although on different scales, come
into conflict.
The truth is that from all that Hegelian verbiage about the end
of history I am most interested in the stories it produces. In that
sense, my work on F.X. Archive may perhaps be understood as
one more story, another tale, just as the word ‘tale’ says.
To continue with Walter Benjamin: talking about the ‘citation’,
the philosopher remarks: ‘The past can only be seized in the image
that appears complete at the instant of its estrangement, like a memory
as it flashes up at a moment of danger.’ Talk to me about that moment
of danger.
From Hölderlin to a Cuban country song in which they sing:
‘Where danger grows, where danger grows, there too grows
salvation.’ A journey around the fertile ground of images, at the
very point where they end up vanishing, is certainly the high point
of their appearance too.
In the absolute kingdom of the image, understood as a structure
or a flow that sums up the general concept of culture from Aby
Warburg and Ernst Gombrich to Walter Benjamin or Guy Debord,
we should pause a moment at that complex nihilist phenomenon
that was the burning of churches and other religious places by
the Spanish anarchist and socialist workers, with its historical,
anthropological or artistic, political, religious or heritage implications.
A newspaper report describes Seville on 18 July 1936 in these
words: ‘All night the city was lit up by the bonfires of the eight
churches that were burning in the Macarena district. Day had not
yet broken, since the sky was black and lowering, it seemed as
if it was about to collapse at any moment on top of us had it not
been held up by the columns of smoke that still rose from the
burning churches.’
The chronicle provides us with a significant image to try
to understand the current state of the arts, an image we can try to
read as if it were an emblem: the different fires would correspond
to the attempts of the different avant-gardes to put an end to
traditional art, to wit, the legends of Dadaism, Futurism or Russian
Constructivism. The smoke of those fires would correspond to most
of the art movements that appeared after 1945, which sprang
from those fires. The black, lowering sky would describe the current
art scene, always about to collapse on top of us. For those of us
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