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where I live and my link to it is voluntary: it has nothing to do
with spiritual legacies, genius loci, and other variants of cultural
falangism. If there is something I can’t stand, however paradoxical
it may seem for a lover of flamenco, it is to be one just because
your father was too.
For me tradition does not conceal a flow of submissions,
rather a fountain of resistances. Many of those iconoclastic images
that I hang on the walls of a gallery or a museum, in Seville are
to be found in the bars. If Bataille had dropped by Casa Ovidio,
he would have confirmed his thesis on the obscenity of Catholicism.
But it is not just in this paradoxical sense attained by the images
of iconoclasm in Seville, where their sponsors venerate them as
relics. Three recent examples: in Seville the judges and the police
were mobilised when the hardcore group Narco gave away,
in the promotion of their latest record, the videogame Matanza
cofrade, a variant on the thousands of games in which Chinese
or Arabs are killed, but with penitents and saints. A few days
later they went into a kid’s house and carted him off to jail for
having illustrated an erotic story with a photograph of the
Esperanza de Triana, a Virgin that a few years ago was given
a full facelift by her Brotherhood; something Orlan would have
loved. A few days later the Brotherhood of La Macarena pressured
a club in Barcelona not to use the image of the Virgin in its
advertising. The legal excuse, in all these cases, is that the images
of the brotherhoods are copyrighted; and from the people at
VEGAP not a word...
We have already mentioned your interest in plays on words,
or rather language games (for Wittgenstein, an indissoluble union
between linguistic rules, objective situations and ways of life), and
as you have written somewhere, you are also interested in Roussel’s
working method. Both of them offer great compositive and imaginative
freedom. What value do you place on fiction in your work?
What interests me about Raymond Roussel is his scientific
approach and his seriousness. Roussel’s guide was the work
of Jules Verne. His project was rational and constructive, and, for
all Foucault might say, it was theoretically lacking in any subversive
element. As we his readers are no longer innocent, the invocation
of his method always seems perverse to us. He is also deeply
materialistic. It seems impossible to sustain a world just through
the phonetic similarity of signifiers, there is no way they could
obtain meanings in that onomatopoeic delirium. It is the culmination
of a whole chain of rhetorical figures in poetry, conceptist games,
almost a caricature of Wittgenstein’s language games. The dictum
that ‘reality functions like fiction’ finds a terrifying verification
in Roussel. Treating words as sounds, as things, in the end as
images, so that they can really function. That way of confronting
language is not new of course; we can find extreme examples
in the Baroque tradition of the ut pictura poesis or the popular
carnivals. Hence my interest in a writer like Silverio Lanza, or
Georges Perec or Marcel Broodthaers. The undermining to which
any core of meaning of language is submitted goes with an
attempt to order the resulting nonsense. Crazy taxonomies which
try to keep a world without meaning on its feet. To go on with
Roussel and his model of ‘machine’ for my ‘machine’, then as
well as the suggestive tools used by Duchamp or Foucault, I feel
closer to the way in which some writers like Enrique Vila-Matas,
César Aira or Roberto Bolaño use them. And of course the vision
that is as secular as it is fascinating given by Leonardo Sciascia
in Atti relativi alla morte di Raymond Roussel.
In the archives, what carries more weight, the memory of art
or its denial? How are the archives, the museum and the collection
related in the light of iconoclasm?
I think iconoclasm, rather than denying art, certifies its
symbolic function. It is clear that nothing could be farther from the
iconoclastic gesture than the principle of the institution of an archive.
However, they are dogged by a community relation. The overlap
between the iconoclastic gesture and the definition of painting
in the form of a picture has been closely studied by Stoichita. The
great European collections came into being as a consequence of
the Protestant iconoclastic fury. The Musée du Louvre and modern
iconoclasm are defined around the French Revolution. The birth
of Tate Modern itself as the cathedral of modern art coincided
with, or more precisely followed, a group of iconoclastic and
‘sensationalist’ English artists. The reactionary, well-read Spanish
right itself, of the José Manuel de Prada kind, that regards the
museums of modern art as warehouses of iconoclastic junk and
naturally call on people to mock them with iconoclastic gestures...
The fact is that in the arts, the iconoclastic gesture has moved
on from attacking the museum, the archive, to needing it as the only
possibility of existing, of being legitimate. In that sense, the
iconoclastic gestures collected in the archive, the ones which from
1845 to 1946 theoretically have a political and anticlerical origin
in Spain from militant anarchism, republicanism and communism,
attain a certain legitimacy by relating themselves with the gestures
of modern art itself, also sharing uncertainties with it. Of course,
the archive would not have begun to gestate without that principle
of contradiction. Its paradoxical operation is the main guarantee of
movement, and that seems to me fundamental, since, as you know,
I understand the archive as a machine. In that same chain of
reasoning, I have to acknowledge other paradoxical elements,
I say fundamental for that aspiration to perpetuum mobile: the
‘mal d’archive’ as understood by Jacques Derrida, as the secret link
of the archive with its destruction or the impossibility of veracity
between the testimony and its archive, as described by Agamben.
An archive of disasters composed of quotations and images,
which in turn work as quotations: flash-image, rip-image or lacunaimage,
image, in short, as something historical and dynamic. Didi-
Huberman goes on: ‘In a world prolific in lacunae, singular images
which, mounted on one another, will arouse a readability, an effect of
knowledge, of the kind Warburg called Mnemosyne, Benjamin Arcades,
Bataille Documents, and which Godard today calls Histoire(s)’. What
readability does F.X. Archive aim at? What remains in the ‘archive’
of salvaged images that can be read between the images?
That the terms ‘archive’ and ‘anarchy’ share the Greek
etymological root arkhé – which means ‘mandate’ and thus
‘archive’, with mandate, and ‘anarchy’, without mandate – is
still an incipient contradiction. When one thinks of creating an
‘archive of anarchism’, one is instigating a poetic rather than a
scientific institution. Moreover, anarchism, like the Utopia it is,
shares the characteristic spotted by Perec: ‘All Utopias are depressing
because they leave no room for chance, difference, diversity.
Everything is ordered and order reigns. Behind every Utopia there
is always a great taxonomic design: a place for everything and
everything in its place’. That anarchism set out to be a Utopia
where disorder could take place has often been put forward as
a reason for its creationist ‘tabula rasa’ strategy. Oddly enough
the arguments that have most censured the iconoclastic behaviour
of the anarchists spring from inside: as early as 1936, there were
pamphlets in Valencia signed by the CNT-FAI, urging the protection
of the material and artistic heritage of the church as something
that could be expropriated by the people. But that exhortation
was immediately classified as ‘bourgeois’ and in many cases the
religious object found in archives and museums was attacked.
In turn, F.X. Archive is an archive about disasters, which, as
Michel Foucault suggests, must also include the disaster of the
archive. And that is the main function of this ‘machine’ to break
the archive, to try to include what it was always lacking. A ‘trace’,
Michel Foucault calls it, a ‘vestige’ according to Giorgio Agamben.
For Jacques Derrida, that ‘mal d’archive’ which is expressed in
the desire to grasp everything, ‘losing no trace, leaving no vestige’,
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