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| Spanish Pavilion and the sculpture of Alberto, The Spanish People Have a Path Which Leads to a Star, 1937, Symbol, allegory, metaphor? Time for the semiotics... |
e-flux journal # 22. (read full article here)
I have published this text which I think it deserves a further metacommentary. The text is a reponse to the editorial line asked by Sven Lütticken and Paul Chan and under the title of Idiot Wind: On the Rise of Right-Wing Populism in the US and Europe, and What It Means for Contemporary Art. In fact, the e-flux journal issue has been conceived under time pressure and personal engagement in order to show the urgency of a rising political phenomenon. And, more, explicitly the whole issue has been organized around the form of reports, rather, national reports: in my case this means to deal with the dialectics of the Basque and the Spanish. In any case, the political situation in Spain is markedly different from the intention of the journal, obviously, the right has always been present, and a quick look through some TV channels is enough to see this, although we can not frame it exactly within that same right-wing xenophobic, racist, populist and, most importantly, nationalist, movements that grow up in France, Holland, Switzerland, Austria and some Scandinavian countries, as a threat of their consolidated social democracies. Spain is different used to say a well know slogan. There is no political media figures in this country to play at a international level neither, where you can compare the degree of outrage against the rise of this global phenomenon. Neither a Geert Wilders, Sarah Palin, Berlusconi, Sarkozy nor a left-wing populist like Hugo Chavez... How then to do a national report that is built on the rise of the right and its negative impact on the field of culture and art? And, we have a socialist government! The issue is quite complex and requires a certain degree of translation to make something minimally comprehensible. International comrades were surprised to know that social conservative policies in our country are those who have raised much of the current art institutionalization. Of they will go astonished knowing to what extent a change in the direction of a regional government can change the cultural politics of an entire region including its main museums. Or maybe they won’t be surprised about the degree of ignorance of the political class whether they are socialists, people's party or conservatives, regional-nationalist and so on: we are not safe in the hands of ANYONE.
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| A sublimated view of a model of Jose Luis Sert and Luis Lacasa's pavilion. How we vehiculate our fantasies? |
Therefore, it’s time to talk about peripheral nationalisms and nation-state nationalism. To speak about the crisis of the nation-state and its internal tensions. Statelessness. But I wont repeat here the main text. But I will clarify that the original draft was more extensive that the one you see. The title I gave at first was Transcoding Critical Regionalism and in this version there is nothing of this “transcoding”. I mean, my article uses a concept borrowed from architectural theory as “critical regionalism” not in order to talk about the discipline in itself, but to use the architecture as an allegory. Thus, “critical regionalism” is a term that serves as a transcoding, as a translation or mediation about a number of other issues related with the configuration of minority identities in local, specific, or vernacular conditions.
For example the Spanish Pavilion of the Second Republic was built in 1937 at the Paris World Exhibition: what interests me is how an architecture can furnish our fantasies of the configuration of a collective identity based in diversity. Throughout the article, the architecture works even metaphorically. This metacommentary is only to emphasize the role that transcoding would play in all this. So, I made a detour and I have used architecture and biennials to talk about politics, to make the report. Surely the subject of the architecture of those regional museums I mention might offer me material for an article in its own right.
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| Euskadi (Basque Country) is polemically represented during the Venice Biennale, 1976. This is not called in our days activist art? |
In this context, what transcoding means? In Fredric Jameson’s own method it is a way of mediating among different theories, that is, a mediation or translation that can be elaborated on the basis of an expanded theoretical spatial order. With transcoding, we set about “measuring what is sayable and 'thinkable' in each of these codes and idiolects” in order “to compare that to the conceptual possibilities of its competitors”, drawing lines of relationship from signs in one code to signs in another, letting each translate and interpret the other. Then some geographical or geopolitical specificities and features can be read both as symptoms and allegories of other situations. In the postmodern world, where culture remains a kaleidoscope of interacting images, this endless diversity gives us the feeling that there is no longer any unity, but just an abstract vast outside named as the totality. The very force of this mediation also presupposes of the relative autonomy of the sectors or regions in question (as if the allegory was both particular and universal). It is not by chance that explaining what transcoding means, a suggestive connection with organ transplanting and architecture was made by Jameson, bearing at the same time many resemblances with the task of translation. Even here, the critical regionalism in architecture should not only to be seen from an exclusive architectural point of view of just from within that debate, but rather in its transcoding variant, that is, as an interpretative paradigm to be transferred to other domains and structures. In another book there is a graphic description of the term: “Transcoding is a process of translation that allows us to move from one theoretical paradigm to another, taking the best that each has to offer. For example, with the aid of trascoding we can benefit from psychoanalytic methods without being closed in the psychoanalytic framework, and combine them with the insights of formalism, structuralism, and other interpretative methods”.[1]
But this transcoding, as an exercise in mediation between different levels of representation, was already to be seen in different garbled forms. Few people would question the idea that all narrative work is allegorical. It is a common feature that narratives presented as representations of a concrete social and political situation have the capacity to become a national allegory that can be used in other geographical situations and contexts. Indeed, this allegoric national transcoding now occurs not only between the local and the global, but also between different specific —let us say “local”— locations. The transcoding, or more advanced version of the mediation, is no more than a mechanism that sets in motion certain cultural artefacts alongside others, situating each work in a relationship with other contexts. There are surely some contradictions that are inherent to the traditional association between texts and historical forms and the social and political surroundings from which they emerge.
My report attempted to play with some of these contradictions.
[1] See “Introduction”, Michael Hardt and Kathy Weeks eds., in The Jameson Reader, Blackwell Publishers, Massachusetts, 2000, p. 20.
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