The politics of display in post-Franco Spain: Max Aub at the Reina Sofa

Abstract

The political significance of museums and commemorative exhibitions in post-Franco Spain has been comparatively little explored. By elaborating on the new critical literature on museums and the debate on the notion of governmentality developed by Michel Foucault, this article draws attention to the institutional rationale at work in the birthday centennials of key Spanish artists and literati of the Silver Age celebrated at the turn of the millennium in various Spanish museums. Since the Nationalist uprising and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War disrupted the cultural revival and the artistic trajectories of figures like Federico Garca Lorca, Luis Buuel, Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, Ramn Gomez de la Serna and Max Aub, such commemorations are, indeed, a battlefield of conflicting ideological and political claims and grievances, whether or not this is explicitly acknowledged by political authorities, institutions and audiences. Centring on Max Aub's centennial held at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa in 2003, and on the memorial exhibition and catalogue entitled Jusep Torres Campalans. Ingenio de la Vanguardia/Jusep Torres Campalans. The wit of the avant-garde (Llopis 2003), this article examines a case study for the official remembering/forgetting of the Spanish Civil War. The article contends that practices orchestrated at this memorial happening silence, euphemize, and/or distort Max Aub's legacy. In doing so, these commemorative practices subtly end up colonizing and domesticating the critique immanent in all of Aub's oeuvre in exile. The visual and rhetorical strategies employed for erasing, silencing, or distorting alternative memories analysed here make explicit the modes in which audiences can be addressed in public contexts. Likewise, the disturbing manipulation of politics and aesthetics reveals that practices heralded as a remembrance of the past may just as well serve to hide and dissimulate that past.