Visualizing Spanish Modernity

Susan Larson, Eva Maria Woods

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781859738016
• eBook ISBN: 9781000324037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

While the simultaneously creative and destructive forces of modernity in Western Europe have been well studied, the case of Spain has often been overlooked. Visualizing Spanish Modernity concentrates on the time period 1868-1939, which marks not only the beginning of the formation of a modern economy and the consolidation of the liberal state, but also the growth of urban centers and spaces made possible by electricity, transportation, mass production and the emergence of an entertainment industry. The authors examine how mass print culture, early cinema, popular drama, photography, fashion, painting, museums and urban planning played a role in the way that Spanish society saw itself and was in turn seen by the rest of the world. Assessing how new cultural forms were instrumental in shaping Spaniards into citizens of the modern world, the authors consider such subjects as the spectacle of the body, notions of race and gender, the changing meanings of time, space and motion, the relationship between technology and everyday life and popular culture.

-1- Visualizing Spanish Modernity: Introduction

Susan Larson and Eva Woods

History decays into images, not into stones.

Walter Benjamin¹

Benjamin's prophetic words remind us that history is less a narrative than a series of visual moments or scenes which inescapably permeate the present as well as the past. We see with modern eyes: the way history "looked" is lost to us, yet at the same time reborn through our present-day vision. Historicizing Spain's visual culture is, therefore, a task of historical perception, of making out constellations of dialectical images that hover between the past and the present and making them our own.² For Benjamin, the material culture of the past is recognizable only through fleeting and instantaneous images that, when unrecognized as constitutive of the present, "threaten to disappear irretrievably" (Illuminations 255). Although we can never see the past as it really was, we must, according to Benjamin, "seize hold of a memory as it flashes up [unexpectedly] at a moment of danger" (255). The urgency conveyed by Benjamin's theory of history could not have been more acute. Fascism's power to manipulate images and the meanings of history needed to be countered by a critical historical materialism that could "brush history against the grain" (257). One of the primary aims of this collection is to excavate the visuality of Spain's past in order to better ground interpretations of Spain's mid- to late-twentieth-century cultures of fascism, dictatorship, democracy, and late capitalism. Benjamin's concerns echo throughout these chapters as they interrogate how we visualize modernity in Spain, and more specifically, how our understanding of Spain has been mediated and shaped by modern technologies of vision since the nineteenth century.³

These chapters offer a series of views into the past that describe the modern experience in Spain as varied, discontinuous, inescapably plural and consisting of mixed speeds and spaces. Perception in modernity, as Benjamin described it, entailed jolts, distractions, and the constant shock of the new, all provoked by the mechanized world. Developments in train technology, trolleys, and eventually subways required individuals to accustom their senses to different experiences of motion, space, and time. As elsewhere, the emergence of panoramic or filmic vision compounded with these other sensory onslaughts provoked an attitude that was at once blase and defensive.⁴ Through photography and cinema, the current of subjective experience could now be mobilized and reconfigured onto a filmic image that reanimated the frozen image, promising seemingly infinite possibilities for the spectator. Visionaries such as Etienne-Jules Marey and Edward Muybridge endeavored to atomize time itself through experiments with chronophotography, "the photography of time."⁵ As the history of European philosophy has shown through its consistent use of visual metaphors, Western culture has been driven to visualize, and images of motion in space and time seemed to capture the very essence of modern life.⁶

In Spain, in the period between 1830 and 1936, dramatic technological advances allowed for greater reproducibility of the image and the corresponding growth of visual culture.⁷ Commonly heard expressions such as "cinema is the motor of modernity" place our present moment in an historical context, while making the nineteenth century an "indispensable starting point" for visual culture studies (Schwartz and Przyblyski xxi). Since we now live in a "visual age" and are more visually literate than at any preceding time, it is essential to incorporate the study of visual culture, practices of looking, and visuality into the methodologies of Spanish Peninsular Studies.⁸ This volume has grown out of a desire to address this issue. It is a collaborative, interdisciplinary project concerned with engaging the meaning of what Benjamin called the "Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in Spain, an age which went hand in hand with shifts in practices of consumption, urban growth, changing gender roles, new ideas of race, nation and ethnicity, the expansion of leisure, and the creation of a new entertainment industry and information technologies.

The chapters in this collection map the relationship between the visual and modernity in Spain, starting with the objects and practices of mass culture that interact or comment upon the production and consumption of images. Each chapter contains arguments about various media that are informed by theories developed in a wide variety of disciplines. These references to diverse media and visual practices support Jonathan Crary's assertion that "[t]he circulation and reception of all visual imagery [was] so closely interrelated by the middle of the [nineteenth] century that any single medium or form of visual representation no longer had a significant autonomous identity" (23). Nowadays, the "collapse of the media into each other" can be seen in the juxtaposition of music, text, video and image on the Internet, or the conflation of video, multimedia performance and installation art (Elkins 42). But this collapse was already beginning to occur in the nineteenth century Many of the chapters collected here reflect on the blurred boundaries between high and low culture, both of which were increasingly subject to commodification, or absorbed by commercial culture. Postmodern aesthetics were already partially visible. Now as then, distinctions between high and low are being superseded. At the level of production and distribution, "cultural workers today actually or potentially rely on much the same technologies and institutions" while at the level of reception, "the meanings of all products of contemporary culture tend to be cut from much the same cloth [...]. As there are no longer any definitively separate realms of cultural production, it follows that there can be no islands of counterhegemonic purity" (Burgin 20).

The chapters in this collection also examine the spaces in which these practices of vision existed, the complicit and contestatory modes that they provided, and their role in forming viewing subjects into modern Spanish citizens. Our contributors describe the social, political, and cultural meanings of urban spaces (Davidson, Haidt, Fernandez Cifuentes, Larson), railroads (Haidt, Woods), museums (Fernandez Cifuentes, Labanyi, Vega), photography (Charnon-Deutsch, Epps, Fontanella, Resina), illustrated magazines (Charnon-Deutsch, Davidson, Cueto Asin, Haidt), painting (Fanes, Labanyi), international exhibits and fairs (Davidson, Vega), serialized or popular literature (George, Fernandez Cifuentes, Bush, Resina), cinema (Larson, Woods, Pingree, Resina), and popular theater (Larson). The chapters differ in their methodologies and disciplinary assumptions, but all acknowledge a modern optic by means of overlapping visual media at different scales - the high and the low, the national and the micronational, the public and the private, and the gendered male and female. Spain is seen both from within and without, represented in very different ways to itself and for itself, and from in and outside of its geographical borders.⁹

Many of the chapters in Visualizing Spanish Modernity identify a common polemic. In their interpretations of modernity and the changing notions of subjectivity and viewership in Spain, these authors locate an anxiety over the desire to represent a coherent vision of Spanish modernity through artistic means, a desire that was frustrated by the difficulty of expressing the material realities of Spain's modernization and its Utopian dream of modernity through mass-produced media. How would the different viewing publics react to these conflicted images? More than one reading was certainly possible in Madrid's Prado Museum in the late nineteenth century, for example, which had opened to the public following its nationalization in 1868. Museum-goers who entered on Sunday, the day free of charge to the general public, tended to read the artwork differently from those who paid full price during the rest of the week (Labanyi, Fernandez Cifuentes). Spanish popular audiences had been schooled to read visual images in terms of religious allegory. As a result, economically disadvantaged spectators who could not afford the museum's catalogue often mistook Velazquez's La rendition de Breda for St. Peter proffering the keys to the pearly gates because the Prado did not display the titles of the paintings until the start of the twentieth century. Traveling sideshows, exhibitions and fairs showcased historical paintings as larger-than-life wax tableaux, further reinforcing popular interpretations of high art and the mixing of high and low.

Several studies examine how cultural artifacts such as painting, photography, lithography, or collage belonged to a conventional, familiar genre or defined new generic boundaries, as did so much mass-produced culture in the "Age of Mechanical Reproduction". Collage, for example, confronted observers with a foregrounded medium, while the object in question receded from view. The aura of the object, which created the traditionally intimate relationship between spectator and artwork, was consciously destabilized in the collages of Miro, who refused the cultural hierarchies of high and low art by ritualizing the popular (Fanes). Indeed the nature of audiences and their expectations were undergoing major shifts as modes of production and consumption continued to shift. It was clear that realism could not satisfy the visual expectations and desires that were developing in the Spanish nation.¹⁰

Contributors to this volume seek to avoid the commonly held assumption that Spain's modernity was radically different from that of the rest of Europe. Instead, they attempt to historicize the relationship between vision and modernity as existing within the larger processes of European and Western modernity, and as accompanied by the many ambivalences and contradictions that sustain it. Simplistic and sometimes demonized concepts of Spanish modernity serve only to justify a fervent defense of a postmodern condition that fails to fully explain the heterogeneous social, political and cultural dynamics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such arguments attempt to demonstrate a clear progression from the modern to the postmodern, from the technologically ignorant and easily manipulated to the media-sawy citizen of the present world. Anxious to break with their Francoist past, enthusiasts of the postmodern aesthetic have oftentimes produced a grand narrative of their own, distorting and simplifying the nature of Spanish modernism. There is a tendency to see the modern observer in general and the Spanish in particular as primitive, backward and nai've compared to the supposedly culturally aware postmodern global citizen. In A Singular Modernity (2002), however, Frederic Jameson (2-5) questions whether the features of the modern - asceticism, phallocentrism, logocentrism, to name a few - were as undesirable, repressive, or omnipresent as the postmodernists thought they were. He now admits that he and other postmodernists may not have done modernism justice.

Studies of European modernity, modernization and modernism have traditionally relied on an inadequate number of European examples.¹¹ The chapters here provide a corrective to such descriptions, envisioning an exchange of cultural practices between the center and margin, between Spain and the rest of Europe, and among Spain's wide array of regions, cultural communities and colonies. ¹² This fluid interaction is an inherent characteristic of the chaotic and tumultuous process of modernity everywhere. Even the most hegemonic of modernities draws on the peripheral or the marginal (Geist and Monleón). The specificity of Spain's modernity does not mean that it lies outside of a larger European modernity (France, Germany, England) or that Spain arrives "late" to modernity, as is so often assumed. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spanish imperialism in Africa has been explained as a strategy to "catch up" with Europe's advance into the African continent, yet France and Britain relied on Spain's participation in suppressing Moroccan resistance in order to offset German expansion into the area.¹³ Spain was therefore materially and symbolically necessary to the larger European claims that capitalist modernity was a justification for imperialism.¹⁴

Not surprisingly, a general definition of Spanish modernity as quixotic or recalcitrant collapses in the face of a serious consideration of Spain's colonial subjects and what can be termed Castile's "internal regional others." Robert A. Davidson, for instance, examines Mirador, the literary and modernista Catalonian journal published from 1929 to 1932, which battled censorship from Madrid and took an intense interest in the cultural specificity of Barcelona. His Chapter 12 presents an alternate vision of the city's development and resistance to hegemonic Castilian culture. In her study of Santiago Rusinol's travel writing, Elena Cueto Asm demonstrates in Chapter 8 how Catalans like the painter Rusinol fall into the trap of culturally colonizing the southern Andalusian region, while Jesusa Vega documents in Chapter 11 the efforts of liberal, secular-minded intellectuals to preserve regional, popular ways of dressing against a homogenizing modernity imposed from without. Eva Woods explains in Chapter 15 how seemingly gratuitous plot digressions in silent films depicted traumatizing yet adventurous journeys to "exotic" lands, offering glimpses at what lay "outside" of modernity, and thereby justifying Spain's modernization. These chapters and others explore how race and class collide with the fears and hopes of advancing technological progress, and consider the new modes of social organization that accompany modernization. Paying close attention to the tendentious power relations between Spain's now autonomous regions - Catalonia and Andalusia in particular - as well as to the shadow of its former colonies, this collection reframes the debate on Spanish modernity; Spain is a European "other" and dependent upon its own internal and colonial "others."¹⁵

How we conceptualize Spain's modernity as we draw the line between the present and the past, however, is generally bound up with Enlightenment understandings of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Visualizing Spanish Modernity: Introduction
• 2 Visibly Modern Madrid: Mesonero, Visual Culture, and the Apparatus of Urban Reform
• 3 Foresight, Blindness or Illusion? Women and Citizenship in the Second Series of Galdós's Episodios nacionales
• 4 Horror, Spectacle and Nation-formation: Historical Painting in Late-nineteenth-century Spain
• 5 Isidora in the Museum
• 6 Thresholds of Visibility at the Borders of Madrid: Benjamin, Gomez de la Serna, Mesonero
• 7 Seeing the Dead: Manual and Mechanical Specters in Modern Spain (1893-1939)
• 8 Santiago Rusiñol's Impresiones de arte in the Age of Tourism: Seeing Andalusia after Seeing Paris
• 9 Landscape in the Photography of Spain
• 10 From Engraving to Photo: Cross-cut Technologies in the Spanish Illustrated Press
• 11 Spain's Image and Regional Dress: From Everyday Object to Museum Piece and Tourist Attraction
• 12 Observing the City, Mediating the Mountain: Mirador and the 1929 International Exposition of Barcelona
• 13 Joan Miró, 1929: High and Low Culture in Barcelona and Paris
• 14 Stages of Modernity: The Uneasy Symbiosis of the génera chico and Early Cinema in Madrid
• 15 Visualizing the Time-space of Otherness: Digression and Distraction in Spanish Silent Film
• 16 Modern Anxiety and Documentary Cinema in Republican Spain
• 17 The Last Look from the Border
• Index