Spain’s Simulated Foreigners

At the beginning of my year in Madrid, I have been interested in how certain presumptions and stereotypes about Spain look to a foreigner from within. (This interest was further fueled by reading Ben Lerner’s wonderful novel about an American poet’s year-long stay in Madrid Leaving the Atocha Station)

A related phenomenon is how such presumptions and stereotypes are simulated within the country, and how the projection of a foreigner’s perspective can offer a means for self-critique of the country. Two books I found in Bilbao looked at this phenomenon from very different angles.

The first, Javier Cejas’ Spain for the Foreigners is a hilarious self-critical send-up of the inside view on Spain, but written in purposefully bad English (with a cleaned-up, Spanish translation at the back) amid a series of roughly drawn cartoons, like this one about the Guardia Civil:

Cejas also weighs in on the foreigner’s preconceptions about Spanish art, offering the following hierarchy of artists:

Cejas’ send-up of Miquel Barceló could be a critique of the unwarranted popularity of this artist outside Spain or, perhaps, a Catalan in-joke about the syndrome of the Majorca-born artist and the Barcelona-born writer.

The simulation of the foreigner’s perspective on Spain in terms of the figure of the artist is taken to another level by the Basque artist Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa’s The Muntadas Syndrome .

This graphic novel without dialogue (aside from a few tongue-in-cheek billboards saying ‘This is Shit’) tells the story of a Basque artist who travels to New York to install an exhibition at the Guggenheim. The artist’s abject experience in the States offers a critique of the phenomenon represented by the Catalan artist, Antoni Muntadas, who has lived in New York since the 1970s. Yet, as the book ends, there is a twist that seems to undercut the stereotyped view of America as the land of hamburgers and shallow social interaction. Agirregoikoa’s less than subtle stereotype of the US seems to be, at the same time, a self-critique of the problems of isolation and limited opportunities facing the artist in Spain and the Basque country as well.