Chapter Fourteen From Counter-Culture to National Heritage La Movida in the Museum and the Institutionalization of Irreverence William J. Nichols “The museum is indeed a site into which bourgeois society projects its dreams and utopian projects” —Herbert Marcuse, “On the Affirmative Character of Culture” (1937) In the past few years, the period known as /a Movida in Spain, an uninhibited and vibrant era in Spanish culture during the early 1980s marked by an explosion of film, music, painting, fashion, and graphic design, has found itself auspiciously recalled and retold through various discursive modes. Through the songs of Mecano, the Spanish pop super-group that gained fame in the early 1980s, the musical play “Hoy no me puedo levantar” (which opened in March 2005 in the Movistar Theater in Madrid) exemplifies the kind of recent cultural expression that retells the narrative of Spain’s transi- tion to democracy through a nostalgic filter that yearns for a perceived lost innocence and vitality of that bygone era. Mecano, though never seen, be- comes the comedic foil in El mundo asombroso de Borjamari y Pocholo (2004) when two “nifios pijos” from the 1980s (played by Santiago Segura and Javier Gutiérrez) undertake a quixotic adventure in search of Mecano’s surprise reunion concert some twenty years later. Emotionally, and linguisti- cally, stuck in the 1980s, the innocence of the title characters contrasts sharp- ly with the heavily corporatized consumer culture in Spain of the twenty-first century.! In La mala educacién (2004) Pedro Almodovar sets the exhuber- ance and excess of the 1980s as a backdrop for a noir exploration of self, 215276 William J, Nichols memory, guilt, and desire. Though Almodovar has clearly stated in inter- views and articles that the film is not autobiographical and should not be considered a reflection on /a Movida nor an “ajuste de cuentas” with Catholic clergy, the era in question offers a perfect historical frame, in his words, to understand “la borrachera de libertad que vivia Espafia, en oposicién al oscu- rantismo y la represién de los afios 60” (Almodévar). Chus Gutiérrez’s film, El calentito (2005) offers easily recognizable cultural references to the era of Ja Movida by integrating original early footage of Pedro Almodovar, Fabio McNamara, and Juan Carlos de Borbén (though not all together) and repro- ducing the “soundtrack” of the era with music from Los Nikis, Aviador Dro, Décima Victima, Derribos Arias, Pardlisis Permanente, Zombis, and Aerolineas Federales. By evoking in the viewer a desire to recuperate a perceived collective space, time, and experience, Gutiérrez articulates a nos- talgic yearning for the manic energy and boundless freedom associated with la Movida. Recent documentary films like La movida: La edad de oro (2001), Rock-Ola: El templo de la Movida (2006), La empanada de la re- movida (2007), Rock-Ola: Una noche de la Movida (2007), Costus: el docu- mental (2007) have likewise found fertile ground in revisiting the era and exploring the legacy of /a Movida. Novels like Luis Antonio Villena’s Ma- drid ha muerto: Esplendor y caos en una ciudad feliz de los ochenta (pub- lished in 1999, then reissued in 2006) and Kiko Méndez Monasterio’s La calle de la luna (2008) along with such non-fiction as José Manuel Lecha- do’s self-proclaimed chronicle La movida: Una crénica de los 80 (2005) or Silvia Grijalbo’s recent testimonial Dios salve a la Movida (2006) offer distinct narrative approaches to Ja Movida that, however, claim authority in asserting the verity of their vision (or version) of the past.? Even the weekly Sunday magazine, E7 Pais Semanal, offered a retrospective “where-are-they- now” in May of 2005, an attempt to “resumir los tltimos 25 afios” [“summar- ize the last 25 years”] by profiling the trajectory of some of /a Movida's more well-known protagonists like Jests Ordovas, Johnny Cifuentes, Antonio Vega, Borja Casani, Rossi de Palma, Ivan Zulueta, and Ouka Leele. Lastly, museum exhibits and state-sponsored commemorations? seemingly contra- dict the uninhibited counter-culture vibrancy of Ja Movida with an institu- tionalized vision of it:+ “Caminos de un tiempo (1973-1987) at the Asociacién Cultural Caminos in 2005, Pablo Pérez Minguez’s display of photographs titled “Mi movida” [My Movida] (2006) presented at the Museo Municipal de Arte Moderno de Madrid and organized by the municipal government of Madrid, “Moda y movida” [Fashion and Movida] in the Mu- seo Manuel Pifia de Manzanares in 2007, “La Luna de Madrid y otras revis- tas de vanguardia de los afios 80” [La Luna de Madrid and other avant-garde magazines of the 1980s] presented in the Biblioteca Nacional in 2007, the self-proclaimed “homage” to the era organized by the regional government of the Comunidad of Madrid simply titled “LA MOVIDA” (2006-2007), andFrom Counter-Culture to National Heritage 277 the exhibition of photos by Alberto Garcfa-Alix titled “De dénde no se vuelve” [From where there is no return] that ran from November 4, 2008 to February 16, 2009 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. Explicitly evoking /a Movida in novel, film, museum exhibits, and other discourses suggests a critical temporal distance from that period which per- mits an evaluation of the perceived origins of Spain’s modem identity. Yet, this same distance lends to the idealization of the early years after Franco and a nostalgia for the innocence and vitality associated with them. In either case, whether a critical assessment of the foundations of Spanish democracy or a longing for the vibrancy of the destape (explosion), such retrospective ten- dencies in the current cultural landscape of Spain are really more about the present than the past, and re-reading the narrative they project will allow, I suggest, a deeper understanding not of Ja Movida (as the texts in question themselves offer as their purpose) but of the political, social, economic, and cultural forces that impel the need to re-tell that particular cultural moment in recent Spanish history. Far from Almodovar's early gritty, experimental Su- per 8 films or the impromptu, underground spectacles of performance art known to happen during /a Movida, the place of memory, to borrow Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire,’ offers sites of nostalgia (whether a commercial movie theater, corporate-sponsored stage theaters, or state-sponsored mu- seums) that invite the spectator to partake in an institutionalized vision of the past through a self-reflexive meta-memory. The purpose of this paper will be to examine the museum as a space of mediation that ironically strips /a Movida of the context of its cultural vibrancy in what Huyssen terms “cultu- ral ossification”¢ to ultimately reinforce a normalization of Spain's self-im- age and reaffirm an official narrative of the perceived origins of its mode identity, Curiously, while many of the protagonists of /a Movida, like Pedro Almod6var or Alaska, are hesitant to offer reflections about the era or are simply reticent to even talk about it, politicians and bureaucrats—especially Alberto Ruiz Gallardén, Esperanza Aguirre, and their ilk—celebrate and commemorate Ja Movida as the culmination and epitome of Spain’s moder- nity. If Ja Movida was a transgressive, urban phenomenon, then its entrance into the museum signals an abandonment of the streets and underground culture as well as a withdrawal from everyday life to form part of what is perceived, ironically as it may be, as patrimony of “legitimate” public cul- ture. The institutionalization of iconoclastic discourse assimilates /a Movida into an official narrative about Spain after Franco that not only further exoti- cizes that moment of recent Spanish history, reducing it to a frivolous combi- nation of big hair and transvestism, but also removes its relevance to the present and reaffirms Spain’s “normalization,” to borrow from Lamo de Espinosa,’ by emphasizing a temporal and cultural distance from the per- ceived values of la Movida. Here I will analyze the discourse of meta-memo- ry in two museum exhibitions organized in 2006: first, the exhibition of