"A Corpse in the Garden": Bilbao's Postmodern Wrappings of High Culture Consumer Architecture

"A Corpse in the Garden" Bilbao's Postmodern Wrappings of High Culture Consumer Architecture Annabel Martin is an Assistant Professor ofSpanhh Film and Literature, Women's Studies and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. She is currently finishing a book on melodrama, censorship , and political resütance in Spanish films of the early Franco years and has written articles on recent film and culture. A new project studies Basque Country writers Bernardo Atxaga and Luisa Etxenike and filmmakers Julio Medem and Helena Taberna, artists who focus on the role the arts pL·y in the development of democracy. But one's own must be learned as well as that which is foreign. —Hölderlin1 Introduction Since its inauguration in September of 1997, over one million visitors have made a point of traveling to the city of Bilbao each year to admire the Frank O. Gehry design of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and experience first hand the ways architecture has been used to reconceptualize the history and identity of the city. A controversial joint venture between the Basque Autonomous Government and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the museum is but another example of the ways postindustrial areas in contemporary Europe have traded in industrial economic infrastructures for cultural ones. Urban planners in Glasgow, Liverpool , Birmingham, London, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Frankfort, Barcelona, and other locations have promoted the culture industry as a means of opening new economic sectors in cities which have witnessed the gradual dismantling of their industrial base.2 In the case of Bilbao, the Basque Government believed mat the area's economic recovery would come about if the city were to adopt a new urban paradigm, one based on developing new architectural settings for the arts within the flux of global capital. This was meant as a kind of conceptual resolution of the historic political contradictions of the area.3 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 7, 2003 212 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies The Basque success owes much to the ways contemporary cultural identity in that community contrasts profoundly with the "amnesiac" quality that dominated the socio-historical context of the 1980s and early 1990s in Spain. Spanish cultural production of this period has been critiqued for thinking of culture almost exclusively as "spectacle" (as a market commodity ) due to its being immersed in a process which aimed to reclaim a "newness " and "(post)modernity" for itself in its newly articulated post-Francoist European identity. The epistemological context of this shift in focus was one that substituted the historical "utopian" projects for what some have termed pseudo-reflexive systems of political action and democratic freedoms—essentially, the disenchantment with traditional large-party politics and the consolidation of a general consumption -oriented culture.4 The Basque socio-cultural context embodies the complex identitarian tensions that the micronational political units of government face in the Spanish/European context: self-government promoted on the grounds of cultural difference and its ties to geography. The Basque Country —one of the four "national historic communities" that the Spanish Constitution of 1978 recognizes5—is, like Spain, undoubtedly immersed in both the European Union's socio-political project of a united Europe in legal and social matters and in an economic context dictated by global parameters. The Basque autonomous government translated the European Union's economic unification in cultural terms by choosing to revitalize a postindustrial wasteland—the steel industry of Bilbao's Left Bank—and give international capital, high architecture, and short-term upscale migrancy (the tourist and conference industries) a place to locate. Hence the names and architectural centerpieces which are redefining a particular kind of cosmopolitan urban paradigm for the city: Norman Foster's metro design, Frank O. Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Federico Soriano and Dolores Palacio's Euskalduna Palace (a conference and arts center built on and inspired by the ruins of the Euskalduna shipyards), the RÃ-a 2000 upscale housing, shopping, and entertainment complex, and Santiago Calatrava's new terminal for the Bilbao airport.6 The city's revitalization projects are teaching us lessons about how politicians, critics, social movements, and parties are interpreting urban change in contemporary Europe for Bilbao's new urban landscape and economic shift are...