The Head of State in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction
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During the drafting of the known as Spanish “Gag Law” (Organic Law 4/2015, of March 30, on the protection of citizen security), the Spanish Government attempted to incorporate an administrative sanction derived from a serious offense, with fines of up to 30,000 euros, for “serious offenses or insult to Spain, its institutions and symbols”, which effectively included the Spanish Crown. The General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) rejected this possibility, pointing out in its final report that insults and attacks to the Crown were already included as a crime in the Spanish Penal Code, so there was no need to introduce them as an administrative sanction in parallel.

Using an official portrait of the new Spanish king, Philip VI, –the image was obtained through Patrimonio Nacional during the transfer of the Spanish crown– the artist proceeded to make a series of correlative photocopies until the image was no longer legible as a portrait. It took 22 intermediate processes -which were carried out completely automatically- from the official portrait to cease to be recognizable.

With a nod to Walter Benjamin’s text Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit [The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction] of 1936, the project points to a series of unanswered questions:

Which of the photographs in this series of mechanized copies of the official image of Philip VI ceases to be an official portrait and can therefore be destroyed, turned over, burned, intervened, etc. without legal consequences? At what point does it cease to be an image? Can the subjective representation, for example a drawing or caricature, be considered under the same criteria of control and legal prosecution as the official image? Can an unrecognizable image of the Head of State be outraged? Can legal responsibility be found in a process of deformation produced in successive phases by the criterion of an automatic machine?