To Be King: Colonising Foucault's Las Meninas

The Albany History Museum The Albany History Museum in Grahamstown is where the installation To Be King was first exhibited.

Like the Prado, it has Greek columns that frame its entrance. On the ground floor are two rooms which house various historical artefacts. A British military uniform stands next to a display of Xhosa spears, brown packing tape holds the corner of the glass display cabinet together. Various items of settler furniture sit with snuff boxes, cameo portraits and household items dating back to the colonial era.

It is my intention to mimic Room XII at the Prado, but I am aware of my inevitable failure. It is this foreseeable fissure that speaks of discontinuity in time and space. I like to think Foucault would have appreciated this gap, the disruption and fracture of observing one cultural system through another, particularly the interruption of the Western logical system that he scrutinizes in The Order of Things. For the Western logical system, writes de Diego “ ...things are either the Sameorder-or the Other-Disorder. Perhaps both terms can even cohabit, but always in clearly separated territories.’[3] A consequence of referencing the painting Las Meninas is that multiple spatial references are evoked. Within the frame of the painting Velasquez depicts himself situated in the room at the Althussar in the Spanish Court. Outside the frame of the painting lies the complex space of the sovereigns who are reflected in the mirror depicted within the painting and simultaneously the spectator. In an intricate web of vectors the viewer of the painting Las Meninas in the Prado museum is also implicated in these multiple spaces. The viewer of any intertextual reference to the ‘original’ painting, particularly if that reference is placed in a post-colonial museum context, becomes part of an ever-expanding field of vectors over space and time.

NOTES [1] E. de Diego, Representing Representation, Reading Las Meninas, Again in Velásquez’s Las Meninas, (ed. L. Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt, Cambridge, 2003 p. 151).

[2] M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London, 1970, p. 15).

[3] E. de Diego, Representing Representation, Reading Las Meninas, Again in Velásquez’s Las Meninas, (ed. L. Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt, Cambridge, 2003 p. 152).