Juan Muñoz

Acknowledgements

This book, which has taken a decade and a half to prepare, would have been impossible without the help of many kind people. My first thanks must go to Laurel Plapp and Katia Pizzi at Peter Lang, whose brilliant and understated support and efficiency have helped to bring the book to print. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Professor Simon Shaw-Miller, and Dr Mari Paz Balibrea Enriquez, my PhD supervisors at Birkbeck (respectively, at the Department of History of Art and Screen Media, and the Department of Iberian and Latin American Studies), for their generous and expert guidance and inspiration in the initial stages of my research from 2008 to 2012. I would like to thank Cristina Iglesias for her kindness in welcoming me at the Juan Muñoz archive in Torrelodones, and for a number of very helpful and thought-provoking conversations about Muñoz’s work. Roughly half the images reproduced in the book have also been provided thanks to Cristina, her daughter Lucía, and ultimately Juan Muñoz himself, who always wished to share his archival material as freely as possible. Warm thanks are also due to Sandra Feio for helping me to find my way around the Juan Muñoz archive, and for her good humour and patience in response to what must sometimes have seemed like a never-ending stream of requests.

During my doctoral research I was fortunate to be able to test some of the arguments of the book in the History of Art and Screen Media department at Birkbeck, both with teaching staff, including Dr Tag Gronberg, and with fellow candidates. I am also grateful for the friendly support of Professor Zoltan Biedermann, Professor John Kraniauskas and others at the then department of Iberian and Latin American studies at Birkbeck, and for invitations to present papers on Muñoz’s work at the Courtauld Institute (2012) and Warwick University (2011 and 2016). I would like to express particular thanks for various stimulating and richly informative discussions with Professor Maria Delgado, Professor Dawn Ades, Rosa Olivares, Gavin Bryars, Adrian Searle, James Lingwood, Joost Declerq, and two of Juan Muñoz’s siblings, Vicente Muñoz Torregrossa and Victoria de Talhora. I am also grateful for the helpful and encouraging commentaries of the two anonymous peer reviewers. A number of friends and colleagues have kindly sampled parts of the book at different stages, providing a vital and sometimes bracing sense of how the narrative might play from the reader’s perspective. These include Juan Aranzadi, Celia Montolío, Angeles Jiménez Perona, Tommaso Gorla, Irina Chkhaidze, Eva Nieto McEvoy, Frank Ferrie, Christos Logothetis, Britt Harrison, Kate Docherty, Tom and Sue Stuart-Smith, Caroline Oulton, and Rebecca Penrose – who lent me her copy of Muñoz’s 2001 catalogue Hirschorn before I decided to write about his work, and has never once asked for it back. Finally, to Juan Aranzadi and Celia Montolío (again), who prompted my attachment to Spain in the first place, and who fed and inspired (albeit with occasional scepticism) my fascination with twentieth-century Spanish history and art: more thanks than I can express.