style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>From the pages of the Spanish
newspaper El Pais erupted a disturbing anecdote. Jose Milicua, a noted
art-historian, uncovered evidence that “anarchist” forces used modern art to
torture prisoners during the Spanish Civil War. Surfacing at a time when
cultural patrimony and the loss of priceless art in Iraq were of concern to the
whole world, the story managed to seem an irresoluble addendum. There was
something astonishing about such a transgression. While cultural artifacts were
mourned as victims of war, we were again reminded of art’s precarious role.
Milicua’s
investigations revolved around the construction of torture cells by republican
forces in the late 30’s that housed those captured from Franco’s fascist army.
They were conceived by an obscure “artist” named Alphonse Laurencic, whose
post-war testimony at a military tribunal served as the main source of
information. With a mix of technocratic modernism and a brutal psychiatry,
Laurencic has entered art history with a nefarious contribution to modernist
aesthetics. Inspiration for the
cells was drawn from the heights of modernist abstraction: Kandinsky,
Moholy-Nagy, Klee, and Dali. The cells were a pastiche of geometric abstraction
and surrealist freneticism, along with a theory of supposed psychological
properties of line and color.
Laurencic coined this style “psychotechnic” and its role was to entirely
debilitate the prisoners through meticulous physical and psychological
punishment.
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> The walls of the 6ft by 3ft cells were painted with tortuous
geometric or pseudo-surrealist patterns that were thought to cause distress to
the viewer. The entire cell itself was constructed in order to force the
prisoners to stare at the walls incessantly. Beds were placed at 20-degree
angles, making sleeping and sitting practically impossible.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> On the floor, bricks were scattered at
irregular intervals to prevent the prisoners from being able to walk forwards
or backwards. Tar was sometimes used to cover surfaces, so that contact was
unbearable in the daytime heat. All the occupants could do was stand and stare
at the oddly shaped walls, covered in supposed psychologically “damaging”
shapes and figures, perspective tricks, and off-scale patterns drawn straight
from the avant-garde. To enforce the dizzying effect, lighting was manipulated
in order to distort the already abrasive decoration.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Beyond the barbaric nature of the cells,
the story seemed appalling to many for a deeper reason. It certainly did not go
unnoticed, and almost no retelling could escape reflection on its irony: the side
which was supposed to be “right” now seemed equally deplorable in the eyes of
history. To torture is one thing, but to do so with the great art of the modern
age? What can be said when the
progressive forces of society are used for the most repressive of means and by
those whom history touts as heroic? In this light, the losses the Iraqi museums
have suffered can seem more ambiguous than unfortunate. Though the irony was
easy to grasp, it was not simple to concede as it is hard to let go of the underlying
hope it denies. This was the same hope through which Nadine Gordimer remarked
that “art is on the side of the oppressed” since “if art is freedom of the
spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?” As far as modern art is
concerned, the arrant ironies of cultural progress have yet to echo the
sentiment. Laurencic’s “practice” shows how modern art could easily find itself
seduced by barbarism, despite the liberationist jargon of its manifestos.
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> As Milicua’s discovery makes clear, the
expanding torrent of modernist culture flirted with a mutual dependence on both
cultural progress and social repression. Torture is an almost too predictable
extension of a culture of shock, disorientation, distress, and a rampant
militarist fetish. Still, it seems far-fetched to imagine the adherents of
modernism, with its progressive core, rejecting even the most basic tenets of
their own faith. Could the context creating a truly modern art also be a
baneful hint of aesthetics immersed from all sides by horror? Are torture, war,
suffering and art inexonerably linked?
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>Perhaps within the depths of
radical cultural freedom there is a specter of anomie, where the art of the
oppressed could turn itself into a repressive mechanism of subjection,
irrationality, and cultural disintegration. Certainly it can be true for what
we’ve lost, since these may the punitive damages of democratic change. What are
we willing to concede? Perhaps it was this uneasy disjunction that inspired
Laurencic. Maybe it is this horror that underscores all attempts to easily
resolve the ambiguities of art in general, which our own na�ve need to do.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Accordingly, El Pais ended its
story with the simple thought, affirming that “the creators of such
revolutionary and liberating languages could never have imagined they would be
intrinsically linked to repression”. |
