[smygo] Anarchists & the Fine Art of Torture
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Anarchists and the fine art of torture
Spanish art historian says they put enemies in disorienting
cells
Giles Tremlett in Madrid
Monday January 27, 2003
The Guardian
A Spanish art historian has uncovered what was alleged to be
the first use of modern art as a deliberate form of torture,
with the discovery that mind-bending prison cells were built
by anarchist artists 65 years ago during the country's
bloody civil war.
Bauhaus artists such as Kandinsky, Klee and Itten, as well
as the surrealist film-maker Luis Bunuel and his friend
Salvador Dali, were said to be the inspiration behind a
series of secret cells and torture centres built in
Barcelona and elsewhere, yesterday's El Pais newspaper
reported.
Most were the work of an enthusiastic French anarchist,
Alphonse Laurencic, who invented a form of "psychotechnic"
torture, according to the research of the historian Jose
Milicua.
Mr Milicua's information came from a written account of
Laurencic's trial before a Francoist military tribunal. That
1939 account was written by a man called R L Chacon who,
like anybody allowed to publish by the newly installed
dictatorship, could not have been expected to feel any
sympathy for what Nazi Germany had already denounced as
"degenerative art".
Laurencic, who claimed to be a painter and conductor in
civilian life, created his so-called "coloured cells" as a
contribution to the fight against General Franco's rightwing
rebel forces.
They may also have been used to house members of other
leftwing factions battling for power with the anarchist
National Confederation of Workers, to which Laurencic
belonged.
Hidden
The cells, built in 1938 and reportedly hidden from foreign
journalists who visited the makeshift jails on Vallmajor and
Saragossa streets, were as inspired by ideas of geometric
abstraction and surrealism as they were by avant garde art
theories on the psychological properties of colours.
Beds were placed at a 20 degree angle, making them
near-impossible to sleep on, and the floors of the 6ft by
3ft cells was scattered with bricks and other geometric
blocks to prevent prisoners from walking backwards and
forwards, according to the account of Laurencic's trial.
The only option left to prisoners was staring at the walls,
which were curved and covered with mind-altering patterns of
cubes, squares, straight lines and spirals which utilised
tricks of colour, perspective and scale to cause mental
confusion and distress.
Lighting effects gave the impression that the dizzying
patterns on the wall were moving.
A stone bench was similarly designed to send a prisoner
sliding to the floor when he or she sat down, Mr Milicua
said. Some cells were painted with tar so that they would
warm up in the sun and produce asphyxiating heat.
Laurencic told the military court that he had been
commissioned to build the cells by an anarchist leader who
had heard of similar ones used elsewhere in the republican
zone during the civil war, possibly in Valencia.
Mr Milicua has claimed that Laurencic preferred to use the
colour green because, according to his theory of the
psychological effects of various colours, it produced
melancholy and sadness in prisoners.
But it appears that Barcelona was not the only place where
avant garde art was used to torture Franco's supporters.
According to the prosecutors who put Laurencic on trial in
1939, a jail in Murcia in south-east Spain forced prisoners
to view the infamously disturbing scene from Dali and
Bunuel's film Un Chien Andalou, in which an eyeball is
sliced open.
El Pais commented: "The avant garde forms of the moment -
surrealism and geometric abstraction - were thus used for
the aim of committing psychological torture.
"The creators of such revolutionary and liberating
[artistic] languages could never have imagined that they
would be so intrinsically
linked to repression."
--
Dan Clore
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