from: The Observer Sunday January 26 2003
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.
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."
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=03/01/27/6976961
