Since this fall, Barcelona has a new art museum. In the modernist building that housed the Godia and Mapfre foundations, the businessman, journalist and collector Tatxo Benet has opened the Museu de l’Art Prohibit. The inaugural exhibition is a selection of 46 works, made from the 200 that today make up this collection of forbidden art. They all have in common having suffered – the works, or their authors because of them – censorship, attacks, threats, complaints or pressure from offended groups or individuals. And almost always for reasons of political ideology, sex or religion.
A fourth reason is commercial fear, and there are also absurd cases. Taken together, these censorships – most of them contemporary, recent – point out a fundamental issue: freedom of expression, without which other freedoms and democratic political life cannot exist. But it is a delicate question, which requires nuances. To begin with, all freedom entails responsibility and this requires limits. For example, slander or defamatory lies are unacceptable.
Behind each work exhibited in the inaugural exhibition there are significant stories, which are briefly outlined in the museum rooms and in the catalogue. However, before commenting on some of the museum's contents, I find it necessary to point out that currently, in modern societies of mass consumption, censorship – in its most literal sense – is no longer the main means of ideological and social control used by the powers that be. established.
The prestige of transgressions – even the most predictable and trivial ones – that seek a headline in the press or even an act of prohibition that gives them prestige, should not make us forget that other effective systems have been operating for years to sabotage and prevent the spread of the wisdom and critical thinking offered by the most lucid and emancipatory works of art and books. Promoting addictive distraction through mobile screens and promoting banal and brutalizing spectacles instead of the most lucid philosophy and poetry is a common form of censorship, which is not usually reported.
But back to the museum. The artistic level is uneven and there are debatable pieces. For example, Piss Christ, by the overrated Andrés Serrano, and that Matchbox by Mujeres Públicas, which incites people to burn churches – just as the Nazis burned free books – are well-made works, but conceptually foolish. However, from a sociological, historical and political point of view all the cases presented are interesting. From the self-censorship that Goya imposed on himself after publishing his Caprichos to a case that is not presented in the form of a work, but that is mentioned, and I find it illuminating: a Californian was sentenced to thirty days in jail for protesting against the war (in this case, that of Vietnam) through three written words. He was accused of “disturbing the peace and tranquility” of citizens. And it was an anti-war banner!
Another surprising case affected the Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour, author of Nation Estate (2011), a subtle and non-aggressive video that was eliminated from the group of finalists for an award because it did not fit the theme of the call, which was nothing less than Joy. to live. In the original language, that theme or motto sounds even more out of tune with the situation in Palestine: La joie de vivre.
Also noteworthy is an installation by Inés Doujak from 2010, which was the (bad) star of the Macba exhibition The Beast and the Sovereign and caused the resignation of its director, Bartomeu Marí, for allowing its exhibition and then regretting and withdrawing it. It represents a German shepherd dog sodomizing a left-wing activist leader, who does the same (you have to imagine that with the help of a sex-shop prosthesis) with a man very similar to the emeritus king Juan Carlos I. It is sensationalist art with anticolonialist alibi and it is a shame that more attention is not paid to works that denounce colonialism without incurring frivolity: Gervasio Sánchez's photographic reports on threatened environmentalists in Honduras and Guatemala (Activistas por la vida), or unjustly forgotten films, such as the Argentine Quebracho, by Ricardo Wullicher.
Eugenio Merino's sculpture Always Franco (2012), which awaits us at the end of the tour, was denounced by the Francisco Franco National Foundation, which lost the case. It is an ugly piece, which presents the dictator stuck in a commercial refrigerator. The message is obvious: in 21st century Spain, Francoism has not died and aims to present itself as a fresh product. He is accompanied, in the same final room, by another dictator: the corpse of Saddam Hussein, who appears, in David Cerny's sculpture Shark (2005), preserved inside a formalin tank, in a double allusion to a famous work of art. sensationalism and a less known practice of the dictator, that of throwing dissidents into the sea.
Museum of forbidden art Barcelona www.museuartprohibit.org
