Threatened, outraged, persecuted, violated, attacked, banned... The history of art is full of works that have challenged what society imposes as acceptable at all times and have paid the price of silence. Impressed by the devastating dimension of the phenomenon, the businessman and journalist Taxto Benet started a collection in 2018 that in just five years has managed to bring together 200 pieces that at one time or another have been accused of being blasphemous, obscene or politically incorrect and which he now frees from the claws of censorship by exhibiting them at the Museu de l'Art Prohibit. A unique facility in the world, which opens its doors this Thursday at Casa Garriga Nogués (Diputación, 250) and reminds us that freedom of expression, which artists should take for granted in any democratic country, is constantly being eroded with effects sometimes sinister. After all, who gives themselves the right to decide what the rest of us can or cannot see?
The first work that the founder and partner of Mediapro acquired was Political Prisoners in Contemporary Spain, the piece by Santiago Sierra that included, among others, the pixelated portraits of imprisoned Catalan politicians. He did it for 80,000 euros at the Arco fair, before knowing that it would be taken down from the Helga de Alvear gallery in the hours before the opening of the fair. The scandal lit the fuse. Sierra's controversial work is not on display, but the one she bought next is: Ines Doujak's sculpture Not dressed for conquering, which in 2015 took down the Macba management team and in the that a Bolivarian feminist peasant is seen sodomizing the king emeritus.
"But in reality - says Benet - the work that for me begins the collection, with which I fall in love although culturally it does not touch me closely and makes me see that there is an important theme, is Silence rouge et bleu," he says, pointing out a room covered with thirty Islamic prayer rugs on which the Franco-Algerian artist Zoulikha Bouabdellah placed as many pairs of white stilettos with which she constructed a powerful metaphor about the situation of Arab women. The installation was removed in 2014 from the Vendôme Pavilion. (France) when representatives of the Muslim community warned of possible "uncontrollable incidents." Self-censorship or covert censorship?
Spread over the two floors of the museum, we find works by Picasso, Ai Weiwei, Mapplethorpe, Goya, Wojnarowicz, Warhol, Miquel Barceló. Art is a reflection of the culture in which it is produced and can be as dark and disturbing as the society it represents, believes Benet, who has not imposed red lines for himself, including those dictated by his personal tastes and ideology. policy. Each of the works - in this first presentation 42 are exhibited, but the idea is that little by little the hundreds preserved in the reserves can be released - each of which carries with it a history of controversy or violence that has brought you here.
Next to the monumental staircase illuminated from above, sitting on his folding chair, the Crónica team's Spectator of Spectators projects the sinister image of the omnipresent Franco censor, whose shadow will extend to a room where we find Franco stuffed in Eugenio's refrigerator. Merino, now sharing space with the Saddam Hussein that David Černý recreated in his underwear and hands tied behind his back, suspended inside a formalin tank, evoking both Damien Hirst's shark and the dictator's cruelty, which he ordered to be thrown into the sea to his enemies.
Upstairs, on the terrace, the ghost of a past that is still present awakens again with the old and dilapidated Fiat Uno decorated with Francoist symbols by Núria Güell and Levi Orta, which the Figueres City Council banned from driving on its Rambla in 2015. "The "Censorship is not a thing of the past, nor does it come only from the right," says Benet, who in the future would like to dedicate an entire room to works kidnapped or vilified in Barcelona. At the moment, the warehouse keeps posters of bullfighters that Ada Colau's government prohibited from being displayed on public roads.
All the pieces are contextualized with abundant documentary material that the visitor can download with a QR code and some are accompanied in rooms with audiovisual pieces in which you can see the visceral reactions that provoked their exhibition, with demonstrations for and against, as in the case of The Revolution (2019) by Fabián Cháirez: Emiliano Zapata naked, with a pink hat and high-heeled shoes riding on a white horse that experiences an erection. The homosexual version of the revolutionary leader angered family members and workers' unions, who went so far as to attack LGBT groups that came out in his defense. Despite everything, the director of the Mexican National Institute of Fine Arts decided not to remove it from the exhibition.
The anxiety caused by sexuality is also present in Mapplethorpe's famous formal beauty with controversial topics such as sadomasochistic sexual practices, in which he himself participated in the late seventies. But history shows that censorship can also be the artist's best ally. The cancellation of his posthumous exhibition, The Perfect Moment, at the Corcoran Washington gallery, by politicians who saw in those images a depraved threat to their conservative values, provoked the rapid reaction of the artists, who provoked their photographs on the facade, making them visible to the eyes of everyone. Mapplethorpe's brother, present at the protest, commented: “Robert must be tap dancing in heaven.” In 2018, the withdrawal of one of his works from the Serralves Museum in Porto ended his director.
The museum, which is directed by Rosa Rodrigo, former head of Strategic Business, Commercial and Public Development at the Reina Sofía, and has hired Carles Guerra, who was director of the Virreina Center de la Image y la Fundació, as artistic director. Tàpìes, among others, also wants to be a space for debate and reflection on censorship, wherever it comes from. And the condemnation, in many cases, comes from the church, intolerant of eroticism and blasphemy (Picasso's Suite 347, in which Rafael and La Fornarina frolic before the Pope's voracious gaze, was shown for the first time in 1968 inside a private, controlled-access room and in 2012 he stumbled upon the Russian Orthodox church.
León Ferrari's work The Christian Western Civilization, which represents Christ crucified on an F-105 plane of the United States armed forces, in allusion and denunciation of the Vietnam War in which more than one and a half million died. people, has been persecuted for decades. And Andrés Serrano's Piss Christ, another image of Christ submerged in a jar of urine by the artist, has been subject to vandalism since its first performance in 1987 in the United States, and in 2011 it was partially destroyed by Catholic activists during its exhibition in a gallery in Avignon. With flowers to María de Charo Corrales, a virgin surrounded by angels touching her crotch with her left hand, she was cut open in 2019 by an exalted person in Córdoba.
One of the works that continues to raise blisters, being prosecuted by Christian Lawyers, is Amen, the work of Abel Azcona, who draws the word “PEDERASTIA” on the ground with consecrated hosts that the artist collected for months while he went to church. commune. The same association filed a complaint in 2005 against the then director of the Reina Sofía Museum, Manuel Borja-Villel, for the inclusion in an exhibition of the piece Matchbox, with the image of a burning church and the historic motto of Piotr Kropotkin "The "The only church that illuminates is the one that burns." Despite pressure, the piece was not removed.
Tatxo Benet recalls that censorship manifests itself in many forms and takes on many faces, but that whoever holds power is always tempted to exercise it. The collection opens symbolically with a first edition of 18 engravings from Goya's Caprichos series, which in 1799 the artist himself withdrew from sale for fear of reprisals from the Inquisition, although its scope is contemporary. There are drawings made by Guantánamo prisoners, whose exhibition, in 2017, caused such a stir in the Pentagon that from then on it was decreed that all drawings should be destroyed after their release. And of course, there are also examples of commercial censorship, such as that poster of a bullring that Miquel Barceló made for the Roland Garros tennis tournament in '95 and that the organizers rejected (but, "what relationship does it have with tennis?"), they asked him. "Don't you see the ball?" he replied, pointing to the albero circle. Ai Weiwei also stumbled upon LEGO when they realized that he was going to use them to build portraits of people deprived of their liberty.
Since his position as a journalist, Benet has been locating many of the pieces through the news he reads in newspapers around the world. One of the ones that has caused the most controversy in recent years is Statue of a girl of peace, by artists and activists Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung. The sculpture represents a woman sitting in a chair with bare feet and a small bird on her shoulder. It is a tribute to the Korean sex slaves who were offered to relieve the Japanese soldiers during World War II, whose shadow is projected on the ground, as if waiting for forgiveness. The public sculpture - it exists in different variations - is considered a monument to peace in Korea, but continues to provoke international incidents, threats of breaking trade agreements, opening bitter divisions between Japan and South Korea.
Benet also wanted to welcome a victim of the cancellation, who was advised by her daughter, who lives in the United States, not to hang up. It is a painting by Chuck Close purchased after the National Gallery in Washington canceled an exhibition of the artist, after several models accused him of sexual harassment. And joining this desire to preserve what others have wanted to destroy, the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera makes her own contribution with Plusvalía, a reproduction of the sign that welcomed the Auschwitz extermination camp ("Work will set you free") which in December 2009 was stolen by a gang that intended to sell it for 150,000 euros and was later found broken into three pieces in a canal in Venice. Bruguera has reunited them, leaving her scars visible and accompanied by tools scattered on the floor.
The price of tickets is 12 euros and 9 for people over 65 years of age and students.
