Threatened, outraged, persecuted, violated, attacked, banned… The history of art is full of works that have challenged what society imposes at every moment as acceptable and for that they have paid the price of silence. Impressed by the bleak dimension of the phenomenon, the entrepreneur and journalist Tatxo Benet started a collection in 2018 that in just five years has managed to bring together 200 pieces accused of blasphemy, obscene or politically incorrect and that is now freed from the clutches of the censors and exhibits them at the Museum of Forbidden Art. A unique facility in the world that opens its doors this Thursday at the Garriga Nogués house (Diputació, 250) and reminds us that freedom of expression is a constant object of erosion.
The first work acquired by the founder and partner of Mediapro was Political Prisoners in Contemporary Spain, the piece by Santiago Sierra that included pixelated portraits of imprisoned Catalan politicians. He acquired it for 80,000 euros at the Arco fair, before knowing that it would be hung from the Helga de Alvear gallery in the hours before the opening of the fair. It was the subsequent scandal that set off the alarms and 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 (No vestida para la conquesta), with a Bolivarian feminist peasant sodomizing the king emeritus who in 2015 brought down the Macba management team.
“But in reality – explains Benet – the work that for me starts the collection, the one that makes me see that there is an important theme here, is Silence rouge et bleu” he says, pointing to a room covered with thirty carpets Islamic prayer on which the Franco-Algerian artist Zoulikha Bouabdellah placed pairs of white stilettos alluding to the plight of Arab women. The installation was removed in 2014 from the Vendôme Pavilion when representatives of the Muslim community warned of possible “uncontrollable incidents”.
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 made and can be as dark and disturbing as the society it represents, Benet believes. Each of the works – 42 of them are on display in this first presentation – has a history of controversy or violence that has brought them here.
By the monumental staircase illuminated from above, sitting on his folding chair, the Spectator of Spectators of the Chronicle Team projects the sinister image of the omnipresent Francoist censor, whose shadow will extend to a room where we find Franco stuck in a fridge by Eugenio Merino, now sharing space with the Saddam Hussein that David ?erný recreated in shorts and his hands tied behind his back suspended in a formalin tank, evoking both Damien’s shark Hirst as the cruelty of the dictator, who ordered to throw his enemies into the sea. Already on the terrace, the ghost of a past that is still present reawakens with the old Fiat Uno decorated with Francoist symbols of Núria Güell and Levi Orta, which the Figueres City Council banned from driving on its Rambla in 2015 “Censorship is not a thing of the past, nor does it come only from the right,” points out the collector, who in the future would like to dedicate an entire room to seized works in Barcelona. At the moment, the warehouse keeps posters of bullfighters that the government of Ada Colau did not authorize to display in public.
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 the exhibition provoked, with demonstrations in favor and against, as in the case of La revolució (2019) by Fabián Cháirez: Emiliano Zapata naked, wearing a pink hat and high heels riding on a white horse that has an erection. There are works considered blasphemous, such as León Ferrari’s Christian Western Civilization, a crucified Christ on an F-105 aircraft of the United States armed forces, alluding to and denouncing the Vietnam War, which has been pursued for decades . Or Piss Christ, by Andrés Serrano, another image of Christ immersed in a jar of the artist’s urine, the object of vandalism attacks since its first performance in 1987 in the United States. The same luck he had, in 2019, Con flores a María de Charo Corrales, a virgin surrounded by angels and her left hand in her crotch.
The museum, under the direction of Rosa Rodrigo, ex-responsible for strategic business, commercial and public development of the Reina Sofia, has as its artistic director Carles Guerra, who was responsible for the Vicereina Image Center and the Tàpies Foundation, among others others Its intention is also to be a space for debate and reflection on censorship, no matter where it comes from, because, remembers Benet, it manifests itself in many ways and adopts many faces, but whoever holds the power is always tempted to exercise the.
