Opmaak 1 - Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart

Transcription

Silo
Archivo F.X.
A project by Pedro G. Romero
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos
13th May – 27th September 2009
From the outset of his creative activities in the late s,
Pedro G. Romero has been the protagonist of one of the most
unique artistic careers within recent Spanish art. His work has
encompassed a variety of different fields, some of them not directly
connected with the visual arts per se, and covering music, theatre,
publishing, exhibition co-ordination and the organisation of
academic activities, all from a range of different perspectives.
Archivo F.X. brings together material of differing origins,
contributed by a network of collaborators. Pedro G. Romero has
used it to offer a poetic reflection that reveals art’s potential as
critical knowledge. On more than one occasion he has acknowledge
that his work involves a particular focus on time. As a result, and
despite his particular interest in being “anarchivist”, we cannot
ignore the element of historical awareness within it. However, this
recognition of time and its density does not prevent the artist from
being critical with regard to certain common ways of
understanding history, and for this reason Pedro G. Romero
introduces analogy in his use of the language of documentation:
a collision of contrasting semantic fields that brings about new
viewpoints in order to explain our past and present and which
uncover layers of successive critical archaeologies.
Ten years of close collaboration with the Abbey of Silos and the
Official Chamber of Trade and Industry of Burgos have made it
possible to present a project such as Silo, whose initial contemplation
will lead us on to more participative and complex artistic forms. Its
involved, committed nature thus merits our heartfelt thanks.
Ángeles González-Sinde
Minister of Culture
The exhibition programme organised by the Museo Nacional
Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in the Abbey of Silos is a most
unusual joining together of forces and a collaborative effort
between two very different institutions: an active Christian
monastery and a national museum of contemporary art. Two
institutions – museum and Christian community – that not only
have different origins and histories but ones that were at times
overtly antagonistic. Nonetheless, this unusual coming together
would seem to offer great potential, and as such constitutes the
active core around which to organise the exhibition programme of
a place whose uniqueness goes beyond its merely historical merits.
In Silo, the new presentation of his Archivo F.X., Pedro G.
Romero locates himself precisely within this space of cross-overs
and encounters. Using various texts and actions, the artist has
established a range of uses and meanings for Archivo F.X.: as
“x files”, an archive of the unknown, the hidden and the lost,
which rediscovers documents, information and images; as “special
effects” in the form of the f.x., “which denominate pyrotechnical,
sound and visual effects in films or on tv, as well as in the theatre
and even in political demonstrations”; and finally, in a particularly
relevant meaning from this Museum’s point of view, as a function
of x, f(x), “in the sense emphasised by the Russian theoretician
Victor Slovsky, that it does not matter so much what things are as
how they work”, i.e. their transformation into a tool of knowledge.
In his various endeavours, particularly the Silo project, which
involves the reconstruction of the secret torture centre [checa] that
was originally installed in the church on calle Vallmajor in
Barcelona during the Civil War, Archivo F.X. works on and
modifies the normal passive approach of exhibition visitors and
instead of visitors produces actors and users. In this sense, Silo can
be located midway between theatre (Pedro G. Romero has spoken
of “choreography”) and a “mechanism at the service of citizens”.
In his text in the present publication (which is not so much a
catalogue as a continuation of the project in book form) Esteban
Pujals analyses all the numerous theoretical and practical subtleties
that the Archivo sets in motion. Physically expressed in a wide
range of ways, including exhibitions, seminars, freely circulated
information sheets, and a website (www.fxysudoble.org), Archivo
F.X. is a work in progress and undoubtedly one of the most
original, profound and significant artistic creations produced in
Spain over the last decade.
The fact that within the context of the monastery of Silos this
project can acquire even greater meaning and intensity is a great
source of satisfaction to the Museum, and I would consequently
like to express our profound thanks to Abbot Clemente Serna and
to the Official Chamber of Trade and Industry of Burgos.
Manuel J. Borja-Villel
Director, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Content
¿Quién le cortaría el cuello al ruiseñor
para intentar descubrir dónde
se produce la canción?
Who would cut off a nightingale’s head

Archivo F.X.: The Maturing Flame
Esteban Pujals

Tesauro 0ikonomia

Chronology

Thesaurus
to try to find the song?
Silo
/grain store
/underground missile store
/underground hiding-place
/satire, parody
/image of a butterfly
A RC H I V O F.X . :
T H E M AT U R I N G F L A M E
Esteban Pujals Gesalí
Imagine a moratorium on the production of works of art, an end
to art that opened a new historical horizon, to consist from now
on of the creative contemplation of works of art from the past. A
last, posthumous life for art, a post-erity in which it would be
obligatory for all possible art to deal in the inventive elucidation
of the what, how and why of previous art. This undertaking
would be enough to meet the aesthetic needs of artists, critics and
public for the next century. Although the prospect may seem
unbearably gloomy or decadent, it is, in a way, an exact description of the state of art over the last seventy or eighty years, however hard the neo-vanguard artists of the s, s and s
may have found it to accept this point of view or be aware that this
was the nature of their activity, perforce neo-.
As is inevitable in any historical understanding, it was only with
hindsight that the art of the second half of the th century was
able to see itself as neo-modern. The unequivocal symptom of
this awareness came, in the s, with the surge of interest by
artists and critics in the debates that continued for the next ten
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E S T E BA N P U J A L S
A R C H I V O F.X . : T H E M A T U R I N G F L A M E
years around “post-modernism”. A symptom rather than an
explanation, as the very word “post-modernism” expressed the
misguidedness of its implicit hypothesis, according to which the
artistic practices of the latter half of the century, the most derivative and historicist ever, were claimed to aspire to nothing less
than wiping clean the slate of the recent past.
An art of museums and archives, in which every possible piece
of work consists of a gloss on what has already been produced, a
commentary, whether slanted in homage or more or less critical
irony; in which every poetic approach, every aesthetic aspiration,
every possible stance already has its antecedent, its original version, clearly defined at some earlier point in the course of modern
art from its Neoclassical beginnings, for it is not only art that is
reproduced ad nauseam by our mechanical-electronic age.
On the subject of interpretations and ironies, there is a striking
resemblance between the short-sighted, unfocussed way in which
artists and critics viewed their situation in the decades following
the end of the Second World War and the historical confusion
suffered by those engaged in the first modern art, the historians,
dilettantes and artists of early Neoclassicism. The radical desire
to break away from existing art and civilization, that we have come
to associate with the most innovative ideas of modern artists,
made itself felt among the Neoclassicists in the form of a republican, civic repugnance for the techniques, models, aims and production methods of baroque art, which they saw as closely allied
to tyrants and the clergy. For the inspired visionaries of Neo-classicism, the regeneration of a corrupt and decadent society began
with the regeneration of the aesthetic tastes of its members. They
believed this could be done by exposing them to glimpses of true
human nature, revealed in its pristine essence. The Neoclassical
artist reacted against baroque sophistication, sumptuousness and
sensationalism, the three dimensional effect laboriously achieved
by an oil painting tradition perfected over half a millennium, the
abject internalization of the point of view of the sovereign,
the master, the bishop, the patron, with simplicity, transparency, the
origin (a key word in the genesis of Neoclassicism, alongside
the adjective original) stripped radically bare. The origin could only
be found in the most remote past available in the th century: the
linear style of Attic pottery, discovered at precisely that time by
contemporary proto-archaeology, and beyond it, even closer to
the origin, Sparta and the world of Homer’s Iliad, on which
artists and poets projected their own concerns about liberty and
civic responsibility.
The fact that people involved in the first European industrial
revolution could see themselves as progressing (another word that
changed in very interesting ways in the course of the th century) towards the origin, that is to say the Homeric origin, is enough
to leave us open-mouthed today. Considered in the light of the
succession of vanguards that followed, the unique strangeness of
the work produced by the Neoclassical vanguard is also undeniable. The static timelessness characteristic of its architectural
forms certainly suggests qualities in marked contrast to the
dynamism of the ideas thrown up by Impressionist painting or
Symbolist poetry, Functionalist architecture or parole in libertà.
A similar conviction of universal applicability and permanent
validity seems to predominate in the paintings of David or the
sculptures of Canova, conceived as exemplary expressions of a
human nature that is fundamentally stable, clearly perceived,
understood in all its genuine, unalterable simplicity through the
efforts of enlightened scientists and moral philosophers. That this
is one of the most conspicuous traits of Neoclassical art, in all its
forms, complicates its reception as modern art by any observer
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from the succeeding aesthetic vanguards, accustomed to self-criticism and doubt. It forces us to consider the peculiar position of
Neoclassicism as the first, and therefore unconscious, vanguard,
and realise that its members were not historically conditioned to
regard themselves as a vanguard thrusting towards the future and
destined to be wiped out by waves of ever more critical vanguards.
The perception of themselves as part of a vanguard would only
be possible for members of the second vanguard wave, the
Impressionist painters who reacted against a degraded later version of Neoclassicism, the academic art of the mid th century,
with an aesthetic program that glorified the exact opposite of the
Neoclassical aspiration to timelessness, the fleeting instant. They
also assumed their own place in time, as an aesthetic approach, to
be transient. Any understanding of the vanguard character of
Neoclassical art must therefore take into account that it was an
exception in relation to later vanguards, its exceptional nature
bound up with its members’ particular perception of time, history, and their special place in it.
History has always been a labyrinth of appearances and illusions
and anyone who tries to hijack it for their own ends invariably ends
up enmeshed in its ironies. If Neoclassical artists and critics saw
themselves as returning artistically to the Homeric origin, so as to
give strength to their own age, what of the neo-vanguard race
towards the end of art, that has left our museums stuffed with
“autonomy”, “formalism” and “dematerialization”? Aporia and
paradox are just what art loves to play with nowadays. No positive
statements or their dialectical falsification, but panoramas of ambiguity and weirdness, journeys, experiences that cannot be synthesised or boiled down to their essence. It is not that there is no truth,
but that it is no longer possible to formulate it and take it home in
our pockets, separated from everything we still want to apply it to.
The archive “as fine art”, said Pedro G. Romero casually in an
interview a few years ago, when the Archivo F.X. was first beginning to bear fruit. It is not an anti-archive that might end up inadvertently internalizing the categories, labels and silences of museums and the history of art in the attempt to set against them a
clearer meaning or a more suitable order, but a non-archive, an
anarchive, the non-work of an anartist. Or maybe it would be
right to speak of an anti-archive, so long as we take anti- as understood by the Greek poets in the composition of the antistrophes
of their odes: emulating the preceding strophe in its metre and
accents and possibly using some of the same words, not to say
the opposite but to structure the expression of something quite
different.
Repetition, then, of forms, intentions and procedures, beginning with the characteristically modern (Cubist, Cubo-Futurist,
Constructivist) reduction, that of the artistic process down to
methods and materials. But “material” and “matter” (etymologically the same word as the Portuguese madeira, “wood”, or the
Spanish madera), with their overtones of the static and inert,
evoke the climate of primitive, strident, militant materialism in
which the reduction was first made. The chief feature of the
materials of the Archivo F.X., on the other hand – in themselves,
before being organised in any way – is that they appear animated
by a breath, fire or passion that seems to break loose of what
Tatlin, for example, might have deemed worthy of being
described as a material. The photographs, stories, descriptions
and inventories documenting the political iconoclasm of the th
and th centuries in Spain are almost alive with motion. Like the
blurred, moving figure in a photo, as though, in all their variety,
they resisted any “normalization” of argument or composition,
the idea of using these documents or regarding them as docile or
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passive appears highly problematic from the start. They seem
best suited to being treated as genetic or even progenitive material. It is worth noting here the Archivo F.X.’s constant references
to the reflections of Georges Bataille on imperfection and inconclusiveness and describing the project, or rather its possible
results, as “formless information” whose elements, records, headings and entries can never quite be considered complete.
But there is more; more material, much more. The archive contains, as well as documents related to the heritage that is so much
our own (to the irritation of Spanish nationalists, blind to the fact
that if anything distinguishes our history of the last hundred and
fifty years it is anarchism and the burning down of convents), others, chiefly from across the Pyrenees or overseas, that record
moments and places (topoi) in the history of modern art, its quarrels, follies and acts of destruction, its denials and suicides. Not just
any moments, of course, but those instants of concentrated, meaningful energy for which the great Neoclassical author Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing so aptly coined the term: “pregnant moment”.
The simple juxtaposition of the two series reveals the potential
of certain similarities and analogies, some certainly extremely
obvious, others more difficult or imprecise, more unsettling or
hard to pin down. Does anything resemble the fetishism surrounding a work of art, more than the flames with which iconoclastic fetishism destroys it, for example? Is it destructive, the
fondness of nostalgic artists for ruins, for broken pillars with real
foliage curling around that carved on their capitals, or quite the
opposite? Is there not an interesting inverse symmetry between
the anonymous and collective nature of the destructive show put
on by the anti-clerical mob of  or the summer of , and
the genius generally attributed to someone who has produced an
admirable work of art? Is there not a striking parallel between the
violence of the arsonists during Barcelona’s Tragic Week and the
virulence of the attacks, in word and deed, on the art watched and
applauded by the audience of the Cabaret Voltaire? Is burning
down a convent a form of popular art or of religious expression?
And what if, in the end, both were the same? Above all, is it not
usual to refer to any great modern artist as an iconoclast? Not to
mention the flickerings here of the Neoclassical concept of the
sublime. At the same time, although in both cases they are made
up of documentation, of historical material, the elements contained in the two series seem to resist fusion or straightforward
comparison. What certain artists are said to have done in Munich
or Paris or St. Petersburg ninety or a hundred years ago is not the
same as what happened in my city at about the same time, leaving
an indelible smell of scorching. Just as it is totally different to talk
of the end of art, or declare it dead, or reveal it to be dead in
advance, than really to put a torch to a church or convent and set
it alight with everything in it. It is that really that has always distinguished words from action, suggesting that in art the work has
always been words, in that sense. Should we therefore regard
Alonso Cano’s Virgin of the Sorrows of Hiniesta, burnt to a cinder after the church of St. Julian of Seville went up in flames, as
mere words, words that are, as they say, blown away on the wind?
The two series come alongside each other, draw close like
rhyming words at the end of two verses. Although in one sense it
was discovered by Braque and Picasso in , the collage had
always existed in the possibility of making “peaceful stream”
rhyme with “piercing scream”. It was a favourite trick of Dada’s
and Duchamp gave it a new twist with his fantastic invention of
the ready-made. But it was the Situationists who upped the stakes
and hit the jackpot by broadening the concept into psychogeographical drift and détournement and decreeing the obligatory
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plagiarism by which we all think and live now. Repetition too,
then, of the ultimate modern procedure, of the whole history of
its improvement as a technology.
A collage of objets trouvés, a constellation of fragments, a kaleidoscope of history, or whatever we want to call the characteristic
art of the end of art, the only kind capable of containing all the
ever-changing transformations and ghostly glimmerings of
apparitions, appearances and resemblances. The Archivo F.X. has
echoes of its illustrious predecessor, equally unfinished and
unfinishable, with which it shares some of its subject matter and,
in a very broad sense, its method: the Passagen-Werk to which
Walter Benjamin seems to have dedicated much of the last thirteen years of his life. To use the word collage, however, may lead
to confusion when the response to this technique has often been to
assume that juxtaposition presupposes a particular order of the
material to which the artist has some magical, intuitive access,
as though there were such a thing as collage-making good taste
(as found perhaps in the more exquisite compositions of Kurt
Schwitters) that would lead us pleasantly back to the baroque. It
must therefore be stressed that collage is a procedure rather than
a method. It makes connections possible that would otherwise be
unexpected and unlikely, but it does not in any way generate
them. It is the decisions about which materials to juxtapose, and
in what conditions and contexts, that constitute the method.
I mentioned earlier the striking analogies and general similarities between the documents in the Archivo F.X. recording the
looting, burning and desecration committed by anticlerical iconoclasm in Spain and those focussed on the joints and nodules in
the fetishistic construct known as the international history
of modern art. I also noted how the perception of similarity
inevitably and automatically produces dissimilarity, discord and
dislocation. When Benjamin suggests an interpretation of the
Parisian Passage de l’Opéra as an emblem of the prehistory of
the modern world, whose contemporary history would correspond in his analogy to the s, when he wrote these comments, what we notice is precisely how inappropriate this connection is, the arbitrary brutality of the incongruous comparison of
cave dwellings to a commercial gallery of , a crazy mismatch
that seems to threaten language itself. Going down the route of
similarity does not lead to the rational ordering of the world into
categories, classes, families and elements, but to a rule of particularity that seems to subvert any attempt at interpretation,
pulverizing the general order into specific molecules and incommensurable atoms.
What we have here then is a method dealing with the extraordinary and the specific, aimed at intensifying our perception of singular phenomena and understanding their improbable ways, the
laws and reasons that govern their exceptional nature. There is a
very early, approximate model of this method, dreamt up in the
days of Symbolism by Alfred Jarry to explore a world formulated
as complementary to the existing one: the ‘pataphysical method.
This contains two concepts in particular that have rarely been
taken seriously but without which it is impossible to grasp the
imaginative scope of Jarry’s proposal: syzygy and the clinamen.
Jarry borrows syzygy from astronomy, in which the term, from
the Greek, refers to a momentary conjunction or opposition of
planets with huge gravitational consequences (syzygian tides produce the most extreme variations in sea levels), and turns it into
the guiding principal of his writing. Every word, every phrase
must pass through a conjunction or opposition of meanings to
reach its meaning in the text. Imagine the consequences, not just
for a piece of writing but for an archive, of conceiving its entries
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in terms of a gravitational game between celestial bodies in
motion. Consider, too, the effect of this starry perspective on one
of the more common metaphors for the collage: the constellation.
Better known than syzygy is the concept of the clinamen, which
Jarry took from Lucretius, one of the most widely appreciated
Latin authors over the last four hundred years precisely because
of the interest aroused by his fantastical materialist view of a universe composed of atoms subject to this law. For Lucretius, the
clinamen was the minimum swerve (spin, in the parlance of the
snooker hall) of an atom from the direction of the liquid flow of
which it formed a part. In contrast to the determinist model of
Democritus, who describes atoms as being in a constant vertical
fall, Lucretius’ atomic theory raised the principal of their haphazard deviation to the level of a governing law, with the clinamen
determining their inevitable and unpredictable collision rather
than the difference in their weight or size. He made the clinamen
the essence of movement, apparent only to itself due to the
absence of stability. Further, according to this theory all instability originated at the lowest order of the demonstrable, without
being determined in any way by space or time.
If we consider that in De Rerum Natura Lucretius refers three
times to the analogy between atoms and letters (letters are to
words what atoms are to bodies) and combine this view of writing
with that produced by seeing the significant elements in a text in
the gravitational terms of the metaphor of syzygy, Jarry’s ‘pataphysical method seems to point to a visionary grammar in which
the letter suffers or partakes in a movement, a heat or passion,
made up of words but also the gaps between them, through which
it slips to generate unconscious and unexpected connections
between different parts of the discourse. Common textual phenomena can therefore be attributed to the constant action of the
clinamen, such as the spontaneous appearance of acrostics and
anagrams, paragrams and metagrams, puns and homonyms, that,
according to Jarry’s application of Lucretius’ lex atomica, all go to
subvert from within the predictability of the way signs combine.
Similarly, syzygy is responsible for the changes in the meanings
of words that come about through their movement from one context to another. All this makes a mockery of any attempt to treat
the phenomena of meaning as fundamentally stable and shows
Jarry’s concept of writing, and of meaning in general, tending in
the same direction as the semiotics of froth behind the no less
astonishing discoveries of his contemporary Mallarmé.
While Jarry’s dissipative semiotic theory, a useful model of
expression for the prodigious productivity of the Archivo F.X.,
remained unpublished on the death of its author in ,
Raymond Roussel, another pioneer of possible ways to organize
an archive conceived as a work of art, also kept secret until his
death, in , the method he had used to construct the two most
disconcerting novels ever written. In his posthumous work How
I Wrote Certain of my Books, Roussel explains that both Impressions of Africa () and Locus Solus () were composed following a formula (le procedé) for generating text based on the
accumulation of meaning from a combination of linguistic polysemy and homophony. The starting point for Among the Blacks, a
short story which later developed into Impressions of Africa, seems
to have been the similarity in pronunciation between the words
billard (snooker) and pillard (looter): changing just one consonant
in the sentence “Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard” altered the context in which the nouns were read and so
completely transformed the meaning of the sentence as a whole
(from “White letters on the cushions of the old snooker table” to
“The white man’s letters about the old looter’s gangs”).
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“Once I had found the two sentences,” Roussel explains, “my
aim was to write a story that could begin with the first and end
with the second”. To compose Impressions of Africa he took each
sentence in the text of Among the Blacks and made minimal
changes in pronunciation, of one or two phonemes, that could
nevertheless cause the alarming mutations of meaning that give
this novel and the later Locus Solus their radical unpredictability.
The clinamen again. A tiny phonetic shift, a slip of the tongue
on a consonant, an accidental pronunciation, a barely conscious
or audible aspiration, and speech suddenly plunges into catastrophe, a metamorphosis that destroys all predictability and gives
birth to the unthinkable. Le procedé, Roussel tells us at another
point in his explanation, “is closely related to rhyme. In both
cases something unexpected is created through phonetic combinations. The process is an essentially poetic one”. Rhyme again,
between things which would otherwise never have entered into
contact or collision.
It is as pointless to ask about the purpose behind the workings
of the Archivo F.X. as to ask about the purpose of the archive
itself. In sustained syzygy between necessity and chance, the
archive performs the dance of all its possible triangulations with
Duchampian disregard for the supernatural results. More of an
organ than a machine, more concerned with making art than with
its destiny, it processes its elements and effects according to its
own varying inclinations, works miracles of form, foreshortenings, and displays its wisdom, a flagrant, maturing flame.
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Archivo F.X.
A YOUNG WOMAN OF NOVEMBER 1917
Laughing without reason you look
At my time, suffering
Weak and cruel you look back.
 
During the Pre-revolutionary period, in secret hideaways in Russia
and in hotels abroad, women were highly esteemed in EDITORIAL
GROUPS AND CONSPIRACIES. Something of this enthusiasm inspired
Irina Sverdlov who could write shorthand, and in the autumn of 
she was put in charge of taking down dictation at the Smolney
Institute. After this she was sent to Moscow with the rest of the staff.
Following Lenin’s death she was moved to an archivist’s job where
she remained, disregarded as a revolutionary, until , after which she
was happy to pass unnoticed. The unnoticed tend to survive.
Nonetheless, at moments during those days of  she had appreciated (she had been told about something similar occurring in )
that a new type of means of exchange or transport of human energies
(“means”, however, not being quite the right word; the elementary
particle is “objective”) in the form of TACIT AGREEMENT could
mobilise an exceptional capacity for work. Far more than could be
achieved by paying with money. The problem of basing a political
formation on this new “gravitation” was not that of the strength of
this “political physics” but rather how to maintain this “field of force”.
Nothing of this FLASH OF MUTUAL AID1 was still convertible three
months later. And nothing could alter this disastrous outcome. A body
politic without memory could not be justified. The archival memory
was still able to register the “spark of solidarity” but it could not revive
it after the event. The elementary particle of this physics that Irina
had observed in a non-scientific manner and as a witness of her age
resisted documentation.
The archives of life, like those of geo-physics, lie hidden in the
world’s crust. Irina knew that. They bear witness to life on this Blue
Planet but they do not generate it. For this reason it was pointless to
try to convey her experience to her daughter (being a very short-lived
one that could only be understood within its context). A high-level and
temporarily indispensable functionary had left her pregnant then
completely abandoned her.
There was much personal understanding between mother and child
but little passing on of facts. How could Irina convey in words a situation that took place in the crepuscular light of St. Petersburg in 
(and one related to taking down dictation, i.e. the pressure of the
fingers and hand on pencil at a “revolutionary” rhythm) to a daughter
who knew nothing of that crepuscular hour and also could not do
shorthand? In addition, there was now a granddaughter, Natasha.
At the very least it would be important to tell her about the “politicophysical” elements that Irina believed she had discovered. The granddaughter does not listen when the conversation turns to that. Irina,
grown old, with no one to ask her questions, would (in constant reminiscence) still be ready to do things, things that she would never do
for money or if ordered to by her parents. She does not take part in
veterans’ parades.
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ALEXANDER KLUGE. The Devil’s Blind Spot. .
1. Due to a textual error, for a long time
Irina thought that this was Karl Marx’s
concept of PROFIT. Is there such a thing
as a SOCIALIST PROFIT?
Tesauro 0ikonomia
Alexander Kojève
 May . The Sacred Heart of Christ among the burned out ruins of
the Colegio de Chamartín. Madrid. Archivos Prensa Española/Prensa del
Movimiento. Copyright Ediciones Españolas, S. A. Original print of the period,
 x  cm.
 December . Alexander Kojève gives a lecture at the Collège of Sociology.
Paris, France. .pm. Collège de Sociologie, Salle des Galleries du Livre,
 rue Gay-Lussac. Correspondence à Georges Bataille. Ed. Denis Hollier. .
——————
Alexander Kojève
All those who have read Galdós’s Episodios Nacionales [National
Episodes] will remember “Napoleon in Chamartín”, the title of one of
the volumes in this series by the eminent novelist. The building in
which tradition has it that the Emperor is supposed to have set up
camp, later became the Noviciado de Religiosas del Sagrado Corazón.
Tragedy would take hold there in that place of history and poetry, and
once the Colegio had been emptied, the small group of arsonists found
no hindrance in setting it alight. With the speed and efficiency of experienced technicians they primarily devoted themselves to sacking and
looting. Who could fail to recall the terrible days of José Bonaparte’s
rule? First, a number of religious paintings were carried out of the door
while the pile of loot gradually grew with a mound of mattresses,
clothes, school equipment and furniture that began to be hurled out of
the windows. Next, the bonfire began. A container of petrol was gener37
Alexander Kojève
Alexander Kojève
ously sprinkled over the treasure. A growing number of curious onlookers impassively watched the sad spectacle. Some minutes later, after the
doors, outer walls, rooms and offices had been doused with petrol, the
huge building began majestically to burn. No one prevented this. Night
fell. The spectacle was tragic and sinister in the extreme. The flames lit
up the entire village of Chamartín and could be seen as far away as
Madrid. A reddish patch of terror – a Napoleonic terror – illuminated
the horizon. The fire continued its imperious course, fanned by the
nocturnal breeze until dawn. The last outbreaks continued to burn feebly on the Tuesday afternoon among the indestructible walls. Not one
single fireman had appeared at the scene of the disaster. So moving was
the sight of that building in the evening light that it provoked tears due
to the fact that, above the rubble and the fires, the outline of the marble
sculpture of the Sacred Heart of Christ that presided over the convent’s
main courtyard was still to be seen, indestructible. This white, glowing
effigy, with its hand raised as if to hold back the flames, was nothing less
than a symbol of peace and consolation. End of story.
that has lost its God. The Romantic poet wished to be God (and was
right to do so) but he did not know how to achieve this aim, declining
into madness or suicide. This is a “beautiful death”, but death all the
same: a total and definitive failure. Napoleon turned towards the exterior World (the social and natural one), understanding it in the sense
that his actions were successful. But he did not understand himself (not
knowing that he was God). Hegel turned towards Napoleon: but
Napoleon was a man, the “perfect” Man due to his complete integration in History: to understand him is to understand Man, to understand oneself. In understanding (by justifying) Napoleon, Hegel thus
achieved his own self-understanding. He consequently became a Sage,
a fully realised philosopher. If Napoleon was God revealed to man (der
entscheinende Gott), it was Hegel who revealed him. Absolute spirit is
fullness of Bewusstsein and Selbstbewusstein, in other words, the real
(natural World) that involves the universal and unified State, achieved
by Napoleon and revealed by Hegel. Whatever the case, History came
to an end. The burning of history.
From a Christian viewpoint, Napoleon made Vanity a reality and was
thus the incarnation of Sin (the Anti-Christ). He was the first to really
dare to attribute an absolute (universal) value to human Uniqueness.
For Kant and Fichte, he was das Böse: the immoral being par excellence. For the tolerant, liberal romantic, he was a traitor (of the Revolution). For the “divine” Poet he was nothing more than a hypocrite. The
Romantic imagination, creator of “fictitious” and “marvellous” universes, culminated in Novalis (in a creative act that made Napoleon into
a real Universe). Even Novalis, however, did not take his “divinity”
seriously. The poet was never recognised by more than a small minority, by a “chapel” (not even by a church!), whereas Napoleon, in contrast, imposed himself universally. The poet pared himself down to his
very essence, ultimately dwindling away and disappearing into his own
nothingness. This is the absolute Unwahrheit, the lie taken to its furthest extreme and one that annihilates itself. This sublimated and fugitive Romantic was the schöne Seele, the accursed (Christian) conscience
38
39
Arc de Triomphe for Workers
 September . The interior after the fire. Hermitage of Nuestro Padre Jesús
de la Cañada or de la Fuensanta. Morón de la Frontera. Seville. It was burned
during the revolutionary outbreaks, destroying the main roof. Visit of the Junta
de Cultura Histórica y Tesoro Artístico. Photograph, Antonio Sancho.
 November . Interior of the factory with a geometrical drawing comprising
the plan for cutting the arch. Sesto San Giovanni. OSVA area. Milan. Factory
occupied by the members of the Circolo Proletario Giovanile e di Lotta
Continua. Collection Salvatore Ala Gallery. Ink and pencil over a black
and white photograph. Gordon Matta-Clark.
——————
On the day of the th, news had it that the coup had succeeded in
Seville. The workers were reluctant to submit. Various rebels were
killed and church buildings destroyed. One of the churches to be
burned, the hermitage of Nuestro Padre Jesús, was occupied in order to
deal with the arrival of people who had fled from the forces of the military coup from El Arahal, Paradas and Marchena. They arrived weary
and wounded. The younger women and the children slept overnight in
the ruined building. The shape of the fallen weathervane was silhouetted upside-down on the roof of the church, and those from outside the
city were given instructions to go to “the house of the upside-down
weathervane”. On the th the rebel troops and the nationalist volunteers ambushed Morón and in the early hours of the morning the
instructions were that the church should be emptied, and the refugees
were obliged to escape along the ravine.
41
The gallerist Salvatore Ala arranged for Gordon to work in an abandoned factory in a poor quarter of Milan. Meanwhile, a group of young
members of the Communist party took over the factory, and there is a
law (presumably a law on squatting rights) under which an occupied
building cannot be demolished. They were really a bunch of youngsters
aged around  or . Their aim was to use the building as a health and
social centre for the area. Gordon suggested cutting a triumphal arch
through the building to draw attention to their actions. The authorities
heard by some means what was about to happen and the day before the
arch was cut they ordered a raid on the false pretext of possession of
drugs, throwing everyone out.
ARCO
42
ARCO
ARCO
. The nave of San Francisco el Grande with the objects stored there by
the Junta Delegada in September of that year. Madrid. Archive, Museo Nacional
del Prado, cat. no. . Photograph, Vicente Moreno. Junta de Defensa del Tesoro
Artístico, original print from the period,  x  cm.
. An overall view of the fair from a remote-controlled balloon, showing
various stands of galleries and the active business of selling being carried out
in them. ARCO, International Contemporary Art Fair. Madrid. Images from
the series Recorridos Fotográficos. On deposit in ARTIUM, Centro-Museo Vasco
de Arte Contemporáneo. Photography Collection of the Asociación de Amigos
de ARCO. Original print,  x  cm.
——————
These successful results undoubtedly represented a solid step forward
in ARCO’s working strategy, aimed at a complete commitment to quality that will determine the selection of the next edition in . This will
also be an edition whose change of location to the new pavilions
in the Feria de Madrid will allow for a re-structuring of the space and
the design into precisely defined sections. Collecting will once again
become the primary point of attention, with a specific focus on corporate collecting as one of the most important sectors in the art world at
the present time. Together with highly successful sales, this th edition
of ARCO, which took place during a period of moderate transition and
with a new management committee led by Lourdes Fernández, has
been characterised by three issues that were universally recognised in
the press: greater professionalism, increasing quality of the works on
display, and the consolidation of a growing local collecting base.
At that period the most important store of cultural objects was the one
in San Francisco el Grande, which became a great motley assembly of
more than , works in precarious conditions of safety and conservation, and which was the focus of the incidents that took place over the
course of the year. In April, Army members attempted to install a military observatory there. Shortly after this and also on the instructions of
the Army, the objects stored in the church had to be moved to the basement for security reasons. After the basement had been disinfected and
the works were being stored in what the members of the Junta believed
to be a permanent location, on the night of the th to th of May, the
architect Francisco Ordeig Ostembach, who was in charge of the store,
was arrested together with his son and a large group of those guarding
the store, accused of organising a Falangist group and of spying.
44
45
Arts and Crafts
 July . Burned façade, in which the marks of smoke on the stone and
of soot on the windows is still evident. Monastery of the Sagrada Familia in
San Andrés. From the series Sucesos de Barcelona, no. . Postcard. Published
by Ángel Toldrá Vinazo.
 May . William Morris seen with his students in the Red House, built
by the architect Philip Webb and the artist and stained-glass designer Edward
Burne-Jones. The Arts and Crafts movement named the house the Palace of Art.
Description by Jane Morris.
——————
Fortunately, and at great personal risk, the main archive of the
monastery and some liturgical and decorative objects were saved. Many
of the local residents refused to keep them in their homes for fear of the
arsonists, who threatened any who helped out with fire.
A hand-built façade, the Arts and Crafts ones – a movement that people
attempted to associate rather artificially with the dim distant Luddites –
structured through the interplay of volumes of a domestic chimney
rather than through the savage decorativeness of flames from a fire.
Arts and Crafts
——————
It was four o’clock on a Friday afternoon when a crowd forced its way
into one of the building’s courtyards with women and children at the
47
Arts and Crafts
head, as always. Behind them followed a group of armed men. They
began by burning some of the outer rooms and pulling up the trees in
the courtyards and gardens. Having entered the main part of the building, they hurled themselves on the chapel, burning and destroying the
altar and the sculptures, looting the monks’ cells and other rooms while
lighting a fire that almost immediately took hold on all sides, creating a
huge bonfire. With immeasurable force, the flames rose up to a great
height, hurling out in their rage remains of books, pieces of furniture
and lumps of burning ash that came to land a considerable distance
away.
With the aggravating factor (exaggerated at that time) of the economic
recession, violence broke out on the streets. Morris, abandoning his
habitual critical distance, experienced the refreshing sensation (particularly for one above the melee by nature) of submerging himself in the
disturbances. This was particularly the case given that to some degree
his class privileges continued to be remain in place: Morris made full
use of them every time he was arrested and questioned by the police,
bringing into play his full cultural superiority when answering back to
an officer. Furthermore, in a way he had become popular: he was always
at the forefront of demonstrations, including the most dangerous ones
such as Black Monday in February  or  November  when
three people were left dead on the streets and many were injured by the
police and the army.
Art Workers’ Coalition
48
. Assault and looting of the Bishop’s palace. Madrid. CNT. Confederación
Nacional del Trabajo. Archives of the Marquis of Santa María del Villar.
Interview with Antonio Reyes Huertas by Manuel Sánchez Camargo, July .
Photograph, Manzano.
. Scenes of protest in front of Guernica in the MoMA. New York. “Art
Workers’ Coalition”. Archives of American Art, interview with Faith Ringgold by
Cynthia Nadelman, September  to October , . Photograph, Jan van Raay.
——————
We gleaned the extraordinary news of what was happening in Madrid
not only from sympathetic newspapers such as the Abc or Arriba, but
also from the official bulletins of the various ministries. The Bishop’s
palace in Madrid was also attacked by the mass, which made off with
any valuable object to be found inside it. It was decided to install in the
building the Marxist actors of the Actors’ Union, who moved into this
Galdean palace, as did the riffraff of the Society of Visual Artists who
would help in the “conservation” of the capital’s artistic treasures.
Naturally, the same artistic criteria were not applied in the Bishop’s
palace. From this building a number of artistic committees “controlled”
(although the Ministry itself and the police acknowledged the total lack
of “control”) the seizures and expropriations of artistic objects from
private houses in Madrid. Don Leocadio Lobo, the priest of the
Bishop’s Chapel and a leftist sympathiser, prepared to move every
50
object in the chapel to another location, an order that was carried out
immediately. As a result, sculptures, paintings and liturgical objects
were removed from the chapel and were subsequently recovered after
the war. The building, which had been damaged in a fire in , was
partly burned after the Orgy of the Internationals was held in it, in
which women who had emerged from the brothels, their nudity barely
covered by embroidered chasubles, offered themselves on the altars of
the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass to foreign militiamen of the Marxist
expeditionary force.
This group began a spectacular protest action in the Museum of
Modern Art that was reported in detail by the New York Times, Village
Voice and East Village Other. The AWC was a democratically open and
anti-hierarchical artists’ organisation. The group devised an agenda for
transforming the world of art and for pressuring museums to change.
Their demands were based on the issue of civil rights – equal opportunities with regard to the chance to exhibit for non-white artists and for
women, and more extensive legal rights for all artists. This reforming
agenda was summarised and refined or even became the object of ravings during the “public audiences” in which artists and critics spoke
out. The AWC began life among the cosmopolitan elites and included
critics, conceptual and minimalist artists, painters and sculptures.
“Destruction artists” committed to street art constituted the Guerrilla
Art Action, which formed a break-away group within the AWC. The
AWC was a melting pot for institutional change within the art world.
Like a large “spinning wheel”, as Jon Hendricks called it, the AWC generated and recycled other groups of artists. They included the Puerto
Rico Band of Artists, who founded the Museo del Barrio, and the feminists’ group known as Ad Hoc Women, who were to be seen in action in
the Whitney Museum.
51
Brillo Box
 September . Auch die Toten haben keine Ruhe (Even the dead have no
peace). From the Nazi propaganda book Das Rotbuch über Spanien. Published
by the Anti-Komintern. Berlin-Leipzig, . Photograph, Burgos bros.
 April . Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? The Brillo Box in the Stable Gallery
on East th Street in Manhattan. New York. Silkscreen ink on painted wood.
 ⅛ x  ⅛ in. Private collection. Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights
Society (ARS). Photograph, Andy Warhol.
——————
The cemetery at Granja de Torrehermosa was profaned by the militias
of the Frente Popular. Niches and tombs were opened in order to steal
any possible items of value, while crucifixes and sculptures were
destroyed.
Critics denied these boxes the status of works of art. An ironic commentary upheld the value of such boxes, but only when open and full of
detergent, as if in a supermarket. There was nothing inside this box.
——————
Brillo Box
They did not dig around in the earth in search of GOLD. The chalice,
the host, the paten, the crown, the nails, the tip of the lance, the humble candelabra… they looked for the saint turned into GOLD. Not the
53
Brillo Box
Brillo Box
honourable toil of one who digs into the ground hoping that the mineral will illuminate the worker’s face, dulled by toil. They looked for
easy spoils, and for this reason it is not avarice that leads us to call them
THIEVES. It is another type of vice, a sinful greed, they do not wish
to satiate their hunger with GOLD but arouse it to commit other types
of crimes. THIEVES, but the least of it is the GOLD that they take
from us, they steal something else. They steal the face, the head held
high, the pride, what for us means offering GOLD to the LORD. Oh,
even our own brothers tell us that it is not CHARITY when, as
Christians, we give GOLD and JEWELS to the Lord. The humble cup
that becomes sacred when converted into the GOLDEN CHALICE.
Oh, nor do some of our brothers understand that that gift made of
GOLD is our PRAYER. We are not jewellers simply because we work
with GOLD, our work is also our PRAYER. The bride’s necklace or
the king’s crown alone do not satisfy our work. The GOLD of our
labour awaits another type of working. Now, when the FATHERLAND is besieged by all manner of THIEVES, not only our GOLD
is stolen but the JEWELS of our labour, our PRAYER, are also taken.
Replacing the GOLD from churches that have been robbed will not
cost us money, it is our LIFE, its weight in GOLD, that we offer to the
LORD. It is we who will give thanks.
the windowsill in my bedroom. Rich women don’t keep their money in
Gucci or Valentino leather purses. They keep it in a business envelope.
In a large business envelope. The ten-dollar notes are held together
with a paperclip, as are the five-dollar and twenty-dollar ones. And the
notes are usually new. The banks – or their husbands’ offices – send it
to them by special courier. The only thing they do is sign the receipt.
And the notes stay there until they have to take a -dollar one out for
their daughter.
——————
But those “ventriloquists’ ceremonies”, in reference to Erasmus’s
judgement on “those who profane books in which the holy word lives
and breathes”, were already perceived intellectually as powerful elements of social action, not only for scholars of the new Social Sciences,
but by those who had decided to proclaim themselves victims of their
attacks. The function of objects and places affected by iconoclasm had
always been that of making the norms that regulate social life psychologically significant, but really it was only thought that this was the case
and that the despotic control of the social should be modified and
replaced in a traumatic manner. Its place would be taken by others,
whose authority would no longer be articulated through ritual action
but through ethical interiorisations whose execution did not require the
mediation of a community whose conservatism made it guilty of the
crime of being an obstacle to Civilisation. The ritual language that
needed to be silenced was the bearer of social information in the same
way that the destroyed symbols were symbols less of conformity than of
reluctant resignation.
The only thing I understand about is BANKNOTES. Not negotiable
bonds, or personal cheques, or travellers’ cheques. And if you give
someone a hundred-dollar note in a supermarket they call the manager.
Money is SUSPECT because people think you shouldn’t have it, even
if in fact you do. I now get PARANOID when I go to D’Agostino’s
because I always have another bag of shopping with me and I am told
that I have to leave it at the entrance, and I don’t see why I should have
to leave my bag. It’s a matter of principle. So I get paranoid thinking
that they are thinking that I steal, so I hold my head up and assume the
look of a RICH PERSON. Because I don’t steal. I go directly to the
dairy products counter with all my money and I feel extremely happy
because I will take a look at all the different counters and buy things for
In the s there was a great outbreak of styles, during the course of
which it seemed to me (this was the basis for my original discussion of
the “end of art”), and it gradually became clear, firstly through the nouveaux réalistes and Pop Art, that there was not one special way of looking at works of art in contrast to what have been termed “mere real
54
55
Brillo Box
things”. To use my favourite example, there is nothing that denotes a
visible difference between Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box and Brillo boxes in
supermarkets. In addition, conceptual art demonstrated that one does
not necessarily need a palpable visual object in order for something to
be a work of art. This meant that it was no longer possible to teach the
meaning of art through examples. It also implied that to the extent in
which appearances were important, anything could be a work of art,
and if one were to undertake an investigation on what is art one would
have to turn away from sensory experience towards thought.
Carl Andre
56
Carl Andre
Carl Andre
-. How the tortured scream! Alfonso Laurencic. Photograph of
the detention centres [checas] for psycho-technical torture in the church
of Vallmajor, Barcelona. Blocks of cement arranged on the floor,  pieces,
over a surface area of approx.  x  metres. Published by Editora Nacional,
S. A. Photograph, Hermes.
-. Lament for the Children. Carl Andre. Photograph shows original
installation in  at P.S.1., Long Island City. Concrete blocks (), each:
 ½   ⅞   ⅞ inches ( x . x . cm), overall:  ½     in.
( x . x . m). Paula Cooper Gallery Inventory Catalogue.
——————
space inevitably repeated itself. That was the physical experience of the
ground, of our journey. We take one or two steps in a room. The placement of the marks. Transactions in space. It is simply a question of
arranging the objects in the space and seeing them operate. Arranged on
the ground, the results of an action, completed. There is no previous
formula, it is not about finding out how the world works. The consequences are transactions between physical and psychological elements.
——————
Prosecuting lawyer: “You used your knowledge to increase physical suffering, physical harm and physical torture through psychological techniques? The ones known as psycho-technical tortures were devised on
the basis of your advice?”
Accused: “I am here as an architect and I only acted on the instructions
of others.”
Prisoners had no option but to remain standing or to give themselves
over to their favourite distraction, backwards and forwards, walking
along the same diagonal across the cell. This movement had to be prevented as its monotony produced an effect of doping in the prisoners or
of a momentary lethargy of thought and thus shortened the sense of
time imprisoned. Obstacles were thus placed on the ground to prevent
the experience of a sense of distraction. Through the use of bricks
placed on their sides right across the floor, prisoners could do nothing
except look at the four walls, after which psycho-technical effects could
start to be used.
Lucy R. Lippard: “I want to talk about the word in relation to the
physical object, physical sensation and physical experience. We have
here four visual artists who have used words in one way or another.”
Carl Andre: “I am a follower of Brancusi and I don’t know what I’m
doing here.”
A certain influence of experience. For example, the long lines, their
continuous coming and going in a line, during my work on the railways.
The landscape was a monotonous experience. Over the course of time
58
59
Centro de Cálculo
 February . The torture victim D. Manuel Godoy, Lawyer and Secretary
of the Colegio de Barcelona, accompanied by the President, in the secret
detention and torture centre [checa] in calle Vallmajor, marked with the letter B.
Documentary proof number bis. Page . Barcelona. Appendix  to the
Ruling of the Commission on Illegitimacy of Acting Powers on  July .
Ministerio de Gobernación. Editora Nacional. Photograph, Hermes.
 January . The deputy director and de facto head of the Automatic
Generation of Visual Forms seminar, Ernesto García Camarero, accompanied
by the Director, Florencio Briones Martínez, mathematician and associate of the
Nuclear Energy Committee, decide on the Centro de Cálculo [Calculus Centre].
Summary of the seminars held during the - academic year. Madrid.
Bulletin of the Calculus Centre of the Universidad Complutense, , pp. -.
Photograph, Alexanco.
——————
Centro de Cálculo
Víctor Esteban Ripoux, aged  and an easel painter, has also been a
victim of the SIM Accused of assisting various priests who were in a
desperate plight due to the cruelty of the revolutionaries, our painter
was arrested on  March  by various agents of the SIM Víctor
Esteban was let out of the Montjuich Palace to work as a labourer on
the building works being carried out in the prison of Vallmajor. Every
day at six in the morning he left the Misiones Palace in a lorry, having
been given a cup of dirty water that aspired to the colour of coffee, and
was taken to calle Vallmajor. He worked in the above-mentioned detention centre as a painter under the orders of a German painter who was
in charge of the cells that have recently been rediscovered. These contained a few bricks and a chair and bed which sloped to such a degree
that prisoners could not really rest, even though when they saw them
they longed to throw themselves down on them. The walls of this cell,
61
Centro de Cálculo
decorated with stripes and circles painted in bright colours, were partly painted by this victim of the SIM.
Barbadillo’s interest in using computers to analyse and compose his
work is evident in his application for one of the grants awarded by this
Centre, and later expressed in a colloquium at the end of the programming course. It seemed to us that Barbadillo’s ideas were relatively easy
to process automatically, given that his work consisted of combining
various models so that they were subjectively satisfactory to him. The
problem was really a combinatory one and it was a question of selecting
from among all the possible combinations only those that interested the
artist. It seemed to us that linguistics at the time could come to his help.
His alphabet was limited, comprising only a few modules. His phrases
(pictures) consisted of  modules. It was thus a question of finding the
subset of the pictures that interested him. In other words, his aesthetic.
This subset had to be defined by a few formal rules that constituted
their syntax, and had to respond to certain aesthetic and emotional
meanings and contents. Computers could immediately help in the
search for syntactical rules.
Cercle Communiste Démocratique
62
August . On some barricades militiamen set up sculptures to act as parapets.
A damaged sculpture of the Sacred Heart of Christ. Unidentified location
between the provinces of Seville and Huelva. Archivo Hemeroteca Municipal.
City Council of Seville. Photograph, Juan José Serrano Gómez.
December . Anti-Stalinist slogans left after the session in defence of Victor
Serge. In the centre, standing, is Georges Bataille. Unidentified location
in the centre of Paris. Librarie du travail. Account by Simone Weil.
——————
Its myths associated social ignominy and the corpse-like decadence of
the crucified with divine splendour. In this way religious worship
assumed the role of an opposition force of contradictory viewpoints
that were previously divided between the rich and the poor, dragging
both to ruin. It closely allied itself with worldly despair, being nothing
but a by-product of the unlimited hatred that divides men, but one that
tends to act as substitute for the divergent processes that it encompasses. In accordance with the words of Christ, who said that he had come
to divide, not to rule, religion thus in no way aimed to vanquish what
others considered to be the human blight: in its most immediate aspect
and to the extent that it had liberated itself, it wallowed in a filth that
was essential for its ecstatic torments.
——————
A commonly observed scene in Spanish villages following the flight of
the Popular Front militias before the arrival of the Nationalist forces.
On some barricades the militias had placed religious sculptures to act as
parapets.
Like insidious underground filtrations, Communism gradually began
to undermine the social foundations of Spain’s villages, and the cataclysm manifested itself through unspeakable horrors at the moment
when Russia experienced its all-powerful force to triumph. This poisoned water seeped from the very depths of the soil, the ink in which
its propagandistic pamphlets, school textbooks and secret books of
indoctrination were written. In its writings – My kingdom is not of this
world, Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God that which is
God’s, Father forgive them, for they know not what they do – not only did
it attack our religion, but also undermined the bases of all moral order,
attempting to destroy the family with the proclamation of free love,
offending the purest sentiments of Christian society and exalting the
lowest instincts, dragging men towards an abject materialism that totally equated them with beasts.
64
Many of their members had been expelled from the Communist Party
in  due to their critical stance over the Stalinist purges. In an early
phase it was known as the Cercle Communiste Marx-Lénine, giving
these images a defensive function.
——————
Piece of cut-out canvas with an image of the Sacred Heart of Christ and
the motto: “Halt, bullet”. During the Civil War these pious and political badges, embroidered by mothers and female supporters of the soldiers, generally bore the motto: “Halt, the Heart of Christ is with me”.
65
Against them, the life and work of Marx constituted a protest per se…
using the very methods offered by Marx, a responsible Marxism
demands an analysis of what can be corrected within Marx’s thought
and writings and of that which came after him and which modified
Marxism’s nature and conclusions. Like Souvarine, Simone Weil carried a photograph of Marx around with her.
Chainworkers
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Chainworkers
Chainworkers
. Militias assaulting the Palacio de Cervellón, property of the Duke of
Fernán Núñez. Madrid. JSU. Causa General. Red domination in Spain. Third
appendix: Anarchist Terror. Causa General. Advance summary of information
supplied by the public ministry. Ministry of Justice. Madrid. Photograph
in the Archivos de Prensa Española.
. Activists during the occupation of a branch of McDonald’s by the
Collettivo Libertario Torinese. CW. Dalla grande distribuzione alla grande
ristorazione, da Burger King a Esselunga, in centri commerciali e ipermercati, in call
centre e cooperative riecheggia l’azione diretta e la sovversione mediatica degli attivisti
precari e precari di Chainworkers. Photograph on www.chainworkers.org
——————
No one worked. Everyone lived off looting or by a miracle. Factories,
workshops and offices were deserted. Urgent demands were to be heard
on all sides, revealing an anguish and desperation that no one was able
to relieve. The radio constantly put out calls for specialists or simply for
workers to replace the large numbers arrested, the dead or the numerous militias who did nothing but hang around cafes or go to shows.
From the Fernán Núñez Palace the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas
who were occupying it declared it a “café for all”, which sounds like a
macabre joke as they also referred to sacas [illegal removals of prisoners
from jail to execution] and paseos [strolls]. Seizures or confiscations of
establishments covered the widest range of venues, from cafés to hotels,
places of entertainment, warehouses, shops and factories. The owners
of such places were generally roughly thrown out. If anyone on the
confiscations committee had a grudge to settle with an owner, he
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denounced him to a Communist radio station or Libertarian centre,
resulting in the immediate arrival of a rifle squad charged with “cleaning up the rear-guard”, a phrase used during the Civil War to cover up
all manner of crimes and outrages. Some seizures were even clad in a
certain official solemnity, if anything could still be solemn in those days.
Chainworkers began as a website in Italy that aimed to become an
instrument for workers in fast-food chains and distributors, call-centres
and all those working in cleaning or other service jobs for a wide range
of companies. The website soon became a web community and a sort of
press agency that circulated information on labour conditions and the
labour struggles of other types of chain-workers. At the same time it
generated and disseminated a debate about the new labour, cultural and
economic contexts that had encouraged these new forms of exploitation. These new economic realities rely most heavily on the world of
images and imagery, using ever more daring, subtle and persuasive
techniques that are irresistibly attractive and sensual and which aim to
replace consumption itself by a type of perception that penetrates into
an ever greater brand awareness. Shopping centre and chain stores have
become cathedrals of consumption, public places that are privately run,
new States base on the democracy of brands and the control of their
image.
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Charles Fourier
 July . Façade of the church Nuestra Señora de Belén, burned by the mob.
Church of Belén, Barcelona. Historia de la Cruzada Española, Vol. XX.
Ediciones Españolas, S. A. Literary collaborator, Manuel Sánchez-Camargo.
Other collaborators, Archivo Mas and Archive of La Vanguardia.
 July . Having debated the idea of the commune, Charles Fourier returns
to his house from the church of the Petits-Pères. Rue de Saint Pierre de
Montmartre. Paris. Fourier o la armonía y el caos. Chapter XX. Editorial
Labor. Barcelona. Account by Émile Lehouck.
——————
Not just in the city’s suburbs or its surrounding villages. Near the plaza
de Catalunya, in the very heart of Barcelona. The Ramblas, by the
church of Nuestra Señora de Belén. The church was sacked and its
doors destroyed, as if to make this holy ground nothing more than a
passing-through place.
Charles Fourier
Surroundings of the palace with the modern-day Rambla. Large parade
ground in the centre of the commune. Winter walkway measuring 
varas inside the Palace. Interior service courtyards with trees, jets of
water, ponds and gardens. Main entrance, watch-tower. Site of the
church. Site of the theatre. The walkway-gallery surrounds the entire
commune.
——————
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Charles Fourier
Charles Fourier
At midnight on that fateful  July, this rich and splendid church was
totally burned down, a building whose style seemed to reflect the lively
vigour and movement of the Ramblas, which adjoins its external walls.
Only the walls were left standing; the rest has disappeared forever. The
Baroque is perhaps the only style that has a single life.
one open to the proliferation of the signifier: infinite but nonetheless
structured.
The layout of the commune defines a unique place more or less comparable to that of a palace, monastery, mansion or major ensemble of
buildings, in which the organisation of the building and that of the terrain combine, as a result of which (from a completely modern viewpoint) architecture and urbanism fuse together in benefit of a general
science of the human space and one whose primary function is no
longer protective but circulatory.
Nothing new revealed itself, as any ingenuous revolutionary might have
supposed, but instead everything old that had been fermenting: rotting
nooks and crannies and at the bottom of that fine city. Rather than revolution it was suppuration, internal decomposition that exploded outwards; an outburst of all the pus that we had seen accumulating, year
after year, in the pages of this history.
——————
Or rather: on the roundabout of the signifier, no one can say what came
before: Fourier’s taste (for sugar, that negation of anything conflictive?
For the mixture of fruit? For cooked food transformed into a semiliquid substance?) or the exaltation of a pure form, a combined compote?
——————
These scenes that took place in the peripheral barrios repeated themselves in places close to the battlegrounds. At eleven in the morning,
when there was still intense firing at the two furthest extremes of the
Atarazanas-plaza de Catalunya axis, the church of the Belén on the
Rambla de los Estudios was set alight. Completed in  by Father
Marimón, it was a magnificent example of the type of Baroque in vogue
in the previous century. In , the expulsion of the Jesuits, the Order
responsible for this church, resulted in the cessation of worship. It
formed part of the old Seminary of the Jesuit Fathers until it became
the parish church in .
——————
Here again we encounter the sharp twist of the syntagm, the anacoluthon, the daring metonym in which Fourier’s “charm” lies. The
number is a thrilling one, a miracle worker like the triangular number
of the Trinity in the Jesuitical style, not because it enlarges but because
it multiplies. Inscribed within the history of the sign, the Fourier-type
construction lays the bases for a Baroque semanticity, in other words
A few hours after the start of the uprising at the garrison, churches in
Barcelona began to be burned, which was some considerable time
before the combat was concluded and before General Goded was taken
prisoner. Marxist propaganda was particularly concerned to present
this burning of churches as a punishment inflicted by the masses on the
Church for the active participation of priests and monks in the battle
taking place from the monasteries and churches. On  July the newspaper Treball published the distorted news item: “At dusk, groups of
the Popular Forces realised that they were being fired on from various
churches and monasteries. Initially they did not fire back but as the
news spread a general indignation of such magnitude took hold among
the population that numerous churches and monasteries were burned
in a short space of time.”
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Charles Fourier
Charles Fourier
The natural inclination of children towards dirt serves to assist the
group and further unite it. God gave children these strange tastes so
that they can carry out the most repulsive tasks. If a field has to be covered with manure, young people and adults would find the task disagreeable but children devote themselves into it with more enthusiasm
than they would a cleaner job.
——————
Both the inside and the outside of the church boast an artistic opulence
rare in this country. The fire, fed by the elaborate altarpieces, the organ
and galleries, was implacable, destroying everything and not even sparing the roof. Later, in , when restoration was already underway,
the galleries and chapel on the right side were demolished. Fourteen
altarpieces were burned and  sculptures, all of great value, were
destroyed… the chapel of Saint Ignatius, a splendid example of Catalan
Baroque, with an image of the saint’s capture, was destroyed… A large
canvas depicting the martyrdom of the suffering Saint Christina, her
tortured, suffering body pierced by dozens of arrows, was punctured
with spikes and bayonets… an extremely interesting set of liturgical
vestments in white with velvet flowers in relief against a gold ground
was also devoured by the flames…
become passionate friends. But instead of thinking about this, the
princess fell into a subversive counter-passion. She pursued the very
person she desired to caress and her fury was all the greater given that
its repression derived from a prejudice that did not even allow for the
possibility of a positive development, given that she concealed the true
object of her passion. The atrocities that Madame Strogonoff inflicted
individually have been carried out by others on a collective basis. Nero
loved inflicting cruelty on groups or in a general manner. Ignatius
turned them into a religious system and Sade into a moral one. This
taste for atrocities is nothing more than a counter-passion, the effect of
repressing passions.
——————
In the Barcelona of the early decades of the th century, the overthrow
of everything sacred and the accompanying damage and harm inflicted
on it emphasised fall rather than ascent. But this abasement and humiliation of the holy was not fundamentally different to the abasement and
fall underlying the idolatrous cult that was now being abolished from the
face of the earth. Abasement and humiliation were not just permutations
of the divine hierarchy of the type expressed in carnivals and other rites of
inversion. It was the very essence of the loathed religion in itself: every
procession, every religious pilgrimage. Every patron saint’s day was a
descent into Hell. The anger vented against churches and religious
images did not invert their expressive eloquence but rather exaggerated
their pathos to the point of horror. Ridicule parodied what was already
pure parody. There were no negations of a sacred order but rather intensifications of a negation without any positive recompense. The iconoclasts degraded rubbish, burned fires, and disfigured monsters.
All repressed passion produces its counter-passion, which is by nature
as malign or benevolent as the natural passion would have been. The
same is true of obsessions. One example of repression of this kind is
that of Madame Strogonoff, a Muscovite princess who on seeing that
she was growing old, became jealous of the beauty of one of her young
slaves. She thus had her tortured and took part in the process, sticking
pins into her flesh. What was the real motive behind this cruelty? Was
it really jealousy? No. Without knowing it, this woman was in love with
the beautiful slave whom she helped to torture. If anyone had suggested the idea to Madame Strogonoff and had brought about a reconciliation between her and her victim, the two would undoubtedly have
In the state of Harmony, the clearly destructive passions do not sublimate themselves but are simply channelled and used in a healthy manner, joining forces with others in an appropriate way. Fourier’s use of
groups of young people who liked to wallow in dirt is a classic example
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Charles Fourier
Charles Fourier
of this technique: solving the problem of cleaning, they contributed to
the functioning of Harmony. Furthermore, Fourier, the eternal bookkeeper, specified that these young people were economic agents,
although he only paid them with fumées de gloire (in reference to the
word fumier, rubbish, manure).
——————
Mystery of the Eucharist were to be seen in the chapel of the Holy
Sacrament. Another work worthy of mention was a lamp-bearing Angel
by the sculptor Clarasó that complemented the image of Christ, a work
of notable artistic merit. This rich ensemble of works was completed
with liturgical and other religious items including a monstrance that
depicted the Evening Star and two sets of liturgical vestments dating
from the end of the last century. The church’s organ was the first electric one to be installed in Barcelona, while its reliquary included the
bones of Saint Fructuoso and the skull of Saint Gertrudis. After the
church of the Belén was burned and looted its interior became a great
pile of ruins. The ceiling collapsed spectacularly and the outer walls,
although still standing, were severely damaged. The mob murdered the
priest Don José Palau in the Sacristy.
Located on the Rambla de los Estudios, the church of the Belén was
ablaze, hit by the fire that came from the two ends of the Atarazanasplaza de Cataluña axis. It was not yet eleven in the morning. The scenes
of iconoclasm witnessed in the city’s outer districts had now moved to
areas close to the real fighting. The old building had been completed in
 by Father Marimón and was a classic example of the type of
Baroque fashionable in the th century. It formed part of the Colegio
of the Jesuit Fathers, an old building that became the parish church in
. Its choir-stalls dated from . Its main façade was noted for its
central, sculptural group of the Nativity, statues of Saint Francis de
Borja and Saint Ignatius on either side of the main doorway, and in particular, the statue of Saint Francis Xavier, located on the corner of calle
de Xuclá. The Saint John the Baptist doorway on the lateral façade was
built in  on the instructions of Father Garriga the parish priest and
was a reproduction of the old one from the church of the Niño Jesús.
Inside the church, all the altars and walls were clad in marble up to a
certain height. The altarpieces and chapels had particularly sumptuous
gilding. The decoration of the roof of the splendid nave was the work
of the celebrated artist Pizzi, while the sculptures of the Twelve
Apostles that stood on twelve columns along the nave were by the
sculptor Talarn. The reclining image of Saint Ignatius in the crypt was
by the Barcelona sculptor of religious imagery Ramón Amadeu. The
works by Antonio Viladomat were particularly notable for their importance and quality, including a large fresco of Faith, Hope and Charity
in the dome above the altar of Saint Francis Xavier, as well as two paintings on subjects from that saint’s life. Another six large paintings on the
This type of pleasure characteristic of Fourier is a convenient one and
divides itself up: separated from issues of random confusion resulting
from acts, rules of procedure, customs and alibis, it always manifests
itself in its sovereign purity; it is an obsession (that of the down-at-heel,
the eater of rubbish, the grown-up, blubbering baby), which only manifests itself through the pleasure that it procures for fellow human
beings. This pleasure is never loaded with other images (ridiculous,
inconvenient ones or difficulties); in other words, it is not tied down by
any metonym: pleasure is what it is and nothing more. Ceremony, which
represents that defining of essences, is the orgy of the museum, comprising a simple exposition of the desirable… This is the unique, triumphant pleasure that prevails over all. Pleasure has no measure, it is
not subject to quantification, its essence is excess… it is the measure of
itself: “sentiment” depends on pleasure: “The deprivation of necessary
sensuality degrades sentiment”, and “the full satisfaction of the material is the only way of elevating sentiment”: Anti-Freud: “sentiment” is
not the sublimating transformation of something lacking, it is the
panic-induced, excessive effusion of a culmination. Pleasure submits to
Death (in the other life pleasures will be sensual ones), it is the Binding
Element, the one that creates solidarity between the living and the dead
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77
Charles Fourier
Charles Fourier
a reality (the felicity of the dead starts with that of the living, as in a way
the former have to wait for the latter: there will be no happy dead while
the living on earth are not happy: an image of generosity or of “charity” that no religious eschatology has been brave enough to champion).
Pleasure is the perennial principle of social organisation: or, put
negatively, it encourages the condemnation of any society, including
progressive ones, that forget it (such as Owen’s experience in NewLamarck, criticised as “too severe” as its members went around barefoot), or put positively, pleasures declare themselves to be issues of
State (pleasures, not amusements: this is what – fortunately – separates
Fourier’s harmony from the modern State in which the pious organisation of amusement is allied with the ruthless censure of pleasures);
pleasure is thus a calculation, an operation that for Fourier is the most
elevated form of social control and organisation; this calculation is that
of all societal theory whose method is to transform work into pleasure
(and not suspend work in benefit of leisure): the barrier that separates
work from pleasure in Civilisation disappears, there is a paradigmatic
collapse, an alchemical transformation of the dirty into the attractive…
and pleasure itself becomes an exchangeable currency, given that
Harmony acknowledges and honours collective prostitution with the
name of Angelical: like the vigorous monad or single unit whose re-activation and extension guarantees societal movement… Given that pleasure is Unique, to reveal it is a unique burden in itself: Fourier is alone
against all (in particular against all Philosophers, against all Libraries),
alone and with right on his side, and this right is in itself the only desirable one: “Is it not desirable that I am right in contrast to all others?”
The fact that it is Unique gives pleasure its incendiary character: to
speak of it burns, ensnares, binds: How many declarations on moral stupor will the too rapid revelation of pleasure produce!
copy in Spain of the “Index of Forbidden Books” drawn up by the
Roman curia.
The Catholic Church included Fourier’s writings in the Index Librorum
Prohibitorum in a list of publications that the Church described as having a pernicious influence on faith. The aim of this list was to prevent
reading books or immoral texts that contained theological or moral
errors and thus to prevent the corruption of the faithful.
——————
The Library that the Jesuits had installed in the church of the Belén
was also burned. Among its treasures it contained the only manuscript
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79
Charles Mackintosh
 July . A medieval scene. A reception room in a convent. Convent of
the Magdalenas. Monastery of the monks of the Sagrada Familia in San Andrés.
Calle de Valencia. Barcelona. From the series Sucesos de Barcelona, no. .
Postcard. Published by Ángel Toldrá Vinazo.
 July . Medieval motifs. Reception room. Church of Saint Matthew.
Queen’s Cross. Garscube Road. Glasgow. Architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
Hunterian Art Gallery. University of Glasgow, Mackintosh Collection.
——————
Charles Mackintosh
When we arrived at the said building we encountered a horrible sight:
the panel of the door left by the entrance to the porter’s lodge was still
burning. In the rooms next to the reception room, which I assume was its
function to judge from the thick grille that divided it, everything was
in complete disarray: broken pieces of furniture, smashed chairs and
burned papers. However, the wrath of the mob had not entirely vented
all its rage there, probably because it had not found what it was looking
for. To the left was a corridor, along which we proceeded, on either side
of which were rooms emptied of all their furniture. In the middle of this
corridor was a staircase that led to the main floor and another flight that
led to down to the basement. Towards the main courtyard was another
spacious room divided into cells of one metre square with wooden
doors and small windows: the damp inside them was unbearable. To the
left of the garden was the kitchen, a fine room of eight metres square
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Charles Mackintosh
Charles Mackintosh
whose gleaming white walls indicated the cleanliness of the place. Set
into the wall was a long line of smashed ovens, and in the centre of the
room a huge pile of broken plates and cooking utensils. A door led on
to the sinks and from there one entered another courtyard as large as
the previous one that had been turned into a vegetable garden and was
filled with fruit trees whose broken branches revealed the damage that
had been inflicted. The church, which occupied the centre of the building (forming a corner with calle de Valencia), had been completely
destroyed by the fire. In the doorway that led onto the calle de Valencia
were pieces of broken beds, stuffing from mattresses, a smashed up
sewing machine, iron plates that had been used to reinforce the doors
and a large quantity of bits of different objects. The larder must have
been on this side as pots of lard and olives were to be seen on the
ground, while vintage wine was running along the pavement.
The slope of the visible faces of the bell-tower, emphasised by the
crashing down of the turret, was still further defined by the two concave mouldings: however, while the upper one was brusquely interrupted at the point where it met the turret, the one in the lower section continued gradually until it terminated in the middle of a section of the
virtual octagon: it was not possible to know if the turret was an excrescence of the tower or if it functioned as a prop to it, connected through
the cornices. The interior space was characterised by the same negation-exhibition of the technical elements. The rectangle of the nave was
covered by a single false, pointed vault of dark wood that unmistakably
suggested the keel of an upturned boat. This shape obviously recalled
the exposed ceilings in churches or in large, medieval halls, combining
technical mastery and grandeur in the use of space: its size was such
that the walls must have been reinforced by huge braces that crossed the
nave and prevented the beams of the roof from bringing the building
down. The problem of the brace has been resolved in a variety of ways
over the centuries. One some occasions it has been ignored and treated
like a thin strip of “invisible” metal; on others it has been emphasised
and exaggerated through sculptures. In Queen’s Cross it could be said
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that Mackintosh does both at the same time, crossing an overall Gothic
space with braces directly supplied by the most up-to-date rollingmills: great metal beams that spring from the first section of the wooden ceiling and whose countless rivets suggest the blows of the medieval
craftsman’s adze. The furniture, obviously designed by Mackintosh,
reveals the skill and knowledge of local craftsmen. Cut from solid
planks, the balconies of the galleries are presented as coats-of-arms or
standards hanging from the walls of a heraldic gallery. We find this
motif ten years later in the library of the School of Art. The manner of
covering the chancel walls, the communion table and the pulpit reuse
all the decorative motifs that Mackintosh prized most highly: blades of
grass, tulips and stylised heads of birds derived from the WildeBeardsley school (which might seem surprising in a church), and above
all from the great precedents in Gothic art and architecture. In general
English critics were harsh on Queen’s Cross church, in which “the old
and the new” were seen to compete. However, it might be that these
critics refused to see the true programme assigned to architecture: that
of building rapidly and cheaply, which would explain the metal framework, in turn expressing Presbyterian faith through the surface
“Gothic” of the displaced walls, the lacy stonework and the mini-flying
buttress.
——————
Image of the Public Dining Room “de la Virgen”, which had not only
been burned but each figure in the print had been scorched with the ash
from a cigarette butt.
Mackintosh illuminated the interior of the House for an Art Lover more
in the manner of a pyrograph than a watercolour, creating a sensation of
warmth and heat. This is far removed from the muted, ashen, desolate
vision that we have of it today.
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Contre-attaque
 September . Destroyed sculptures in the church of Porto Cristo. A chapel
in the church of Porto Cristo with decapitated sculptures, the altar and the
altarpiece burned… The entire church, of great artistic importance, in a similar
state. Majorca. Published by F. Ferrari Billoch. Imprenta de Amengual y
Muntaner, S. A. . Photograph, Miró.
 September . Dorothea lying on the ground in the shape of a cross in
a chapel in Barcelona. Georges Bataille speaking to Benjamin Péret – behind,
in the middle-ground, André Breton – evokes L’azur du ciel following a meeting
of Contre-attaque. Paris. Contre-attaque. Appel à l’action. Published by Georges
Bataille. . Photograph, Cahun.
——————
Everyone carried about them jewels, religious objects and money stolen
in the Balearic Islands. Even more respectable-looking people had
money in their pockets or in their rucksacks as if nothing were more
important and dear to them. From the churches of Porto Cristo and
Carrio, which had been destroyed and profaned, the fleeing looters
abandoned six chalices, three pyxes, two candlesticks, four bells, trays
for holy wine vessels, four patens, two incense burners, six candelabra
and other liturgical items.
Contre-attaque
At that moment the urgency of the events made them forget old ideological quarrels. It was a question of putting a new movement into
action, literally a counter-attack to the Fascist threat. He forgot his differences, was reconciled with Breton and the Surrealists and founded a
revolutionary publication with them. It aimed to combat capitalism,
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Contre-attaque
Contre-attaque
nationalism, the parliamentary system and Puritanism, countering
Fascist myths with new ones under the guidance spirits of Sade, Fourier
and Nietzsche.
——————
Along with Italian army, the Bolognese mafioso Arconovaldo Bonacorsi
arrived in Palma, a Fascist sent by Mussolini. The local Falangists in
Majorca had asked Rome to send them a prominent figure in the
movement. Bonacorsi, who had himself called General Conde Aldo
Rossi, was a fanatic and a swindler. He immediately created a number
of squadrons named the Dragons of Death (“fucilate subito, nessun
prigionero, tutti i rossi fucilati” was his favourite refrain), with which he
spread terror across the island for various months. On the request of
the Nationalist authorities, who were unhappy with the excessively
prominent and bogus profile that he had achieved, he was forced to
leave Majorca in December . Among the gifts that he received for
services rendered, in the manner of war booty, were unidentified religious treasures and ornaments previously in store in military deposits.
In Bonacorsi’s palazzo in Bologna it was possible to see badges of the
CNT and the FAI on display alongside heads of saints and other religious trinkets.
The historical context is well known: during those interwar years, democratic politics became totally discredited throughout Europe. It was
the subject of attack from the Nationalist right and the Communist left.
From the outset Bataille was critical with liberalism, but was equally so
with the totalitarian states constructed by the Fascist and Communist
revolutionaries. Hence his desire for Revolution became a tragic one.
On the one hand he considered that bourgeois democracy lacked sufficient authority to end social conflicts and establish a true human community, given that democracy in fact consisted of a precarious harmony between antagonistic forces; and on the other, he considered that the
Communist regime constructed by the Russian Bolsheviks had become
86
as totalitarian as the Fascists, i.e. it had imposed social unity by means
of terror, reaffirming the nationalist, militarist and expansionist characters of the old empire under the Czars. Despite all of this, in 
Bataille continued to defend the possibility of a revolution that was both
anti-bourgeois and anti-totalitarian. In the alternative of “war or revolution” that brought leftist groups into conflict with each other in
France, Spain and the rest of Europe, Bataille opted for revolution
against war, in other words, he opted for the “human community” and
against the “national community”, for “love of the land” and against
“love of the fatherland”.
——————
Nonetheless, I should say that our soldiers and militias have recovered
all the objects that were looted by the Reds at the outset. I have them all
in my keeping and we are proceeding to order and arrange them with
the aim of returning them to their rightful owners from whom they
were seized. The liturgical items undoubtedly come from Ibiza,
Barcelona and Menorca as they have not been identified by the verger
at Porto Cristo.
The life of the movement is brief. Ghosts of personal confrontation
return, unnecessary struggles for superiority. The Moscow trials, Stalin
and the positions adopted in the light of the triumph of the Popular
Front began to inflame the spirits of those who defended Breton and
Bataille. In March  the new magazine ceased publication. Its legacy continued in other new magazines in Paris, Barcelona and Tossa de
Mar, and Masson continued its activities.
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Critique
 August . A disorganised heap of liturgical objects stolen from churches
and kept by the Marxists in Santander, exactly as they were found on the entry
of Franco’s glorious troops into the city. Document from the book Esto es
el comunismo. Doscientos documentos gráficos e inéditos de la barbarie roja en
el mundo y en España. Librería Santarén. Valladolid. .
 October . “Il faudrait que la conscience humaine cesse d’être
compartimentée. Critique cherche les rapports qu’il peut y avoir entre
l’économie politique et la littérature, entre la philosophie et la politique”.
Text from the magazine Critique, revue générale des publications françaises et
étrangères founded by Georges Bataille. Éditions du Chêne. Paris. .
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Critique
It is also necessary to make note of the sacrilegious theft of innumerable
liturgical objects that, stripped of their precious stones, broken and
twisted, were turned into flattened strips of gold and silver and were
tossed into primitive smelting-pots so that they could be melted
down and sold. Chalices, hosts, trays, candelabra, crosses, crowns and
pedestals, all went into the fire to become an easily pawned lump or into
ingots that could be negotiated and sold. For centuries the piety and
respect of previous generations had assembled these treasures for use in
the mass and for adorning holy images. Montaña was a region of émigrés to the New World, and when they returned after years of toil and
labour, their donations enriched churches and monasteries and rebuilt
factories and other buildings, while they gave elaborate ornamental
objects for use in the mass as a sign of their gratitude and piety. It is
easy to appreciate how keenly the thieves stretched out their hands in
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Critique
churches and monasteries, filled with desire for the treasures of these
temples and religious houses. We could estimate in various millions the
value of these pious donations, this wealth sent back over centuries by
émigrés imbued with religious fervour and love of their homeland. This
sacrilegious pillaging had begun earlier but it became worse and
reached its most brazen height during the thirteen months of the barbaric rule of the mob. In the Jesuit church, which was turned into a
weapon and gunpowder store, some of the stolen objects were stored
but this was only around a tenth of the total, and many items disappeared into the hands and pockets of those who had seized them. In this
way, the big fish and even the smaller ones procured reserve funds for
the times that they themselves felt sure were to come. The total value of
the stolen items cannot be calculated and will probably never be known.
of recourses is preferably increased but in any case never decreased.
However this role of awareness and reason is never an easy one; as soon
as the tension is slightly relaxed people begin to destroy or consume the
available wealth without making good use of it. The exterior movement
may only be one of pure internal consumption, but it can be translated
into an act that destroys objects, whether one’s own or other people’s or
other people’s lives. But the object only yields itself to frenzy with the
consequence of being negated in some way..
Christianity aside, spiritual fervour aimed itself towards an ever clearer
awareness of objects and an ever more precise discrimination. The history of religions is the clearest result of this quest due to the fact that
religions manifest man’s concern to concede an inner truth to himself.
Thus awareness of objects, which in its origin is the result of man’s anxiety regarding his inner self, culminates its development by destroying
the task of dissociation that made it possible. In its origins, a clear conscience is born from an execration of drunkenness and violence and
from an emphasis on the world of useful activity. On the one hand there
is drunkenness brought about by ingestion of a toxic substance, and on
the other the excitement of a great crowd as it becomes aware of its
ecstasy. In fact, there are good reasons to compare the state of mind
brought about by the ingestion of a toxic substance with the one experienced during the formation of a huge crowd, while both can be compared to the ecstasy of saints. On some occasions the violence is an interior one and the resources consumed are those of the group or the
drunken individual, while on others it takes place outside and the victims are thus the lives or possessions of others. Everything happens as
if the higher faculties had to save energy or available resources, whose
use is required to subordinate beneficial operations, such that the sum
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Daniel Buren
August . Image left at the doorway of the house of a pariah. He was not even
allowed to enter his own house. A village in Huesca. Texts by Francisco Mateos.
La Tierra (); Tierra y Libertad (). State Archives. Photograph-account,
Kati Horna.
October . Spanish cleaning-lady at the door of the Apollinaire Gallery in
Milan. Vertical green and white strips stuck to the door of the gallery, sealing
it and thus “closing” it and the “exhibition”. Milan. www.danielburen.com.
Photograph-record, Daniel Buren.
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Daniel Buren
I went a bit far when I called all artists pariahs of the present day. The
artist is not a pariah if he knows how to offer judicious reflections in the
right place and at the right time, such as the following in a minister’s
waiting-room: “Politics does not provide the serenity that art needs for
its creation; art, which has much of the divine, cannot be concerned
with intrigues, as its elevated and ‘superior’ spirit does not allow it.” In
the face of such insincere stupidities, the politician will applaud and put
his hands into the State’s coffers in order to throw the artist a few coins,
albeit to the detriment of his “lady friend” who that day will see her
tart’s allowance diminished in favour of another prostitute. The pariah,
I say in his defence, has little of the idealist, and will continue be a pariah under monarchies or republics alike, pursuing his pure path of fine
deeds and ideas. The pariah may feel himself to be Socialist, but being
Socialist has its inconveniences, and in truth I tell you that I am not
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Daniel Buren
Daniel Buren
As things stand today the role of the artist is of little importance. The
artist produces art for a bourgeois minority with a cultural education.
Consciously or not, he plays the role required by the bourgeoisie, which
is his audience, and which in turn accepts the entry of the product produced by its artist-producer. The bourgeoisie particularly likes socalled subversive art (of a mental or political type), not only in order to
have a clear conscience, but also to savour the “revolution” when it
hangs, “lined-up”, in galleries or well displayed in their apartments. Let
us thus take as a working hypothesis that it is necessary to radically
change the circuit that has been “imposed” up to now on the artistic
product with the aim of find a new public and other consumers, including those who do not have the right to “culture”. This might imply, for
example, putting on art exhibitions in factories. This is the point
reached at which the truly pernicious role of the artist is clearly
revealed. The system has no fear of seeing art in factories. On the contrary. The task of alienation will be complete when “anyone” can participate in culture. This is because culture and art, as they are now perceived, are, of course, the most alienating element, as we find in them
the political and even the intellectual merit of art, namely distraction.
Art that is just illusion, illusion of the real, is necessarily a distraction
from the real; a false world and false appearance of itself. “Art is the
blindfold placed over the eyes of the viewer and which does not allow
him to return to reality, either his own or the world’s” (Michael
Claura). In these conditions, art in the factory will have the positive
result of making the working environment more agreeable, but no more
or less. Taken to its extreme, this might create aesthetic battles in which
revolutionary inclinations could arise. Art is the safety valve of our
repressive systems. While it exists and the more it prevails, art becomes
the system’s distracting mask. And a system has nothing to fear while
its reality is masked or while its contradictions remain concealed. Art is
inevitably an ally of power. This was not known at the turn of the last
century when the Impressionist and Fauve exhibitions were closed
down. But in the present day it is so obvious that , policemen were
sent to defend an avant-garde biennial. The artist wishes to work for the
construction of a new society, he or she must begin by confronting the
very foundations of art and accepting a total break from it. If not, it will
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thinking of that too physiological Socialism that we find today but
rather that dose of poetic creation that Socialism had in other times. I,
an artist, for example, turned to Socialism in  and remained with it
until yesterday. I dreamed of that “final struggle” and took part in the
preliminary skirmishes, although so many afternoon teas listening to
the The Internationale and The Siege of Zaragoza made me somewhat
ironic. I deployed my own resources and have painted misery and
poverty in all its aspects: the deaths of miners, prison rounds, menacing peasants, charges of the Guardia Civil, and young ladies who symbolised better times for the workers. I believe I have got the thing completely covered; but little of my faith has been left behind in every work
as I realise that Socialism “is” to paint any old way. Nonetheless, this
idealist remains incorruptible and his ideological youth is still capable
of reviving itself. Would it not, however, be a heresy to go back to my
old types of images? Now that Socialists have a share in power, how
could I depict fishermen in machine-gunned landscapes? Or the
grotesque bombing of the Casa Camelia? Or the application of the Ley
de Fugas in Seville? Or the rounds of workers imprisoned in every jail
throughout Spain? And in those allegories of the First of May, how
could I paint General Burguete singing The Internationale and Worker
Arise in the face of so much filth? Socialism is replete with numerous
different pathways that the artist cannot pursue, neither with wicked
intentions nor with a broad, deep and long-lasting smile. What remains
for the pariah is thus Communism and Anarchism-Syndicalism. For
the artist it is easy to once again stretch out the ribbon of hope, but for
one who was a Socialist his natural desire will be weak and sick of sadness as he sees all hope, all naivety strangled. Nonetheless, his spiritual
responsibility will once again start to vibrate for physiological, antistate, anti-Socialist art and his weapon will be ready for the moment
when his art becomes necessary for other social pariahs, in another
return to his youth and his years as a pariah.
Daniel Buren
be the next revolution that undertakes to do so instead. It is the most
beautiful ornament of society in its present state and never the premonition of a society as it should be. How can an artist confront society
when his or her art objectively “belongs” to that society? The artist
believes in the myth of revolutionary art. But objectively, art is reactionary.
Dreams that money can buy
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February . Valuable objects stored in the castle at Figueras. Noticiario
Español, no. . Cinefoto, Barcelona. Script by Dionisio Ridruejo, Manuel
Augusto García Viñolas, Antonio Obregón, Joaquín Goyanes. Departamento
Nacional de Cinematografía. Political director: Dionisio Ridruejo. Film director:
Manuel Augusto García Viñolas. Photography, Andrés Pérez Cubero.
February . Dreams that money can buy. New York. Seven chapters. Art
of This Century Corporation. New York. Stories by Hans Richter, Man Ray,
Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Alexander Calder. Produced
by Peggy Guggenheim/Kenneth MacPherson. Director: Hans Richter.
Photography, Werner Brandes.
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Liturgical objects stolen from various churches attacked and set alight
in Catalunya, and which are now the subject of recovery attempts as if
they were objects of national heritage.
The exterior object has distanced itself from its habitual context. Its
component parts have freed themselves from the object in such a way
that they can establish completely new relationships with other elements.
——————
One cannot speak of rationality when dealing with these individuals.
The valuable objects and money seized were often despised as things
from another world. Even if they changed their way of looking at them,
one can only expect that these objects would be destroyed.
As in documentary filmmaking, the exterior object was used as the raw
material, but rather than using it for a “rational” subject of a social, economic or scientific type, it was “separated” from its normal context and
was used as material to express irrational visions.
A lieutenant colonel shows valuable objects stored in the basement of
the castle at Figueras. Paintings, jewels, Manila shawls, industrial
bonds, etc. Voice-over: “Treasures recovered thanks to Franco’s army,
whose advances have prevented them from being taken abroad.”
A full-length film that aims to transport viewers to the dreamlike world
of the unconscious through the story of Jack/Narcissus, an impoverished poet who discovers his ability to create dreams and opens a business, designing them for an unusual group of clients as a way of earning
a living.
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Edificio para parados
 July . Distillery burned down by the rebels, who assumed that it belonged
to the Jesuits. Barcelona. La revolución de julio en Barcelona. Su represión, sus
víctimas. Proceso Ferrer, by José Brissa. Casa editorial Maucci. Barcelona. .
Photography, A. T. V. Merletti.
 July . Edificio para parados [Building for the unemployed]. Madrid.
Premature Architecture. Departments. Central elevation. Lateral elevation.
Cross-section. Layout. Scale and details. Art Gallery of the Colegio de
Arquitectos. Málaga. . Architect, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina.
——————
It is evident that these events given little cause for concern in the City
Council. They do not regard them as we, the directly affected, do. They
do not see an ulterior motive in the exercise of simplification that these
days of revolution have involved. Ultimately, they assign our destiny in
the way they do their work, in which everything is reduced to paperwork.
It is not that normal observers no longer belong in the field of the
observable, but rather that they do not want the latter to become an
image. They don’t like it, for example, that my drawings don’t conform
to architectural plans and are nothing more than a vehicle… even
though it would be so refreshing to only have to see what’s on the paper!
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The cylindrical design of the building that housed the alcohol stores on
its various floors undoubtedly contributed to the spread of the flames
throughout the entire structure.
A building with cylindrical towers in which it will be convenient, cheap
and easy to install lifts. The continual toing and froing of the unemployed around the various departments with thus be facilitated.
——————
We denounce the ease with which the lawless hordes obtained gasoline
and fuel, the ease with which they walked the streets with such unimpeded access to the means of creating a fire, getting weapons and
encouraging the burning. No one to help them, you say? Where were
the forces of order to be found? Did the police initially let them act?
While we patiently listen to a wealth of demagogic views, no responses
are to be had regarding the ease with which these criminals still learn
such crimes in school and carry them out.
And these days, what is economic art? That type of work whose creator
is equipped to carry out with his own resources or with other resources
loaned to him. However, it is never an art that cannot be realised in
some way without full, external contribution. Economic art is a sort of
“do it yourself.” If the work is then shown around, sold and handed
over for the purpose of collective enjoyment, and it is thus easy and
logical that has been supported by outside money, then yes, fine. My
viewpoint on this matter is just that I prefer works that by nature and
circumstances are self-created.
El capital. El carácter fetichista
de la mercancía y su secreto
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El capital. El carácter fetichista de la mercancía y su secreto
. Nuestro culpable. The sacred idol for sale and its vicissitudes. Excerpt from
the film of that name by Fernando Mignoni. Produced by CNT-FAI in Madrid
in . Stills taken from the copy placed on deposit in the Filmoteca España
by the Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo in .
. El capital. El carácter fetichista de la mercancía y su secreto [Das Kapital.
“The fetishism of commodities”]. Projects based on the text by Karl Marx of
that name in volume I of Das Kapital. Notes by Sergei M. Eisenstein, .
Stills from related films: October, ; Old and New, ; The Bezhin Meadow,
, in the  edition by FSF (Films Sans Frontières).
——————
After the end of the war it was noted in Motion Picture Herald that the
Spanish studios had also undergone a significant transformation during
the period of the conflict. Cameras and projectors were moved to party
and union headquarters to “protect” them. Thefts and embargoes were
among the studios’ enemies but not the only ones. The Madrid studios
produced few fictional works and subsisted in a state of complete contradiction. There was no change in their financial backing and the economic structure remained as before, with “capitalist elements” still
contributing money for the exploitation of these studios. The popular
musician Luis Patiño explained that the cinema inevitably came into
conflict with various alien elements: “the first of which is CAPITAL”.
The actor and producer Antonio Portago, who appeared in La bien
pagada (by Eusebio F. Ardavín, ), noted that investors of capital
began to show signs of greater comprehension “although not to the
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required degree”. The success of films made by Filmófono or Cifesa
began to overcome investors’ doubts: “Spanish films began to be boxoffice ones and to be profitable, and in the light of these undeniable
facts, Spanish cinema opened its hungry, street urchin’s eyes and out of
avarice and greed ventured to emerge from its warren.” The “economic
elements” practically disappeared. As a consequence of this scarcity,
the CEA studios only produced one film in three years, entitled Nuestro
culpable. The war resulted in a flight of capital.
It was not possible to understand Soviet cinema without understanding
the subtle mechanisms of its production system. All material belonged
to the State as the “studio was the State.” The more important a film
and the more successful its director, the more direct and high level the
State political intervention. The most politically logical idea of the
Soviets, Eisenstein’s project to create a great cinematic fresco on Marx’s
Das Kapital, was expressively forbidden by the chief head of the Soviet
film industry and by the State itself. This was an internal and structural decision that would bring about the failure of this new project. No
capital for Das Kapital. Stalin recommended Eisenstein to forget about
it and to change his outlook. He treated him like a madman, which was
clearly a contradiction of reality. Eisenstein thought about selling the
project of Das Kapital to the Americans. Stalin had told him he was
mad and, logically speaking, any capitalist who thought of getting
involved in the project to bring Das Kapital to the screen would have
been similarly insane. Nor did the Soviet production system accept it.
“The State was the studio” and Eisenstein had to resign himself to
abandoning his project on Das Kapital.
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It is highly unusual, not to say unique, that Spanish films such as
Aurora de esperanza, Barrios bajos and ¡No quiero... no quiero! exist
under the circumstances. Similarly surprising is the interest in experimentation. While other filmmakers opted more or less unanimously for
105
conventional documentary formats, as it was considered premature and
untimely not to devote oneself to aims that would speed on the ultimate
victory in the war, SIE Films and the FRIEP produced fictional reconstructions rather than the limited type of format that was created from
excerpts of news reporting. Nor was it common, given the context of
the war, to make films on social themes filmed in the streets or in studios, such as Aurora de esperanza, or entertaining titles such as Nuestro
culpable or Barrios bajos. Following this same line of Anarchist-syndicalist thought, propaganda film could not in itself justify the th of July
when workers’ organisations had confronted an old and reactionary
society. “Cinema as art” also had to be produced according to Mateo
Santos, one of the ideologues of that viewpoint. The experience of the
Marxists was radically different to that of the Anarchist-syndicalists to
the point where they were in direct confrontation on numerous occasions, particularly with regard to everything concerning the showing
and boycotting of specific films. The same political contradictions that
experienced their most dramatic moment in the events of May 
were to be found within the context of film. While the Communists
ultimately set up their own production company and distributor,
becoming another element in the large number of film organisations
currently existing, their discourse throughout the war was always one of
unity and centralised management, “with a unified political and ideological criterion for all the anti-Fascist masses”, as called for by Juan M.
Plaza, organiser of the Popular Army’s propaganda machine.
According to the filmmaker, this was the direction that that the subjectmatter of film should pursue in the future. “A purely intellectual cinema which, free from traditional limitations, adopts direct forms to
express thoughts, systems and concepts, without transitions or paraphrases. And which can thus become a synthesis of art and science.” “I
believe that only film is able to achieve this great synthesis, to offer the
intellectual element with its revitalising sources, as specific as they are
emotional. This is our function and this is the direction that we must
pursue.”
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The method of teaching through entertainment or that of communicating ideas without stifling a sense of humour would seem to be recent
discoveries and to coincide with the re-assessment of comedy, an
unjustly undervalued genre until very recently, when in reality it has
been the most effective genre for introducing changes of use and habit
in society due to the high degree of spectators’ openness to this genre.
I believe that only cinema is capable of achieving that synthesis, returning the intellectual element to its specific and emotional vital sources.
Here lies our task and here is the path on which we have embarked.
This is the starting-point for the next film that I am thinking of making, which must make our workers and peasants think dialectically. This
film will be entitled Marx’s “Das Kapital”.
In his article “Beyond interpretation and the un-interpretable”, published in Kino in , Eisenstein announced his new cinematographic
project, based on Marx’s Das Kapital. “As we are aware of the overall
immensity of this theme, we will soon proceed to firstly select the
aspects that can be transferred to film. We will do this in collaboration
with the historian A. Efimov, who also advised us on the script for
October.” As Eisenstein said in the Sorbonne in : “It will not be
a story that unfolds, but rather an essay through which the illiterate
and ignorant public can understand and learn dialectical thought.”
I believe that the FRIEP was more intelligent than the SIE, as while the
productions of the Barcelona company aimed to reach the viewer
through sentimental means and ideological ambiguity, the Madrid studio was more direct, using the genre of popular comedy, like simple
operetta, in order to influence people. It was of little concern to the
Regional Federation of the CNT that their films were of inferior cine-
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matographic quality to those of the SIE; the effective element was the
use of a language that the viewer of the day understood and with which
he was familiar. This is the viewpoint of film historians in the present
day with regard to Nuestro culpable. The English critic Roger
Mortimore, for example, made the following perceptive observations:
“The production of films in Spain by the Popular Front had to wait
until the outbreak of the Civil War when the CNT in conjunction with
two other companies produced Nuestro culpable (Fernando Mignoni,
), an Anarchist comedy in the style of René Clair… These films
perhaps constitute the connecting link between the working class ones
of Chaplin, Keaton and Clair and Italian Neo-realism.”
This is the starting-point for the break-away from classic theories of
montage (Griffith, Kulechov, Pudovkin), who understood it as a mere
“addition” of shots (like bricks that are built up to construct a wall, in
Kulechov’s expression), whereas Eisenstein understood montage as
“shock, “conflict”, and “collision” between two shots that bring about
a new un-representable or abstract concept in the viewer’s mind. This
is naturally the starting-point for so-called “intellectual cinema” (or
concept cinema), which focused on film adaptations of works as difficult as Marx’s Das Kapital and Joyce’s Ulysses.
——————
semi-politicised film industry, while the culminating moments (and the
most devastating for the Republican cause) of the Civil War were being
played out. A cinema of emotions is not necessarily opposed to a cinema of ideas. Emotions are the vehicle and as Mateo Santos noted:
“Emotions are comparable to the sound track, the lighting, the sets,
never to the ideas or the plot.”
Without letting himself be intimidated, Eisenstein began to become
enthusiastic about the idea of a cinematographic discourse that could
express arguments and present entire systems of thought. He considered using montage to generate not just emotions but also abstract concepts. “From the image to emotion, from emotion to the intellectual
argument” (). He began to think about a film on Marx’s Das
Kapital, starting from the sequence of the Gods in his film October,
which had aimed to criticise the idea of God solely through the juxtaposition of images. The film would create an “intellectual attraction”
that would “teach the worker to think dialectically” (). At the same
time he had also begun to read Joyce’s Ulysses and saw in it the possibility of anecdote-free film, as well as the use of precise, lively details
that produced overall conclusions “physiologically” (). Das
Kapital would focus on the Second International but “the formal
aspect would be based on Joyce” (). The film was never made:
Stalin rejected it.
The crucial influence of US cinema, the cinema of entertainment, was
basically due to the conviction that it was in the production of emotions
and in amusement that the most effective weapons to inculcate different ideological viewpoints were to be found. Technique was used in the
service of film and in the service of the viewer at the moment when both
had their defences lowered, at the climax of the action and the cinematographic montage, thus opening the way to free love, workers’ equal
rights under the law or the right to a decent wage. For this reason
Fernando Mignoni, script in hand, was able to convince his comrades
on the CNT who functioned as producers in a semi-professional and
Nuestro culpable has an ending that can only be described as a deus ex
machina, a sort of tacked-on end, in which the director lost control over
the conflicts within the story. The plot lines had become so convoluted
that it was impossible to achieve a natural conclusion and a rather
forced end was imposed. Mignoni uses his deus ex machina in the same
way that Jardiel Poncela had done in his comedies, offering a rapid
rather than a logical ending. El Randa declares himself to be better off
in prison than anywhere else. He is left alone in the judge’s office with
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the suitcase and the  million dollars, at which moment he has time for
a small jest at the expense of justice when he puts on the judge’s overcoat and takes his pipe, and makes a symbolic gesture by freeing a caged
bird. He climbs out of the office window, which happens to be on the
ground floor, and at that moment a car passes by with Urquina’s lady
friend in it, who stops and picks him up. They exchange a brief, smiling greeting and move on. El Sol said that Nuestro culpable was “a real
misfortune. It points to a direction of empty, useless frivolity that can
only lead Spanish cinema towards total failure.” The public, however,
liked it and its Anarchist messages reached a wider public.
Eisenstein’s writings of the s offer a unique vision of cinematic
form and effect. For him, the film had to be put together (he uses the
word “assembled”, like a machine) on the basis of stimuli. Inside and
between the shots the stimuli encompass everything, from the beat and
the rhythm to the dominant and the harmonic, with each leaving room
for the possibility of conflict. These formal possibilities will take shape
through the response they may arouse in the viewer, a response that
involves perception, emotion and a certain degree of cognitive awareness. Conceiving of the stimuli as “attractions” functions to emphasise
perceptive and emotional dimensions; conceiving of them as “signs”
places most emphasis on their intellectual aspects. In both cases, the
film leads the viewer towards an experience that refers to ideological
conclusions: a work of social agitation, propaganda or even abstract
manifestation, as the project on Das Kapital intended. Overall,
Eisenstein insisted that the perceptive and emotional impact must be
present even in the most intellectual forms of cinematic discourse.
In a letter to Léon Moussinac, Eisenstein wrote: “The announcement that
I am going to make a film about Marx’s Das Kapital is not a publicity
stunt. I believe that it is the direction that film of the future will pursue.”
——————
Commonplaces aside, an attentive viewing of Nuestro culpable presents
us with a series of connotations in which the ideology under discussion
here manifests itself through the storyline despite the apparently frivolous narrative. Examples include small but highly significant details such
as the exhibition of a photograph of a pig in a silver frame, the Anarchist
gesture accompanied by a disrespectful noise made by the main character towards the prison, or the Christmas card that falls out of the wallet
during the scene of the confidence trick instead of bank notes. More
important, however, are the sequences in which the three characters ask
for equal status with El Randa, saying “we are the bosses”, and the one
in the cabaret in which a song includes a toast to thieves.
It could be asked to what point the film offers a Marxist mise-en-scène.
The principal measure of the film’s emotional makeup is the constant
sense of frenzy and of coming and going, jumping from one register to
another in the individual elements or each significant sign in the work.
Alongside this, the intensity of the emotional content of each sequence
and scene increases, as does that of the overall work.
——————
At the heart of most of these films was the concept of “Work and
struggle for the Revolution.” Nuestro culpable, for example, is a musical
comedy that offers an ironic viewpoint on relations between justice and
bourgeois society.
Once again, repressive forces such as the police, the judiciary, the bank
and the underclass join forces to punish El Randa, the disinherited
character, and to sexually exploit the woman, Greta. Nonetheless,
although the main characters finally emerge victorious, the message is
that bourgeois order can only be mocked through low-life, picaresque
doings or by a chance stroke of luck, hence the importance given to
a horse-shoe. With this “magic object” the film defends the notably
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revolutionary notion that happiness depends on chance and not on
man’s actions. In the same way, the evident fetishism for the dollar and
for luxury is unorthodox. Overall the film blends anarchy with
Anarchism and the destruction of order with libertarian order.
As I say: policemen preparing their boots, in addition to capitalists
– who all look remarkable alike, equally fat, similarly dressed and with
no neck – in a meeting with the minister and disposed to bring an end
to working-class aspirations. And also disposed to enjoy themselves.
The minister takes the workers’ manifesto off the table around which
they are all gathered and makes a gesture with his hand calling for attention: the table opens up, splitting in half like the bridges of St.
Petersburg, and from its interior emerge liqueurs and full glasses, ready
to be drunk. There is something obscene in this gadget that signifies the
shift from work to pleasure (the faces of the capitalists express this
unreservedly). Having removed the piece of paper – the discourse – the
hidden is unmasked, appearing in just the right place. One only needs
to look carefully at the shot to perceive its latent sexuality.
——————
A small figurine of a saint that is involved in the big swindle in the story
passes from one character to another. When it is finally opened up and
its interior destroyed it turns out that there is nothing in it: it was all a
trick, as revealed in the grimaces of astonishment into which the faces
of the prisoners crumple.
A sacred cylinder that passes from one hand to another. A phallic object
that contains the promises of salvation. For a while the cylinder has no
marks and cannot be identified by us. We still do not know if it is going
to help the church or the factory. Its function is the same. It holds a
promise of salvation.
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Here again Antonio Polo opted for professionalism: “I decided to make
the film and the shooting began, using the best actors and technical
crew available, regardless of whether they had union cards.” The shooting had, however, to be under the control of a supervisory committee
that would look at the footage every day and would have the power to
alter the script or stop filming. According to Polo, Mignoni, who was a
highly regarded set designer and responsible for the sets of Aznar’s
films, for example, refused to work if “coerced by unsuitable colleagues”, although an agreement was finally reached and the film came
to a happy conclusion with its premiere. Polo, however, lost his job due
to arguments and conflicts with the supervisory committee.
Stalin made suggestions to Eisenstein and to his two colleagues on how
to shift the focus of attention of the film’s overall argument and they
had no choice but to accept. At this point Eisenstein asked Stalin’s permission to go abroad with Alexandrov and Tisse, in principle to study
western sound techniques, saying that he wanted to make a film of Das
Kapital there.
“You’re mad”, was Stalin’s reply, which was all he said although he
also indicated that he would think about the travel permit.
——————
It was Rodiño, manager of the CEA, who suggested adapting a comedy
by Fernando Mignoni, which had already been offered to them in the
past. The reading to the union supervisory committee passed off without problems (there was nothing ideologically unacceptable about the
subject) and it was agreed to make the film. There was some degree of
friction at the outset as obviously the production team was a motley
group. The situation with Nuestro culpable was somewhat comparable to
that of ¡No quiero... no quiero!, directed by Francisco Elías for the
Catalan CNT and which was the last major project of the trade union
confederation, in a process that saw considerable about-turns with
regard to the initial production budgets (financial, artistic, etc.).
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Lasky proposed various subjects including the Dreyfus case, a film
about Zola and the box-office success of Vicki Baum’s book Grand
Hotel; none of these suggestions greatly interested Eisenstein. He proposed another three works that had the advantage of having been
offered to him personally by their respective authors: The War of the
Worlds by H. G. Wells, Ulysses by James Joyce, and The Devil’s Disciple
by George Bernard Shaw. Ultimately, film versions were made of all
three but not by Eisenstein. As Lasky was already running a considerable risk in inviting a “dangerous” Bolshevik to Hollywood, Eisenstein
prudently decided against expressing his desire to make a film on Das
Kapital.
lot and the honours will be yours.” However, an unexpected outside figure, the banker’s lover, breaks the pre-established equilibrium by
rebelling against her lord and master and suddenly becomes a part of
the aristocracy of crime, committing a spectacular robbery that it suits
everyone not to clear up. From that moment onwards all those affected
are obliged to tell lies, which reinforces the humorous slant of the film
and allows for the use of songs with bitingly ironic words in which the
producer gave full range to visual experimentation using superimposed
images. If these are not perfectly achieved with regard to technical resolution, it is because Mignoni did not have aesthetic pretensions but
rather adhered to a preconceived concept of cinematic syntax.
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Critics and reviews coincided in emphasising the problems that had to
be overcome to complete the film: “It has been, it is and it will be an act
of heroism” (Super-Filme,  April ). While some expressed themselves satisfied with the effort that was involved in making it in the middle of the war in a Madrid studio, others questioned the merit of a
humorous film when men were fighting at  degrees below zero on the
Teruel front, while Mignoni was described as a mere apprentice of
Perojo. The professional activities of Fernando Mignoni, an Italian theatrical set designer based in Spain, generally focused on his core skills
(particularly when working in Benito Perojo’s normal team) except on
some occasions, such as that of Nuestro culpable, for which he should be
considered the overall creator of the work, responsible for the storyline,
script, dialogues, sets and direction. The action of the film takes place
entirely in Madrid, presumably before the Civil War, and it is surprising how a non-Spaniard captures the authentic feel of popular life, the
accents and local expressions. There are four principal characters as
well as others that add nuances to particular sequences. Schematically,
the film involves a triangle of a poor man, a rich man, and the judge,
each one faithful to the social role assigned to him and subject to the
maxim that runs: “Rob a small amount and you’ll be put in jail; rob a
As on so many occasions in Eisenstein’s career, the theoretical problem
arose from a cinematic project. When he edited October () he experienced moments of “intellectual cinema.” By interweaving shots of
battlefields with the interior front, Eisenstein gave visual form to
metaphors; the Tsarist eagle waving over the troops, a lackey’s document unleashing a bombardment, a tank slipping from its mounting
chain and “crushing” soldiers in the trenches. He showed Kerensky
both walking around in his office and rising up in the scale of official
titles, while in the most memorable sequence, “God and Homeland”,
Eisenstein turned a group of statues into symbols of incompatible ideas
about the existence of God. The editing of October left Eisenstein with
the desire to make a film on Das Kapital and to theoretically explain
how one could make use of cinema to generate concepts. As a category,
“film without plot” included films without a romantic story centred on
a character, but Eisenstein gave thought to the idea that in film it could
be possible to do without a plot completely. “The plot is only one of the
devices without which we do not yet know how to communicate something to the viewer.” His film on Das Kapital would have to be an essay
in which the development of ideas occupied the central position. For
Eisenstein, this type of cinema with its intellectual discourse would
transcend the distinction between documentary and fiction. By showing non-fictional events and by dealing with history, it would also
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present an argument of a poetic nature that dealt with the abstract laws
of social change.
——————
Nuestro culpable also, however, received positive reviews. Luis Gómez
Mesa said of Mignoni’s film that it was, “the most photogenic of the
authentic, popular films” (meaning titles such as Aurora de esperanza,
Barios bajos and ¡No quiero... no quiero!). He considered that it did not
resemble the work of a novice, having the grace and humour of René
Clair, “but translated into working-class Madrid culture.” Mi Revista
emphasised “the fine quality of new Spanish cinema” as to be seen in
this film and in En busca de una canción by Eusebio Fernández Ardavín.
It cannot be denied that Mignoni was notably skilled in the treatment of
comedy despite certain irregularities in the rhythm, which is slightly
frantic at times, some problems in linking the various episodes and quite
a few failed gags. The frivolous tone that prevails has its culminating
moment in the “happy” ending of a type quite uncharacteristic of the
period (both within Spain and abroad). El Randa and the millionaire’s
ex-lady friend who have appropriated the two million dollars do nothing
less than escape with the booty without an excess of moralising excuses.
What could be apparently further than Eisenstein, who dreamed of
filming Das Kapital, than this cinematically patient representation of a
unified theatrical action? The concept of unity of editing marks an
important change in the practice of a filmmaker whose style in silent
film was famous for its risky juxtapositions of shots and dislocated shifts
in the editing. His new approach should perhaps be seen as Eisenstein’s
attempt to find a rigorous style within the context of the growth of
Social Realism based on coherent theatrical scenes that focus on individual characters, unified in dramatic space and time and freed from the
“intellectual” and “monumental” dimensions of “plot-free” film.
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Very correctly played by Ricardo Núñez, the adventures of El Randa, a
small-time crook who finds himself involved in the disappearance of
two million dollars, all tackled in a comic tone, did not universally
please. Some critics were very much against the fact that the film had
“a comic theme” just a short distance away from the battlefront. In
Nuevo Cinema (the more or less official Communist mouthpiece) the
review of the film emphasised this inappropriateness: “A film made in
Madrid just a kilometre away from the trenches. Under machinegun
fire, did it not occur to Fernando Mignoni – a very highly regarded set
designer and artist of whom the Spanish cinema can expect much – to
do anything other than offer (very much in the manner of Benito
Perojo, to whom he was an efficient collaborator) a humorous subject in
the line of René Clair, Lubitsch, and a grotesque farce by Willy Forts
whose name we cannot recall at this moment. Nuestro culpable offers
nothing worthy of praise to the Spanish cinema. Before the th of July
it would have been acceptable but not today.” Despite all this, the critic in Nuevo Cinema said it had “a number of felicitous insights.”
As always, the aim was to instil ideas into the viewer via their emotional impact. However, Eisenstein now even questioned the very notion
of “idea”. In his “intellectual montage” the idea was a slogan or proposition. The scenes of the “Gods” in October, for example, could be
expressed as: “The idea of Gods is culturally relative and socially
regressive.” Following Eisenstein’s return to the Soviet Union and
under a barrage of criticism, he rejected this notion of intellectual cinema. The work of art now had to transmit concepts that were much
more tendentious. Once again we find ourselves in the world of imagemaking, of creating an “expressive abstraction”: for example, emotional qualities that signify an action or situation. Eisenstein’s writings of
the s are based on three schematic notions on the formation of
concepts that reappear time and again. The first notion is that of the
interior monologue, the second that of sensual thought and the third
that of representation and image. The interior monologue has its origins in Ulysses. When Eisenstein read Joyce’s novel in  he consid117
ered it an example of how a text could engender abstract conclusions
using “psychological” methods. The book’s rejection of anecdote
seemed to him to form a parallel with his project for Das Kapital. In the
early s, however, and possibly under the influence of Axel’s Castle
() by Edmund Wilson and James Joyce’s Ulysses () by Stuart
Gilbert, Eisenstein began to consider Ulysses as a model for his use of
the flow of consciousness.
having left behind their earlier campaigning behaviour, and were now
fully involved in decision-making. Despite the fact that it was only
shown briefly in cinemas, Nuestro culpable fulfilled its function and is
now a testimony to a period of Spanish life that was as vital and complex as this work of cinema; a work that, overall, was simply intended
to be an item of entertainment and for this reason fully preserves its
power of persuasion.
——————
The signs of interpolation are clear. The montage breaks up the arguments of the characters into slogans. The written signs/commentaries
emphasise, challenge or poke fun at the associated images. Even when
the indication is purely a visual one, Eisenstein uses a verbal indication
as a comment on the narrative. The written sign “The truth is being
drowned” appears as a copy of Pravda sinks. Kerensky’s desire to
assume power is conveyed by showing him among interminable flights
of steps, which is a joke on the word lesnitsa, that implies to ascend “the
ladder of success”. The soldiers crouched in the trench “beneath” the
cannon are literally “oppressed” by the war of the provisional government. These abstractions based on language are typical of Soviet propaganda art: posters and processions showed images of scissors cutting up
speculators or of White soldiers writhing about as they are fried in a
pan. The Das Kapital project, Eisenstein promised, would use games of
this type as springboards for didactic generalisation.
There is, in contrast, a particular emphasis in the phrase pronounced
by the judge, from which the film’s title is taken and in which we appreciate Mignoni’s stance with regard to its subject: “We’ve already got our
guilty party, why do we need another one?” in the words of the judge to
the girl when she confesses to being the author of the crime. It is at this
precise moment that the various elements dispersed throughout the
film come together and its discourse is ordered and formulated. This is
because we now no longer find ourselves in the presence of a series of
individuals who act in their own interests (a banker who needs to avoid
scandal; various public officials who need to demonstrate their efficiency, etc.), but rather a dominant class that protects itself via the institutional framework and who, in order to maintain its privileged position,
has no hesitation in leaving in the gutter a whole stream of victims of
injustice (also known as “bad luck”). This is because ultimately everything is a question of good or bad luck, except for those who can afford
to buy it. Only this explains why the poor small-time thief, the film’s
main character although the passive vehicle of events, will emerge triumphant from the tangle. He has found his good-luck horseshoe and
his girl, who is the moving force of the action. She is the rebel, the
insurgent, and the person best equipped for business. It is she who
selects her companion, first getting him involved in her affairs and then
planning his liberation. Furthermore, her manner of behaving is presented as quite normal, indicating that in the Spain of  it was taken
for granted that women had already achieved their social conquests,
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It was not normal during times of war for films of a social character to
be shot in cities or in film studios, such as Aurora de esperanza, nor were
productions such as Nuestro culpable and Barrios bajos, which were simply light entertainment. According to the viewpoint of the Anarchistsyndicalists, propaganda alone could not justify the revolution when
workers’ organisation had confronted an old, reactionary society.
Cinema as art also had to be cultivated. The Communist experience was
different to that of the Anarchist-syndicalists, resulting in conflict
119
between the two on various occasions, particularly with regard to questions relating to the industry, such as the distribution of films and the
prohibition of certain titles. The events of May  introduced comparable tensions and violence into the world of film with the imposition
of Communist theses, and while the latter ultimately set up their own
production company and distributor, their discourse throughout the
war was always one of absolute unity and centralised management with
a single political and ideological criteria for all the anti-Fascist masses,
as called for by Juan Plaza, the military propagandist.
It would seem that Eisenstein agreed with his critics that October did
not succeed in fusing its official aim with its experimental aspirations.
He admitted that the film contained, “a clumsy, vulgar and even embarrassing symbolism” but at the same time he thought that a passage like
that of God and the Fatherland, “like the lions in Battleship Potemkin,
serves to give access to an idea of a completely different type of cinema.” This idea, as he indicated, would be popularised in Old and New
and would culminate in Das Kapital. Ironically, however, the most pronounced influence of the film in Soviet cinema derived from its most
“realistic” aspect. By consolidating a historical image of the Bolshevik
uprising, the revolutionary romanticism of October later influenced representations of the events of October. In fact, numerous documentaries
have used shots of the sequences of the events of July and the attack on
the palace as if they were news footage.
office in the Number  Examining Magistrate’s Court, as justice was
no longer imparted in the name of God or of the head of State but in
the name of the People, with whom it resided.
With regard to the Das Kapital project, Eisenstein wrote in a postcard from the Aga Khan: “On the godhead. Aga Khan – an irreplaceable
body – the cynicism of shamanism taken to its limits. God: a graduate
of Oxford University. Who plays rugby and ping-pong and accepts the
orations of the faithful. And, at heart, the calculators do not cease
to work, carrying out a “divine” book-keeping, introducing sacrifices
and donations. The finest exposition of the subject of the clergy and
worship.”
——————
We cannot completely pass over elements that reflect the socio-judicial
situation of the Second Republic and the context of the creation of the
film, such as the explicit reference to the divorce of the banker and his
wife in one of the conversations, or El Randa’s dream in which he marries the girl in a civil ceremony held by the judge. These are overtly secular institutions of civil society that had been the terrain of political and
religious battle between the rebels and the Second Republic. Also striking is the complete absence of religious or State symbols in the judge’s
Antonio Polo went further in his justification of the film: “When we
thought about making Nuestro culpable, we had no further idea than that
of producing a commercial, pleasant and moral-free film, always supposing that its argument was not in any way reactionary, and we fully
achieved this.” He added: “When we shot the film at the end of 
the public was saturated with propaganda and triumphalism, which the
war reports unfortunately contradicted, and only desired to find a
means of escape from what was an increasingly pessimistic atmosphere
for one side and an increasingly hopeful one for the other. The fact that
we were censured for not having made a film to raise the spirits is logical among journalists who did not seem to read the official reports, but
our aim was to provide work for the industry and, sadly, we could not
continue due to lack of funds.” These ideas were shared in an overall
sense by the second Production Committee of the CNT in Barcelona
and rejected by the other political and syndicalist organisations that isolated Anarchist-syndicalist experiences behind a wall of incomprehension and criticism. This fact possibly speeded up their ultimate “reconversion” towards aims that were primarily conceived in terms of
commercial profitability.
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121
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A new Eisenstein was in the process of being forged. The articles in
Cahiers du cinéma were translated in all western countries. Access to his
notes on a film based on Das Kapital, published in Russia in  and
soon after made available in other languages, confirmed the idea that he
was a filmmaker who aimed to combine leftist commitment with experimental technique. A lecture in Italy that year devoted considerable
space to Marxism, while the leftist German magazine Alternative devoted an issue to the political implications of Eisenstein’s theory of montage. As revolutionary politics declined, his work began to become an
ironic reference point. The main character of Sweet Movie () by
Makavejev wears a cap like the sailors of the Battleship Potemkin, while
in Marker’s film Le Fond de l’air est rouge (), a polemical meditation
on the failure of left-wing movements, the sequence on the Odessa
steps is intercut with material from news bulletins of .
El fantasma de la libertad
122
. Getafe. Cerro de los Ángeles. Monument to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
On  July a firing squared consisting of Anarchists from Madrid with a film
crew performed a pantomime execution of this monument. -second sequence
of film of unknown origin, supplied by the British news service British
Paramount News, transmitted on  August .
. Paris. Luis Buñuel. El fantasma de la libertad [Le fantôme de la liberté].
Appearing: Buñuel himself, the producer Serge Silberman, and two personal
friends of Buñuel, the poet José Bergamín and Dr José Luis Barros who are
about to be shot. -minute film produced by Serge Silberman and Greenwich
Film, premiered on  September .
——————
tical calculation”, already used in an expurgated version that was shown
in working-class areas and which Breton in L’amour fou described as
“childishly tranquilizing”. But the title did not stick, and this a posteriori one should not be confused with the two earlier titles given to the
script, La bestia andaluza and ¡Abajo la Constitución! With regard to the
first we should bear in mind that Henry Miller had written a long and
enthusiastic letter to Buñuel in which he expressed his boundless admiration for Un perro andaluz, of which only the title seemed to him inadequate and which he considered should be changed for La perra
andaluza. With regard to ¡Abajo la Constitución!, it is clear that it heralds the ¡Abajo la libertad!, which was the French version of the
Hispanic phrase ¡Vivan las cadenas!, from which Le fantôme de la liberté
arose.
——————
In the face of it being banned, it was attempted to disguise it using a
title taking from The Communist Manifesto, “In the icy waters of egotis-
One stifling afternoon in July , in its archive in Cerro de los Ángeles the Bishopric of Getafe kindly allowed me to investigate the almost
entirely unpublished photographic documentation on the story of
the Monument to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, its unveiling in , its
sacrilegious demolition in  and its subsequent reconstruction. I
believe that this photographic sequence at el Cerro is one of the least
known and most shocking documents in the history of Spain. This
sequence is the key to the Civil War, including the Second Republic
which was the direct origin of that war; a war of religion in the fullest
sense of the phrase. A war essentially motivated by the Republic’s religious persecutions to which the persecuted responded with those
which they themselves and the Church from then on termed a
“Crusade”. In this sequence I present, with all the tremendous power
of the images, one of the most revealing pieces of data relating to the
conflict. It is curious that the monumental Historia de la Cruzada
Española of , whose first volume makes reference to the unveiling
of the Monument in , does not refer to its destruction although it
focuses with a wealth of detail on the incidents of the Alzamiento
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Despite their symbolic importance, the events that took place at the
Cerro de los Ángeles have not been the subject of serious attention or
study in accounts of the Spanish Civil War. I admit that their enormity
always seemed to me so abnormal that for many years I thought that the
famous photograph of the shooting of Christ, which circulated the
whole globe but with few accompanying details, might have been a
montage of enemy propaganda.
Falsified photographs, obscurity regarding the provenance of the
images, manipulated use of the propaganda war and counter-information, changes in the names. When I found the terrible sequence that I
reproduce here in the archive of the diocese of Getafe, I realised that it
records tragically real events.
Nacional in Madrid. The sequence conserved in Getafe opens with the
photograph reproduced on the front cover of the Historia, in which we
see the “execution” of the image of Christ by a squad of militias who
had come from Madrid on  July  at the orders of a virago who
gave the order to fire. The same scene was repeated over the following
days, during which the attackers climbed up the monument, uttering
gross blasphemies and covering it with aggressive daubs.
Le fantôme de la liberté begins thus: an execution by firing-squad in the
plaza de Toledo at the period when Napoleon’s army had invaded
Spain. The cry is heard: ¡Vivan las cadenas! [Long live chains!], which
Luis Buñuel preferred to translate as ¡Abajo la libertad! [Down with
liberty!]. The Spanish preferred the slavery of rule by monarchy to the
liberty of the French Revolution. The film ends with the same cry. This
time the scene takes place in a zoo. Some policemen fire shots. We simply see some frightened animals and once again hear the cry of ¡Vivan
las cadenas! It might be thought that at the end of the day men prefer
slavery to freedom but Buñuel very much guards himself against saying
so, both during the course of the film and when we reach the inevitable
end of the story. The first ending of the film, to be found in one of the
early scripts, was different: the film ended with the scene of the meeting of the High Command of the Police. In a highly dramatic scene, two
Commanders found themselves in the company of all the other characters during the execution by firing squad in the plaza de Toledo which
opens the film. Buñuel considered that this ending was too contrived.
The end to be seen in the film was devised during the shooting. The
first scene is described as follows: “The firing squad halts, as do the
condemned men. ‘Line the prisoners up against the wall!’. The officer
unsheathes his sword. The soldiers in the firing squad have carried out
their orders. The priest says his rosary beads: the man with the bandaged head lowers his gaze with great dignity; a man next to him takes a
step forward. ‘First line, kneel down…, on the ground. Firing squad,
aim.’ The firing squad obeys the orders (with its back to the camera),
facing the condemned men leaning against the wall. A Spanish rebel in
126
military uniform pushes the French soldiers. They push him away with
ease as his hands are tied. He cries out (having taken a step forward)
‘Long live chains!’ Subtitle (literally translating the cry): ‘Down with
liberty!’ All cry out: ‘Long live! Long live! Death to the Frogs.’ New
shot of the courtyard (opposite the church, which remains out of the
field of vision), always at night, following the French soldiers and
Spaniards, exchanging cannon shot, while others, in off, sing ‘La
Carmagnole’, of which the French words ‘La Vierge l’écurie, le Christ
la voire’ are to be clearly heard. Following two soldiers who lead two
horses, the camera enters the church.”
127
El manifiesto comunista
. Paradas. Parish church of San Eutropio. Looted between  and  July,
this photograph was taken on  July . It was published in Religious Buildings
and liturgical Objects looted and destroyed by the Marxists in the Villages of the
Province of Seville, by José Hernández Díaz and Alfonso Sancho Corbacho.
Imprenta de la Gavidia. Seville. .
. London. El manifiesto comunista [The Communist Manifesto], by Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels. Written for the Communist League and begun in early
February. Completed during the uprising of the Commune in Paris. Illustrated
edition by Frans Masereel, -. Facsimile edition. Dietz Verlag. Berlin.
.
——————
A phantom passed among the Sevillian countryside in the form of the
Marxist hordes. True Spain has risen up against these dogs: Franco and
Queipo de Llano, the Church and the Civil Guard, Redondo and
Castejón, the Falangist volunteers and Carlist tradition.
A spectre menaces Europe: the spectre of Communism. Against this
spectre all the forces of old Europe, the Pope and the Czar, Metternich
and Guizot, the French radicals and the German cops, have conspired
together in a holy pack.
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Overall the damage and destruction in the church encompassed the
sculptures from the numerous altarpieces dating from the late th and
early th centuries. Firstly, the early th-century high altar has lost its
sculpture of San Eutropio and two of its four columns. Secondly, the
chapel of the Sagrario has also been looted and the sculptures on the
altarpieces lost, of which the largest was the most important, dating
from around  and featuring an image of the Immaculate Virgin of
that period. The lateral chapels have lost figures of Saint Peter and the
Virgin of Mercies. Thirdly, the same chapel had an interesting painting of Mary Magdalen that can be attributed to the circle of El Greco.
This was slashed with a knife in various places. Thanks to the repeated
efforts of the Junta it has been recovered and restored with great care.
Fourthly, the following images have disappeared from the remaining
altarpieces: Saint Joachim, the Carmelite Virgin, Christ the Nazarene,
the Group of Souls, Saint Francis de Paula, the Virgin of Consolation,
Christ of the Good Death, a painting of the Holy Trinity, another of
Saint Christopher, a sculpture of Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint
Anthony of Padua, Saint Anne, Saint Bartholomew, Saint Joseph,
Saint Michael, a Risen Christ, a recumbent Christ, a Virgin of the
Rosary, and a Virgin of the Head. Fifthly, items of goldsmith’s work
that have been destroyed in this church include: an altar set of
repoussé silver comprising a cross, six candlesticks, two book rests and
three text tablets; all dating from the th century, and of which only
two text tablets and a book rest survive. Sixth, the tabernacle and a
repoussé silver casket, also th century, almost completely destroyed.
Seventh, two vessels for the holy wine of the same date. Eighth, a
ciborium of repoussé silver-gilt in the Renaissance style, and two
others, also silver-gilt and repoussé, th century. Ninth, three chalices
that accompany the above-mentioned ones, and five more modern ones
of plain silver. Tenth, an th-century silver-gilt monstrance, probably
colonial, etc.
through means that, although they currently seem economically insufficient and unsustainable, as the movement proceeds will provide a
major impulse and which are indispensable as a means to transform the
entire prevailing system of production. These means will obviously not
be the same in all countries. For more progressive ones, a few can be
mentioned, which will undoubtedly be applied in a more or less generalised nature, according to each case: . Expropriation of property
and use of the rents for public expenditure. . A sizeable progressive
tax. . Abolition of inheritance rights. . Confiscation of émigré and
rebel fortunes. . Centralisation of credit within the State through a
national Bank with State capital and monopolist regime. .
Nationalisation of transport. . Increase in national factories and of the
means of production, crop rotation and improvement of farm-holdings through a collective plan. . Proclamation of the general obligation to work; creation of industrial armies, particularly in the countryside. . Re-structuring of agricultural and industrial holdings; trend
towards gradually eliminating the differences between town and country. . Free public education for all children. Ban on child labour in
factories in its actual form. System of education combined with material production, etc.
——————
During the period of the Republic, the Popular Front, and the months
of Marxist domination in villages in the province of Seville, the balance
(of persecutions, destruction of buildings and works of art and looting)
was a positive one. Ninety-three churches were burned and looted and
around , items of religious art destroyed. These are facts that were
only possible due to the collaboration of all the forces of destruction
united!
Evidently at the outset this could only be carried out through a tyrannical action against property and the bourgeois system of production
Communists have no need to keep their ideas and aims concealed. They
openly declare that their aims can only be achieved once the existing
social order has been overthrown through violence. The ruling classes
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may tremble before the vision of a Communist revolution. The workers
have nothing to loose from it, apart from their chains. Instead, they
have an entire world to gain. Workers of the world unite!
Exposición Universal
132
 July . Interior of the church of Nuestra Señora del Carmen. The parish
church of the Carmelite convent, former convent of the Jerónimas, which
together formed a majestic architectural ensemble. Both were set alight at
the same time. Convent of the Jerónimas. Barcelona. From the series Sucesos
de Barcelona, no. . Postcard. Published by Ángel Toldrá Vinazo.
 September . Exterior view of Crystal Palace. In Dickinson’s Pictures
of the Great Exhibition of , from the original painted for HRH Prince Albert.
Dickinson Bros. . Private collection. Photograph of the reconstruction of
Crystal Palace. Sydenham Park. . London. Collection of the Victoria and
Albert Museum.
——————
The Committee’s visit to the convent of the Jerónimas in its state of
absolute and pitiful ruin, the entire building without its roof, with
sculptures, jewels, chalices, beadwork and pieces of furniture unprotected from the elements, and the damage from the fire still visible.
The great Crystal Palace designed by Paxton, whose transparency
Marx interpreted as reflecting the need to provide a showcase for so
much merchandise. It was destroyed by fire in .
site owned by the Hospital de la Santa Cruz, in the th century the
present convent was built, whose recent burning, looting and profanations we will now go on to describe. It was midday on the th. After the
mob had set light to the parish church of San Pablo they turned their
steps towards the convent of the Jerónimas. In order to avoid encounters with the forces of law and order, the insurgents raised barricades in
calle Botella, calle Príncipe de Viana and calle Hospital as well as other
adjacent ones, finally installing a large one opposite the parish church
of the Carmelites.
In , Dostoyevsky attended the Great Exhibition [Exposición
Universal] in London where he visited the Crystal Palace, a veritable
symbol of progress and built as a showcase for the latest innovations in
machinery and technology. The Russian author saw the building as the
symbol of “the utilitarian paradise of the bourgeoisie that the western
world had become: a world in which passions are quieted, risk and the
tragic sense of life eliminated, and in which the human being is reduced
to a mere automatic consumer.” In Nietzsche’s phrase, the inhabitant of
the Crystal Palace was “the last man”, the bourgeois (or worker newly
elevated to that category) who paid for his material comforts with boredom, adopting the mentality of the pack and hostile to spontaneous
curiosity and imagination.
——————
The first convent of the Jerónimas was founded in the th century and
was located in the place now occupied by the church of San Lázaro on
calle del Hospital and plaza de Padró. Having acquired the very large
As our situation became more difficult we turned out eyes to a well by
the side of the kitchen, and with a rope that we had ready for the balcony, we jumped down to the floor below, which was a shop, taking care
to slip the rope down without leaving any sign of our escape. How surprised the assassins would be to see that the birds had flown the nest,
without knowing where we had gone! The first sound that I heard was
followed by a metallic noise and the voice of a man saying to another,
“let’s go and have a drink.” Through the holes in the shop doorway I
could see how the books in the archive were burning, as well as all the
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——————
of people then arrived who threw the founder’s body into the garden
then took it out onto the street, blaspheming and behaving crazily.
Having prayed before the image of that Crucified Christ, I left and went
to the house of the reverend chaplain, Dr Badosa, by the vegetable garden, where I found almost everything in its place; on returning I saw
two men with sacks entering but I managed to turn them away by saying that it was a private house. Entering the church again via the
Cemetery I was forced to see what I would rather not have done: people smashing sculptures with hammers and digging up corpses, treating them with absolutely no respect as if they were their worst enemies,
even nailing nails into their heads and other parts of their bodies. Those
men were the very worst of human degradation and brutality!
furniture on that floor; I also saw various boys dressed in liturgical vestments, tearing them into shreds in the street; but what most disheartened me was to see how many of the balconies of the houses opposite
were crowded with people enthusiastically applauding these barbaric
acts. Pretending to be choking, I walked a few steps towards the church,
until various circumstances made me turn back in fear that a piece of
the wall that was about to collapse would fall on top of me, and on turning back I met the fireman who asked me to accompany him as he was
holding tabernacle with the Host. I was so agitated that I thought there
were enemies on all sides, which explains why I looked at him with suspicion; the worthy man put his axe away and accompanied me to the fire
station, but as we passed by the church of the Buen Suceso I decided to
leave the Host there. I then went in search of the nuns and discovered
the whereabouts of almost all of them; finally I set out for the convent
and seeing that it was again in flames, I went home, where I had something to eat for supper and spent a sleepless night. The following morning I went to the convent again and was able to see the damage caused
by the fire. The high altar, like the other altars, had been burning all
night and I saw that the part corresponding to the tabernacle was still
alight. By the doorway was a large pile of rubble and debris from the
choir and the roof, which had come down in the night; among this pile
were half-charred images of saints. I entered the Sacristy where there
was no trace left of the cupboards or of wood of any type. Imagine my
admiration when I arrived at the chapterhouse to find that the fire’s
hand not affected it nor had the criminals that had destroyed everything, and I saw unharmed the body of the convent’s founder and a precious image of the Holy Christ, a carved wooden sculpture in a case
with its glass broken! Among the numerous people entering and leaving
I saw a young man with an adze attempting to destroy the Crucifixion,
blaspheming as he did so. I do not remember how I dissuaded him from
his labours. Another young man came in, who I regarded for a while and
thinking that he looked to be an honourable type I said aloud: “If only
we could take this sculpture out”, “Oh yes”, he replied, “And as soon
as we get onto the street they’ll set light to us along with her!” A group
You believe in the Crystal Palace, indestructible, eternal, who cannot be
the subject of your hidden jibes or threats. But I, however, mistrust that
Palace of Crystal, precisely because it is made of glass and indestructible and because one cannot poke fun of it, even behind its back.
Let me explain: if instead of a Crystal Palace I had a simple chicken
hut, I could take shelter in it when it rained; but, unless I was particularly grateful to it for having saved me from the rain, I would not take
shelter in a palace. You will laugh and say that in that case a palace and
a chicken hut have the same worth. I would reply that this is true, but
the purpose of life is more than to not get wet. What would happen if I
had got it into my head that we do not live for this alone and that one
has to live in a palace? This is my intention because it is my wish. And
you cannot rid me of that intention if I do not modify my wishes. You
can try, offering me another goal or ideal. But until you succeed in your
attempt, I refuse to see a chicken hut as a Crystal Palace. It is possible
that the Crystal Palace is just a myth, that the laws of nature do not permit it and that I have foolishly invented it myself, compelled by certain
irrational customs of our generation. But what does it matter to me if
that palace is not real? What does it matter if it exists in my desire, or,
to put it more precisely, while my desires exist? Once again you laugh,
I think. Fine, laugh as much as you like. I accept all jests but I refuse to
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say that I am full up when I am still hungry. I will not settle for a compromise, for a continually renewed zero, for the single reason that the
palace conforms to natural laws and really exists. I will not admit that
the culmination of my desires might be a brick house with cheap lodgings that has been rented out for a thousand years and which has a sign
on it for Wagenheim the dentist. Destroy my desires, demolish my
ideal, present me with a better goal and I will pursue it. Perhaps you
will say that it is not worth worrying about me; but bear in mind that I
could say the same to you. We are having a serious discussion but I warn
you that if you do not deign to give me your attention I will burst into
tears. I can withdraw into my underground hole. But while I exist,
while I desire, dry your hands of me if I bring a single brick to that
house! Don’t tell me that I myself renounced the Crystal Palace a short
while ago for the only reason that I could not stick my tongue out at it.
If I spoke thus it was not because I like poking fun. Possibly what irritates me is precisely that, among all the buildings in your possession,
one must stick one’s tongue out at all of them. In other words, I would
have my tongue cut out in a gesture of thanks if things could be
arranged so that I lost my desire to poke fun. What does it matter to me,
however, if things cannot be arranged thus and I have to settle for having cheap lodgings? Why was I made with such desires? Am I not made
thus in order to prove that this state of affairs is merely a joke in bad
taste? But is this really the only goal? I do not admit it. In addition, do
you know what I say to you? That I am convinced that we, the underground men, have to be securely tied up. The underground man is able
to remain silent in his hole for forty years; but when he emerges from
underground, he starts to speak and there is no way of stopping him.
Ezra Pound
138
Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
- July . The surviving walls of another church that has been set alight.
Church of San Pedro Pescador in the Barrio de Pekín. Pueblo Nuevo. Barcelona.
From the series Sucesos de Barcelona, no. . Account by Palou Garí. Relatos de
sedición e incendios en Barcelona y Cataluña. Barcino. Editorial HispanoAmericana. Postcard. Published by Ángel Toldrá Vinazo.
to burn down our poor dwellings if we offered the least opposition to
the church burning… Nothing, nothing remains of what was the
church and the Catholic Circle except the four walls that threatened to
come down and four half-burned benches from the church.
 February . No man has a Paradise on the wall of his church. Church of
SS. Pedro y Pablo. Double-page illustration. Canto number . Double-page.
Prosperity. London. The Cantos. Leopoldine Cantos. With Usura. Ezra Pound.
Published as the Fifth Decad of the Cantos XLII-LI. London: Faber & Faber,
.
Iconoclasts. The power of putrefaction aims at the confusion of history,
it proposes destroying not just one but all religions, destroying its symbols and leading to theoretical debates. These debates occupied the
position of contemplation. Debate destroys faith and an interest in theology eventually goes out of fashion: the moment arrives when not even
the theologians are really interested in it. The power of putrefaction put
an end to all intrinsic beauty. It spread like the typhus bacillus or the
bubonic plague, transmitted by rats, albeit unknowingly. Suspect anyone who destroys an image or tries to blank out a page of history. Latin
is sacred, wheat is sacred. Who destroyed the mystery of fertility, introducing the cult of sterility? Who set up Church and Empire in opposition? Who destroyed the unity of the Catholic Church with that mire of
doctrine that was used by the Protestants as a replacement for contemplation? Who has wiped from the European mentality the awareness of
the supreme mystery so that is has fallen into the atheism proclaimed
by the Bolsheviks. Who has received honours for setting up a debate
where before there was faith?
——————
The Tuesday of that week of sad memory, a group of men presented
themselves in this quarter, their faces stamped with the anger that had
taken hold of them, and without uttering a single cry, made their way to
the church to set fire to it, initially attempting to set the doors alight;
but as they proved resistant, the task was a difficult one; the insurgents
decided to get gasoline from the street lights and with the aid of this liquid were able to carry out their destructive task. By seven o’clock the
church of San Pedro Pescador was burning and the fire remained active
until the following Friday… In addition to the church, fire also consumed a Catholic Circle located next to it where our children received
lessons while their parents were engaged in the hard labours of fishermen… Yes, we residents of the Barrio de Pekín really wanted to set
about the insurgents but we held back on hearing that there was a group
of them positioned by the station in Pueblo Nuevo and fully prepared
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——————
The Catholic Circle, the only institution of its kind in the Barrio de
Pekín, where we poor folk found good teaching and help in times of
sickness, has been almost completely destroyed. With its destruction it
could be said that we have ended up on the streets, people who, through
the efforts of many years work, had succeeded in accumulating a little
money to assist us in the face of misfortunes and adversities.
Falling into debt is a sure way to make a political career. The Mandarin
Wu Yung recounted that he had been made Governor and that bankers
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Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
pressured him to borrow money from them. He became tired of repeating that he could never repay them with what he earned. But this was a
minor detail that in no way bothered them.
——————
This is because today it is money that rules. There scarcely exists a
principality where priests do not take their tithe, exhausting villages,
estates and mills. They scandalise the world. They show the poor ways
to sin: women hoarding the whole bed in sin, more and better. A blind
man gives his hand to another and is his guide on a path that does not
look to God. The wise and good man is perverted by the vicious and
pernicious, that is the example of the clergy, a bad example. Although it
preaches the true word, behind its back laymen whisper: “Idle words of
he who sins first”, and meanwhile he leaves nothing for the Church…
And to us he says: “Help the church and gain pardon and indulgencies.” He who ends his sermons this way contributes very little in
exchange and probably couldn’t care less if the Church falls to pieces.
They only have one thought, fine vestments, good food and enjoying
everything they feel like: what are the prayers and hymns for? What will
we say about the Pope’s legates, abbots, canons and prelates, Beguines,
nuns, and suchlike. They say: “Give me what is yours and leave mine
alone.” Among ten of them you won’t find more than seven complying
with the rules of their Order. This is our Church. I know full well what
happens in Rome and what can be got in Rome. There you’ll find Mr
Snatchit and Mr Grabitall, and along with them Mr Prevaricate and
Turncoat, all friends of mine. I sent the money in advance so they know
me well there. This is because they speak about law and actually mean
money. There is a certain Cardinal Alwayshappy and his scribe John
Advantage, he knows old and new coins well. Listencarefully is his
accomplice, a crafty courtier of the curia where Twistthelaw is a notary
and scholar and expert in both fields, only lacking a year to be a master
of those texts in which the law is written. COIN AND MONEY are
judges of that same court: when these two condemn a man for his ill142
doings, nothing can save him. I know of a woman whom they greatly
love and who will never fail to attend you at a meal or pass on a letter.
With usura hath no man a house of good stone / each block cut smooth
and well fitting / that delight might cover their face, / with usura /
hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall / harpes et luthes /
or where virgin receiveth message / and halo projects from incision, /
with usura / seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines / no
picture is made to endure nor to live with / but it is made to sell and
sell quickly / with usura, sin against nature, / is thy bread ever more of
stale rags / is thy bread dry as paper, / with no mountain wheat, no
strong flour / with usura the line grows thick / with usura is no clear
demarcation / and no man can find site for his dwelling. / Stone cutter
is kept from his stone / weaver is kept from his loom WITH USURA
/ wool comes not to market / sheep bringeth no gain with usura. /
Usura is a murrain, usura / blunteth the needle in the the maid’s hand
/ and stoppeth the spinner’s cunning. Pietro Lombardo / came not
by usura, / Duccio came not by usura / nor Pier della Francesca;
Zuan Bellin’ not by usura / nor was La Callunia painted. / Came not
by usura Angelico; came not Ambrogio Praedis. / No church of cut
stone signed: Adamo me fecit. / Not by usura St. Trophime. / Not by
usura St. Hilaire. / Usura rusteth the chisel / it rusteth the craft and
the craftsman / it gnaweth the thread in the loom. / None learneth to
weave gold in her pattern; / azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is
unbroidered / emerald findeth no Memling. / Usura slayeth the child
in the womb / it stayeth the young man’s courting / it hath brought
palsey to bed, lyeth / between the young bride and her bridegroom. /
CONTRA NATURAM. / They have brought whores for Eleusis. /
Corpses are set to banquet / at behest of usura.
——————
The present author had never been in that low quarter and I must confess with all naivety that I had never seen such a poverty-stricken, abandoned place; its mean houses and huts were so small that four people
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Ezra Pound
could barely move around in them: in the narrow, winding alleys the
residents hung out black nets that smelled of fish, beside which played
dirty, dishevelled kids wearing shirts that barely covered their bodies;
moored on the beach was the “small fleet” of the place comprising
about six boats on whose hulls the names of the vessels were clumsily
traced. During the hours when there was little wind they provided
shadow for the men to sleep, with their curling beards, tanned skins and
iron muscles. Walking around the Barrio de Pekín one had the impression at times of walking around a Bedouin village displaced into the
middle of civilisation. Seated on the beach, an old sailor offered us the
following account, while the waves gently lapped on the sand and left a
lacy foam in their wake.
The Centre for Disciplinary Training, as it was called, was outside Pisa
on the Viareggio road; it consisted of an outer fencing of barbed wire
surrounded by fourteen watchtowers that remained illuminated all
night. Inside were medical and dental wings, dining rooms, areas where
the ordinary prisoners set up their basic “campaign tents”, and various
lines of metal and concrete cells for solitary confinement and those
awaiting execution. Dressed in the army “punishment” uniform and
without belt or shoelaces to prevent suicide, he walked around the
cement floor of his metal cell that offered no real protection from rain,
sun or dust from the nearby highway. He first slept in the cell with blankets and was later given a “campaign tent”. It was taken for granted that
no one could speak to him, but gradually a few surreptitious words were
directed his way at meals or when emptying the latrine bucket. He was
allowed a few books, Legge’s Confucius and a Bible, and also writing
paper and a pen; to keep in shape he played tennis alone, practiced fencing and boxed with shadows.
Felipe Alaiz
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Felipe Alaiz
Felipe Alaiz
 July . Rectory and church of Horta. Parish of San Juan de Horta.
Barcelona. From the series Sucesos de Barcelona, no. . Relatos de sedición
e incendios en Barcelona y Cataluña. Barcino. Editorial Hispano-Americana.
Postcard. Published by Ángel Toldrá Vinazo. Photograph, Merletti.
 July . Felipe Alaiz takes over the publication Tierra y Libertad
[Land and Freedom]. Barcelona. Tierra y Libertad, no. . Third series. .
CNT battle journal. Daily publication. Published by the Federación Anarquista
Ibérica (FAI). From a drawing by Helios Gómez.
——————
Speculation of plots of land in the Horta district and the local residents’
specialisation in construction jobs (the Societat de Paletes d’Horta was
known throughout Barcelona) particularly characterised their activities.
Speculation was difficult: the aim was to put towers where honest houses previously existed side by side. Large farmhouses and towers had
nothing to envy more modest buildings. The workers took it on themselves to watch over the correct increase in land prices. Thus a more or
less anarchist network began to consolidate itself without any more
intervention of the public authorities than the self-creation of its property titles. The huge increase in speculation in the s coincided with
a massive influx of workers from outside the region.
“A painting may have a value in pesetas or dollars. This is evident
because a painting sells. If the painting is sold for ten thousand pesetas
and is a landscape, while an orchard is only worth two thousand in the
present market, what should we think about the market for orchards
146
and the market for paintings? We could think that this is mere convention and that paintings and orchards should not be sold, as one should
not sell one’s children, although on occasions children, paintings and
orchards are sold”; prior to this he had exclaimed melodramatically: “A
painting should never be sold for more than the place that it depicts!”
——————
The parish church of Sant Joan de Horta was originally located beside
the Can Cortada (the name calle de la Esglèsia records this) to the north
of the centre of town (set fire to on the last day of Setmana Tràgica,
the church survived until well into the th century). In  Cardinal
Casañas blessed the laying of the first stone of a new church in its present, more central location, which was partially opened in  and
completed in . Set alight and wrecked in July , it was totally
rebuilt in the post-war period in a modernised Neo-gothic and was not
finally completed until  when the main doorway and tympanum of
the façade were unveiled, the work of the painter J. Torras i Viver, who
also decorated the interior.
Time and time again. Time and time again in Barcelona the act was
repeated. Churches were burned from the s. This is not serious.
Time and time again the effort was made to rebuild them. To make
them again. With all the cost involved. At today’s price, burning them
comes out at  pesetas, the price of half a gallon of petrol. Nothing more
is required. Churches are made of things that burn. Wood, varnish,
paintings and twisting forms that let oxygen circulate and thus allow for
rapid ignition. The Baroque burns well. But we can only draw one conclusion regarding the money spent on the reconstruction of churches
and religious buildings of various types: a worker’s wage does not go up
due to the fact that we are funding the new building work. Time and
time again, the costs and the wage are the same.
——————
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Felipe Alaiz
As a precautionary measure, and although they did not think the
church would be burned, the parish priest and verger had removed
the most valuable objects some days before, while they themselves had
taken refuge in one of the many fine towers to be found in the new part
of Horta.
In the ideological terrain he merely evaded the issue rather than
analysing or investigating in depth, offering a phoney elaboration created from ingenuous but obvious truths that disguised his superficial,
arrogant manner of approaching ideas, situations and problems.
——————
Moments before, a densely packed crowd, who had arrived from San
Andrés de Palomar, had passed through the middle of the village on
their way to the church, which was on the other side of the quarter and
slightly separated from it. The first thing the insurgents did on their
arrival was to force the door, then proceeded to act as they had done in
other churches: piling up religious images, benches and other objects,
sprinkling them with petrol and setting them alight; they spread the fire
through doors and chapels and allowed it to undertake its all-devouring
task, which completely destroyed the church, of which only the tower
now survives, standing up as proudly as before.
What do we care about novels that shouldn’t have been written? The
ones you used to read. Do you want us to sell them? No, if you don’t
mind… It would be better to burn them. Do you have a little petrol?
Here it is. No more said than done. Oro Molido piles up fifteen or
twenty yellowing volumes in the fire. Once sprinkled all over with
petrol he sets light to it. The tart’s opium, the devil’s morphine and the
boudoir scenes burn to his delight. The bags under the young gentlemen’s eyes and the procuress’ shawl twist and burn to the rhythm of the
bursts of flames.
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Félix Fénéon
Félix Fénéon
Félix Fénéon
 July . The revolutionaries move into the crypt of the church, which
was set alight, amusing themselves by pulling down partition walls to see if there
was any hidden treasure. Church of S. Joaquín. Guinardó. Barcelona. From the
series Sucesos de Barcelona, no. . Postcard. Published by Ángel Toldrá Vinazo.
Louis Lamarre had neither job nor house, but he had a few centimes.
He bought a litre of petrol in a grocer’s shop in Saint-Denis and
drank it.
 July . Accused of being an art critic and terrorist and defended by
Mallarmé on both occasions, Félix Fénéon was portrayed by Signac under
this very roof. From the series Nouvelles en trois lignes, Le Matin. rd ed. Paris.
Chamberlain & Co.
——————
As was habitual, they sprinkled the doors with petrol, went in search of
wood from a brick furnace nearby and brought the fuel into contact
with the valuable library.
——————
As a joke or out of a desire to make a fire, one night in Bonnières a gas
lighter was “executed” with a gun next to a container of petrol.
——————
Furniture, religious images and other objects were piled up in the middle of the room and set alight, as was the case on other occasions and in
other buildings.
They burned the old library, which had been saved from the  revolution and which was until recently kept in the old monastery of the
Minorites.
“I shall die like Joan of Arc!” declared Terbaud from the top of a bonfire made from his furniture. The Saint-Ouen firemen prevented him
from doing so.
——————
In the region of Maine-et-Loire, the local mayors did not tire of putting back the image of the “Most High One” on school walls, nor the
local magistrate of suspending these mayors from office.
An -year-old monk, despite his physical weakness, had to escape in
order to avoid being a victim of the brutality and violence of the mutineers, who mouthed foul blasphemies and insults.
——————
The body of Saint Anthony of Padua was broken into pieces in SaintGermain-l’Auxerrois. The saint is looking for his assailant.
The group of arsonists was led by a young man in a straw hat who, once
he had seen the building go up in flames, moved on to another to continue with his task of destruction.
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151
Félix Fénéon
Such a sudden, unexpected event greatly alarmed the peaceful residents of such a holy institution. They barely had time to escape through
the vegetable garden before the insurgents invaded the building.
Four hundred clergy welcomed their new bishop, Monsignor
Lobbedey, in the station at Moulins. Five of them were arrested in full
spiritual fervour.
Gabriel Alomar
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Gabriel Alomar
Gabriel Alomar
 July . The distinguished architect visits the ruins with the aim of
proposing an economical plan for reconstruction. Mission House and remains
of the Seminary. Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Mary. Gracia. Barcelona.
From the series Sucesos de Barcelona, no. . Postcard. Published by Ángel
Toldrá Vinazo. Photograph, Merletti.
Montmartre, or the Romans to erect one to Giordano Bruno in the
Campo dei Fiori.
 July . Vindication of Futurism in the presentation of his poem
La columna de foc by Gabriel Alomar, ideological founder and inventor
of the idea prior to Marinetti. Introduction by Santiago Rusiñol. Ed. Antoni
López. Barcelona. .  pp.  x  cm. Photograph, Merletti.
Would it not also be appropriate and fair to erect one to the xuetes
[descendents of Majorcan Jews] of , some of whom had the notably
uncharacteristically Jewish merit of noble persistence in their faith and
who died, burned alive at the stake while the conversos were garrotted
and burned after they were dead? To erect a memorial stone in the place
of execution is a case identical to the one that moved the Parisians to
erect a statue of the knight De la Barre in front of the Sacre Cœur in
At nightfall on Tuesday  July, the mob presented itself in front of the
buildings of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart in the Campo de
Grassot.
The missionaries saw them arrive from the roof terrace of their building, from where they watched thick clouds of smoke billow up from
other monasteries that had been set alight.
Their first idea was to try and resist but they decided not to, realising
that all their efforts would be of no use in saving their buildings from
the wrath of the insurgents.
They therefore decided to leave, removing their monks’ habits and
putting on other clothing in order to pass unnoticed among by the mob.
They left the monastery in pairs and moved away from the spot. By
agreement, they met up some distance away, from where they went to
find shelter, some in friendly houses and others in various religious
refuges.
At the precise moment when the mob arrived in the Campo de
Grassot, Father Vergés arrived at the monastery and was attacked by the
insurgents. Various shots rang out and the monk fell wounded on the
ground, his face bleeding. Those helping him realised that he had been
shot in the eye, as a result of which he was blinded on that side.
Two monks, Father Ferrán and Brother Roca, refused to abandon the
building, disregarding the risk that they ran. It was not until nine
o’clock that night that the mob attacked. At that moment the boldest
tried to break down the church door and that of the monks’ residence.
These two custodians came out to try to prevent the destruction of the
buildings by whatever means. They were received with gunfire and
Father Ferrán was hit by a bullet from a revolver.
The mutineers hurled themselves into the courtyard and dense
columns of smoke soon began to pour out of windows and doors.
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155
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Before long the flames had taken firm hold of the house, which the
attackers had to abandon in haste in order not to perish in the fire. As
in the burning of other religious institutions, they employed petrol,
which they used to set fire to pieces of furniture, beds, clothes and other
objects previously piled up in courtyards and large rooms. The chapel,
seminary and convent became huge furnaces.
——————
Gabriel Alomar
Gabriel Alomar
– “What happened to you once with a bishop?”
– “Oh, yes. A while ago, when I was very young and was walking around
those narrow streets, I met a very solemn bishop, who gave me his blessing. As to be expected, I replied in the same manner. That was all that
was needed! As I wasn’t a member of his religion, I blessed him with
mine. And he thus realised that there was not one bishop, but two, at
least in that part of town.”
– “Don’t you think that these days the idea of being a Republican is
becoming a bit insipid, now that capitalism is one of the warring forces,
fighting to maintain the capital that the other party wants to take from
it, that of the workers, in order to achieve an equilibrium?”
– “Sure, if we give the word Republican the meaning of a structure, it
is obviously an insipid concept not just with regard to the social but also
to the political. No liberal would hesitate between a monarchy such as
the English, Belgian or Scandinavian ones and a Republic like so many
that we have encountered in South America and Europe. I believe in the
current primacy of the social struggle. But I don’t think that political
struggle should be completely despised. For me, the concepts of
monarchy and republic are the eternal struggle of politics through
history. However, to counterbalance a superficial view, a monarchy is
demagogic and a republic is aristarchic.”
– “Don’t you think that once it is installed, a Soviet regime is more
durable than a Fascist one?”
– “I’m convinced of it. This is because the Soviet regime is a dictatorial transition whose ultimate goal is to ensure the future redemption of
a social class, while the Fascist regime is a defensive structure aimed at
preventing that transformation. The Soviet system is based on an ideal
of human perfectibility, while Fascism denies that infinite improvement. The former is dynamic, the latter static. For me, the greatest
virtue of the Soviet system lies precisely in its limitless potential for
transformation and improvement.”
A large number of curious onlookers and locals observed the devastation from a distance, offering a range of opinions depending on each
person’s particular viewpoint. Every now and then a roof came crashing down, fanning the flames that illuminated the horizon. Other
churches were also alight at that time; dense clouds of blackish or reddish smoke were to be seen rising from different points. The chapel was
filled with rubble, as was the school and other buildings. After that terrible week came to an end the Missionaries returned, ready to repair the
serious damage caused by the fire and to move back into their home.
With Alomar and with Ras, we can see how the libertarians primarily
present the urban industrial environment from its most negative viewpoints. In their writings they emphasise the city-countryside polarity:
Is there air, light, fields? / You are trapped in the factory. To an extent this
division came to replace religious symbolism. The sky is the collectivist
rural utopia, hell is the urban, industrial environment. Alomar is in
purgatory.
——————
We have allowed the mob to become our principal social body.
The revolution is the hyperbaton of society.
——————
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Georges Bataille
Between  February and  October . The Virgin of the Esperanza Macarena
in hiding on calle Orfila , in Seville. This image shows the image of the Virgin
inside the crate in which it was concealed. Crate of the Banco Español de
Crédito. Archive of the Hermandad de la Esperanza Macarena. Later moved
to the University chapel. []. Unknown photographer.
Between  and  October . Georges Bataille, in the background, squeezed
between two bookcases in the Bibliothèque Nationale during the presentation
of the Sevillian edition of History of the Eye by Lord Auch. Paris. Limited
edition of  copies. Illustrated with  prints by Hans Bellmer.  pp.
Seville [Paris],  [], nouvelle version.
——————
Georges Bataille
February  brought the arrival of the Popular Front and with it the
virtual disappearance of the Second Republic. Power was now on the
street. The Communist International closed its net around Spain and
Seville “the Red”, as the leftist proudly proclaimed it, would once again
be the key: firstly, the overwhelming triumph of the Popular Front, and
then the initial success of the military uprising. Some days before the
triumph of the Popular Front and fearing the worst, the governing
Junta agreed that only three people were to know the secret hiding place
where the venerated image of the Virgin was to be concealed. The idea
was to avoid any risk. The image was taken to its new and secret refuge
during the early hours of  February in a van belonging to the Banco
Español de Crédito and driven by the Brother Superior, José Ruiz
Ternero. Inside the van, taking care of the wooden crate in which the
image was placed, was Domingo de la Torre, while Antonio Román Villa
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Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille
waited in the pre-decided place, which was his house on calle Orfila ,
where he also had his veterinary clinic. From there the Virgin would
only emerge during the small hours of the night and in the greatest
secrecy for religious weeks and processions. She returned to San Gil on
 March and returned to her hiding place on  of that month once
the Lent celebrations had finished. She emerged again on  April for
Palm Sunday, to return to calle Orfila on Easter Saturday,  April.
Meanwhile, the place where the Virgin normally stood in the church
was occupied by a large painting of her. Of course, during the time that
the Virgin was in San Gil, groups of members of the brotherhood stood
guard day and night to avoid any risk of attacks. It should be added that
on earlier occasions when the Macarena had been taken into hiding, the
location of the hiding place eventually became known, with all the risk
to the owners of those buildings, but on this last occasion the secrecy
was absolute. No one, absolutely no one, found out from the lips of the
three people the secret of where the Macarena was hidden.
that of a military organisation, which establishes and increases power
from necessity. To conclude, I would like to recall that Caillois says that
the “secret society” is linked to a sacred one that consists in the violation of the rules of life, a sacred society that lays waste and wastes itself.
At the same time I would like to recall that tragedy has emerged from
dionysian religious groups and that the world of tragedy is the world of
bacchantes.
Caillois also says that one of the aims of the “secret society” is that of
collective ecstasy and paroxysmal death. The domination of tragedy
cannot be characteristic of a sombre, depressed world. It is clear that
the charlatans cannot retain power. Only “existence” in its totally,
which implies tumult, incandescence and a will to break out, which the
threat of death cannot hold back, can be an option, for which reason,
and being impossible to dominate, it must itself prevail over anyone who
allows himself to work for another; in conclusion, that power corresponds to those whose life springs up to the point where they are in love
with death.
Intervention in public affairs could even be described as normal in
organisations of a comparable type. It thus seems necessary to set aside
the term “conspiratorial societies” for those secret societies that are
expressly set up to undertake an activity aside from their own intrinsic
one: in other words, that are set up to act and not to “exist”. It is impossible to conceive of undertakings that are not obligatory. Furthermore,
it seems absurd that a few men decide to join forces with the mere aim
of existing as their purpose of coming together. However, the true
virtue of the idea of the “secret society” per se lies precisely in the fact
that it constitutes the only radical and operative negation that cannot be
reduced to words alone, or from that principal of need in whose name
people today collaborate in the great muddle of life. Hence, and only for
this reason, human aspirations avoid making any possible commitment
to the deviations and veritable swindles carried out by political parties
who make use of man’s natural inclination to break out and commit violence in order to achieve any kind of brutal negation of that type of
inclination to break out. The manner of proceeding is thus the same as
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Guy Debord
 March . Keeping watch after the bombing. Militias keeping watch over
objects in a bombed-out street in Barcelona. In the foreground is a sculpture of
the Virgin with the Christ Child lacking its head. In the background are a lorry
and various people. Sculpture mass-produced by Arte Cristiano S. A., Olot,
Gerona. San Antonio Market. Barcelona.  x  mm. Cellulose nitrate negative.
Black and white. Photograph no. . Photograph, Kati Horna.
 July . The warrior’s rest. Guy Debord resting among the ruins.
A moment of rest at the doorway of the tower in Cosio d’Arroscia. Imperia.
Liguria. Founding conference of the Situationist International in Cosio
d’Arroscia. Photograph, Archive of the Kunstmuseum, Silkeborg. Denmark.
Shigenobu Gonzalvez Archive. Guy Debord ou la beauté du négatif. Published by
Nautilus. Paris. . Archive of the London Psychogeographical Association.
Photograph, Ralph Rummey.
——————
The issue was the following one: once religion was abolished, what
would the religious imagery business be selling? The work of art
became the finest refuge for the permanence of spiritual values.
Guy Debord
Exchange value has not been able to establish itself as more than use
value, but by defeating itself with its own weapons it has created the
conditions for its autonomous control. By mobilising all human usage
and appropriating the monopoly of its satisfaction, it has ended up by
controlling the manner of use. The process of exchange has identified
itself with all possible use and has reduced it to its mercy. Exchange
value is the mercenary soldier’s of use value, which ultimately makes
war on its own account.
——————
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Guy Debord
Guy Debord
No one has more rights than we do, we who have built these churches
and made these images with our own hands, to destroy them, occupy
them, seize them, sell them or do with them what we will, what we
decide or simply what we fancy.
Our only declarations, which were few and brief in the early years,
aimed to be completely unacceptable; initially due to their form and
later, having gone further into the matter, to their content. They were
not accepted. “Destruction was my Beatrice”, wrote Mallarmé, who
himself acted as the guide to others in somewhat dangerous explorations.
——————
Anti-clerical collectivisations resulted in substitutions in the production of religious images. With its eye on the non-local market, the
Conselleria d’Economia del Consell Municipal d’Olot recommended
the production of the following works of art: crib figures of all sizes,
educational material for schools, busts of Macià and reproductions of
buildings.
As an indispensable ornament for objects produced in the present day,
as a general model for rationalising the system, and as a cutting-edge
sector that produces an ever greater number of image-objects, spectacle
is the principal product of present-day society.
Although I am the leading example of what this era did not want, knowing what it did want does not seem to me sufficient to leave proof of my
excellence. In the first chapter of his history of the last four years of the
reign of Queen Anne, Swift says, with much reason: “In no way do I
wish to mix panegyric or satire with history, being aware that I have no
other intention than to inform posterity and instruct those of my contemporaries who find themselves ignorant or who have been induced
into error. This is because facts precisely related are those that produce
the greatest praise and the most long-lasting reproaches.” No one knew
better than Shakespeare how life passes, in his famous phrase: “We are
such stuff as dreams are made on.” Calderón reached the same conclusion. I am at least sure of having been able to convey through all the
above a few opinions sufficient to clearly understand exactly what I am
without leaving any room for ambiguity or deception.
——————
In a meeting of prisoners that was called to analyse the “outbreak of
attacks”, Durruti adopted a categorical stance: “This is not the moment
for carrying out individual expropriations, but for putting collective
ones into action. For us today there is no room for individual actions, as
the only ones that count are collective, mass actions.”
As a result of collectivisations by Anarchists and other leftist, anticlerical groups, it became evident that religious objects would cease to be
produced. According to a list of , Artes Decorativas produced a
bust of Durruti and according to Alexandre Cuéllar, even made busts of
Joaquim Maurín, Karl Marx, allegories of the Republic, and more.
Of the  libertarian prisoners, mainly held in the prison at Segovia
although also elsewhere (the Model in Barcelona, Carabanchel and
Yeserías in Madrid, Burgos, Herrera de la Mancha, Soria, and others),
many were innocent victims of classic police provocation. This was spoken of to some extent and there were a few ready to defend them,
although mostly in a passive manner. Most of the prisoners, however,
had blown up railway lines, law courts and other public buildings.
They had resorted to armed expropriations from various companies
and a large number of banks. In particular there was a group of workers from the SEAT car factory in Barcelona who were at one point
known as the “Revolutionary Army of Aid to Workers” and whose
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Guy Debord
actions were intended to contribute financial support to the strikers in
the factory and to the unemployed. There were also the “autonomous
groups” from Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia who generally acted with
the intention of fomenting revolution throughout the country. These
comrades were the ones who had the most advanced theoretical
positions. The prosecution called for individual sentences of between
thirty and forty years for some of them, and it is precisely these men
who are surrounded by the most absolute silence and who have been
deliberately forgotten by so many people!
Hans Haacke
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Hans Haacke
Hans Haacke
 July . Monastery of the Salesian monks. Calle Sepúlveda. Barcelona.
From the series Sucesos de Barcelona, no. . Relatos de sedición e incendios en
Barcelona y Cataluña. Editorial Hispano-Americana. Postcard. Published by
Ángel Toldrá Vinazo.
 May . Photograph of  East rd Street. Shapolsky et al., Manhattan Real
Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May , . Hans Haacke.
New York. Rejected by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.  photographs.
Françoise Lambert Gallery, Milan.
Shapolsky, also president. Principal: Harry J. Shapolsky (in agreement
with Manhattan Real Estate Holdings). Acquired on  July  from
the John the Baptist Foundation. The Bank of New York,  Wall St.,
New York. $, mortgage and interest. --. Hold by the
Ministries and Missionaries Benefit Board of the American Baptist
Convention,  Riverside Drive, NYC (also  other buildings).
Assessed land value $,. Total $, (including - East rd
Street). .
——————
Number , calle Sepúlveda and Calabria. A three-storey building in
the form of a block of three floors, enlarged to a ground floor and four
floors. Acquired from the Community of Salesian Monks in Barcelona.
Now the headquarters of the CEIP Salesianos María Auxiliadora.
Acquired on  November  for  million pesetas in an agreement
guaranteed by the Caixa. Offices on Paseo de Gracia. Deducting %
in charitable bonds for the Community of Salesian Monks in Barcelona,
who express disagreement with the mortgage of the building.
Approximate value following this hypothetical statement, ,,
Euros.
 East rd Street. Block  Lot II.  storey walk-up old law tenement. Acquired by Harpmel Realty Inv.  E th Street. New York
City. Contract signed Harry J. Shapolsky, president, and Martin
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Harmonía
 July . Convent of Paulas. Calle Mallorca or calle de Aldana. Barcelona.
From the series Sucesos de Barcelona, no. . Relatos de sedición e incendios en
Barcelona y Cataluña. Editorial Hispano-Americana. Postcard. Published by
 July . Harmony, general view. Based on Charles Fourier’s description.
Le nouveau monde industriel et societaire ou invention du procédé d’industrie
attrayante et naturelle, distribuée en séries passionnées. Paris and London.
 edition published by the Librairie sociétaire.
——————
The said Home lovingly housed and cared for  boys and girls.
During the day while their parents were at work they were cared for free
of charge by the nuns, who provided them with education, food and
clothes to wear. It was Tuesday the th, the first day of the holidays, and
the fifteen Nuns who made up this community were alone in their
Convent-Home.
Harmonía
If it has been proved that the religious spirit engenders an overall charitable abnegation, as we see in Orders such as the Redemptive Fathers,
Sisters of Charity, etc, we only need to put that inclination to use following the requirements of the new order. And if the procedures of
these small groups do not seem to operate in the most effective manner,
it is no less true that the principle of industrialised charity exists among
us all, albeit lacking any religious spirit, which indicates that if I erred
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Harmonía
Harmonía
in the application, you should demonstrate and prove to me how to better use a resource whose existence is quite clear: inventing a sect that is
more suited to elevating and dispensing with industrial society’s dislike
of dirty activities, which is a hindrance.
——————
“At almost half past twelve” the Mother Superior said, “we heard the
bell of the Escolapios fathers sounding and at that point we began to get
alarmed. At three o’clock we looked out of the window and saw that the
church of Santa Madrona was alight. We had no doubt by then that the
danger was coming closer and at half past three the mob appeared, who
started to attack the main door with heavy blows. I need not describe
the alarm that seized hold of us all. As the blows increased we all went
down and opened the door, and a whole crowd of people of all different
sorts rushed into the broad passageway. Death threats were shouted but
our pleas halted some of their aggressive intentions. ‘What is it you all
want?’ I asked.”
The most important element in Harmony is communication. Like
groups of teenagers who spend every day of the holidays together,
absorbed in never-ending pleasure, the members of the commune only
had a walk-through sleeping area with a simple brazier for heat in which
to get undressed and sleep. With what affection and detail, however,
does Fourier describe the long galleries, the doors and open windows,
the corridors that interrupted the space and had to be demolished in
order to create communication, which was the most important element.
the nuns looked after while their parents worked, and a man who
seemed to be in charge of the group shrugged his shoulders, saying,
‘You tell me’”.
At that moment a person from the Red Cross whose name I cannot
recall arrived and seemed to inspire the respect of the mob.
Following this, two of the men told us that if we wanted to collect a
few of our possessions we could do so, but the Red Cross dissuaded us
given the over-excited state of the crowd, and a large group of people
accompanied us to the women’s prison where we said that nuns from
our community were to be found.”
Nonetheless, the Harmonics, who are more discreet than us in the theory and practice of charity, will not apply it to pointless ceremonies
such as that of washing the feet of the poor when they can wash their
own feet, or spend , francs of income in extracting a prisoner
from jail. Where there are neither beggars nor condemned men, ostentatious charity cannot be wasted on them. All these practices, praiseworthy with regard to intent and example, are just a failed product of
political charity. Charity must devote itself to bringing us closer together and to a union of these extreme casts that civilisation cannot reconcile because this society has failed.
(For the exercise of that industrial charity, Fourier established a group
of vestal girls in the manner of Sisters of Charity. These were virgins of
 to  years old, of which each commune supplied . Adored by all,
these virgins worked with children and were paid the minimum
amount).
——————
——————
– “We want to burn the convent!”
– “But it’s a charitable home!”
– “Out, out, Burn it! We want the Republic!”
“I asked him what would happen to the poor families whose children
So the nuns from the children’s home set out for there, holding on to
each other in their affliction, while the mob and the people on the balconies shouted out: “Nuns out! Long live the Republic!”
Among the insurgents, the nuns knew various older boys who had
been educated at the Home and even a few fathers who went to collect
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Harmonía
their children after work. The mob gave themselves up to robbing and
looting of the most brazen kind. According to some of the residents
and from what was subsequently observed, the insurgents spent all
night taking away items that they wanted: armfuls of clothes, furniture,
food, paintings, in other words, anything and everything. They had
piled these things up during the afternoon and pretended to set fire to
them but the fire did not actually start until the following day at five in
the afternoon, i.e. after the looting was finished.
When a faint sign of coming together between castes is to be observed
in civilisation, as in Naples, where the nobility protects the lazzaroni, or
in Spain, where the upper clergy protect the beggars, such a cast
alliance is no more than a breeding ground of vices. Such a civilised
state only creates subversive and illegal unions, be it in love, in which
contact between local aristocrats and village women results in seeds of
disorder due to the birth of bastards, or in unequal marriages that set
families against each other, or in ambition. Hence the wealthy class only
comes into contact with the people in order to weave intrigues including advantageous business and oppressive organisations that have
unfortunate consequences for public tranquillity. It is only between
children that friendship can really have a chance as it is not countered
by love, desire, or family interests. Friendship in the early years would
blend together all social classes if parents did not intervene to make
their children become accustomed to pride. In adolescence it is love that
brings together the classes and places a king alongside a shepherd. In
the present social order we thus still encounters seeds of fusion between
the different classes, to be found even in the ambition that makes familiarity between superior and inferior common in electoral and political
matters and others.
Ilya y Emilia Kabakov
174
 July . Convent of the Magdalenas. Calle de Muntaner. From the series
Sucesos de Barcelona, no. . Relatos de sedición e incendios en Barcelona y
Cataluña. Barcino. Editorial Hispano-Americana. Postcard. Published by
Kabakov’s installations are complex constructions with some elements
of satire or irony in which objects, images and texts are piled together,
recreating depressing spaces in public buildings such as mental hospitals, classrooms and dark offices.
 July . The Palace of Projects. The Retiro Park. Palacio de Cristal.
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Madrid. Installation director,
Luis Feduchi. Jointly produced with Artangel, London. Drawings by Ilya
and Emilia Kabakov.
——————
——————
At six in the evening on the th a man presented himself at the porter’s
lodge of the said convent and furtively whispered the news that the
place was about to be burned and that the nuns should therefore seek
safety.
A friend’s house was surrounded in complete silence. Even if it is the
political police who interrogate you, you must continue in complete
silence, this being the bravest thing, even if there are basically no reasons to hide anything. This form of silence that hides nothing is the
most highly valued.
——————
The flames had reached the roof and had opened up a hole in it, giving
us the feeling that the nuns that we were looking for had escaped
through it.
Aerial view of The man who flew out of his flat by Ilya Kabakov. A hole,
an opening, that invites us to follow it, to emerge on the other side, to
get to know and undertake new things.
There were twenty-five of them who left the convent in small groups of
three and four; and although none were wearing their habits they were
recognised by some low women who grossly insulted them at that
moment of panic and tribulation for the nuns.
The humiliation was completed when this women, disguised as a western one, i.e. as a showgirl or bunny-girl or other form of woman-object,
had to eat some delicious cakes or brilliantly coloured meringues
straight from the toilet in which they had been arranged.
——————
——————
It was built in  on calle de Valencia where it crosses calle de
Muntaner. There the nuns lovingly devoted themselves to teaching the
message of Christianity to working-class girls, whom they also helped
out with second-hand clothes as well as assisting their parents.
So great was the confusion and tribulation suffered by the good nuns that
they had difficulty even walking: eyewitnesses related that some of them
broke into bitter sobs as they passed by the threshold of the building.
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177
On numerous occasions the presentation of its rooms, past experiences
frozen and recalled, leave a sensation of desolation, sadness and the
need for evasion. Despite all this, there is always room for hope and that
place is always connected with the past.
A place for reflection, located in the centre of the building and at a halfway height from the floor, whose measurement corresponds to double
that of a person’s normal height. At the same level and height hangs the
light, just reaching down to the level of the head.
——————
——————
The church-convent of the nuns of the Order of the Magdalenas was
undoubtedly among those most profaned by the mob’s vandalism.
When we reached this building we saw a horrible sight: the door panel
left by the entrance to the porter’s lodge was still burning.
This side had the larder, in which we could see pots of lard, pieces of
bread, cured meats, olives and vintage wine running across the floor. In
the doorway opposite calle Valencia were some pieces of broken beds, a
large amount of woollen filling for mattresses, an old and pretty much
destroyed sewing machine, sheets of metal and iron bars that we used
to strengthen the doors, as well as innumerable bits of various things,
like an abandoned storeroom.
It would seem that by regularly connecting vibrators that have been
installed on the walls of buildings, it is possible to neutralise (for the 
hours of each treatment) a persons’ individualising tendencies. In addition, this has no negative side effects.
——————
A dark room is created behind them in which it is possible to leave the
guilty objects for a while. If sufficient objects are accumulated, they can
queue up to enter.
The house is thus an object of memory, it evokes recollections and conjures up ghostly beings. The unconscious is also peopled with phantoms. Not only memories are “stored” there but also things that we
have forgotten. The soul is a dwelling place. By remembering houses
and rooms we learn to look inside ourselves.
——————
——————
Crossing a carefully tended garden, albeit with clear signs of having
been invaded, there was a small area that was used as a cemetery for the
nuns. The insurgents had not respected this place either. A legend
about this convent had grown up among the local people, about a martyred nun, and as a result bodies were dug up. As can be imagined,
numerous were the comments on this fascinating subject made at the
time!
The church, which occupies the centre of the building (on the corner
of calle de Valencia), was completely destroyed in the fire. The large
metal lights still hung from the ceiling, held up by the fire.
According to the ideas of the late th-century Russian philosopher
V. Fyodorov, the valid aim of a living person can be none other than that
of the resurrection of all those who have died before. Living people
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179
In the rooms adjoining the nuns’ visiting room, which must have been
its function to judge from the thick iron grille that divided it, everything was total confusion: broken pieces of furniture, smashed chairs
and burned papers.
carry around with them an indelible guilt towards the dead and this
guilt will not disappear until each and every one of the dead has been
revived.
——————
Apart from the church and the façade, the rest of the building, both at
the top and on the lower floors, showed no signs of fire but had clearly
been damaged.
The world consists of a wealth of projects, some achieved, some halfachieved and others still to be achieved. Everything that surrounds us
in the world is an unlimited world of projects.
Inkhuk
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Inkhuk
Inkhuk
 August . Interior of the church of San Francisco after the looting.
Mahón. Menorca. Balearic Islands. Historia de la Cruzada Española. IV. Vol. XVI.
Ediciones Españolas, S. A. Madrid. . Artistic advisor, Manuel Sánchez
Camargo. Photograph, Durán.
 August . The empty classroom of the FTO group after Malevich’s class
at the INKHUK. Institute of Artistic Culture. Leningrad. Vitebsk group.
UNOVIS. Lomonosov Ceramics Manufactory. FTO (formatol-toretischeskoie
ordelenie). Documents, Nakov Archive.
——————
or a factory, the consequence of the games and uncouth barbarity of the
Red militias.
They aspire to reach the factory and industrial employment: liberating
themselves from work by means of work. This is indicated by their
interest and desire to free themselves by means of the machine, which
at the present time only lightens men’s work. If man has to free himself
from work by means of work, in the kingdom of Heaven the Church
must also free man and the soul from prayer through means of prayer.
If the opposite were the case, what prayers could be said if everything
has been achieved in God, if man has communed with him and above
all, if it is considered that the soul is a part of God? In the future, then,
man will no longer possess industries or factories, he will shed himself
of them when he has achieved goodness: factories and industries will no
longer produce goodness because the one and only goodness will have
been obtained in perfection, or because the one and only goodness will
have been obtained in perfection or in God. Thus in the future neither
the Church nor the factory will exist, because they were only the people’s guides.
After the partly looted churches and religious institutions were closed,
their systematic destruction began with the excuse of using them as
lodgings for troops from Barcelona or the use of their materials for fortifications and other construction work. The militias, who declared
themselves activists, were offended by the proximity of the religious
images. Filling wagons with them, they took them to the Explanada
where they made an enormous fire that reduced these church treasures
to ashes. The church of San Francisco became a store for building
materials and gunpowder. The militias, transformed back into workers,
took the ashes to the gunpowder store to be used as mortar. Recruits
were frequently heard remarking that they had come to fight not to
work on rebuilding Mahón. The dome of the Sagrario chapel was
destroyed and collapsed during a bombing raid and the building was no
longer used as a building lot. San Francisco thus ceased to be a church
182
183
Internacional Situacionista
. Sacrilegious scene committed by the militias of the “Battalion of Death”.
Huesca. Archivo General de la Guerra Civil Española. Photograph, Rafael
y Oltra. Silver tone print.  x  cm.
. Surrounded by bottles, the plenary succession of the Situationist
International [Internacional Situacionista] meeting in a bar. Cosio d’Arroscia.
Guy Debord collection. Photograph, Asger Jorn. Photocopy of the lost original.
 x  cm.
——————
The Malatesta Battalion or Battalion of Death comprised a few hundred Italian Anarchists exiled in France. It was organised and financed
by Diego Abad de Santillán, the FAI minister of Economy of the
Generalitat, and led by the Italian Cándido Testa. In late March  it
made its first appearance, parading in the Paseo de Gràcia and the plaza
de Catalunya in Barcelona, the troops wearing their elegant uniforms
and displaying the motto: “Neither God nor master.” They wore black,
high-necked jerseys, olive green uniforms with braid, black berets and
an insignia with a skull, and they had short knives at the belt. The only
significant military action in which they participated was the offensive
on Huesca in June  when they notably disgraced themselves, forming part of the th BM of the th Division. Many of them were killed
or wounded. As a result the group was immediately disbanded and a
number of its members put on trial. In his book The CNT in the Spanish
185
Revolution, Peirats makes various references to this battalion. There was
another Malatesta Battalion of the local CNT in Vizcaya that had no
connection with the above-mentioned one. Also known as CNT, it was
number  of the Basque battalions, commanded by Jesús Eskauriaza.
It took part in numerous actions in the Vizcaya campaign and was one
of the battalions to take part in the assault on the prisons in Bilbao on
 January , when a large number of prisoners were killed.
The Situationist International (SI) was an organisation of revolutionary
artists and intellectuals whose principal aims included that of ending
class society as an oppressive system and of combating the ideological
system prevailing in western civilisation, in other words, capitalist
domination. Ideologically speaking, the SI arose from the various revolutionary movements that had evolved between the th century and the
period in question, particularly the Marxist thinking of Anton
Pannekoek, Rosa Luxembourg and Georg Lukács, as well as the socalled Consensus Communism. The SI, formally established in the
Italian town of Cosio d’Arroscia on  July , arose from another
protest movement of the , International Lettrism, which was criticised for its inefficiency by the founders of the SI, notably Guy
Debord (-). In  one of the first of numerous schisms came
about on the initiative of the seven dissident members of the so-called
Second Situationist International, but this did not prosper. The SI is
generally considered to be one of the principal ideological forces behind
the events that took place in Paris in . In  the Situationist
International voluntarily disbanded and in  some of its members
went on to found the short-lived Situationist Anti-national.
John Ruskin
186
John Ruskin
John Ruskin
 August . Parish church of Peñíscola set alight. Castellón de la Plana.
Historia de la Cruzada Española. IV. Vol. XVI. Ediciones Españolas, S. A.
Madrid. . Artistic advisor, Manuel Sánchez Camargo.
 August . Detail of the interior of an abandoned church in Venice.
Political economy of art. A Joy Forever and its Price in the Market, or The Political
Economy of Art. London. The Ruskin Library. Illustration by John Ruskin.
——————
assemble the largest quantity of notes possible on the medieval buildings of Italy and Normandy, currently being destroyed, before the
restorers and revolutionaries completed their work. Recently the author
decided to draw the buildings (which he busied himself with on one
side while they were being knocked down on the other) and cannot yet
commit himself to an exact date of publication of the final part of
Modern Painters. The author can only promise that its delay is not due
to any laziness on his part.
——————
In this historic city, formerly the residence of Benedict XIII, all the
churches were also looted and set alight apart from the hermitage
church of the patron saint, undoubtedly because it was very near to the
gunpowder store, which would have gone up. The parish church has
become unusable as the roof has been destroyed. The valuable jewels
given to the city by Pope Luna were stolen, although they were later
recovered.
Given the systematic way in which churches were attacked, the destruction of artistic treasures in Castellón and its surrounding province
acquired the dimension of an authentic catastrophe. It cannot be said
that the attacks were sporadic or isolated. To judge from the dates on
which they were carried out and the methods used, they must have conformed to an overall plan that was carefully devised and prepared
beforehand. Almost all the outrages took place in the month of August
and at the time when villages had fallen completely under revolutionary
control. The most infamous use was made of churches: they became
dance halls, centres of vice, warehouses, stables, animal stalls and
pigsties. Imagine what this implied for the artistic and cultural heritage
amassed in these buildings over the course of so many centuries.
This church, this palace, residences of bishops and princes. All
destroyed. We cannot only blame this on the turbulent times that
stalk the continent of Europe. The immorality of monarchs is comparable to the villainy of the revolutionary leaders. Our lament does not
set a man’s life below a handful of stone. A life is lost forever, but a
church can still hope for another crime: that of its reconstruction.
——————
The surprising delay in the appearance of that supplementary volume
was primarily due to the fact that the author believed it necessary to
In the s the tourism boom in Spain allowed coastal villages to
brighten-up and give a face-lift to the ruins of all that religious architecture that was irretrievably destroyed in the war and revolution of
-. Most are imitations, impostures of the most kitsch type,
when they are not literally papier-mâché fakes. It would be easy to
attribute what has happened to the carnival, bonfire and fireworks tra-
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189
John Ruskin
John Ruskin
dition of the area, both with regard to the efficiency of the destruction
and the comic nature of the restorations.
Neither the public nor those responsible for the care of public monuments understand the true meaning of the word restoration. This is
because it signifies the most absolute destruction that a building can
undergo: a destruction after which no original remains are left that can
be reassembled: a destruction that is accompanied by false descriptions
of what was destroyed.
——————
The Junta has been informed of a communication received by the
Secretary of the Central Junta, dated  of this month, requesting from
the Junta a comprehensive explanation of the state of the following
national monuments: Monastery of Benifazá; Roman arch at Cabanes,
walls, castle and church of Santa María in Morella; the castle and palace
at Peñíscola, and the church of San Mateo, and other monuments even
though not classified as national ones. Given the difficulties of travelling, we will instead request reports from the respective Town Councils.
The Junta agrees to make requests to the Army Driving School, the
Carabineros and the Civil Government to supply us with a car in order
to personally research and inform the Central Government, a task with
which the delegate Mr Sos Bainat has been specially entrusted. Only
when all possibility of making these trips has been ruled out will Town
Councils be asked to become involved by supplying reports. There
being no more matters on the agenda, the President brought the abovementioned session to a close.
advance of the masses, as described by Runcini. From the beginning to
the end of the book there are frequent references to the destructive
action that the revolution (and restorers – Ruskin’s bête noire) were
relentlessly undertaking. In the face of the unstoppable advance of barbarianism and the destruction of the beauty of the old world, Ruskin’s
text is a vibrant sermon, a passionate call to change mindsets with the
aim of holding back a process of meaningless destruction and construction. On the other hand, his call to order is incapable of adopting the
brutality of the simple repressors. Ruskin even conveys his understanding for revolutionary excesses when he appreciates the reasons for the
frustration of an exploited working class, stripped of all gratification in
its work and compelled by the same blindness as the ruling classes
towards the excesses that  had set before his eyes.
——————
A recommendation for Peñíscola. The replacement of bells in the various churches whose bell-towers were stripped in the  revolution.
Represent this destruction with a small, broken and mute bell. It should
not form part of the original bell-tower but should act as a testament.
A detail of its destruction should be reflected in the new building, such
as cracks in a window or a broken column, not as imitations but to
demonstrate that we are not copying a medieval building but rather
venerating its ruin.
——————
The Seven Lamps of Architecture constitutes the meditations of a cultured, sensitive citizen, and one possessed of a highly detailed knowledge of some architectural styles. In the context of the social revolution
of  Ruskin was also a conservative and a Tory. On the one hand we
find the terror experienced by bourgeois society in the face of the
If anyone has the right to destroy these buildings it is the people who
built them with the toil of their hands and sweat of their brow. Those
who had been exploited for centuries in the construction of these temples to luxury and power that the Christians call Catholicism now take
their revenge. It is their bodies that were sacrificed to construct buildings in which each stone is a son or daughter dead of hunger and each
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John Ruskin
column a wife afflicted with sickness and suffering. If anyone has the
right to take home every one of these bricks, to cover his roof with these
splendid tiles, to shore up his hut with these exaggerated buttresses, it
is the workers who built them. Workers, sons of workers, grandsons of
workers, assigned their unchanging condition over the centuries by a
class society. This is changing and this change cannot be separated from
this justification: those who are destroying the churches are the same
ones that built them.
It is pointless to speak of more gratuitous or uncouth destruction; my
words will not reach those who carried them out, but whether they hear
me or not, I cannot refrain from repeating the truth once more: that
convenience or emotion should not determine whether we conserve the
buildings of past eras or not. We have no right to touch them. They are
not ours. They belong in part to those who built them, and in part to
the generations to come. The dead still have rights over them, due to
their labour and out of respect for what they did, for their expression of
religious sentiment or for the element of permanence that they wished
these buildings to have. For all these reasons we have no right to destroy
them. We are free to knock down what we ourselves have built; but for
buildings whose construction involved the efforts, wealth and lives of
other men, their rights do not disappear with their deaths. We have even
less right regarding the use of what they left to us as this right belongs
to all their successors.
Joseph Beuys
192
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys
April . A church that has been occupied and turned into a food and
building materials store. A church turned into a storeroom. As in the Gospel,
“they offered him water and gave him vinegar”. Alcañiz. State Archives.
Ministry of Culture. Agency, Photo. Photograph, Kati Horna.
August . Notes in the margin of a treatise on Ignatius Loyola. Annotations
by Beuys on economy in a spiritual work. Ignatius von Loyola in Seibstzeugnissen
und Bilddokumenten. Alain Guillermou. Reinbek bei Hamburg. .
Neustadtsgalerie, Stuttgart. Photograph, Hildegard Weber.
——————
The first measure was the solution of the supply problem. With this in
mind all means of food production were collectivised. The second
measure was that of food distribution. In villages the parish churches
were occupied as these were the largest and most suitable buildings for
that purpose. They were turned into grain and wine stores, which one
might consider to be a function for which churches were originally
intended. The third measure was giving out food. A series of coupons
were printed that could be exchanged for a daily ration for each adult
and child according to their requirements and in just recompense for
their work and defence of the village. The immediate consequences of
these measures was the disappearance of money, trade and moneylending, as these practices were dissociated from the true culture of
work. All capital is communitarian and every town and village knows
how to administer its own capital. When it is said that Zaragoza is our
capital it is not only in reference to the fact that it is the main urban hub
194
of the region, but also the place where the fruits of our labour were
organised and decisions taken on the economic situation of our village.
If we start from the base of the pyramid, we can see that at the same
time that the food situation was resolved, this did away with the remainder of the economic functions of the village. Others trades and material needs were covered in the same way. All villages can thus consider
themselves capitals in a way.
Much less, or in fact nothing of man’s need for food can be met by the
soul. However, if we ask ourselves what it is that really has to be saved
on this earth, it is not material things, nor even in a strict sense the
human body. We all know that we have to die some day. What has to be
saved is the human soul. Life has to yield some fruits per se, and it must
be possible to vividly experience the fact that life is all there is.
Economics considers these viewpoints irrelevant and they are not even
taken into account. It is now evident that man, with growing self-awareness and in a more demanding manner, is casting off the chains of material egoisms. It is true that egoism survives in us to a great extent, but
we are seeing a gradual casting off of these shackles. Ego, the Id,
demands a spiritual food through the economy. This Ego also realises
that the most important branch of economics lies in the field of production rather than in the field of consumption, but in that part of it that
works in accordance with the principle of labour division, not the part
relating to small businesses and liberal professions. Rather, I consciously refer to larger and more important companies, to schools and centres
of higher education. These are where society’s CAPITAL is produced.
I repeat: CAPITAL is not money (means of production), CAPITAL is
capacity and the product of capacity.
——————
Nonetheless, the coupons of the Food Supply Committee, of the
Cooperative Stores and subsequently of the Supply Commission,
which were the first issued, were widely distributed, both printed and
195
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys
hand-written. They worked for almost all the war (they ceased to be so
common when the family card and rationing card was introduced) but
none have survived to the present day. The large majority must have
been destroyed at the time once they had completed their function, as
M. Mascaraque recounts in his memoirs. One example is known in this
province of a hand-written coupon for feeding refugees, the sick, use in
hospitals etc., but it is not signed or stamped by the Committee but
rather by the Municipal Council with the signature of the mayor and
councillors. This is also the case with coupons from shops and businesses from other localities, which are associated with the Food Supply
Committee, with private shops and with political parties. Such coupons
were issued by different institutions relating to food supply such
as the Supply Committee, the Municipal Supply Commission, the
Regional Supply Ministry, the Supply Delegation, the Municipal
Supply Council, or other bodies such as Foodstuffs, the Agricultural
and Consumer Cooperative, the Cooperative Stores, Meat Supply, etc.
This being said, with the disappearance of the Committees in early
, power passed again to the Municipal Councils and their work
continued with the Municipal Supply Commission established in every
village and town. In late , in the light of the serious food shortage
that was starting to cause anxiety and with the rationing card now
implemented, the purchasing system was decentralised in the cooperative stores. According to its municipal acts, to reduce the length of
queues in Belalcázar, for example, the sale of rationed products to a
number of privately owned shops was authorised, with a small margin
of profit permitted. It can be assumed that this measure was adopted in
all the towns and villages of the country but the cooperative stores continued to exist until the end of the war.
in fact we already have advanced towards it as we have noticed that as a
result of a concept of art that describes all human beings as artists, man
is described in the most dignified and correct manner, as he is the bearer of dignity and pride, and from this consequence it can be deduced
that he appropriates capital and realises that it is not an economic value.
The economic value is human capacity used in labour and what arises
as a product in the workplace, a fine sculpture, a marvellous painting,
a car that does not pollute the atmosphere, a healthy, tasty potato, a
healthy fish that a fisherman can catch rather than poisoned ones that
mean we cannot eat fish too often or we will end up poisoned ourselves.
Of course one should not suffer from this fear or hysteria that is so
often these days the result of an insufficient grasp of ecology and which
can be acquired with scant spiritual courage. No, one must be braver
and say: man needs a little lead in order to be a bit more of a drag.
Money is not an economic value! Given that the power of money crushes and flattens everything free and democratic time and time again, and
this power destroys ideals time and time again, we have to put our hand
in the lion’s jaw and grapple with the concept of capital. We need to
advance in an absolutely real manner towards the concept of capital, but
196
197
Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?
. The rabble taking a siesta. Red Domination in Spain. Third Appendix:
Anarchist Terror. Causa General. Advance of information prepared by the Public
Ministry. Ministry of Justice. Madrid. Photograph in the Archivos de Prensa
Española. Madrid.
. Leisure, a new way of life. Just what is it that makes today’s homes so
different, so appealing? Richard Hamilton. Collage.  x  cm. Edwin Jans Jr.
Collection. Thousand Oaks. CA. Thames and Hudson photographic archive.
London.
——————
The Socialist militias captured the historic Moncloa Palace and profaned its chapel where tattered old beds on the floor co-existed with
tapestries by Goya on the walls. The uncouth made themselves comfortable, lying down like animals in a stall, while their faces were marked
by that cynical smile that was a sign of the times. Is this what they called
popular culture?
Just what is it that makes today’s homes
so different, so appealing?
Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? A
comic is hung on the wall like a painting; a can of ham displayed like
a sculpture; pin-ups; a particular emphasis on attractive consumer
objects; and in a prominent position, the word “Pop”, an abbreviation
of “popular culture” or “popular art”.
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Karl-Marx-Hof
August . Church of the Dolores/Hospital of Sant Jaume. Olot. La Garrotxa.
Gerona. Set alight in July . The building was knocked down between August
and October . The photograph shows part of the plot after the demolition,
abandoned and turned into a building site, next to the old hospital of Sant Jaume.
General view of the site. Photograph, Josep M. Dou, in the Dou Archive.
August . Karl-Marx-Hof. Architect, Karl Ehn. Built in Vienna between
 and . Aerial view of the site during construction and the present
location of the courtyards in the residential complex. Photographs, Margherita
Spiluttini (modern photograph) and the Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek
(old photograph).
——————
Karl-Marx-Hof
From the time of its foundation in the th century, the Hospital de Sant
Jaume, as well as Dr Fàbregas’ surgery attached to the hospital, was governed by a citizens’ committee. The director was Dr Danés while Dr
Enric Genover was the staff doctor. There was also a religious institution known as the Caridad, which looked after the elderly and people in
need. Both institutions were run by nuns. Following the outbreak of the
Civil War and the subsequent revolution on  July  Catalonia and
Olot in particular saw the implementation of a series of organisational
measures in line with the new revolutionary principles. They included
the creation of a Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias that controlled the
population until the reorganisation of the City Council in October of
that year; confiscations, nationalisations, etc. This Committee, organised
into sub-committees, did not have a specific section specifically devoted
to health and social work, which fell under the Defence Committee.
With regard to health in Catalonia, which was transferred to the
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Karl-Marx-Hof
Conselleria of Health and Social Work of the Generalitat, we know that
from the outset Catalan hospitals attended to those wounded in street
fighting and shortly after, at the Front. However, the first measures
aimed at organising civilian health matters were not implemented until
 with the Decree of Dissolution of the Provincial and Municipal
Health Committees and the creation of the General Board of Health,
which depended on the corresponding Conselleria of the Generalitat.
The Karl-Marx-Hof took hold in the collective imagination as a legendary symbol of social housing in Vienna. This was particularly due to
the symbolic power of the towers and corridors in the central element,
which was in itself part of a complex of , flats. Its true architectural merit did not so much lie in these signs of power as in the fact that
the design offered solutions through which all the flats equally benefited from the large spaces of the three interior courtyards. Like no other,
this building represents the type of “super-blocks” built by the Social
Democratic city council between  and . Karl Ehn, a pupil of
Wagner, remained faithful to the Viennese City Council through its various changes of regime until the s.
——————
that international pressure from the Church created numerous obstacles – the International Red Cross.
Following the end of the monarchy a State was constituted that almost
no one believed in. During the glorious era of “Red Vienna”, Social
Democracy played the same role as the protectionist power of the
monarchy. The Karl-Marx-Hof became the new Schönbrunn Palace.
However, before this new architecture could be fully developed the
process was interrupted in  and came to a permanent end in .
Until  only military buildings were constructed and as a result of
the barbaric deportation of Jewish citizens, in Vienna alone ,
houses and flats became vacant for Aryans. During this period Austrian
architecture was only created in exile.
——————
Even though there were many religious buildings occupied for use as
campaign hospitals, clinics for the wounded and rest homes, all in
response to the requirements of the service corps that looked after soldiers from the front, and even though many churches, convents and
monasteries were occupied as well as schools, hospitals and hospices
that had previously belonged to the Church, Rebel propaganda (within
Spain) and Fascist propaganda (abroad) did not hesitate to describe
these acts – which undoubtedly corresponded to a continuation of the
old Christianity with the new Socialism – with the gross and ignominious terms of “iconoclasm” and “vandalism”.
The events and evolution of the war obliged the municipal health
authorities to adopt a growing number of health and sanitation measures for the local population, which found itself in increasingly difficult
circumstances. A notable amount of propaganda activity was also evident, dealing with issues such as hygiene and prevention of easily transmittable diseases, campaigns against prostitution, improvements in the
conditions for giving birth, abortions etc., all in line with the guidelines
and rules of the Conselleria of the Generalitat. The progress of the war,
with ever larger numbers of wounded arriving from the different
fronts, resulted in the proposed use of churches and convents as suitable spaces for military hospitals. This was possible on some occasions
under the protection of the Spanish Red Cross and on others – given
The monarchy was transformed into national States. Austria, with the
then “hydrocephalic” Vienna, lost its important industrial and agricultural hinterlands such as Bohemia, Moravia and Hungary. The Imperial
city became Social Democratic “Red Vienna”. In the context of a difficult economic situation, the construction of Siedlungen and of flats for
the workers became the principal activity for architects. While in
France and Germany the avant-garde tacked the industrialisation of
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Karl-Marx-Hof
Karl-Marx-Hof
The term Höfe describes huge closed or semi-open blocks of housing
that had large interior courtyards with green spaces and shared servic-
es. Located in “white zones” made available through the th-century
expansion of Vienna towards the outer periphery, they were not conceived as something completely different to the pre-existing city or as a
radical alternative to the Berlin approach, but as elements that could be
inserted into the urban grid that had been set out in the general plan of
 and which had to be transformed in a qualitative manner. Also
known as “proletarian monuments” in virtue of their intended use and
large size, or “workers’ fortresses” as a number of epic events were
played out inside them, they rejected the ideas of the radical European
avant-garde both with regard to the overall use of the city and its individual elements. They have been seen on various occasions as a “regressive utopia” and in a way these structures, located halfway between the
th-century Ring and the large city of the Hilberseimer type, oscillate
between populist trends filtered through certain stylistic traits of the
School of Wagner and free interpretations of various Expressionist
manifestations that affirm the uniqueness of each construction and its
image of the city, as we see in Amsterdam, for example. The best-known
construction of this type and the model for other similar projects was
the Karl-Marx-Hof (, Heiligenstadterstr. -) by Karl Ehn.
This is because it offers the most refined synthesis of an eclecticism that
reconciles avant-garde features such as use of different elements to construct its idiom, Constructivist additions, neo-plastic deconstruction
and Expressionist dynamism, with various traditional and th-century
Historicist stylistic elements. The result is to steer the avant-garde
towards a sort of pragmatic realism remote from “New Objectivity” but
in harmony with the proletarian epic and with a use of exaltation
through symbolism that does not, however, entirely break away from
bourgeois culture. Finally, from a topological viewpoint, the KarlMarx-Hof articulates a gigantic block over an area of more than one
kilometre and includes almost , dwellings, a clinic, a library, a laundry, shops, offices and other shared facilities. Its majestic appearance
resulting from its startling size and the purity of its volumes is only
softened by the arches leading to the exterior, the variety in the articulation of the volumes, the large flagpoles from which the building’s flags
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construction and of mass housing, in Austria the necessary vehicles in
the form of large industries with a high level of technology were not to
be found. Quite the opposite: in Vienna we still find huge brick factories from the early period of industrialisation and large numbers of
unemployed. As a result, large buildings in Vienna were constructed
using totally conventional techniques in contrast for example, to the
reform programmes of the “New Frankfurt”. However, as a result of
Karl-Marx-Hof and the technical-scientific experiments of the
Bauhaus, a Viennese movement grew up in support of the Siedlungen,
which were small units of workers’ houses based on a simple structure
that could be enlarged by the inhabitants themselves or through the
addition of gardens and vegetable plots.
——————
The origin of social housing and workers’ colonies should be located
further back in time in Utopian Socialist communes, in the construction of charitable buildings by the Church and more obviously in the
construction of “residences for the sick” such as leper colonies. From
the French Revolution onwards and after the State assumed control of
mental asylums, workers’ colonies arose as a new reading of this type of
building in which the focus was on the greater comfort of an alienated
group of citizens who would now be exploited in an industrial manner.
The new “hospitals” were under the control of local councils and the
smaller mayor’s offices that worked for order and healthy conditions in
the colonies. In fact, most of the practical control over workers was
implemented through proclamations relating to health, given that law
and order continued to be strictly controlled by the police and the central State. These small governing bodies exercised control through
reform of the laws on water, sewerage, drains, rubbish etc., with doctors
as the new agents of control.
Karl-Marx-Hof
waved on special days, and some figurative sculptural elements that
emphasise the Social Realist aspect of the whole ensemble.
——————
[The girl is seated on a bench beneath an apple tree, next to the door
of a building resembling a castle in a high mountain valley that a
distinguished gentleman has discovered during his excursions to
visit churches and interesting buildings. The gentleman stops next
to the garden fence and is gripped by the girl’s beauty, with her long
plaits. He pretends to be writing something in his notebook but in
fact he cannot take his eyes off the girl. He, in turn, is observed by
the nuns of the convent who are working in the vegetable garden,
but he does not notice this. He does not wish to break the tension
between the girl and himself and for this reason does not make any
movement to speak to her. However, he thinks that at some moment
he will introduce himself and strike up conversation with her. He will
tell her about his travels and will thus rapidly make contact. He
will tell her of the world in which he lives. However, at the very
moment when he decides to move towards the girl she lifts up a leg
covered with a thick stocking and pulls her plaits with both hands.
As she does not know how to speak, she makes unintelligible noises.
She pulls the plaits until her eyes go blood red. Only at this moment
does the gentleman realise that he has wandered into the grounds
of a lunatic asylum and he moves off immediately without taking
any notice of the nuns, who grab hold of the girl and bundle her
indoors.]
Karl Schmitt
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Karl Schmitt
Karl Schmitt
 October . Himmler visits the detention centre [checa] on calle Vallmajor
in Barcelona. Church of Vallmajor. Barcelona. Archive of La Vanguardia.
Los secretos del franquismo. Eduardo Martín de Pozuelo. Libros de Vanguardia.
Barcelona. . Photograph, Carlos Pérez de Rozas.
 October . Schmitt and some of his followers at the Conference of
the National Socialist Union of Jurists. Berlin. Karl Schmitt. Deutsche
Juristen-Zeitung, no. . . A Nazi Element in Karl Schmitt’s Thinking.
Antropos, Barcelona. . Commentary by Yves-Charles Zarka.
——————
After dinner, Himmler and his Nazi retinue went to see the checa or
secret detention centre on calle Vallmajor. The head of the SS and
the Spanish Fascist leaders expressed astonishment at the cruelty of the
Spanish Republicans and Communists. In March , slightly more
than a year after that visit to Barcelona, systematic massacres began in
camps such as Treblinka and Sobibor, while Himmler gave instructions
to his subordinates for this elimination plan to be completed in December
of that year, concerned that the efficient Nazi system was unable to
achieve this given the number of people who had to be got rid of.
ner that we can base ourselves on this fact as the scientific conclusion,
and one also crucial for racial psychology, of our conference for higher
juridical studies. By doing so, as German jurists and teachers of law we
have, for the first time, made a contribution to the important investigations on racial science currently being undertaken in other fields.
——————
There were many detention camps but only one terror, one single cold,
cruelty that has been studied by psychiatrists. In the centre at Vallmajor
in Barcelona the following took place: cells were built in what was formerly a church, we do not know whether this was on the order of the
Comisaría de Cultos so beloved of Mauriac and crew, but the fact is that
the church was filled with a honeycomb of tiny, narrow cells. Prisoners
could not see the sky or the distant outline of the mountains and only a
faint light filtered through the stained-glass windows of the church…
Prisoners looked out on a grille, behind which was a powerful beam of
light with a reflector. A dazzling light that burned their eyes from only
 centimetres away. Nothing could be done, all possible means of escape
had been foreseen, and the prisoner had to remain in front of the light,
feeling himself going blind and his eyebrows and eyelashes burn.
As all the papers given here have demonstrated, Jewish law appears to be
redemption on the basis of chaos. The singular polarity between Jewish
chaos and Jewish legality, between anarchic nihilism and positivist normativism, between crude sensualist materialism and the most abstract
morality, now offers itself before our eyes in such a clear and visual man-
But man is a being who does not allow himself to be absorbed by his
surroundings. He has the power to conquer his existence and his consciousness. Not only does he know birth, but also the possibility of rebirth. In numerous difficult situations in which animals and plants
hopelessly succumb, man can save himself for a new existence due to his
intelligence, his acute observation, his capacity for logic and decisionmaking. He has the field free to develop his historical powers and possibilities. He can choose, and at particular moments even choose the
element that he opts for in virtue of an effort and action aimed at his
total new form of historical existence, organising himself in function of
that element. As such he has fully understood the idea of “liberty to go
where he will”, in the poet’s words.
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Kein Mensch ist illegal
. Church of Sant Esteve. Olot. La Garrotxa. Gerona. Set alight on  July
. Became municipal property on  July . From  November  it was
used as a store for works of art from Barcelona and was run by the Committee
for the Safekeeping of Museums in Catalonia. The photograph shows the arrival
of works of art, watched by those involved in the undertaking. View of the
principal staircase of the church. Photograph taken in November  by
Joan Vidal i Ventosa.
. Kein Mensch ist illegal arose as a response to the apparent absence of real,
committed political activities in the late s and the lack of genuine social
and political movements. Its field of action was directly associated with urgent
political issues such as immigration, refugees and workers. Images on the website
of the campaign deportation-alliance.com, -, with free distribution
material from the “KLM” print run. Printed image,  x  cm.
——————
The “note” sent by Joaquim Folch to the general director of Catalonian
Museum explains that at the end of September the most important
works had already been catalogued. Seventy percent of them were
effectively in the possession of the Government and on deposit in the
Museo de Arte de Cataluña, but their safety had to be guaranteed. With
this aim in mind it was firstly proposed that these works (or at least
most of the collections assembled in the Montjuïc Museum) were taken
out of the city to Olot. Aerial bombing had destroyed the Museum’s
roof and in addition, Montjuïc was functioning as a munitions store.
This fact led the Government to decide to implement Folch’s second
proposal. On  October lorries were filled up with works to be sent to
Olot and the operation continued until December.
All these campaigns combine the use of the world-wide web or Internet
as a means of disseminating information and creating links between
separate organisations (including local networks that were working
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separately on the same issues) with activities in real space through a
wide variety of resistance activities such as demonstrations, concentrations, camps, in which music, dance, video, cooking etc., were involved.
All campaigns were characterised by the concept of civil disobedience
and direct action, the idea of “empowerment” aimed at giving a selfdetermined voice and visibility to minorities traditionally obscured
behind the economic and political interests of established power, giving
them more effective tools for confronting them.
——————
The series of images of this trip reveal somewhat precarious means of
transport, possibly even as precarious as some of the military equipment used, which has often suggested the difficulty of capturing or
even defending anything. Nonetheless, the technical staff of the
Museum put all their efforts into preventing these extremely valuable
works of art from being damaged.
In the summer of , three or four dozen political activists, high-profile activists, photographers, film directors and artists published the
manifesto “No one is illegal” in the “hybrid space” of Documenta X.
Some of us had already met through the social movements of the s
and early s when new, non-functional means of combining art and
politics began to be experimented with, including “committees of public health”. Others, however, met for the first time having previously
communicated solely by e-mail. This encounter was made possible
through an open-minded use of the new technologies.
or where military actions might take place; and finally, getting them
nearer the French border in case new measures had to be undertaken.
While the choice of Olot in October  was a good one, there was an
awareness that although Olot seemed strategically suitable (for its location and topography), in the case of war experience had shown that
most of the bombings in Spain were not strategically motivated and that
no topographical situation could prevent them.
As in the action of , that of  aimed to disturb the tranquil
atmosphere that normally surrounds the reporting and arrest of
refugees and immigrants, a context that even includes the legal prosecution of taxi drivers who pick them up in their cabs. Our aim was to
become involved in the space where the armed police function, who are
provided with a technological backup more in line with a state of emergency, and in which racism underlies their actions, encouraging NeoFascists who control the public domain through fear in many cities in
East Germany, attacking refugee hostels with impunity. During the
campaign we aimed to invert the situation and we thus set up a monument to the Fluchthelfer in the market square, a term referring to people who help immigrants to escape. We temporarily occupied the barracks of the frontier police, organised swimming competitions in the
rivers that acted as frontiers, and raves that served to confuse the police
in question.
——————
Why Olot? According to Folch himself the idea of Olot responded to
three objective: removing the collections from Barcelona, locating them
somewhere that was relatively calm socially and politically; removing
them from built-up urban areas where it was easier to set them on fire
The Comisaría’s activities focused on producing descriptions of the one
million works in store, caring for them and publishing the Bulletin of the
Museums of Art, that was produced until late  and which maintained links with pre-war cultural life. Despite the abnormal situation,
the Higher School of Landscape Studies in Olot, directed by Iu
Pascual, kept up its programme of classes and even increased its educational activities with a series of lectures given by the staff – Francesc
Labarta, Joan de Garganta and Raimond Vayreda – in addition to
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——————
further ones made possible by the presence of the director of the
Barcelona Art Museums.
A large number of these campaigns involved the active participation of
artists, designers and other experts in the new media. Working in a collaborative manner they showed the potential to connect artistic strategies with political actions, tacit activism in the media and militancy in
real life. This involved developing connections and connectivity
between the new social movements and their particular campaigns,
undertaking new political, aesthetic and ethical challenges. The series
of materials “Deportation-Alliance” is a good example of this.
Conceived as an improbable international coalition of airlines involved
in the business of deporting immigrants, it has set up its own website at
www.deportation-alliance.com and has generated an entire body of
graphic and action material. This material has been used to pressure the
airlines in question to stop collaborating in the deportation policies of
European governments. Basing itself on the tactics of the deconstruction of the corporate image and using first-hand material on these
deportations, “Deportation-Alliance” has demonstrated the effectiveness of tactical embarrassment.
——————
Despite the climate of confusion produced by the Civil War, albeit not
characterised by the harsh intensity that prevailed on the fighting
Fronts, cultural activity in Barcelona did not come to a halt. From the
outset, Catalan artists from the different branches of the art world
established various central unions and undertook a wide variety of public manifestations. Thus, for example, in August  the Union of
Professional Draughtsmen of the UGT painted an entire train on the
Barcelona-Manresa line with Anti-Fascist symbols that were closely
related to the mobile paintings that six artists of the Bolshevik
Revolution had painted in . The application of artistic endeavour
to posters, murals, prints, drawings, etc. was also evident. The
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Comisaría also published a finely produced book illustrated by Josep
Obiols entitled Auca del noi català, an Anti-Fascist and profoundly
human work published in Catalan, Spanish, French and English that
was used as a propaganda tool abroad. With regard to foreigners in the
cultural scene, the situation of the Civil War that took hold of Spain
aroused concern with regard to the situation of the country’s artistic
patrimony and was echoed by the Office International des Musées. On
 September  Folch i Torres wrote a long article in La Vanguardia
on the protective measures undertaken by foreign supporters. This was
the period when the Government of the Generalitat had around % of
confiscated works in its care, and a week later they would be sent off to
Olot. We know that in Olot, which was only fifty kilometres from the
French border, Folch’s suggestion of letting works of art cross over into
France was not supported. Nor were the Catalan or Republican governments in favour of the idea.
Among the issues that we should bear in mind with regard to the danger implied in considering the Internet as an Alternative Terrain to the
Real World – and the parallels between the invisibility of the real frontiers and the global nature of the web in this case exceed its political
use – is that of the subjects of our campaigns, the men and women who
suffer the legal consequences of the various policies of immigration,
mere merchandise, mere nominal appendices whom we deal with in our
desire to politically distort and transform the information campaigns of
the companies in question. We are not dealing with easily forgettable
works of art. In fact, this issue is directly applicable to the various policies of immigration that treat people in this manner, like goods of a
more or less profitable nature.
——————
[VOSS. Dr Frege, Dr Frege, Dr Frege. It is not enough that you have
ruined your brother, who also became a painter due to your interference. But while these monstrosities became part of the history of
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art a while ago (look at the paintings that come into this flat), these
bodges will not become part of it, this era will not only part of the
history of art except as a stigma, a catastrophe, an artistic catastrophe, like a huge artistic crater that people will look at in a hundred
years and which only gives out a bad smell, nothing more, nothing
more, nothing more. (He looks around). I always said bare walls, my
cabin in Norway is completely empty, no paintings, nothing. Bare
walls. (He gets up, takes down the paintings that are still on the wall
and places them next to each other on the floor) but naturally you
have to paint the walls or paper them again. They haven’t been
painted or papered in fifty years. This smell… (He looks at the paper
in the places where the pictures were taken down). That was what
the wallpaper looked like originally. It wasn’t better, it was still more
revolting when it was new. So, we need to make some changes here.
DENE. (Enters). VOSS. This is our house, not that of the dead any
more. (He wants to move the sideboard but can’t manage it). Come
on, help me, help me. RITTER and DENE. (They try to help him
move the sideboard but cannot). VOSS. Come on, push, push. RITTER and DENE. (They try to push but without success). VOSS. Half
a metre to the left, half a metre, just half a metre. (They all push
but the sideboard will not move). Just half a metre, maybe it’s nailed
to the floor. (He crouches down and looks under the sideboard. He
gets up again). Push it just half a metre. (The sideboard doesn’t
move). Push, concentrate and push. (They all push together and
there is a sound of china falling down inside). RITTER (Letting out
a laugh). DENE. Oh God! VOSS. This is what happens, I said slowly,
push very slowly, not quickly, firmly but not suddenly. (They sit
down at the table, exhausted). DENE. (He opens the door of the
sideboard and takes out one of the broken pieces of china). The fine
porcelain plates, the beautiful Bohemia teapot, oh my God. (He
turns to his brother). The finest pieces were broken.]
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Kritik der zynischen Vernunft
. Became municipal property on  July . From  November 
it was used as a store for works of art from Barcelona and was run by the
Committee for the Safekeeping of Museums in Catalonia. In the photograph
a member of the fire brigade checks a piece of fire extinction equipment beneath
a sign reading “No Smoking Allowed”. Photograph taken in November 
by Joan Vidal i Ventosa.
July . Peter Sloterdijk was among the most important post-war German
philosophers. He became famous overnight with his Critique of Cynical Reason,
a book that affected the general public more profoundly than any other
philosophical diagnosis of the times since The Decadence of the West by Osward
Spengler. The latter sympathised with the Roman emperors, liking the lofty
heights of power and the imperious command. Sloterdijk’s model, however, was
Diogenes in his barrel, mocking and ironic. Critique of Cynical Reason recounts
how, following moments of illumination and disenchantment, the modern
consciousness became fully self-aware but still functions incorrectly even with
a correct self-awareness. As the author says: “Cynicism is false enlightened
consciousness. It is the unhappy modern consciousness, on which the
Enlightenment has worked both successfully and in vain.” This is according
to the publicity text on the back cover of the second Spanish edition published
by Siruela in .
——————
The Generalitat’s policy of protecting the cultural and artistic heritage
inevitably had to involve the collaboration of Anarchists and
Communists, and it is impossible to conceive that those who were
arsonists just a few days earlier became the most expert firemen overnight.
and penetrating interpretation of Baudelaire in which he described the
poet as a secret agent of his class.
——————
When the works of art arrived in Olot they were received by all political and union groups in a positive manner, and a Board of Trustees was
set up to safeguard them that included the City Council’s Cultural
Committee, the directors of the Fine Arts and Crafts School, the High
School, and the Olot Museum, all presided over by the General
Administrator of Museums. The works were placed in the church of
Sant Esteve, which was the largest in Olot. However, the building had
to be specially repaired and reconditioned for this purpose as it had suffered at the outset of the conflict, having been set alight and its liturgical objects stolen. Fire hydrants were installed around the building and
the valuable items stored on special shelves, reaching a total of a million
items. A team of local police, firemen and members of the local committee constituted the body that looked after their safety.
For this reason we need to keep Enlightenment thought alive, embodied Enlightenment thought, it goes without saying. To enlighten
implies the affirmation of all anti-schizophrenic movements. On the
whole, universities are no longer the place where this can happen. The
universitas vitae imparts its lessons in other spaces, where men oppose
the cynicism of the official, split consciousness, where they experience
forms of life that offer an opportunity to the fully aware life that exists
in our heads, bodies and souls.
——————
Walter Benjamin, that great expert in ambiguity, was the one to deliberately extend mysterious bridges between Judaism and sociology,
Marxism and Messianism, art and criticism. He introduced the motif
of the double agent in the sciences of the spirit. Consider his famous
In the early hours of that morning enormous bonfires had been lit
inside the churches of Sant Esteve and the Carmelites, made up of
altars, sculptures, benches, chairs, tables, textiles, and broken pieces of
the organ and harmonium, etc. By pure chance and due to the zeal of a
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219
few eyewitnesses, most of the Carmelites’ books and archive were saved
that very night, despite the danger of the rescue efforts. These were
extracted from the flames and were taken to the nearby Resplandis religious house. The same was the case with the church, which was not too
severely damaged by the fire and the convent, which the flames did not
reach. In Sant Esteve, the flames from the enormous pyre did not reach
the side altars (apart from the ones next to the crossing, which had
clearly been deliberately set alight), the Sacristy and the offices, due to
the fact that the heat and suffocating smoke meant that the arsonists
had to get out. As a result, the community’s archive, the library and the
paintings in the sacristy were rescued and were moved that night along
the roofs to the old archive of the Casa de la Ciudad. When we were able
to get inside Sant Esteve on the mid-morning of the next day, and
despite the heat and amount of smoke inside, we were able to set up a
watch and gather up the most important pieces that had survived the
fire and which were still in danger in case it started burning again. We
thus moved El Greco’s painting of the Christ of Amadeu, all the treasury, all the liturgical objects from the Sacristy and altars, the relics of
Saint Sabina, the textiles, baldachin etc., into the storage area of the
Museum that had been temporarily set up in the Hospice. We took out
everything that could be rescued and kept in a place of relative safety.
The light became a fire and the bonfire became a huge conflagration.
The great fire of the Enlightenment. The Revolution acted like a great
sounding-board for its ideals. The ideas of the philosophes were perhaps
complex but those of the revolutionaries were pretty simple: the church
that we previously dedicated to God we now dedicate to the goddess
Reason. Destroying the treasures of a palace in order to replace them
with others of less or equal worth.
private collections, constituting a unique ensemble; textiles and
embroideries (the third most important group in Europe); jewellery
and goldsmith’s work from church and from the Treasury of Barcelona
cathedral; coins and ceramics (complete series dating from the th to
the th centuries); Catalan stained-glass windows; Far Eastern art
(from the Mateu collection in the Palacio de Pedralbes, and the
Massana collection); Renaissance and Baroque paintings (from the
Museum and private collections); contemporary art; thousands and
thousands of Old Master and modern drawings; old prints; and the
Library of Art and Archaeology comprised the priceless store of works
of art assembled and kept there. A simple listing provides an idea of
what the old walls of the church of Sant Esteve housed, albeit unknowingly and vulnerably, like everything else in those terrible times of war.
The Enlightenment can only offer a summary: man cannot enlighten
himself, given that he himself was a false premise of the Enlightenment.
Man is not enough. Within himself he carries the obscurantist origins
of distortion and wherever his “Self ” appears it cannot manifest that
which every era of enlightenment has promised: the light of reason.
——————
Olot thus became an extremely important centre. Collections of
Romanesque and Gothic paintings and sculptures from museums and
Two issues are thus involved. On the one hand equipping buildings and
establishments that have previously been set alight with fire-fighting
equipment without all traces of these catastrophes being totally
removed. This is because a sudden change of the course of events may
once again make these buildings the focus of symbolic interest on the
part of the arsonists. Secondly, installing fire-prevention systems for
the works of art and objects that will be temporarily housed in these
buildings, calculating the possibilities that fire will break out due to
the inflammable nature of the materials themselves, as well as the need
for the fire-fighting equipment to be portable and mobile so that it can
travel with the objects in a rapid exit from the previously equipped
buildings.
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221
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The Enlightenment, however important it might appear as a mere vehicle of reason, is as irresistible as light, hence its name, derived from a
tradition of somewhat mystic origins. Les lumières, illumination. Light
can only not reach places where there are obstacles that break up its
beam. For this reason, it is most important firstly to turn on the lights
and secondly to remove obstacles that may impede its spread. Light “in
itself ” can never have an enemy of any sort. It thinks of itself as a pacifically illuminating energy. Where it falls on reflecting surfaces it produces brightness. The issue is the following: are these reflective surfaces
really the ultimate goals of the enlightenment or do they insert themselves between the light sources and their true goals? For th-century
Freemasons, these impediments that block the light of knowledge had
three names: superstition, error and ignorance. They were also known
as “the three monsters”. These monsters were real powers that had to
be dealt with, and the Enlightenment’s aim was to provoke and then
overcome them. In an impulsive and slightly naïve manner, the early figures of the Enlightenment presented themselves as knights of the light
before the powers of darkness, demanding to be allowed to pass.
However, they did not sufficiently clearly perceive the “fourth monster”, the true enemy and the most difficult one. They attacked the powerful but not their knowledge. On more than one occasion they forgot to
analyse systematically these powers’ knowledge of control, a knowledge
that always has a double structure: one for the artificial rules of power
and the other for the rules of general conscience. The conscience of
rulers is that “reflecting surface” that decides on the progress and dissemination of the Enlightenment. As a result, the Enlightenment is in
fact only capable of inviting power “to reflection.” It reflects in the double sense of the word: the verb, meaning to consider, and the noun, in
which a beam of light is broken and moves off in a different direction.
fact, Mehr Licht! but Mehr nicht! (Nothing more!). Only Riemer and
I – and Kräuter – were present. The three of us, Riemer, Kräuter and
I, decided to let the world know that Goethe’s last words were Mehr
Licht! and not Mehr nicht! I still suffer today from that lie and falsification, long after Riemer and Kräuter have died.]
——————
[And, shortly after this, the two words that were his most famous:
Mehr Licht! (More light!). However, Goethe’s last words were not, in
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La Critique Sociale
 October . Interior of a chapel in Sigüenza Cathedral, which was
comprehensively looted. After it surrendered, the militia used it as a stronghold.
Sigüenza. Guadalajara. Le Martyre des Œuvres d’Art. Guerre Civile en Espagne.
L’Illustration. Paris. . Imprime Émile Achard.
 October . The editorial board. La Critique Sociale, magazine of the
Cercle Communiste Démocratique, led by Boris Souvarine. Revue des idées et
des livres. Offices: Librarie des sciences politiques et sociales, Marcel Rivière
éditeur,  rue Jacob, Paris e.
——————
La Critique Sociale
On opening the doors of the Cathedral that afternoon it was evident
that in the space of a few days the Red Anarchists had turned the magnificent church into a pigsty. Profaned and robbed, its walls were almost
bare. Bonds from the cathedral’s funds, from bequests and religious
foundations for dowries and charitable gifts, everything had gone to a
value of a million pesetas. The most valuable paintings, including El
Greco’s Annunciation and seventeen more of great merit, sixteen magnificent Flemish tapestries, the triptych from the chapterhouse, the
gold chalices and sacred vessels, the fine Plateresque, processional monstrance dating from the th century and other ornate and valuable ones,
as well as gold and silver reliquaries, all had been stolen. Along with the
content of the Cathedral’s treasury, all the most unique decorative
objects had also disappeared including various incense burners of highly wrought goldsmith’s work, the important silver amphorae for the
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La Critique Sociale
La Critique Sociale
holy oils, a beautifully crafted pyx, a crucifix and an ivory Infant Christ
which was among the most unique of its type. Much of what had been
stolen would subsequently reappear among the huge quantity of loot
accumulated by the Red Government in its treasury. But other precious
objects of inestimable value or quality would disappear without any
trace of their whereabouts. This was the case with the splendid gold
monstrance for the Host set with diamonds, given to the Cathedral by
Cardinal Delgado. The Reds took it to Guadalajara on the order of the
Governor. From there it was taken to Barcelona with Negrín’s booty
and from there all trace was lost of this famous and splendid object. The
magnificent Altarpiece of Santa Librada, patron saint of Sigüenza, was
seriously mutilated. An elaborate Plateresque work carved in limestone,
its execution was funded by the Bishop, don Fadrique de Portugal, son
of the Count of Haro. The same was the case with the altar of Santa
María la Mayor, with its ancient image of the Virgin dating from the th
century. Finally, similar damage was inflicted on the nave and aisles, the
elaborate cloister, the chapels, the delicate traceries and statues in the
choir and the beautiful pulpit carved by Viladomat. The crossing had
almost collapsed in the Red’s senseless attempt to turn the cathedral
into a fortress and expose it to the hazards of war.
ance out their contributions through the benefits received. Mauss’ revelations aimed at helping to change the western social model with the
intention of making it more human, in line with the idea of Christian
charity. In opposition to this, and while acknowledging the idea of the
gift in Mauss’ study, the real explanation of the potlatch is to be found
in its destructive aspect, as a response to the need to experience the
feeling of destruction that manifests itself in the collective representation of destruction. This allows it to be integrated as a form of dépense
[waste] in the particular vision of man implied by general economics.
The revival of the sentiment of destruction was extremely important. It
aimed to dissipate the utility and rationality that dulls the need for
dépense found in war, mysticism, sacrifice, eroticism and art. In this
respect it associates the other version of the economics of surplus with
the explanation of why people take risks, squander fortunes and waste
large amounts of energy and goods while exhibiting equal disdain for
their immediate and future preservation. Bataille maintained that
“exchanges of gifts” are in reality deceptive manifestations of the oldest reason for dépense or waste, which he interprets as a total experience,
often confused through the application of the term economic activity.
It is first worth looking at how Mauss describes the potlatch itself:
“What are exchanged are not solely goods and valuable objects, pieces
of furniture and buildings, i.e. objects that are useful financially. Above
all they are courtesies, banquets, rites, military service, women, children, dances, festivals, in which the market only plays one part and in
which the circulation of wealth and possessions is only one element
within a much more general and permanent contract. These contributions and counter-contributions arise in a voluntary manner through
gifts and presents although basically they are in fact obligatory under
pain of private or public war.” In Mauss’ investigations, the meaning of
the potlatch is that of a form of exchange, which, although not set out in
an explicit contract, results in the distribution of wealth and the creation of ties between the participating communities who ultimately bal226
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La Fiambrera Obrera
. A group of militias greet us. Socialist militiamen, pistols at their belts
and fists held high. In the Episcopal Palace. Madrid. Socialist Militias.
Photographic archives of Ediciones Españolas, S. A./Editorial Católica.
. A packed lunch in the barrio. Protagonists of direct action. Barrio
of Lavapiés. Madrid. La Fiambrera Obrera [The Workers’ Packed Lunch].
Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca/Centro de Fotografía de la Universidad
de Salamanca.
——————
La Fiambrera Obrera
The occupants of the Episcopal Palace accompany a relative of the
church’s doorman, thanks to which it was possible to save various valuable objects and avoid serious excesses from being carried out. The
most scandalous profanation was that committed on an image of the
Christ Child. Some militias tore it from its altar and in the entrance to
the church in full view of the street, dressed it up as a militiaman, putting a pistol into its hands and hanging a sign from it that said: “I used
to be a Fascist: now I’ve become a Communist”. Throughout the entire
month of August the profaned image was visible to passers-by. The government took advantage of the relatively good state of the church to
show it to foreigners as proof that Red Spain did not persecute religion.
Both our desperate research and census department, harassed by these
and other doubts, decided to get stuck in and produce a report or cen229
La Fiambrera Obrera
sus on the situation of our intimidated, unemployed population. The
terrain that they opened for us promised to be fertile one, and new
issues arose. How many of the virtues of our desperate unemployed
workers could be put into practice today? How much would the famous
“Violet-seller” of Lavapiés earn? Would she do the civil-service exams
to be a prison officer? Would the saint set up a non-governmental
organisation and get funding? Passers-by stopped in front of the statues, many for the first time, and exchanged views between one unemployed person and another. Luckily our desperate research and census
department had taken it upon themselves to indicate the urgency of the
matter and undertake take to find them some sort of little job, however
rubbishy it was, having noted down the skills and availability of the desperate unemployed.
La moneda viviente
230
La moneda viviente
La moneda viviente
 April . The well-known photograph of the flower-pot stand was taken
in the courtyard of the monastery of San Cayetano. The charred bust of the
Virgen de la Hiniesta is surrounded by a group of members of the brotherhood,
including Guillermo Carrasquilla, to the right of the Virgin. La feria de Sevilla.
Julio Romano. Published by Mundo Gráfico. . Archivo Hiniesta.
Photograph, Sánchez del Pando.
 April . The well-known image of the group in the room with the parallel
bars. Tied up is Roberte, undergoing enjoyable suffering, surrounded by a group
of actors including Pierre Klossowski who takes him by his right arm. La moneda
viviente [The living Currency]. Pierre Klossowski. Éditions du Terrain Vague,
. Images by Pierre Zucca. Photograph, Michel Nguyen.
industrial production for having a pernicious affect on the emotions
with the aim of denouncing its negative influence on morality is to
attribute considerable moral power to it. Where does this power derive
from? From the fact that the mere act of making objects calls their very
intention into doubt, as what is the difference between the use of useful objects and the use of objects that arise from art and which are “useless” from a point of earning a living? No one would confuse an implement with a simulacrum, unless it is by being a simulacrum that an
object possesses a necessary use.
——————
It is modern times that are finishing off village beliefs, with their deeprooted customs and ways of life. The railway, industrialisation, business, new teaching methods and popular festivals are encouraging a
change in morality, possibly because machines and pasodobles have their
own morality. How can what was previously love have turned into hate?
Is the face of Our Lady now seen as nothing but a more or less artistic
object? Cultural heritage, as they now want to call her. No one sees a
mother’s face in her any more, a sister’s face, a young maid to be courted. That sixteen-year-old girl we walked out with. Man does not live
without hopes, which wake us up and give us energy every day. They
see a lump of wood where there is only love.
From the mid-th-century and in the name of life, numerous imprecations were hurled against the havoc of industrial civilisation. To blame
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La part maudite
 March . Works of art abandoned by the Republican army in Castellón,
rescued by the Servicio de Recuperación Artística. Archive of the Instituto
del Patrimonio Histórico Español. Photograph attributed to Vidal Ventosa.
 January . La part maudite, précedé de La notion de défense. Georges
Bataille. Essai d’économie génerale. Éditions de Minuit. Paris. Review by
Claude Rou in Action.
——————
The artistic wealth of this country was divided, possibly into equal
parts. The Republicans had the concentrations of museums in Madrid
and Barcelona as well as Valencia, the large number of monuments in
Catalunya, the lovely small cities of Andalusia, the monasteries and castles of Extremadura and the pleasing variety of local styles in provinces
such as La Alcarria and La Mancha. They also had the imperial city of
Toledo, the richest of all in art.
La part maudite
This is a social division that is compensated for by expenditure. There
is no division of power without it being subject to general economic
laws that require the destruction of surplus. Without this possibility of
destruction and ruin there would be no accumulation, luxury, useless
monumental constructions, religious architecture, gewgaws, possessions, decorative excess, etc. Our cities are no less useful as a result of
everything that people en masse help to squander.
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235
La part maudite
La part maudite
Firstly, hold back the destructive revolutionary action, principally
aimed against the Church. Secondly, assemble and preserve cultural
items abandoned by their owners or under threat, as well as those that
can be seized in reprisal against the “enemies of the Republic”.
And above all, lead men and their works to catastrophic destruction.
This is because, if we do not have the courage to destroy the excess of
energy ourselves it cannot be used and thus, just like a wild animal that
cannot be tamed, it is this excess of energy that destroys us: it is we ourselves who run up the costs of the inevitable explosion.
to re-absorb part of it in an increase of leisure time. These derivates,
however, have always been insufficient: an excess of them in some places
has always led to hordes of people and large amounts of objects that
serve the purpose of destruction in war. In the present day, the relative
importance of armed conflicts has grown and has acquired the disastrous proportions that we now see.
——————
These excesses of vital force that block the poorest economies on a local
level have always in fact been the most dangerous factors leading to
ruin. For this reason de-congestion at the most profound level of consciousness has always been the subject of intense research. Ancient societies achieved it through public festivals: some built impressive monuments of no specific use; we use up surplus with a proliferation of
services that serve to dampen-down life. Furthermore, we are inclined
This Record of Official Minutes reflects a series of events that took
place in a prosperous, peaceful county. What is remarkable, however, is
the sincerity and liberty expressed in these pages, the cry of suffering
of people who loved the artistic wealth of their native region and who
were obliged to witness its pointless destruction. We also have to bear
in mind that when they wrote with such spontaneity, the members of
the Junta did not think that their text would fall into the hands of the
rebels. The Recovery Agents of National Artistic Treasure, experts who
accompanied Franco’s army during its advance, found it during their
triumphal entry into Castellón in June . This Record of Minutes
reflects a series of events that took place in a prosperous, peaceful county that until a few months before had been completely remote from the
clamour of war. It was a region rich in art with an Episcopal city,
Segorbe, that had a cathedral famed for its treasury, and one of the most
historic cities in the Levante, Morella. In almost all the reports in the
book the Junta was obliged to record news of looting and destruction.
Thus in Minute  of  June , the Members Adsuara (sculptor),
Porcar (painter) and Sánchez Gozalbo (architect) give an account of a
trip to Segorbe in which they observed the destruction of the fine
sculptures by the great Baroque sculptor Esteve Bonet and of others by
Juan Muñoz, a pupil of Gregorio Hernández, as well as of large numbers of important canvases. This same Minute is almost entirely filled
with laments on the destruction of the church in Castellón, which was
the only National Monument in the city and whose exquisite thcentury Gothic architecture endowed the whole city centre with its
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It was only possible to go forward, the only aim was to conquer terrain
in order to reaches the boundaries of the homeland, and the greatest
possible care had to be taken with objects taken from the enemy, as they
were not war booty for looting, but Spanish patrimony that had to be
restored after the damage it had suffered and the circumstances it had
endured. This is where the radical difference lies between the services
set up on the one side and the other for the protection of works of art.
The other side’s corresponded to an ethics of removal. While our aim
was recovery, they applied their efforts to evacuation. This is a conclusive demonstration that awareness of defeat soon became widespread
among the Republican side, perhaps subconscious in many cases and of
course contrary to the propaganda disseminated both inside and outside of Spain.
La part maudite
La part maudite
particular character. On this occasion the church was destroyed not by
an irresponsible mob but following a meditated decision by the city
council, which proved impossible to revoke despite official attempts to
do so. In August  the mob certainly did destroy the splendid thcentury Virgin on the Caballeros Doorway as well as the archives of the
church and abbey, which had housed the birth certificate of the painter
Ribalta, “both burned down in the plaza del Pintor Carbó in broad daylight, one day in August .” The third Minute gives an account of
the destruction of the convent of Santa Clara, while the fourth
describes the lamentable disappearance of another monument in the
city, the church of the Holy Blood.
the increase in wealth is greater than ever before, it has acquired for us
the meaning that to some extent it always had, that of “la part maudite”.
This is a paradoxical truth to the point that it is exactly the opposite of
the usual one. This paradoxical character is emphasised by the fact that
at the culminating point of exaltation, the meaning remains concealed.
In current conditions everything conspires to obscure the fundamental
process that tends to devolve wealth to its function, to the act of giving,
to the non-reciprocated expense. On the one hand, mechanised warfare
and its concomitant destruction makes this process alien and hostile to
human inclinations. On the other, the raising of the standard of living
is not represented in any way as a demand for luxury. The movement
that upholds it is actually a protest against the luxury of the great fortunes, and this upholding is thus carried out in the name of justice.
Naturally, without having anything against justice, it is permissible to
observe that here the term disguises the profound truth of its opposite,
which is, precisely, freedom. Beneath the mask of justice it is true that
general liberty has the blurred and neutral aspect of existence subject
to needs: it is rather a reduction of its limits to the narrowest, not a dangerous unleashing, a word that has lost its meaning. It is a guarantee
against the risk of servitude, not a willingness to accept risks, without
which there is no freedom. The sensation of an evil is united with that
double modification of the process that requires us to consume wealth.
A rejection of war under its monstrous aspect, a rejection of squandering, whose traditional form now implies injustice. At the moment when
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La société du spectacle
July . A group of militias positioned behind various images. A group of
images used as a parapet by the revolutionaries. Lunatic asylum of Santa Eulalia.
Barcelona. Report by the Revolutionary Movement in Barcelona. . Director,
Mateo Santos. Oficina de Información y Propaganda of the CNT-FAI.
Photography, Ricardo Alonso. Editing, Antonio Cánovas.
July . A workers’ demonstration concealed behind a large publicity
display. Behind the hoarding the demonstration slowly proceeds. Hong Kong.
Photograph for the Chinese edition of . Guy Debord. La société du spectacle.
Champ Libre, . Version, Archivo Situacionista Hispano. Agence FrancePresse. Photograph, Philippe García.
——————
Militiamen positioned behind a Sacred Heart of Christ and other holy
images. The voice-over recounts that various Fascists had shot against
the people from the asylum. Images, possibly mock-ups, of a group of
militiamen shooting against the windows, others removing images and
other religious works of art that are piled up by the entrance and subsequently set alight.
Without doubt the preference in our own day is for the image over the
thing, the copy over the original, representation over reality, appearance
over being… What is sacred for the present is nothing other than illusion, but what is profane is the truth. Better still: the sacred grows in its
eyes as truth wanes and illusion grows, to the point where the culmination of illusion is also the culmination of the sacred.
——————
241
Manuel Somocarrero helped his comrades to pile up the images. We
found many of them in the porter’s lodge, still packed up and wrapped
in paper or in cardboard boxes. Antonio our assistant used the largest
one to shelter behind with his rifle.
positioned behind the barricades made from these images. On occasions
during the filming the first take was done without film. At one point one
sees one of the men look at the camera but there was not enough material to repeat the shot.
The entire life of societies in which modern conditions of production
prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles.
Everything that used to be directly experienced is now sidelined into a
performance.
On occasions spectacle is like society itself, like a part of society and a
unifying instrument. To the degree that its starting-point is society it is
precisely the sector that concentrates all gazes and all awareness. Due to
the fact that this sector is a separate one, it is the place of the deceived
gaze and of false consciousness; and the unification that it brings about
is nothing but an official language of overall separation.
——————
The steps of Santa Eulalia were covered with images that the patients
in the asylum were busy taking out of the door. When we arrived they
recriminated us in their innocence for our disrespectful and ridiculous
treatment of these clay Christs and Virgins. Accustomed to the example
of the nuns who had them locked up, they undoubtedly thought that
these statues really had magic properties. Seeing how they lived, in
another world, it is logical that that were frightened by our jokes and
our scorn for these lifeless dollies.
The resulting images of every aspect of life fuse together in a common
flow, in which the unity of this life can no longer be re-established.
Reality in part unfolds in its own overall unity as a separate, pseudoworld, the object of mere contemplation. The specialisation of images
of the world appears, fully complete, in the world of the autonomous
image, in which the liar lies to himself. Spectacle in general, like a specific inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.
——————
It was Mateo Santos who had the idea when he actually observed the
scene. All the mad people there, mixed up with the sacred images. We
later got rid of the material and only had the stills left of the militias
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The group’s relationship with the images was comic rather than anything else. An Infant Saint John the Baptist accompanied us as a mascot during the rest of the filming.
Spectacle is not an ensemble of images, but a social relationship
between people that is modified by images.
——————
The nationalisation of the entertainment industry was our great contribution to the CNT and to the other revolutionary groups. I believe that
critical elements equally contributed to propaganda productions and
fiction films.
Spectacle cannot be understood as the abuse of the visual universe as a
consequence of techniques for the mass diffusion of images. Rather, it
is a Weltanschauung that has become real and has taken on material
form. It is a vision of the world that has become objectified.
——————
243
In a way comparable to what happened to industry in general, in
Republican Spain places of entertainment were nationalised or collectivised. In the first case they were controlled by the unions, and in the
second by the workers. According to Emeterio Díez in his article “Cine
Libertario”, nationalisation was imposed in large towns and cities as
this is where numerous different types of film companies were to be
found and as a result there was a CNT entertainment organisation.
Collectivisations, in contrast, were carried out in smaller places where
the entertainment sector was no more than one or a few cinemas and
the number of related workers was thus so small that they had to be
members of the Sindicato de Oficios Varios [General Trades Union].
There was also a third formula that was applied in some villages in
Aragon where the entire municipal economy was collectivised, as a
result of which cinemas became just one more community services and
in some cases were free.
Spectacle, understood in its entirety, is both the result and the project
of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real
world or its tacked-on decoration. It is the heart of the unreal of a real
society. Beneath its particular forms of expression, information or
propaganda, advertising or direct consumption of amusements, spectacle constitutes the current model of socially dominated life. It is the
omnipresent affirmation of a pre-decided choice regarding production
and its associated consumption. Form and content of spectacle are
identical and are the total justification of the conditions and aims of the
existing system. Spectacle is also the permanent presence of that justification, occupying most of the time lived outside of the modern production system.
remote from the issues that directly affected workers or to do with the
war, and those who wanted to make films as examples that would raise
morale at the Front and at home, did not annul the dignity of these productions. In the end it was the results of the films premiered in Madrid
that determined the prospects of the new production.
Separation per se forms part of the unit of the world, of the global
social praxis that has split off in both image and reality. Social practice,
to which self-sufficient spectacle is opposed, is also the real totality
within spectacle. But the rupture in this totality damages it to the point
of making spectacle seem like its object. The language of spectacle is
made up of signs of the prevailing production, which are at the same
time the ultimate aim of this production.
——————
In Barcelona, shops passed into the hands of the Confederación
Nacional del Trabajo-Federación Anarquista Ibérica (CNT-FAI), in
Madrid into the hands of the Socialist Unión General de Trabajadores
(UGT), and in Valencia, to a joint body that encompassed both these
unions. In the case of Catalonia, in  the Generalitat initiated a
gradual process of intervention and control of all industries, provoking
a response from the Anarchists who saw it as an attack on their interests. The appearance of the Junta de Espectáculos in Madrid favoured
the joint action of the Republican Government and the unions. Each
nationalised cinema had a workers’ committee or control committee
that included representatives from the film industry and unions.
The importance of the nationalisation committees arose when new
films were put into production. The debate between entertainment and
commitment, represented by those who wished to make fiction films
One cannot establish an abstract opposition between spectacle and
real social activity. This division in turn divides itself. Spectacle that
involves the real comes about in a real manner. At the same time experienced reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of a spectacle
and reproduces within itself the order characteristic of spectacle, giving
it a positive adhesion. Objective reality is present on both sides. Each
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notion established in this way has no other function than that of passing over to the other side: reality arises in spectacle, and spectacle is
real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and fundament of presentday society.
——————
The Libertarian militias were definitely affected by that combination of
insane people and sacred images.
In the truly inverted world, what is true is a moment within what is
false.
La vérité sur les colonies
246
. Free-port store. Sculptures and furniture of artistic merit organised for
packing and sending abroad. Committee of the governing body of the University
of Valladolid for the investigation of outrages committed by the Red-Separatists
in the Basque provinces. Bilbao. Photographs of Ricardo Magdalena, Manuel
Ferrandis and Francisco Antón.
. Counter-exhibition, primitive objects and Surrealist assemblages
against Imperialism. Organised by the Headquarters of the French Unions,
the Communist Party, the Anti-Imperialist League and intellectuals belonging
to the Surrealist group. Place du Colonel Fabien. Paris. Photographs of
Louis Aragon, Benjamin Péret and André Breton.
ing its possessions in Africa, South America and Asia through means of
a major exhibition. As a political expression of anti-colonialism the
exhibition constituted a critical presentation of images and objects that
in the official exhibition were displayed in praise of the government’s
actions, glorious hymns to the Republic, which here showed itself
stained with blood. In addition, the documentation room included various books, magazines, posters and photographs that provided evidence
on the atrocious barbarity to which French capitalism subjected its
colonies.
——————
In order to achieve the aim of easily obtaining documented, methodical
and unquestionably accurate information it was necessary, as I
remarked earlier, to visit the actual places that had endured the Red
domination. Thus all villages that have at any moment been considered
by the transient Government in “Euzkadi” to be under their control
have been conscientiously visited. Once there the religious, civil and
military authorities have been consulted and all have immediately
understood the project and have been extremely happy to collaborate
with it. Municipal and parish archives have been studied and churches,
hermitages, monasteries, palaces and historic buildings have been visited. Photographs have been taken and official records made.
This is an exercise in counter-information with the aim of telling “the
truth about the colonies” at a time when the French State was celebrat248
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LEF
April . A peasant completing work on the repair of the communal
dormitories. The church occupied and turned into a hospital by the CNT.
Re-used church in a collectivised village. Province of Teruel. State Archives.
Ministry of Culture. Agencia Photo. Photograph, Kati Horna.
August . Meeting of the Leftist Artists’ Front in the deconsecrated church
of Saint Paul. Meeting of intellectuals in a collectivised church. LEF. Leftist
Artists’ Front. (Levogo Front Iskusstva – ãÂ‚˚È ÙÓÌÚ ËÒÍÛÒÒÚ‚ Moscow.
Photograph, Alexander Rodchenko.
——————
LEF
During the days that I spent in the hospital I learned the few things that
really matter in life. Firstly, that churches and other religious buildings
would be better used as schools or hospitals. The hospital where I was
looked after had been a Catholic church, hence my opinion. Life is not
the great battles but that the care that the nurses showed towards me,
most of them countrywomen who had rapidly learned their job, and the
doctors who looked after me. Their manner towards me was neither
excessively friendly nor paternalistic and they approached their work
with zeal and passion. Every gesture, usually rapid and forceful given
that they were dealing with bullet wounds or a sectioned leg, expressed
sufficient love through its precision. There was no attempt to disturb or
sweeten the final hours of those who were about to die. These people
had no use for the pious homilies dished out for years by priests or
nuns. It was the inevitably humble, austere life of the peasants and
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LEF
workers that gave a certain roughness to the gestures that I saw but
which was undoubtedly guided by love. The way that they buried the
dead or announced the increase in the ration of pork for lunch that
comforted me without my failing to note a certain rudeness in their
manner. Love has always been represented with violets, silks and feeble
things. To learn that the most valued caress is the one given by a roughened hand was the most important lesson that accompanied me through
life. A life full of heartbreak and disappointment.
Various lessons can be learned from this. . Stop raving about the fact
that the “epic frescoes” will be broken during the fighting on the barricades; the fresco will be shattered into pieces. . The raw material of the
events in question (hence the interest in the products of the corresponding workers and peasants) must, during the Revolution, be paid at an
amount higher, and never lower, than that for “poetic work”. A precious
poeticising only castrates and spoils the material. All style manuals of
the Sengeli type are harmful precisely because they do not deduce the
poetry from the material, in other words, they do not give the essence
of the events or condense the facts until they have obtained the compressed, concentrated, economical word. Rather they limit themselves
to imposing any old form on a new fact. Very often the form does not
adapt itself to the fact and the fact is thus either lost in the form, like a
flea in a pair of trousers (example: Radimov’s little pigs dressed up in
Greek pentameters devised for the Illiad), or they become transparent
through the poetic veil and become ridiculous rather than grandiose.
This has happened, for example, with Kirillov’s Sailors, strung together into an amphibrach of a totally worn and tatty type.
Libro
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Libro
Libro
July . The painting protected with newspaper pages dated August .
Paintings in the Diocesan Museum in Valencia damaged in the fire of . On
top of the oil painting of Saint Lucy and Saint Margaret by Rodrigo de Solsona.
Panel,  x  cm. No confiscation number. Photograph, María Gómez Rodrigo.
July . Typographical design for the Libro [Book] by Stéphane Mallarmé.
Essays, ideas and notes for Livre. Stéphane Mallarmé. Livre. Unpublished,
preparatory edition, Armand Colin. Cosmopolis. May . Paris. Feuillet B.
Notes inédites en vue du ‘Livre’ (). Photograph, Nadar.
——————
The list shown here () of panel paintings that were burned includes
information on their state of conservation, confiscation number, photographs taken before the war from the Mas Archive and bibliography. We
also see some of the paintings already restored and the results of the
work undertaken. The pages of El Mercantil, dated August , were
used to try to prevent further loss of pigment from the charred paintings.
constitutes the tragic declaration of the impossibility of what is set out
in Livre.
——————
The worst of these technical problems was the imminent threat of the
priming lifting off due to the separation of the wood of the panel from
the paint layers. In some cases, while the paint layers had only partly
swelled, in others the situation was extremely alarming as they had
totally separated from the support. It has to be assumed that it is impossible to move these very notable works of art. It would be an attack
on their sacred integrity to subject their fragility to an outcome that
would undoubtedly be disastrous. The panels are so thin that they would
crumble away at the slightest contact. I am absolutely against moving
them in the present circumstances.
“Everything in the world exists to end up in a book” Mallarmé stated
when he explained Livre, his poetic undertaking par excellence, whose
writing would subject chance to the rule of the human spirit. While the
poet was the only person capable of offering an orphic explanation of
the earth, its great imperfection was in fact chance. Mallarmé believed
that it was necessary to do away with random arpeggios in order to sing
“the song of the earth” on the strings of his lyre. Only in this way the
word, among the pages of Livre, would conclusively present all the
material states of the world, free of the corruption and the possible contingencies of the man who wrote this word.
——————
In Livre (for which the project and ideas were published in ),
Mallarmé aimed to ascribe to the poet the mission of writing the work
which, by nature of being the orphic explanation of the earth, would
thus subjugate chance to the human spirit, in which chance symbolised
that spirit’s imperfection. A Throw of the Dice will never abolish Chance
() is a long poem of free verse with revolutionary typography that
In the book Dr María Gómez describes the process of restoring the
Saint Michael Altarpiece. The first chapter offers a highly judicious
account of the fate of the works of art in the Cathedral and
Archiepiscopal Palace, starting with the initial attempt by Cardinal Reig
(who set up the first diocesan museum in the archiepiscopal building)
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Libro
to gather together the works of art dispersed around the diocese and
under threat from unscrupulous art dealers and ignorant owners. Dr
Gómez then recalls the fateful days of July  and refers to the fires
in the Cathedral and Palace. It is only by knowing this information that
young scholars can understand what is meant by phrase the “burned
works from the Cathedral”, thus appreciating the reason why so many
works of art were in such a lamentable state. Her brief account offers a
deserving tribute to all those people who were moved by the instinct of
artistic sensibility and did not throw away those mutilated canvases and
panels but rather kept them. Thanks to them, what seemed dead has
now regained life.
Mallarmé, however, could only sketch out such a disproportionate and
ambitious project such as this one. Against his most strongly-held convictions, against the staunchest ardour and blind faith expressed in his
written manifestoes, Nothing ultimately occupied the pages of Livre:
blank pages, crossed-out, corrected or edited in the mind and memory;
drafts for a “Pure Work” that did not even come to equal the vast number of concepts and theories that Mallarmé expressed on the subject in
his correspondence. Ironically, the lyrical and brutal acknowledgement
of his failure as the producer of this “Pure Work” would be A Throw of
the Dice, Mallarmé great legacy to the th century of poetical adventure, the borderline and summit that Valéry accurately called the “ideographic spectacle of a crisis”. In A Throw of the Dice Mallarmé made
concrete what he was unable to in Igitur or even in Livre: the founding
and completion of a new world on the basis of abjuring the known one:
the creation of a Thought (to use his own capitalisation), an image, a
language, a grammar and above all, a rhetoric for this new world, even
when it implied avoidance on the author’s part and at the same time
allowed him to write the fable of his own annihilation. None of this
would have taken place without the acknowledgement of the triumph of
fate over the idea of order and without previously understanding that
poetry inoculated against chance produces a “false mansion/immediately evaporated into mist/that imposed/a limit on the infinite.”
256
Lost Magic Kingdom
Lost Magic Kingdom
. Galleries of the Jesuits. Exhibition of material to be restituted in the annexes of the church. Historia de la Cruzada Española. Vol. XXVII. Church of the
Jesuits or of the Sacred Heart. Santander. Photographs of Gil y Goizueta, Klark
y Mendía, and Alejandro Arce.
. Ethnographic galleries in the British Museum. Material intervention
and selection of pieces by Eduardo Paolozzi. Lost Magic Kingdom (and Six
Paper Moons from Nahuatl). The Museum of Mankind. The British Museum.
Photographs, Henry Brewer, Tony Cowell, and Andrew Hill.
——————
The Reds completely looted the churches in the province of Santander,
appropriating the treasures, ecclesiastical vestments and liturgical
objects, some of which were recovered on the entry of Franco’s troops.
Controlled chaos: objects and materials of different origins, torn from
the heart of Africa, the South American jungles and the Oceanic Islands
and exhibited here according to the curator’s viewpoint, randomly, like
a collection of butterflies.
Marcel Broodthaers
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Marcel Broodthaers
Marcel Broodthaers
 July . Interior courtyard of the Convent of Jesús-María. San Andrés.
From the series Sucesos de Barcelona, no. . Relatos de sedición e incendios en
Barcelona y Cataluña. Barcino. Editorial Hispano-Americana. Postcard.
Published by Ángel Toldrá Vinazo.
 January . Un jardin d’hiver. Catalogue-Catalogus. Marcel Broodthaers.
Palais des Beaux-Arts. Brussels. Société des Expositions/London, Petersburg
Press, . Limited edition of  copies. Maria Gilisen Collection. Galerie
Jos Jamar, Knokke.
——————
Since  the community of nuns had felt itself obliged to equip the
Schools in the buildings that they possessed at that time on the
Rambla de Santa Eulalia, nos.  and . The day schools provided
education and instruction to poor girls aged over seven, primarily the
daughters of workers. Around  to  girls per year attended, on
average.
If we look at the photograph from close up we can see that with somewhat malign pleasure Broodthaers modified the place much more than
the different arrangements, locating a panel beyond the threshold of the
first gallery that creates a zig-zag passageway that obliges the public to
crowd together before entering his exhibition. Nonetheless, it is not the
public that squeezes together in front of the entry but some palm trees
that queue up in the back of the room.
——————
The night schools were open from . to  o’clock at night, and
between  and  female workers attended. These Schools were
divided into seven sections run by twenty-six nuns. Since they were
first set up, more than , women have attended as pupils.
The community of Jesús-María, founded in the mid-th century in
San Andrés de Palomar and wishing to meet the needs of the town’s primarily working-class population, made the sacrifice of replacing the old
boarding-school with these new, free buildings to be used for cultural
and social projects.
Since I started to make art – my own and what I have copied – the
exploitation of the political consequences of this activity, whose theory
can only be revealed outside of its own ambit, has seemed to me to be
ambiguous, suspicious and too angelical. If the artistic product is about
the thing, the theory becomes private property.
——————
260
Un jardin d’hiver is based on the idea that film is a greater ill than theatre but a worse one than television. By this I mean that the ill lies in
the fact of an ever-larger audience, to the benefit of profitability. Which
is still, however, a good thing.
——————
On the th, when the female workers who were keeping close watch
believed that their precious Schools were safe, the mob appeared
between am and  noon, split open the doors with axe blows and
great cries, and set fire to the building. The flames did not take hold as
they had imagined and much was saved. But on the afternoon of the st
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Marcel Broodthaers
these merciless individuals reappeared and completely burned the furniture, altars, pianos, harmoniums, etc.
That sort of pergola seen in the first version was re-used but placed offcentre and inverted. While in the first version the middle was empty,
here it is occupied by various palm trees surrounded by the same foldable chairs turned towards the foliage. A glass case contained two stuffed
snakes, one of them poisonous. A lectern painted red and covered with
mussel shells was a piece of furniture that had formed part of an ensemble of  but which had been taken apart some time previously.
A scene of ruin and destruction. The courtyard of the school, into
which pieces of furniture and doorframes had been thrown from the
windows of the upper floors in order to be burned along with the
archive, was dirtied with ash and earth as the flowerpots had been broken one by one and the earth and roots scattered over the ground.
In Barcelona, Federico pointed out to me the virtues of Marcel
Broodthaer’s palm trees as archetypes of trees for classifying the world.
He showed me these, in pots, which move in the space and indicate
directions, cutting off pathways, etc. When they break the pot and put
down roots, palm trees become an archive of ruin.
——————
They went as far as to threaten the local people with fire if they were
not allowed to check whether they had removed anything from the
Schools. Fortunately they had nothing, as they had foreseen that this
would happen.
This is how the interior architecture looked when Broodthaers invaded
the terrain of that venerable institution. Its elegance formed a strange
contrast with the solemnity of the setting.
——————
In the present day I believe that the value of the creative act only takes
concrete form at the moment when it shifts from being an object to a
commodity. The deficit within the objects is compensated for by the
element of novelty in art.
The value of what was lost and destroyed amounted to , pesetas,
making it difficult to rebuild the Schools as there was still money owing
on the new building.
——————
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Marcel Mauss
 July . Smashed religious images in the convent of the Mercedes.
Azuaga. Badajoz. Various Authors. Historia de la Cruzada Española. Vol. XV.
El alzamiento. Extremadura. Ediciones Españolas, S. A. Madrid. .
Ed. Manuel Aznar. Artistic direction, Carlos Sáenz de Tejada.
 December . A bewildered Marcel Israel Mauss emerges onto the street
for the first time since France was liberated. High Points in Anthropology.
Paul Bohannan and Mark Glazer. McGraw-Hill/Interamericana de España
S. A. Madrid. . Marcel Mauss Archives.
——————
We only have these photographs left as we lost the true images.
The art of magicians consists in replacing reality with images.
——————
In Azuaga the people were divided and this division could only have
come about as the consequence of great violence. We thus asked that
when the Sacred Heart was restored, that sign, which reminds us how
we were divided, should be retained.
Marcel Mauss
It is so complex that even by describing very carefully separated fragments one can never achieve more than a flat, two-dimensional image.
Fortunately there are cases in which coherence is to be found in less
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Marcel Mauss
extensive ensembles, privileged moments in which everything can be
grasped in a single moment.
——————
After the militia, who were loyal to the constitutional order, had
opposed the Guardia Civil’s control of the town, violent clashes broke
out leaving two Guardias and eighteen Republicans dead. The atmosphere in the town was extremely tense as a result of these events and
people feared the worst due to the hatred and grief provoked by these
deaths. These fears were soon confirmed. The Benemérita’s control of
Azuaga continued for two days after which the troop was ordered by the
rebels to concentrate in Llerena and thus left the town, which remained
in the hands of some militias at the height of revolutionary activity.
During the two months that they were in control of the town they committed a variety of excesses in the name of Republican legality, including numerous executions of local people.
start of violence and excess. The lieutenant and his Guardias came out
of the building in order to avoid being attacked and on the command of
the Socialist mayor Manchón and the Red leaders Muñoz, El Chato
Maguilla and El Jorda, the revolutionary mob comprising more than
, men started to throw stones and shoot at the Guardias. They
responded to the attack and fighting broke out. A Guardia soon fell dead
and nine were wounded. Sixteen corpses lay in the plaza, which the
Reds had abandoned. The Marxist leaders in Badajoz raised an outcry
when they heard of what had happened: “The Guardia Civil is with the
rebels! Once again it has attacked the defenceless people!”
Soon after dark, the Red leaders in charge of Azuaga concentrated their
forces in the plaza. They needed arms and thought that they could make
use of the Guardia Civil’s. The mob ran to the barracks and demanded
that it surrender and hand over its weapons. This idea being rejected,
they fell back to the plaza and noisily proclaimed the revolution with the
His pinpointing of the origins of the Italian and German tyrannies in
Bolshevism is completely correct. Austrian Social-Christian corporativism transformed into Hitler’s version is, however, a tyranny of very
different origins, but ultimately by copying Mussolini it has placed itself
in the same category. My second point is this. I have to insist more than
you do on the fundamental fact of the secret and conspiracy. I have lived
for a long time among active Communist circles, including in Russia.
The active minority there was a reality; a perpetual conspiracy. This
conspiracy lasted throughout the entire war and won. But the structure
of the Communist party continues to be that of a secret society. The
party itself has installed in Russia what the Fascist party and Hitler’s
party installed, without artillery and ships but with the full political
apparatus. In this respect I happily acknowledge events such as those
that frequently happened in Greece and which Aristotle describes so
well. It is the “Society of Men” with their simultaneously public and
secret brotherhoods, and in that male-dominated society it is the society
of young men that brings about actions. Even from a sociological viewpoint it is perhaps a structure necessary for action but an old-fashioned
one. It meets the need for secrets, for influence, action, youth and frequently, tradition. I should add that due to the way tyranny is normally
associated with war and with democracy itself, one might think that we
were living in the times of the young men of Megara who took a secret
oath not to stop until the famous constitution had been destroyed.
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The capacity of the mass to impose its desires on the real world. Mauss
described how, in group trances, the social body was animated by a single sweeping movement in which the individual disappeared and
became a sort of machine. He concluded: “Only at this moment does
the social body truly come about, as at that moment each of its cells, the
individuals, feel as united as a group as they do as a single body. In these
conditions universal consent may be able to bring concrete realities into
existence.”
——————
Masse und Macht
. Church of the Providencia. Olot. La Garrotxa. Gerona. In the background
of the photograph we see the church just as the arsonists had left, with clouds
and trails of smoke. Photograph, Josep M. Dou.
. Masse und Macht [Mass and Power]. Elias Canetti. In  at the age of ,
he unexpectedly encountered a workers’ rebellion in Vienna and saw how the
energy of the pent-up mob vented itself on the burning of the Palace of Justice.
There are photographs in the Österreichisches Institut für Zeitgeschichte Wien.
——————
The church and convent of the Divina Providencia. The church was
attacked and set alight on  July . The City Council, in session on
 November that year, decided to undertake building work and disfigure the façade (in order to erase its religious appearance). The church
became a community carpentry workshop and later a barracks, while
the convent became a refugee centre.
Masse und Macht
The same thing happens with the work of Elias Canetti. Auto da fé is a
narrative that inevitably concludes with the burning of a large library,
the Theresianum, while in Masse und Macht [Mass and Power], the
process is the opposite, starting from his personal experience of a workers’ uprising in Vienna in the s in order to delve into it and reveal
its consequences in an analytical manner.
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Masse und Macht
Masse und Macht
In a way, the assault on the church of the Providencia could be
described as a model action of its type. The manner in which it happened, the movement of the mob, the relative unimportance of the fire
and the rapidity of the whole action.
I refer to Elias Canetti, who could be described as an anarchist of
anthropological thought, and in fact we have to thank him for the most
incisive and intellectually rich social anthropology text of the th century, Mass and Power. When it was published in  it was not only
badly received but also dismissed and disregarded by most sociologists
and social philosophers. The is because the book refused to undertake
the activity carried out almost without exception by sociologists ex officio: adulation, concealed as criticism, of present-day society, that object
that in turn acted as a potential client. Canetti’s strength lay in this
unwavering lack of condescension, backed up by his ability to describe
crucial experiences of society as a powerful mass in action over the
course of various decades.
——————
and all around were countless traces of the sacrilege and profanation
that had taken place. Numerous houses had been occupied by undesirable types after their legitimate owners had been packed off, and dozens
of homes were broken up under the cruel sign of the hammer and sickle. A terrifying plague of Police, Carabineros and Assault Guards were
a constant threat to decent, peace-loving people. The fairground had
neither fairs nor markets; the streets were almost empty of local people
but were invaded by a multitude of grim, horrible and unknown faces.
No young men were left while many of the young girls had sold their
honour for a plate of lentils while still more, formerly young ladies from
good homes, worked their fingers to the bone in humble but respectable
jobs in order not to starve. So many bodies covered with pustules and
infected spots; nothing left of that former atmosphere of art and
artistry; numerous industries still just keeping going under the workers’
control, and another sizeable handful of shops closing down or already
shut up; the School, the main Theatre and the Xiqués Tower all turned
into emergency hospitals, as was the Escolapios’ seminary; a municipal
pharmacy set up and stocked with stolen and looted goods and lastly,
Olot’s mountain, Montolivet, once thickly covered with waving holm
oaks, now so stripped and bare thanks to the Marxists’ endeavours, like
Azaña’s head with one of its huge warts on his snout.
If, in the past, the multi-faceted nature of the city would have made it
difficult for any writer to attempt to describe Olot, this is sadly now an
easy undertaking: as easy as it is difficult to image Olot without its
parish church of Sant Esteve and without its Sanctuary of the Santa
Patrona del Tura, or rather, with its Sanctuary turned into a huge store
of esparto grass for making explosives, and a parish church turned into
a store for paintings and for high and low reliefs that had been wickedly stolen. Furthermore, in the church the magnificent organ that had
been rescued from the fire had been very quietly smashed to bits, while
the Carmelite church was in ruins having been turned into a car repair
workshop, the Convent of the Corazón de María transformed into the
headquarters of the CRIM, and the church of the Divina Providencia
(Oh Providence of the Lord!) used as a carpentry workshop. The
Capuchin church and monastery were nothing more than a skeleton,
Mob destruction is a topic frequently discussed: it is the first aspect of
the mob that springs to view and one that is universally encountered
among the widest range of countries and cultures. While it is a demonstrable and widely condemned phenomenon, it is never satisfactorily
explained. The mob prefers to destroy houses and objects. As these
objects are often fragile ones such as windows, mirrors, vases, paintings
and sets of china, it is often thought that it is their fragility that encourages the mob to destroy them. It is certainly true that the noise produced
by destruction, the smashing of china or of shop windows into
smithereens undoubtedly explains a lot of the appeal of this activity:
they are the vigorous cries of a new being, a recently-born infant. The
fact that it is so easy to provoke them increases their popularity; every
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Masse und Macht
cry in unison and tinkle of glass represents general applause. A particular need for this sort of din seems to exist from the very onset of the
events in question, when the mob still consists of a fairly small number
of elements and when almost nothing has yet happened. The noise heralds the desired reinforcement and is a happy herald of what will take
place next. But it would be a mistake to think that the ease with which
things can be broken is the key point. Mobs have started with pietra
dura sculptures and have not ceased until they have left them absolutely destroyed and unrecognisable. Christians destroyed the heads and
arms of Greek gods. Reformers and revolutionaries had sculptures of
saints taken down from their pedestals, sometimes from such a height
as to represent a grave risk, and on more than one occasion the stone
that was to be broken into bits proved so hard that the thing could not
be completely smashed up. The destruction of images that represent
something is the destruction of a hierarchy that is no longer recognised.
The result is to attack the normal distances that are visible to all and
which prevail everywhere. The expression of their permanency is their
hardness, they have existed for a great length of time, forever, standing
up proud and immovable, and it was impossible to reach them with hostile intent. Now, however, they have fallen to the ground and have been
left in pieces. The discharge has been consummated in the act. Things,
however, do not always go this far. Destruction of the normal type,
which we discussed at the outset, is nothing but an attack on all boundaries. Windows and doors belong to houses, they are the most delicate
part of its separation from the exterior. Once doors and windows are
destroyed the house has lost its individuality. As a result, anyone can
enter at will and nothing nor anyone is protected inside.
the Carmelites, of the Escolapios, even, oh Heavens! of the Divina
Providencia… not even the little chapel of the Virgen del Portal escaped
the revolutionary wrath of that mournful  July . Three years ago
those mounds of ashes had been blown into the wind in front of the
monasteries, hermitages and churches, all that was left of numerous
altars, sculptures and holy ornaments, little specks of ash of something
that the fire could eternally purify without ever destroying. However,
still more piles of ashes awaited us. It was three years ago to the very
week that other similar piles appeared here and there around the horrified town. They were the sculptures and religious objects looted from
persecuted priests or from prominent right-wing figures and used as
fuel for the fire. Their objects and images had been thrown into the
street from balconies and windows, accompanied by a spewing-out of
vile blasphemies and foul words from the new iconoclasts.
The arsonists’ torch had already completed its destructive task in our
city and county. The patina of the fire left its mark on the walls of our
“Casal Mariano” and on our churches, chapels, hermitages and monasteries. Our parish church, the churches of the Santuario del Tura, of
In general, these are the houses that conceal the men who aim to stay
apart from the mob, its enemies. But now what separates them has been
destroyed. There is nothing between them and the mob. They can come
out and join them. They can go out and find them. But, there’s more.
The single being has the feeling that in the mob he exceeds the limits
of his persona. He feels relieved as all the distances that returned him
back to himself and enclosed him within himself have been abolished.
By lifting the burdens of distance he feels free, and his freedom pushes
him to go beyond these boundaries. What has happened to him will also
happen to the others and he expects the same for them. It annoys him
that in a clay jug everything is boundaries and limits. Closed doors in a
house annoy him. Rituals and ceremonies, everything that maintains
distance or threatens him is unbearable to him. The attempt will be
made to return the mob to those pre-formed recipients. The mob hates
its future prisons, which were always its gaols. To the naked mob everything seems like the Bastille. Fire is the most impressive of all the
means of destruction. It is visible from far off and attracts other people.
It destroys irrevocably. After a fire, nothing is as it was before. The
arsonist mob believes itself invincible. As the fire advances they add
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273
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Masse und Macht
Masse und Macht
everything to it. Everything hostile to it will be exterminated by it. It is
the most vigorous symbol that exists for the mob, as was subsequently
proven. Following all destruction, fire, like the mob, must burn itself
out.
——————
[I know it hasn’t escaped me that they destroy everything, but pretend I know nothing about it, I also know that they will destroy the
old school but I no longer protest about it as that’s what the next
generation is for, the world today is a destroyed one, in other words,
unbearably ugly, go where you will, the world today is just an ugly
one and a stupid one from one end to the other, all completely gone
off wherever you look, all abandoned, the best thing would be not to
wake up any more, over the last fifty years the people in charge have
completely destroyed it and now there’s nothing to be done, architects have destroyed everything with their stupidity, intellectuals
have destroyed everything with their stupidity, the people have
destroyed everything with their stupidity, the political parties and
the church have destroyed everything with their stupidity, which has
always been a complete and abject stupidity, and the Austrian stupidity is absolutely repulsive. Industry and the Church are the ones
responsible for the Austrian disaster, the governments depend totally on industry and the Church, this has always been the case and in
Austria everything has always been as bad as it could be, everyone
has chased after stupidity and intelligence has always been shouted
down. Industry and the clergy lie behind want and misery in Austria.
Deep down I can perfectly understand your father, what astonishes
me is that the entire Austrian people hasn’t committed suicide some
time ago, but the Austrians en bloc are a brutal and imbecile race
today. In this city any clear-sighted person would be a homicidal
maniac 24 hours a day, every day of the week. (He looks towards the
Burgtheater). The only thing that is left to this poor, immature race
is the theatre. Austria itself is nothing but a stage-set on which
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everything is chaos, putrefaction and degradation, a roll-call that
hates itself, six and a half million abandoned people, six and a half
million half-wits and furious loonies who constantly demand a
director at the top of their voices. The director will come and definitively plunge them into the abyss. Six and a half million extras who
are insulted on a daily basis by a few criminal actors installed in the
Hofburg and the Ballhausplatz and who will one day sink them all
again into the abyss. The Austrians are possessed by misfortune, the
Austrian is an unhappy wretch by nature and if he is ever happy he
is embarrassed about it and conceals his happiness under his
despair.]
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Merzbild
 September . Liturgical objects, silver, bonds, watches and stolen jewels
discovered on the militia prisoners. Palma de Mallorca. Various Authors. Historia
de la Cruzada Española. Vol. XVI. Photograph, Herrein.
 September . Discs, strips of canvas, a cigarette, pieces of wire and watch
parts with oil paint. Merzbild A (The Psychiatrist), also known as The Mental
Health Expert. Kurt Schwitters. Berlin. Mixed technique and collage on canvas.
. x . cm. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.
——————
Merzbild
Given that they said, at least in their own propaganda, that the militias
attacked banks, rich people’s houses and churches in Barcelona before
they came to the island and that they did not redistribute money or gold
or silver as all material goods of any worth were to be abolished, and
now that we have got them prisoner can see that their pockets are
absolutely bulging and their bags are crammed with chalices, silver
rosaries and gold ciboria, jewels, money, votive silver medals and
women’s earrings as well as earrings from religious images, not to mention necklaces, large and small coronets, gold bracelets and sets of china
and watches that are clearly not religious, what I say is that the revolutionaries’ big plan is robbery and that the thieves are wearing the initials of the CNT.
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Merzbild
The material is as inessential as I am myself. The really important thing
is the way it is assembled, as the material is inessential. I use whatever
material the picture allows. Just as I compare different types of materials, in front of the oil painting I have a window, as apart from comparing colour with colour, I also compare line with line, form with form,
etc. even material with material, for example, wood with canvas. I call
this idea of the world, from which this artistic form came about,
MERZ.
Michel de Certeau
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Michel de Certeau
Michel de Certeau
 July . Figure of Christ temporarily adorning a public garden in
Barcelona. On its head is a paper hat with what seems to be a crossed-out
swastika while its body is decorated with the initials of the CNT. The figure of
Christ is a stone sculpture made in Olot. Barcelona. Photograph, Hans Namuth.
 July . Unpublished photograph of Michel de Certeau removing his
cassock in the courtyard of the Jesuit seminary in which he trained. The red cap
is a sign of his academic merit. Jesuit Archive. University of Lyon. Photograph,
Sergent Blandan.
——————
blank page in relation to the past, writing itself (in other words, creating itself as a new system) and re-making history according to the
model that it is itself fabricating (this being “progress”). It only necessary for this ambition to extend the writing operation into economic,
administrative and political areas for the project to come into being.
Nowadays and through an inversion that indicates the rate of progress
of this development, the written system is like a car, it becomes selfpropelling and technocratic. It transforms those subjects that possess a
mastery of it into operators of the typewriter, which controls them and
uses them. The Computer Society.
——————
Once the outset of the revolution had been concluded, when the
Anarchists established themselves in the city as a ruling power, one of
the principal established powers, the rules of the game began to change.
They now addressed the main institutions on an equal level. The
Generalitat saw them as a danger and one that was more imminent and
close at hand than the rebel forces. If the Republic won, it would have
to know how to get rid of “friends” like these.
The days of revolution in Barcelona saw disorder of all types. The new
marks and signs on buildings, monuments, beneath reactionary street
names, even on people’s bodies (members of the Graphic Artists’
Union painted their bodies with hammers and sickles, for example)
were the most obvious sign of the change that was taking place. A scribbled piece of paper often functioned as currency, with the value
depending on the scribe of the moment. Lorries and local transport
vehicles were daubed with the new slogans of the day: Republican and
Anti-Fascist signs, UHP or Hijos del Pueblo [Sons of the People].
Badges for the people were no more than pieces of cloth with the initials CNT-FAI hurriedly traced onto them. A new world in action.
As Michael de Certeau rightly said, tactics are legitimate when used
between disorder and organisation, between the mob and the monarchy,
the church, the government… between equals (thief to thief, bank to
bank). To speak is to be in agreement, regarding a major robbery, a coup
d’état, etc. Two institutions always talk to each other on an equal level,
with an antagonism that is intrinsic to their very nature as an institution
and which does not depend on one being stronger than the other.
——————
Revolution itself, that “modern” idea, represents the written project in
the context of an entire society whose aim is to constitute itself like a
These were moments of revolutionary change. As a result of collectivisations by the Anarchists and anti-clerical Communists it became clear
that religious objects would cease to be manufactured. A new phase had
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Michel de Certeau
arrived for workshops producing religious statues. Artes Decorativas
started to manufacture mountings for Modernist calendars in order to
survive in these new times. To update these calendars they turned to old
designs for chocolate and cigarette adverts. The new acronyms did not
go very well with the decorative chocolate motifs.
Tactics are procedures that function through the importance that they
concede to time: to the circumstances that the exact instant of an action
transforms into a favourable situation, the rapidity of movements that
change the organisation of space, etc. Tactics place their hopes on a skilful use of time, in the opportunities that it presents and also in the
tremors that it produces in the foundations of power.
——————
In Can Mató, for example, they produced shop mannequins and educational relief maps of Catalonia. There were no skilled workers so they
based themselves on ordinary printed maps that unfortunately resulted
in differences of scale that made these relief maps unusable. The volcanoes in Olot, for example, came out at the same height as the Pyrenees.
Micromuseo («al fondo hay sitio»)
282
. Details of the altarpiece on the high altar of the parish church, in the state
in which it was seen by members of the Junta during an inspection tour on  July.
On the left is Luis Martínez Feduchi and next to him in profile is Thomas
Malonyay. Sonseca. Toledo. Committee for the Defence of Artistic Patrimony.
Fototeca de Información Artística. Instituto del Patrimonio Artístico Español.
Madrid. Original print of the period,  x  cm.
. Details of the front wall which presents in the manner of an altarpiece a
number of works by popular “makers”, as they were termed by Gustavo Buntinx
and Susana Torres, respectively “chauffeur” and curator of the space, also to
be seen in the photograph. Lima. Peru. Colectivo Sociedad Civil. Museo
de Arte de San Marcos and Centro Cultural de San Marcos de Lima. Colour
slide.  x  mm.
——————
Gustavo Buntinx and his wife Susana Torres are the creators of the
Micromuseo (“al fondo hay sitio”) [Micromuseum (There’s Room at
the Back)], a museological project that plays with the different means of
the word “micro”, including small, transportable and nomadic.
Gustavo Buntinx, author of the text Power and Illusion: the loss and
restoration of aura in the Peruvian Weimar Republic, is in my opinion a
true “scene generator”. Under his critical eye groups such as N. N.,
Piensa and E. P. S. Huayco have acquired greater visibility, as have
artists such as Claudia Cocay and the above-mentioned Sandra
Gamarra and Gilda Mantilla. Lima is the epicentre of an art that provides witness in various ways to the harsh years under the Fujimori dictatorship. I would confirm the direct link between the violence carried
out on local communities and the application of Neo-liberal policies
that have devastated entire countries over the last decade, including
those in the Southern Cone of South America.
It was only Natividad Gómez-Moreno who continued to work on the
cataloguing of the paintings at this period, while Feduchi (who had
returned from Valencia) concentrated on the furniture and Mergelina
and Elvira Gascón on the objects. Meanwhile, the other half of the
Junta’s members devoted themselves to collecting up the objects.
Malonyay and Lafuente took charge of the normal confiscations in
Madrid and its surrounding provinces, while lieutenants Colinas and
Iturburuaga were responsible for works of art on the front line. In addition, the curious trip that the Ferrant brothers in Barcelona suddenly
undertook without any explanation left the Junta without leadership for
months, while its members awaited the start of a new phase full of tension and danger.
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Movimiento okupa
 March . Members of the Junta affixing protective signs to the façade
of the Carmelite Convent of Afuera, occupied by El Campesino’s troops. Alcalá
de Henares. Fototeca de Información Artística. Instituto de Patrimonio Histórico
Español. Photograph, Aurelio Pérez Rioja.
 January . The police seal off the entrance to the Colegio Mayor at number
, calle Marqués de Viana, occupied by members of the Ateneo Libertario de
Tetuán. Madrid. Occupation as analyser.
www.ucm.es/info/america/okupa.htm. Photograph, Trillo.
——————
The Junta de Recuperación [Recovery Committee] placed more value
on buildings that had been occupied and to some extent preserved by
the various militias active in the Red army. The damage often only
affected the furniture and fittings while the buildings remained in good
state.
It has been a real relief for the neighbours. The house was practically
falling down. These young people are doing it up and have got rid of the
rats and made the front wall look nice. We’re happier with them than
we are with the Town Hall. The roof was also falling down but they’ve
done that up too.
Movimiento okupa
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Movimiento okupa
Movimiento okupa
In August we also started the propaganda campaigns aimed at gaining
the collaboration of the militias and of the confiscation bodies to convince them that they should hand over the works of art that they had
seized. The National Committee of the Frente Popular had agreed at
the beginning of August to “fervently support” the actions of the Junta,
declaring that “political parties and union organisations represented in
the Frente Popular will adopt the necessary measures so that the
Nation’s Artistic Heritage will be respected and our vital work not
impeded.” However, doubts still remained about their degree of control
over the large number of committees, circles and militias that made
their own decisions, as well as the actual willingness to collaborate on
the part of the members of these sub-groups. Hence our systematic
campaign of persuasion on which the Junta embarked in early August
and which began with a series of press releases and radio announcements informing of its existence and calling for full collaboration from
all parties. All these announcements had the same script, which
described the activities of the Junta, praised the facilities that the militias had offered to them and their respect for works of art (which, it was
stated, belonged to the people and would enter into museum collections, thus giving a permanent character to these confiscations), and
described the handing over of works of art as a liberation for the militias, given the “natural impatience of these organisations who wish to
rise to their responsibilities.”
media do not transmit information or views that are totally against the
squatters but nor do they do so in their favour, simply tolerating them
as an inevitable phenomenon in a “free, modern society”. One example
within this sector of the media is the newspaper El Mundo. These mass
media carry out an institutionalising function in the sense that they
only reflect the visible part of the movement, that which is already present to a certain degree, never going beyond in search of the motives,
causes and consequences underlying these movements. As a result, the
media of this type contribute to the fact that these movements cease to
exist, although this has not happened in the case of squatting and the
alternative movement. The media talk about the squatting aesthetic,
squatting culture, squatters as a tribe, etc. in other words, that aspect of
them that attracts attention in a world in which the exotic sells.
Others sectors of the media that aim to give a more liberal image
through the selection of their news items tend to give more coverage to
social movements, such as the squatting phenomenon, presenting it in
a more benevolent light although not really more usefully as they also
give out slanted information in which the political and revolutionary
message of the squatters is concealed an intent to empty it of content,
as a consequence of which the information transmitted to the general
public from these media neither endangers nor questions the prevailing
system but on the contrary, does it a favour, given that it presents the
idea that it exists and that it offers liberty of choice and thought. These
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New Harmony
 July . Convent of the Siervas de María. Calle de la Universidad.
Barcelona. From the series Sucesos de Barcelona, no. . Relatos de sedición
e incendios en Barcelona y Cataluña. Editorial Hispano-Americana. Postcard.
Published by Ángel Toldrá Vinazo.
 March . Break up of the Community of New Harmony. Indiana.
The Harmonist. Gary Scott Collins’ ancestors and related families. A Year of
Co-existence in the New Harmony Community. Washington. Published by Rosalie
Allan Collins Collection.
——————
On reaching the refectory, the insurgents smashed up the marble tables
and took down a fine oil painting from the wall, kicking it to pieces. The
following day some friends of the convent, as well as a few nuns, walked
around the building, rescuing a few objects that had not been devoured
by the flames and looking at the huge amount of damage. Of the church
and convent only the façade remained, which threatened to fall down.
The rest was in ruins.
New Harmony
The keystone of Owen’s system was the fact that everything depended
on the surroundings, the environment and the habitat. The constant
confrontations on religious, social and economic issues resulted in people leaving or being expelled as well as new changes in the structure,
that were in turn accompanied by divisions and schisms. At the end of
May, the New Harmony community was dissolved.
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New Harmony
New Harmony
The nun that received them told them that she could not understand
why she and her fellow nuns, who looked after the sick of all social classes, had to leave their home. The men paid no attention to her and the
nun once again said that she and the other sisters were in their own
home and would not move. At this, various supporters of their community and some of the neighbours insisted that the sisters leave as the
revolutionaries would not respect anyone, pointing out that the nearby
convents of the Arrepentidas and the Adoratrices had been burned
to the ground. At eight o’ clock a nun emerged from the building to
attend the sick at Dr Botey’s clinic. On arriving at calle de Aribau she
encountered a mob who where coming to burn down the convent with
cans of petrol, ladders, iron bars, etc. Not respecting the two individuals from the Red Cross who accompanied her, they pushed and shoved
the nun so that she was surrounded by them, thus preventing her from
being rescued by any passing neighbour. At a quarter to nine when some
of the neighbours were placing a ladder against the garden wall so that
the nuns could escape to an adjoining property, a heavy knock on the
main door could be heard, which was clearly the arsonists arriving.
They started the fire in the rooms of the Chaplain, don José Lluch,
burning all his furniture and sacking all the rooms. Not finding a door
that led into the church, they went back to the main door of the convent and set it alight. After invading the church and convent they
reached the cloister where they rung the convent bell among a deafening din of shouts and cries. At that moment the Mother Superior and
eleven nuns, helped by some worthy neighbours, escaped from the garden to the adjoining property.
wool dresses. After they had got up, a group of girls would go to milk
the cows and this milk, together with porridge boiled in large pans, was
the main ingredient of the breakfast, which the children had to eat in
fifteen minutes. We had bread once a week on Saturdays. I thought that
if I ever managed to get out of there I would eat sweets and cakes until
I burst. After breakfast we filed into the community house number . I
remember the blackboards hanging on one of the walls of the classroom
and the wires with beads threaded on them that were used for mathematical exercises. There were chanting classes that we used to go over
the lessons. For lunch we had soup and at dinner porridge and milk
again. We went to bed at sundown in small cots hanging from the ceiling in rows…. We were regularly lined up and taken to the community’s pharmacy where all pupils were given a dose of a product that
smelled of sulphur. Boarders were not allowed to see their parents
except on rare occasions. I saw mine twice in two years.”
——————
One of the arsonists dressed up in an alb, dancing around to the laughter of the revolutionaries who cheered him on with shouts.
One of the functions fulfilled by rock and roll dancing derives from the
hysteria that was reserved for community dances.
The schools, which were separated into boys and girls, were for boarders. An abandoned church was used as a workshop for pupils who wanted to learn the trades of carpentry or shoemaking. Pupils slept in the
attic of the church in camp beds in lines of three, close to the workshop.
A former pupil of the school wrote down her recollection of life in New
Harmony: “In summer the girls wore rough linen dresses and Scottish
tartan ones on Sundays and special occasions. In winter they wore thick
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Novyi Vavilon
 July . Destruction of religious images at Seo de Urgel. Martirilogi
de l’esglèsia d’Urgell. -. Jesús Castells Serra. Edició Bisbat d’Urgell.
CEDOSA. “Nihil obstat, Dr Ramon Vilerdell, censor”. La Seu d’Urgell.
. Cordon Press. Roger Violet Archive.
 March . A barricade with stock from the department store The New
Babylon. Novyi Babilon-Shturm Neba (The New Babylon or Attack from the Sky).
Leningrad. FEKS. Fabrication by the eccentric actor. Based on texts by Marx
and Zola. Directors L. Z. Trauberg and G. M. Kozintsev.
——————
Novyi Vavilon
In view of the ugly look of things, the local authorities decided to act
and, accompanied by various dignitaries, awaited the arrival of the
detachment. The van in which they arrived did not take long in appearing. Monés helped the leader of the group to get out and the civic body
awaiting them appeared to inspire a certain respect. After a few minutes
the interview was over and the group’s leader, standing on the low wall
that divided the two streams from the end of the Paseo de Tetuán,
exclaimed in a boastful manner: “Comrades! We have to come back;
they do not love us Seo de Urgel; Seo de Urgel has not yet reacted; we
will make them do so.” And in fact, the next day, a double group of
Anarchists came down from Puigcerdà, resulting in a total of more than
 of them including those from Lleida and Barcelona already present
and others who would subsequently arrive. During that Sunday afternoon and the early hours of Monday the th and th of July, local lead295
Novyi Vavilon
Novyi Vavilon
ers removed a large quantity of goldsmiths’ work from the Cathedral’s
treasury. They had already taken formal control of the building in situ
on the previous Thursday. The extremely important capitular archive
with the silver urn of San Armengol was taken to the military barracks
and on  August was removed in its entirety to Barcelona, the reliquary having been by that point mutilated. That Monday afternoon saw
the start of the looting, destruction and burning of all the city’s churches and religious buildings, and over the following days the same happened to the houses of priests and other citizens. Acts of this sort were
almost always the prologue to individual killings. It should be mentioned, and in particularly in the case of La Seu d’Urgell, that outside
Anarchist-syndicalist elements had quite a few highly effective extras
associated with the cultural centre of the Esquerra party. It provided a
very useful moment for adding names of unpopular people to their
“black list”, either for their religious beliefs or for being social or political antagonists or out of simple envy of their possessions, which could
now be safely appropriated. When local leaders began to accuse FAI
members of going too far with their attacks and assassinations, no one
dared to reply to the words of “comrade” M. Arenas, expressed in a
public debate: “We haven’t killed anyone, as we’re outsiders and don’t
know anyone; all we’ve done is carry out the will of your fellow citizens.”
had fed, whom she loved and whom she had embraced. The communards fought joyfully. They fought singing, defending Paris. The New
Babylon. The oldest women do not abandon their husbands. They continue with their knitting and they know that when the moment arrives
they will take the rifle from the hands of the dead and that they also will
fire. The soldiers fall back and prepare a fresh attack. The leaders of the
Commune appear among the defenders of the barricades. They see the
result of their error: a destroyed barricade and various dead. One old
man, a member of the Commune, encourages the communards with a
song; a young man takes his rifle. The leaders of the Commune die with
the workers. The soldiers bring a cannon. The soldiers occupy the barricade. The soldier in love with the shop assistant, the soldier whom she
has fed, climbs up to the top of the barricade like a terrifying monkey.
He kills the shop assistant’s father, firing all his bullets. The barricade
is taken and nothing is left of it but ruins. Only the shop assistant is still
alive. And, as before, in The New Babylon, she cries to the soldiers:
“For sale, it’s not expensive, for sale”. Everything starts up again: the
owner, the shop, the business of selling. The Commune has died. Long
Live the Commune.
The royal army from Versailles swiftly arrived in Paris. This did not,
however, mean that Paris had yet been taken. Barricades were set up on
all sides of the city, in every street and square. Rocks, cobblestones and
pieces of furniture were piled up. A piano was dragged in and pillows
thrown down. The working people gave their possessions and their life
to defend Paris. The leaders of the Commune did not want to nationalise shops and banks. Now it is the workers who have nationalised
them. The New Babylon department store provides them with boxes,
lengths of cloth and dummies to fortify the barricades. The one located near The New Babylon is manned by the shop assistant and her
father. And the soldier who took that barricade was actually one that she
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Objet trouvé
July . Destroyed crucifix. Deicidal sadism. El Arenal. Ávila. Around Ávila
and Toledo. Iconoclasts and Martyrs. Father Teodoro Toni. Published by El
Mensajero del Corazón de Jesús. Printed by Escuelas Gráficas of the Santa
Casa de la Misericordia. Bilbao. . Photograph, Luis Yoldi.
July . Cut-off leg from a statue of Goethe. Haus der Kunst. Munich.
Entartete Kunst. Part of a Merz work by Kurt Schwitters. Reichminister
für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda. Stadtarchiv München, Historisches
Bildarchiv. . Photograph, Huhle.
——————
They were seen using the chalice as a cup for throwing dice and betting
with the consecrated Hosts as coins.
The name Merz refers to a piece of paper on which the German word
Kommerz, from Kommerz Bank, was written.
——————
Objet trouvé
In the hermitage church of the Santo Cristo de la Expiración, the
sculpture of Christ on the Cross was first shot at then destroyed in a
more horrific manner. The hands and feet were left hanging from the
cross; the bust was kicked to pieces while the torn-away head retained
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Objet trouvé
Objet trouvé
the face intact with its penetrating gaze that produced fear in the first
man who went to shoot it with his rifle. Another “likely lad” then presented himself, the roughest, coarsest one in the village and the “militia sergeant”, as witnesses inform me. Issuing foul blasphemies, he
threw the Holy Christ to the ground, damaging the bust. What happened subsequently must have been a coincidence, but the fact is that a
few days after his unfortunate act of blasphemy, he was shot by his own
pistol and the bullet wounded him in exactly the same spot as the place
that he had damaged on the image of Christ. It took some days to cure
him in the hospital at Arenal.
A sort of personal museum in which the objects exhibited and the exhibition rooms are inseparable components within one work of art,
patiently elaborated and in a permanent state of construction. As in
James Joyce’s Ulysses, life springs up in all its ramifications inside the
Merzbau. To list the content of the Merzbau: there was a series of grottoes, the sparkling treasure of the Nibelungen, the house of Kif or
Kyffhausser, with its stone table, Goethe’s Grotto that preserved a leg
from a statue of the poet in the manner of a relic as well as a large number of pencil stumps that Schwitters has used, the exhibition of art
from the Ruhr region, the organ (that had to be pushed backwards and
forwards out of the way in order to continue with the tour of the
Merzbau), the grotto of love, Señora Chichí de la Vida, etc. These grottoes, which were elements within the overall construction, were so large
that two or three people could be in them at one time. Everything was
made from throw-away materials that society had previously destroyed.
Ironically, this first Merzbau was destroyed by Allied bombing during
World War II.
——————
their impious reuse as the disdain that it implied. The paten was often
used for defecating, which was of course far from its intended function.
We can justifiably speak of a “martyrdom” of the objects in such cases
although it was not a case of their destruction or burning. Nor were
they used for financial purposes as they were not bought or sold. This
was about a desire to de-sacralize their functions by continuous, everyday use and abuse.
The objet trouvé was introduced into the visual arts by Kurt Schwitters
as a new art form related to Merz collage and the Merz structure. He
used this concept to define throw-away objects of no value whatsoever,
found by chance. They provided the bases for his collages and assemblages made up of labels, matches, bottle tops, metal and textile objects,
pieces of wire, etc. From Schwitters onwards the objet trouvé became an
essential part of object-based art that primarily expressed itself through
Pop Art and New Realism. It was the basis for Jean Tinguely’s Kinetic
devices, which were compositionally equilibrated through the use of
objets trouvés found in rubbish bins. The piles of tins of Campbell’s
Soup and the Brillo Boxes by Andy Warhol, the North American Pop
artist and producer of superstars, are objets trouvés of modern civilisation that undergo an ironic-critical distancing with respect to their consumer function by being elevated to the status of works of art.
——————
His words gave us fresh hope. We did not even mind the destruction.
We barely spoke to the priest, who was of Italian origin. We remade a
cross with a few bits of kindling, while a broken glass bowl acted as a
chalice. The priest closed the door and turned towards us. In a mood of
contemplation, we began our first mass in Latin.
The practice, for example, of using ecclesiastical sashes and stoles as
belts and liturgical objects as cooking implements. It was not so much
It is most common to deploy the term in French. Objet trouvé can, however, also be used in English. The term “found art” is rarely applied, as
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Objet trouvé
it is a poor translation. It is not that the work of art is “found” but as
you rightly say, it is created from found objects that could just as well
be a bone, pieces of paper, a bottle or a piece of wood.
Ombre Rosse
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Ombre Rosse
Ombre Rosse
July . A small church converted into a Social Centre for the village.
Barcelona. Report by the Revolutionary Movement in Barcelona. .
Ed. Mateo Santos. Information and Propaganda Office of the CNT-FAI.
Photography, Ricardo Alonso. Editing, Antonio Cánovas.
December . In the doorway of their office we see the editorial team of Ombre
Rosse before it was disbanded. Turin (Red Shadows was also the Italian title for
Stagecoach by John Ford). Student Movement/Militant Cinema Collectives.
Cinegiornale. Editing, Fernando Solanas.
these sectors: barracks, the Military Headquarters, the Hotel Colón,
churches, the prison, office buildings, etc. Some of these buildings had
even been set alight, as we have to remember that for the Anarchists, fire
has a purifying function. They threw into it property deeds, the civil
register, notarial acts, payment notes, administrative files, recruitment
books, and direct and indirect taxation. The strongly anti-clerical tone of
the film’s commentary includes clumsy lies such as the fact that the pillaging of the tombs in the Convent of the Salesas had revealed the presence of priests and nuns martyred by others of their own community.
——————
The only ones working at that time were a group of Anarchist filmmakers who filmed the resistance to the military coup in Barcelona between
 and  July. On  July Anarchist workers appointed a Technical
Commission to prepare a project for running the entertainment companies that they had taken over and which comprised almost all the
companies of this type in the city, giving its hegemony in the sector. On
the basis of this take-over and using the material filmed on the streets
of Barcelona, Mateo Santos’ film of the revolutionary movement in
Barcelona was made. The film was structured into five parts: the betrayal by the armed forces, the people take up arms, the complicity of the
Church, the march of the militiamen towards Zaragoza, and the workers’ control of the city. Those behind the coup d’état (the military, the
clergy, capitalists, the judiciary) were never personified in the film. The
revolution is shown as the militias’ occupation of places that represent
The campaigns and struggles in the world of Italian education have
clarified the profoundly reactionary, authoritarian and conservative
nature of the institutions of bourgeois culture, starting with schools, the
use that this culture has for the economic and class system, and its
apparent strength and internal fragility. With the mobilisations of 
the working class initiated its cultural revolution by rebelling against
power and its conditioning inside and outside the factory, on the street
and in working-class areas. A process of liberation of consciousness and
of political struggle was implemented whose action will be long and difficult but which has established crucial theoretical and practical reference points and has drawn up a clear demarcation line between Neocapitalist and revisionist attempts at recuperation and the demands and
real impulse of the masses. Nonetheless, we do not believe that at the
present time there exist autonomous values of the proletariat that have
remained immune to the offensive of bourgeois ideology; we note the
skill and force of the system when conditioning working-class ways of
thinking and living and those of students. The role that the Church
played at one period is now given to the school, to television, the press,
cinema and advertising. We locate ourselves at the very heart of the real
drive of the masses and what it once again expresses, with the intention
of supporting, accompanying and assuming its most profound meanings and of collaborating in the evolution of the new culture, new ways
of thinking and living, in parallel to our participation in the struggles of
the masses.
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Saint-Simon
 July . Interior of the church of S. Pedro de las Puellas. Barcelona.
From the series Sucesos de Barcelona, no. . Relatos de sedición e incendios en
Barcelona y Cataluña. Barcino. Editorial Hispano-Americana. Postcard.
Published by Ángel Toldrá Vinazo. Photograph, Canelo.
 July . Interior of the Saintsimonian church. Ménilmontant. Paris.
Inspired by the doctrinal thought of Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Count of
Saint-Simon: The New Christianity. Archivo Crédit Lyonnais. Accounts
by Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin and Saint-Armand Bazard.
——————
Saint-Simon
Two hours passed relatively peacefully but at nine o’clock groups of
people reappeared and the crowd swelled rapidly, with large numbers of
women. The doors were sprinkled with petrol and planks of wood
soaked with petrol were also stacked up against them. In a question of
minutes the doors were burning and the glow of the flames brilliantly
illuminated the small plaza and the figures in the crowd who had come
to see the arson attack. Among applause and cheering the fire pursued
its devastating task and to help it along the insurgents began to attack
the doors with picks and hammers so that the fire could get in and
spread to the interior. Shortly after this the three parts of the building
were burning, accompanied by the din of the mob and the noise of
objects falling to the ground, the noise as they were dragged over the
paving stones, the curses of some and the cheering of others and the
sound of interior walls and windows crashing down. The next morning
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Saint-Simon
Saint-Simon
it was possible to see the effects of the fire. The altars, sculptures and
baptismal font were all destroyed. The parish priest, helped by the
vergers, managed to take the Hosts out of the church. They then abandoned the rectory. The fire did not harm the archive, located by the
chapel of the Holy Sacrament.
danger! Destruction is a clinically necessary operation. Science, industry and art contribute the stones from which to build a new Christianity.
Saint-Simon would be called Saint Peter. Destruam et aedificabo.
Few th-century figures were as anti-Catholic as Saint-Simon; he
refused to take First Communion and bit the priest who tried to administer it. Later he revealed an interest in trying to set fire to Notre Dame
in Paris using worthless bank notes printed by the Convention. He particularly hated the figure of the Catholic priest and proposed locating
the scientist at the apex of the social pyramid. For him, scientists should
exercise spiritual power. With regard to the rest of the population
– apart from writers and artists who would occupy the position of the
clergy and nobility of the Ancien Régime – he considered that their fate
was to work. Everything that had come before and had aimed to destroy
the feudal and cast system did not prevent Saint-Simon from being a
fervent admirer of the Middle Ages; he recommended – and in this
respect, as in many others, he was ahead of his time – European unity,
justifying it on the basis of medieval ecumenism.
The fire’s glow lasted all night; but the plaza was deserted and fell silent
some hours afterwards, an uninhabited space. However, from time to
time it was possible to make out behind the windows of the balconies
the anxious face of an inquisitive neighbour who had got out of bed to
observe the progress of the fire and check whether the plaza was quiet
and tranquil enough to go back to sleep safely.
——————
As his systematic understanding of the world and its forms of social,
industrial and scientific production progressed, there arose an evergrowing and imperious need to attend to the problems of the spirit. A
perfect world is an empty one if one does not grasp it with the committed gaze of Christianity, and, prior to that, any other religion. We cannot live in a tranquil dream if we cannot inhabit it when awake without
the fear of thinking that we are asleep.
——————
It was seven in the evening when the insurgents made their first attempt
to destroy the historic building. They presented themselves at this hour
in the plaza de San Pedro and a large group of them approached the
church door. At that moment the soldiers on patrol arrived and on seeing them the insurgents moved away from the door, escaping down the
streets that led off the plaza. This became deserted after the soldiers
fired off a round.
Time moves on inexorably. But the movement of times, i.e. history,
does not always advance. History and time do not move at the same
pace. They often advance at a different rhythm, and thus progress is in
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Salon des Indépendants
. Free port. Paintings piled up waiting to be sent abroad. Committee
of the Governing Junta of the University of Valladolid for the Investigation
of outrages perpetrated by the Red-Separatists in the Basque provinces. Bilbao.
Photographs of Ricardo Magdalena, Manuel Ferrandis and Francisco Antón.
. Without specific instructions from any jury, works appear around the room
in calculated disorder. First Salon des Artistes Indépendants pour la Société
des Artistes Indépendants. Pavillon polychrome. Palais de l’industrie. Paris.
Photographs of Odilon Redon, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac.
——————
In the province of Vizcaya, homeland of separatism, % of its churches, hermitages, convents and monasteries have been destroyed. This has
been the general rule, as can be deduced from a the reading of official
accounts, due to the fact that barracks, supply and ammunition stores,
hostels for refugees, etc, have been set up inside them. As a logical consequence, the mass ceased to be celebrated, in some cases throughout
the entire period of Red control, and as the occupants of these holy
places, separatists or Communists, Socialists or Anarchists, had no
respect for religious objects, these places are now marked by the signs
of their barbarity and impiousness.
In late th-century Paris, artists needed a venue other than the official
Salons, the famous Salon National created by the monarchy and
continued under the Republic. The idea was thus to find a manner of
311
presenting all the works that, year after year, were rejected by the
National Exhibitions of art that were controlled by the Académie. The
“refusés”, however, accounted for most of the public space occupied by
art: the small galleries and art shops along the Seine, the writings of
critics and poets, the café debates and doings of the art world and its
artists. It was a question of giving “legal” status to the work of these
artists, whom the Académie termed profaners of the “sacred temple of
art”. The city council of Paris was able to find a venue for those who
would soon be described as “Fauves” (wild beasts).
Société Anonyme
312
Société Anonyme
Société Anonyme
. View of the exhibition in the Gothic Pavilion. Plaza de América. Seville.
Junta de Cultura Histórica y Tesoro Artístico. Hernández Díaz Archive.
Photo-library of the Geography and History Faculty. Laboratorio de Arte.
Photograph, Antonio Sancho Corbacho.
. View of the collection donated to Yale University. Yale University Art
Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. Société Anonyme Inc., was an artistic
organisation founded in  by Katherine Dreier, Man Ray and Marcel
Duchamp. Société Anonyme Archive. Photograph, Man Ray.
——————
The knowledge and abilities of Sancho Corbacho, Hernández Díaz and
Collantes de Terán made possible the recovery of numerous objects that
were practically destroyed. Many of them were little more than shapeless wrecks, but were returned to their places of origin following careful restoration. Others remained only in the memory. Parish churches
and religious houses lost altarpieces, objects, even their roofs and parts
of the structure of the buildings, as we can see in various photographs
taken at the time by the recently established Junta de Cultura Histórica y Tesoro Artístico [Committee of Cultural History and Artistic
Treasure]. These photographs were subsequently published in  as
Religious Buildings and Liturgical Objects looted and destroyed by the
Marxists in the Province of Seville. Shortly after this an exhibition was
organised in the Gothic Pavilion in the plaza de América in Seville. It
featured all the items rescued and restored as far as was possible. The
314
display was complemented with earlier photographs and plans of these
buildings. These images later entered the photographic archive and
most of them were used soon afterwards to illustrate the HistoricalArtistic Catalogue of the Province.
The thirty-two critical texts that follow were written by Marcel
Duchamp between  and  for the catalogue started in 
by George Heard Hamilton, director of the Société Anonyme. This
Anonymous Society was a collection of more than  works of art
by  modern artists – Archipenko, Arp, Boccioni, Braque, Calder,
Covert, Czaky, Chirico, Derain, Dreier, Duchamp-Villon, Eilsheius,
Ernst, Gleizes, Gris, Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, Lipschitz, Man Ray,
Marcoussis, Matisse, Matta, Metzinger, Miró, Nicolle, Pevsner,
Picabia, Picasso, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Severino, Taeuber-Arp, Villon,
and others – from  different countries, created in  by Katherine
S. Dreier and Marcel Duchamp, who was its secretary and administrator for a long period. In  the collection’s founders donated it to Yale
University. The other critical notes in the catalogue, numbering ,
were almost all by G. H. Hamilton and K. S. Dreier. All are accompanied by one or more reproduction and are arranged in alphabetical
order by artist.
——————
It was decided to hold the exhibition to reveal the barbaric actions of
the mob and to show to the city the remains of so many looted works
of art that had been rescued by the Junta Conservadora.
The negative side is perhaps the fact that I will go down in history for
having destroyed art, but the positive side is that I have also assembled
one of the best collections of that destroyed art, La Société Anonyme.
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Sol LeWitt
November . Torture victims in the psycho-technical cells. Psycho-technical
cells. Church of Vallmajor. Barcelona. From the magazine España. .
Photograph stuck in L.-Carnet’. Rediscovered by Juan José Lahuerta.
Ministerio de Gobernación. Editora Nacional. Photograph, Hermes.
January . Sol LeWitt drawing the lines of his Drawing pattern. New York.
Sol LeWitt. Magazine  To , no. . Phrases on Conceptual Art. Sol LeWitt.
Drawing. October . Ink on paper.  x  cm. Courtesy Art & Project.
Amsterdam. Photograph, Sol LeWitt.
——————
For my part I had nothing else in mind than to supply the information
requested of me. In a way I knew how to use this information but it was
not my intention to know how it was going to be used. In any case, what
I suspected made it obligatory.
It is simply a question of supplying information in the same way that a
clerk classifies the results of certain assumptions. Chance, taste or
unconsciously remembered forms will not play any part in the result.
——————
Sol LeWitt
During the first few days I was not given any food. I could not sit down
or walk around… my gaze always alighted on parallel lines, which
became lighter in colour to the point almost of whiteness under the
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Sol LeWitt
Sol LeWitt
light of the bright beam behind the glass. And on the end wall were
those brilliant, fixed, mute, immobile circles… On the sixth day something strange happened to me… I found myself alternating between a
dumb stupor at some moments and crazy excitement at others. I lost
awareness of reality and my hallucinations replaced it. The movement
of the lines and the form of the cubes produced in me such a complete
feeling of being real that I hurled myself against the walls with my
hands clenched in order to try and stop the lines and feel the outline of
the cubes. For a second the hallucination went away, the lines kept still
and the checkerboard was flat. But as soon as I took my hands off the
walls, the lines started to move and the cubes to become three-dimensional. All this is so imprinted on my mind that sometimes – particularly just after I was let out – I project them in my field of vision.
After three days of working without the slightest sign of achieving density I was exhausted. As I only had a propelling pencil, even the energy
required to change the leads added to my tiredness. I forced myself to
do the lines quicker, while trying not to make them short or straight but
rather touching and overlapping randomly to the greatest degree possible. I decided to use colours one by one until I would reach the point
when each one that seemed to me a quarter of “Maximum Density”.
My physical discomfort became an unconscious clock that determined
when I had to stop and take a break from drawing. Climbing up the
ramp to see the drawing from a distance offered momentary relief from
the physical effort. From far off, each colour created the effect of a
swarm that slowly started to make its way across part of the wall. The
drawing was paradoxical in a way. The uniform density and dispersion
of the lines produced a highly systematic effect… Having decided on
the particular difficulties of each colour, I thought less and less about
the already drawn lines until I completely ceased to think about them.
By making the drawing I realised that totally relaxing my body was only
one of the ways of achieving a more profound level of concentration. It
could also lie in creating the drawing in a totally casual, unbothered
manner. In a sense, keeping my body totally active in an almost invol318
untary way relaxed my mind. When I relaxed my mind, my thoughts
flowed gently and lightly.
——————
The accounts left by prisoners are more hallucinatory than real. They
are partly invented and partly illogical. They represent an experience
that we can never share.
Conceptual artists are more mystical than rational. They draw conclusions that can never be reached through logic.
——————
No one denies the unique nature of experience.
Illogical judgements lead to new experiences.
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Teatro Campesino
. One of the numerous “control committees”, absolute masters of the lives
and possessions of Spaniards in the Red zone. Madrid. Photographs from the
“Cifras”, Duque, Marqués de Santa María del Villar, Ortiz and Yubero Archives.
. Group of actors with the names of their characters around their necks
(Boss, Blackleg, Contractor, Peasant, etc). They visited estates and farmland,
giving performances. California. Photographs from the UFWOC, Kourilsky,
Pasquier, Jotterland and Harrop-Huertas Archives.
——————
Teatro Campesino
The demonstrations and marches brought types of men and women to
Madrid that we had never seen before. Where had they been living up
to now? What had they been doing? The women were not, as was often
said, prostitutes, but wild beasts, dishevelled, tragic, horrible, macabre.
The men had a look of sinister fierceness. They didn’t seem like the
usual ones always seen strolling about the streets or in the squares: these
hordes of demonstrators had emerged from a mysterious, terrifying
world. It made one scared looking at them. We were nervous when they
walked passed us as they smelled of crime and exuded a whiff of murder. The troops of the Vicálvaro artillery who had joined the Marxists
paraded down Alcalá. They slowly moved their artillery equipment and
clenched their fists, raising them to up to forehead level on the right.
The lorries of the Guardia Civil and Assault Guards passed by. And the
rabble, drunk with horror.
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Teatro Campesino
We are in southern California, on the Mexico frontier: a region covered
by vast, monotonous stretches of vines and fruit cultivation, whose
owners – large companies and private landowners – employ around
, Mexicans who cross the border every day, not to mention an
even larger army of illegal immigrants that numbers around ,.
These are the chicanos, North Americans of Mexican origin who live in
sub-human conditions with pathetic salaries, poisoned by the powerful
pesticides continually sprinkled by planes going over their heads. On 
September, , workers, led by César Chávez, shouted “Long Live
the Strike!” on the streets of Delano. At this point Luis Valdez decided
to give his Peasants’ Theatre [Teatro Campesino] a Green Card. A strikers’ theatre, improvised during the long workers’ marches that moved
around the California countryside. A theatre with a single script that
always ended in the same cry: “Long Live the Strike!”
Teatro de Guerrilla
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Teatro de Guerrilla
Teatro de Guerrilla
. Via Crucis of the Lord in the Land of Spain. th Station. Christ encounters
his Holy Mother. Madrid. Director, José Luis Sáenz de Heredia. Storyline and
script by Manuel Augusto García Viñolas. Editora Nacional. . National
Cinematography Department.
. Public Events for the Radical Theatre. th Event. Main Recruiting Center,
Times Square, New York. Director, Richard Schechner. TDR, no. . Interview
with Meter Schumann. Script Kill Viet Cong by Herbert Head. . Published
by The Drama Review, no. .
money, which settled on the floor, interrupted the frantic pace of work.
Traders, brokers and other employees all started to look up at the public gallery. Crowds of staff rushed to pick up the notes. James Fourrat,
who together with Abbie Hoffman had led the action, explained very
calmly: “It’s the death of money”. To prevent another such action, staff
of the Exchange have closed off the gallery with bullet-proof glass.
——————
Haven’t the bells and the stones already burned? And the marble of the
tombs, did that not burn also? But man wants the holy Mystery to burn
as well. Oh my Lord and God! He who heard you say “My son, here is
your mother” now comes to offer up the eternal. And the lamp that
watched over your altar sets alight your mantle. Oh, my God, what a
wealth of shades in the approaching night! When the women come
again at dawn they will mark their sons’ brows with the ashes that they
left.
——————
The first scene, a preface to the film that provides a historical context
and introduces the poetic tone, was a complete failure. A sort of choir,
The Furies of Communism, comprising sour-faced harpies who were
supposed to represent the most depraved side of the Marxist hordes,
sang or almost shouted: “Oh Lord, regard my sorrow, for the enemy has
grown. It has stretched out its hand to all your precious things. How the
gold has darkened! How the good gold has altered! The stones of the
Sanctuary are scattered at the crossroads of all streets…” Father Otaño
wanted to provide a musical background of the dodecaphonic type and
Manuel Augusto seemed convinced but the director, Sáenz de Heredia,
thought the idea was ridiculous.
Rat-a-tat-tat! Hey, brother, join up! The fatherland and the flag. Kiss
the flag. America needs you! We are Americans! Death to the Cong!
This is a call-up for all good Americans. We’ll kill the women and children as well! A massacre. The beat of a massacre. Rat-a-tat-tat. God
bless America! Women and children first! Rat-a-tat-tat! Death to the
Cong! America for Americans! We’ll make mincemeat of them! Rat-atat-tat! Women and children! First!
——————
Yesterday a group of hippies dropped a handful of banknotes in the
rooms of the New York Stock Exchange. The unexpected shower of
After the following heading: “To formally record the suffering that the
Communist rage inflicted on the Lord in his Holy Church of Spain”
and an image of an edition of the Book of Lamentations, the documentary begins by linking the liturgical Via Crucis of Easter with images,
most of them fictitious, of anti-religious excesses committed by the
Marxists. There is a particularly notable shot of Dolores Ibárruri along-
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Teatro de Guerrilla
Teatro de Guerrilla
side the first Station of “Christ is condemned to death”, together with
fictional profanations of liturgical objects and executions by firing
squad. Each of the Stations is accompanied by a commentary pointing
out in a mystical vein the relationship between the liturgical moment of
the Via Crucis and the sufferings of the Spanish Church. The fourth
Station is the Mystery of the encounter between Christ and his mother on route to Calvary. Manuel Augusto’s words are literally represented by a group of actors. The film studio used various items of props and
scenery: for example, the images of Christ and the Virgin are the same
ones that are destroyed in other scenes and were made in religious
imagery manufactories in Olot, while there are also gruesome lighting
effects. Sáenz de Heredia, who had worked as director’s assistant to
Luis Buñuel, used Expressionist-type photography and a number of
dramatic effects. The swearing and blaspheming heard in the studio
surprised the censorship board as the actors were all ideologically on
the side of the film and included a number of Falangists. The scarcity
of material and the urgent need for propaganda meant that each scene
was filmed in a single take. The film was withdrawn from circulation in
 on the request of the authorities themselves.
began to put forward their personal views on the war. The performance
ended rapidly, some of the dialogue became mixed up with noise from
the street, and the actors lost their grip and their ability to communicate. We realised that the very small space we had on the triangular
stretch of pavement, surrounded on all sides by traffic and ultimately
made even smaller by the crowd pressing up against us, had made the
performance brief and abstract.
I helped to prepare and direct a series of events (entitled “Guerrilla
Warfare”) that were performed in twenty-three different locations in
New York City in October . The script and three reviews of it
appeared in specialist publications. Here I would like to mention two of
those twenty-three performances. The first is the one that took place at
pm in the Main Recruiting Center in Times Square, and the second is
the one that took place at pm in the Port Authority Terminal. The
Recruiting Center is a popular place for demonstrations and the police
are accustomed to provocation of all sorts. Our anti-war event, however, attracted a large, hostile audience that crowded around the actors (if
not actually threatening them, than at least menacing), shouting or bellowing its discontent. Given that our performance was deliberately
ambiguous (an ultra-patriotic citizen might have thought that we were
in favour of the war), some teenagers took us for American Nazis and
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This is Tomorrow
. Free Port. Valuable objects that were not sent abroad due to lack of time.
Committee of the governing Junta of the University of Valladolid for the
Investigation of Outrages committed by the Red-Separatists in the Basque
Provinces. Bilbao. Photographs of Ricardo Magdalena, Manuel Ferrandis and
Francisco Antón.
. View of the room that presents an interpretation of time through Lost in
Space. The Independent Group worked at the Institute of Contemporary Arts
(ICA-London) between  and . Whitechapel Art Gallery, London.
Photographs of Richard Hamilton, John McHale and John Voelcker.
——————
After the victorious advance of our troops had made them retreat, they
left behind the holy places turned (at the very best) into dung heaps,
filled with filth and destruction, but if they had time, which unfortunately they frequently did, they set light to the churches or monasteries they had occupied without a thought for the artistic or material
value of the sometimes unique objects destroyed by these fires. The
photographs that record these acts speak for themselves.
This is Tomorrow
After World War II there is no better example of the new situation of
the sacrosanct realm of the house, the traditional home now converted
into a space for consumption, a window onto the messages received
from the outside world, a dirty repository of the most hidden aspects of
human desire. We are now in the s and, as can be seen in the pho329
This is Tomorrow
tograph, under the banner of progress (all the machines are clocks that
speed up the space) a corrupted space for buying and selling is illuminated, in which kitsch rules victorious in the everyday environment.
Tucumán Arde
330
Tucumán Arde
Tucumán Arde
. The monastery of the Santa Cruz was turned into the headquarters and
command centre of the advancing militia. The statue of the venerable bishop
seems to look irritably at the unexpected armed group that disturbs the usual
tranquillity. Toledo. Photograph published in “The Siege of the Alcázar in
Toledo”, Heraldo de Aragón, . Jordana de Pozas Archive.
. General view of the exhibition at the headquarters of the Argentinean
unions. A peaceful, cheerful group is to be seen below the images on the walls
and banners with their critiques and demands. Photograph in the exhibition
Tucumán Arde [Tucumán Burns]. District of Rosario. . Source, Noemí
Escandell.
——————
The proximity of the Holy Cross to the hill with the Alcázar gave the
actions of this part of the militia a certain prominence. The headquarters was marked out by flags, announcements, posters and slogans of the
military initiatives of the Republic army, although there were also
inevitably jeering, sarcastic ones – jokey posters, irreverent drawings
and parodies – to be seen adorning the former monastery. This was total
war and certain emergencies had to be remedied using the material at
hand. As a result, furniture, altarpieces and pictures frames that had
once testified to the celebration of worship now went into the bonfire,
whose flames warmed the militia and heated up their food. The harsh
conditions of those days and the fighting left their indelible mark on the
men, and in subsequent actions in Madrid, Guadalajara and Teruel the
experience proved very useful to us: which were the best monasteries
for use as barracks; which objects could be broken into firewood with332
out damaging works of art; which ecclesiastical garments were warmest
and lightest. An experience that we took with us into refugee camps in
exile then into the war in Europe.
On  November , at the harshest period of the mandate of the de
facto president Juan Carlos Onganía, in the headquarters of the
Confederación General del Trabajo de los Argentinos (CGT) in
Rosario, a few metres from both the Military and the Police headquarters, a group of artists exhibited film, photographs, posters and recordings of overtly political content, denouncing the serious situation
prevailing in the province of Tucumán. The exhibition was entitled
Tucumán Arde and was just one of a number of actions in a process
encompassing various phases. Working with experts, these phases
involved presenting the results of research, discoveries and reports on
social and economic issues, as well as conceptual actions characterised
by use of strategies borrowed from the mass media. Misleadingly advertised at the outset as the “First Biennial of Avant-garde Art”, the exhibition was not censored in Rosario despite its overt criticism of
Onganía’s behaviour. However, when the exhibition was presented
again some weeks later in the headquarters of the CGT de los
Argentinos in Buenos Aires, it was taken down the day after the opening following police threats to close down the union building. This decision was taken by the artists themselves, who preferred not to put the
union in a position of risk.
333
Yippie!
. Type of wedding that the new Red customs wish to impose in the future.
The couple only need to present themselves before any people’s organisation and
the union is complete. Socialist militias. Madrid. Photograph, Archivo de Prensa
Española. Abc.
. Bizarre scene in a wedding of a Hippie and a Yippie, meaning a left-wing
hippie, in the shed of the parents’ house. Youth International Party. Iowa.
Photograph, Library of Congress archives. Middle Earth.
——————
Yippie!
Other picturesque touches of life in Madrid would have been extremely comic if they were not half-tragic, relating to attempts to implement
new systems and customs in the city. On  September, for example, we
find a photograph in the Abc of the marriage ceremony of two members
of the militia, published as an example of this new form of union, as the
word matrimony cannot really be applied. The text runs: “Marriage of
two militias. On Sunday afternoon and in the simplest manner, in the
presence of Doña Josefa Sanz de Mangada, Damián Recio Escobar,
militia in the Mangada column, and Hipólita Molina Sánchez, manifested their desire to contract matrimony and formally acknowledge the
child born from their relationship, signing the corresponding document. The act was held in front of a military column and, as already
noted, within the context of its great simplicity was extremely solemn
and set a precedent for future popular legislation.”
335
Yippie!
On other occasions the incitement was deliberate, highly pedantic and
somewhat spiteful, as we see in a text published in Middle Earth in Iowa
City. Under the headline “They’re doing something!” it announced:
“Among its activities for this summer, the New Left’s agenda includes
a demonstration to disrupt the National Democratic Conference in
Chicago. It promises to be a nice little party, with Yippies smoking pot
on the pavement (civil disobedience), rock bands playing on the streets,
and our usual hordes of liberals and pacifists… Anyone with a minimum of political intelligence will know that it will all end in a big mess.
However, romantic rhetoric continues to spout from the mouths of our
leaders (The time for words is over! The moment for action has arrived!
Something must be done! It’s time to act!). The New Left’s malaise is
passion without politics.”
Zéro de conduite
336
Zéro de conduite
Zéro de conduite
 May . Les événements d’Espagne [Events in Spain]. Burning of the Colegio
de Maravillas and adjacent churches. Madrid. Pathé Journal, France. Issued from
 to . Photograph, Daniel Jorro. Pathé Archive.
 April . Zéro de conduite [No marks for behaviour]. Garde de BellevilleVillette, Belleville, Paris , France. A film written and directed by Jean Vigo.
Franfilmdis Productions. . Photograph, Boris Kauffman. Gaumont Archive.
——————
attack: the iron door gave way, sculptures and architectural elements
came crashing down; the school crackled as it suddenly caught alight.
What was not lost through looting was burned and mercilessly
destroyed. After the pupils had managed to get away the monks decided to save themselves, having asked for help that did not arrive from
official quarters. They came out wearing normal clothes but were spotted by the crowd due to their pale skins. Voices were heard inciting violence and bloodshed and the mob was on the point of lynching them
when some men with red armbands, civil guards, made their way
through and snatched the monks from their clutches. A group of evillooking types followed them to the Casa de Socorro, fired up by the
words of a street orator who was calling for the deaths of all the monks.
Soon afterwards the monastery’s hundred or so windows became
mouths from which spouted flames. The collapse of the roofs produced
a tremendous din that made everything tremble. Sparks and ashes filled
the air. And the magnificent Colegio became a pile of rubble. A wealth
of scientific material and a magnificent mineralogical museum was lost.
On the one hand, the Government (in whose breast the very revolution
that it appeared to be suppressing was nestling) had decided to proclaim a state of war, but on the other hand it believed it had to offer
some satisfaction to the insurgents, and consequently had many lawabiding people arrested. As the rabble managed to figure out the
Government’s double game, anarchy continued to prevail in the capital’s barrios. Various demonstrations of tattered individuals crossed the
city’s streets with banners demanding the expulsion of the Jesuits,
while in bars and cafés illegal leaflets were handed out encouraging
violence, or justice as they called it. Nevertheless, the arson attacks
stopped for a while. At three in the afternoon, however, Madrid once
again lit up with a new conflagration: the Colegio de Maravillas was
alight, an institution that had been run by the monks of the Escuelas
Cristianas for forty years. Around thirty fierce, dirty men began the
While a Nietzschean “transvaluation” of the “herd” morality frequently has implications that are more conservative than radical (notwithstanding the fact that many Anarchists admired his work, particularly
Emma Goldman), Zéro de conduite begins as a mere expression of contempt for the false virtues of uniformity but reaches its apogee with an
extreme, although prototypically infantile rebellion against established
order. The final gesture of revolutionary defiance on the part of the
schoolboy transforms what some might have considered a random
series of images into a specific Anarchist critique. Taking advantage of
the formal, end-of-term ceremony, which is attended by representatives
of the Church and State (a bishop and a governor), the rebellious pupils
interrupt the events with whistles, throwing shoes and home-made
weapons at the honoured guests and escaping to freedom through the
roof. It is evident that this enjoyable rebellion is more than the mere
negation of a depressing school regime; rather, it is an attack on pedagogical authority that combines anti-clerical and anti-state elements.
338
339
Zéro de conduite
Overall, and despite the fact that the film proposes something like an
educational version of Bakunin’s autonomous commune as the antidote
to repressive schooling, it is not surprising that the open ending leaves
unanswered the question on whether an alternative educational structure or a wide-ranging de-scholarisation offer a more anarchic solution.
Alan Lovell seems to underestimate the extremist implications to be
found in the ending of Zéro de conduite when he states that the “status
quo has been disturbed but not overthrown”. It is true that the attacks
on pedagogy, centred around the children, and the equivalent ones on
adult politicians, will only succeeded in replacing one corrupt and
deep-rooted hierarchy with another. Nonetheless, Vigo’s film makes a
dent in ideological assumptions on traditional education much more
successfully than many serious texts.
Zur Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz
340
. It became municipal property on  July . The photograph shows the
façade with its empty niches from which statues of saints have been removed.
Unknown photographer.
. Critique of German Intelligence. Hugo Ball. Berne. Following his break
with the Dada circle of the Cabaret Voltaire that he had founded in 
(Ball and Hülsenbeck also invented the word Dada), Ball wrote this book
in the form of articles written from  onwards with the aim of voiding
the German conscience in order to fill it with guilt over the Great War
of . Insert published in Die Freie Zeitung.
——————
The church of Sant Esteve was attacked on  July  and benches
and others objects were piled up in the middle of the church in order
to start a large fire. The conflagration was started with an incendiary
bomb and as a result most of the altars were destroyed. The sculptures
on the façade were also ripped off. The church was turned into a store
for paintings and sculptures from various museums in Catalonia. The
priest’s house was expropriated by the Town Council, and both the
house and the church underwent repairs and alterations during the war.
In fact, under the First Republic when Joan Deu was mayor of the
town, the church had already been expropriated and used for various
municipal and community purposes.
Critique of German Intelligence, published in , represents, according to Hermann Hesse, “the greatest, most honest and profound
342
attempt undetaken by Germany to arrive at awareness of the sinister
powers that led to the new Germany’s degeneration of spirit and customs, producing a state of interior guilt with respect to world poverty
and the world war. It is one of the most stimulating and unique documents of religious anarchism.”
——————
The church of Sant Esteve in Olot, turned into another Bastille, filled
up with unfortunate individuals who were locked up behind the altar
grilles like wild beasts in a cage for the crime of having a relative hidden up in the mountains or for not wanting or not being able to pay the
taxes and fees that were imposed in the most arbitrary, illegal manner
and on the pretext of public health. Inside the church, instead of the
psalms and hymns of the Christian liturgy, the notes of the Himno de
Riego and the cancan resounded, played on the organ by coarse,
scoundrelly hands. The symbol of the Trinity over the high altar was
used as a target for shooting practice. Horses were watered at the baptismal fonts while on the high altar, the commander’s dog was giving
birth to her brood.
Self-determination, freedom, equality, fraternity: the celestial words
bumped into each other. Enthusiasm and happiness lifted Paris up onto
giant shoulders and it became the world’s capital. The Pope, the executioner and the monarchy sunk into darkness and man was born alongside man. La vertu est un enthousiasme, having nothing of faith or of
dogma. Dogma is dead, as is that pedantic God who thought up the
laws on Mount Sinai. Being human means being able to dance and feel
happy. All the forces of the spirit flow through the body in a rush, all
together. “La Carmagnole” wailed and the “Marseillaise” thundered.
Minds aglow, lips frothing.
——————
343
If in addition to religious liberty we add government laws aimed at the
religious Orders, the expulsion of the Jesuits, freedom of press and
association, the obligation for the clergy to swear the  Constitution,
the authorisation of civil matrimony (), liberty of teaching, the
Republicans’ defence of the separation of Church and State and various
acts and proclamations of an anti-clerical type against church and the
clergy, the energetic reaction and mobilisation of Catholic sectors can
be understood. Their aim was to create a specific body of public opinion against the new situation that had first manifested itself in .
With regard to the anti-clerical demonstrations that were often to be
found in a number of Catalan towns and villages, Marian Vayreda noted:
“The prevailing note, however, was a sectarian, bestial hate against
everything relating to the clergy and religion. Whenever anyone got up
to speak in an academy or stood up at a club table or in a tavern, by the
second word he was swollen with anti-clerical mania.” It is thus in this
anti-clerical context that Marian Vayreda discusses a certain revival of
religious feeling, a response to a time when some sectors of university
students, as that author notes, started to take figures such as Renan and
Zola as reference points, while also being notably influenced by
Kraussist and Darwinist academics. In Vayreda’s opinion, and greatly
simplifying the complexity of political life of that democratic period of
office, the  revolution helped to polarise society into two fronts or
blocks: “The Revolution started in the countryside”, Vayreda states,
“and in opposition to a radical and emphatically anti-Catholic one,
another Catholic one established itself. Joining it were numerous
enlightened young Catholics who decided to fight on all front, both
intellectually and physically.” The characteristics of these forces of
opposition and mobilisation discussed by Vayreda are those of political
mobilisation and armed mobilisation in the form of Carlism.
described systematically or set against a specific social system without
resulting in a certain degree of conflict, is not the same as its overtly
stated viewpoints or its religious consequences. For this reason, when
limiting ourselves to the criticism that soon arises on the part of the
reader relating to the fact that the economic-political processes within
German history cannot be represented as key areas within the religious
process (not to speak of those same processes seen as explanatory bases;
rather, they have to be seen as consequences of spiritual struggles) we
thus have to renounce the benefits that we might gain from Ball’s suppositions, i.e. the experience of a necessary relationship and the ambivalence of German thought. One of the unexpected benefits of reading
Ball in the present day lies in the fact that Critique of German
Intelligence anticipated at least two of Adorno’s intentions in his negative dialectic: a retrospective intention relating to western development,
considered as irrational rather than reasoned, with the result that liberating reason appears as a concealed exception and as a secret history
that has to be deciphered; and secondly, an intention to adopt a position
in favour of the forgotten in society, the degraded, “a kind, friendly attitude regarding things, fraternity between man, animals and plants.”
——————
This is one of the most stimulating and unique Anarchist, religious
documents, which, in addition, is written in a language whose importance throws new light on specific latent issues of a reactionary type.
The experimental nature of Hugo Ball’s text, which cannot basically be
The fetid emanations of a society undergoing complete decomposition
would continue to infest Olot. The decent, upright population, submerged in a sea of tears of blood, remained holed-up in their homes,
constantly menaced by murder and theft. The citizens of Olot only
went out when they had to, while the militia and those that they
favoured prevailed in sinister triumph. The destructive pickaxe of the
godless and those who rejected the Fatherland, had laid waste to the
church of Nuestra Señora de los Dolores and had wrenched apart the
façade of Sant Esteve to “strip it of saints” in their own words, now took
over the Sanctuary of the Virgen del Tura following a vote even supported by those who declared themselves to be against actually burning
it. And the murderers and thieves, the iconoclasts and arsonists,
344
345
whether on the Committee or in the Town Hall, did not cease to devise
and undertake barbarous acts and misdeeds. Their thirst for innocent
blood and their pillaging instincts were not assuaged while their fierce
hatred of the Heavens had not achieved its maximum expression.
Lounging in the armchairs of what was the “Olot Club”, the fanatics of
the Defence Committee smoked, spat and vomited out foul words and
blasphemies. Gun magazines and missiles gleamed on some of the
tabletops. New Red propaganda posters dirtied the walls that had
already been soiled with the passing of so many tattered individuals. A
few prostitutes disguised as militias when out and about attempted to
enliven the atmosphere. Downstairs in the entrance the killer on watch,
herald of omnipresent death with his hangman’s face, revealed to the
outside world the atmosphere that reigned within. Suddenly, the lowest
and most degraded of all them started to bellow dreadful insults at
everything sacred and holy, growing ever more excited until his very
eyes seem to glow with fire, his disgusting hair stood on end and his face
became ever more diabolical, emphasising the ugly prominence of his
jaws as his faun’s snout ran spittle. After smashing his fist down on the
table he stood up, resolute and furious, and was followed out on the
street by half a dozen of his savage retinue. This was none other than
the repulsive Pelegrín Serrat, or ‘Trotsky’ as some called him, while
others call him L’escabellat. He set out for Sant Esteve with another
crime in mind.
political writings. The German schoolteacher, who was said to be the
victor of the wars of  and , was extremely reluctant to bring to
the people the liberalising attitudes of German thinkers or to present
better opinions of the people and the “herd” to high-minded circles of
intellectuals. There was a lack of love, commitment and suffering.
There were no Russian Nihilists in Germany, those pioneers of intelligence for the people. In Germany there were only pedants, dreamers
and unscrupulous and ambitious individuals. I thus consider – with the
greatest respect and admiration – that it was Dostoyevsky who was right
when in  he wrote to Maikov from Dresden: “It is the teachers, the
doctors and the students, not the people, who provoke agitation and disorder. A white-haired sage shouts out: ‘We have to bomb Paris’. This is
the extent of his folly, not his learning. Despite the fact that they always
claim to be sages, this doesn’t stop them being any the less infantile.
Another observation: the people can read and write but despite this
they are incredibly stupid: barely educated, extremely limited and
always guided by the most base concerns.” On  February ,
Dostoyevsky wrote: “They shout out ‘New Germany!’. But it is precisely the opposite. They are a nation that has exhausted its strength, as
they accept the idea of the sword, of blood and of violence. This nation
has not the faintest idea of the idea of a spiritual victory, even laughing
about it with a military brutality.” In Germany, Dostoyevsky saw the
savage Doctor Faustus, the martial funerary mask of a totally spent
theocracy.
Overall, the history of Machiavellianism in Germany, in which one
would also have to devote a chapter to Marx and Lassalle, demonstrates
that the religious thought of the Empire was systematically perverted
with regard to its use and that these struggles to determine who would
exercise the greatest authority have not yet come to an end in Germany.
However, at the same time they demonstrated the caste spirit, remote
from the people, and the scholasticism of the same period of humanist
splendour in Germany, whose representatives – Kant, Fichte,
Schelling, Humboldt and Hegel – still started with the malice and
depravity of individuals as the founding points of the State in their
[A huge cloud of dust floated over the cathedral, which had been
split open in a horrible manner, and where the dome had been there
was a hole of the same size, while from the Slama corner we could
see straight through to the great paintings that had in part been brutally ripped off the walls of the dome: now they stood out, illuminated by the afternoon sun against the clear blue sky; it seemed as if
the huge building, which dominated the lower part of the city, had
346
347
——————
suffered a terrible bleeding wound in its back. The whole square
below the cathedral was filled with pieces of rubble and people who,
like us, had come from all around, looked on in astonishment at the
sight, no doubt one of horrible fascination, and which for me was as
monstrous as it was beautiful and did not produce any sense of fear
in me. Suddenly I was confronted with the absolute brutality of war,
while at the same time I was fascinated by its monstrosity, and I
remained there looking on for some minutes without saying a word
at that scene that was still pulsating with destruction and which was
for me represented by the square with the cathedral immediately
after it had been hit and the dome savagely split open, like something powerful and incomprehensible. We then followed everyone
else to the Kaigasse opposite, which the bombs had almost completely destroyed. We remained there for a long time, condemned to
inactivity, standing in front of the huge piles of smoking pieces of
rubble among which it was said there were many people buried,
probably already dead. We looked at the piles of rubble and at those
who were desperately looking for people among them, and in that
moment I saw all the helplessness of people who in an instant
become part of war, of man, subjected and humiliated, who suddenly becomes aware of his helplessness and meaninglessness.]
348
Chronology
Chronology
Chronology
cualquier momento, en cualquier lugar.
28th November 2008.
Coleccionar, exponer. Historia del arte y
Zemos98. Seville.
Anarchivos. Seminar. Memorias
arte del presente en los museos españoles
y olvidos del archivo. Directed by
de arte contemporáneo. Directed by
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
19th February – 17th May 2009.
Fernando Estévez and Mariano Santa
Bartomeu Marí. Round table talk: Los
Abadía de Santo Domingo de Silos.
Tesauro Brangulí / Tesauro A. T. V.
/ Tesauro: CHK. Il·luminacions.
Ana in collaboration with Jorge Blasco
archivos como colección with Leire
Gallardo, Anna Maria Guasch, Yaiza
Vergara. Summer courses. Universidad
Complutense. El Escorial. Madrid.
2009
13th May – 27th September 2009.
Silo. Exhibition and publication. Museo
Burgos.
Catalunya visionaria. Curated by Pilar
Hernández, Juan José Lahuerta, Antoni
28th April 2009.
Parcerisas. Presentation of various
Muntadas, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina and
Archivo F.X.: La ciudad vacía:
Política. Book published by the
materials from the Archivo F.X. CCCB.
Antonio Weinrichter. CAAM. Centro
1st July 2008.
Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de
Atlántico de Arte Moderno. Las Palmas
Fundació Antoni Tàpies. Presentation at
Barcelona.
de Gran Canaria. Canary Islands.
Ensayo y demolición (para un
centro de arte en Sevilla-caS). Un
18th February 2009.
1st November 2008.
prácticas artísticas actuales, revisión y
14th April 2009.
Taller, laboratorio, ensayo. Ensayo
La España fantasma. Acto maga-
análisis. Edited by Nekane Aramburu.
Entrada: Enrique Larroy.
general. Pensamiento en proceso. With
zine, number . Sobre fantasmas. Edited
AECID. Centro Cultural de España en
Catalogue of the exhibition Enrique
Miguel Morey, Perejaume, Carmen
by José Díaz Cuyás. Santa Cruz de
Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Larroy. Curated by Chus Tudelilla.
Pardo and Cristina Masanés. El ensayo
Tenerife.
Museo de Teruel. Diputación Provincial
expandido: arte, archivo y literatura.
lugar bajo el sol. Los espacios para las
the Tantarantana Theatre, Barcelona.
de Teruel.
14th June 2008.
Archivo F.X., Máquina P. H., La
internacional, etc. Museo Molecular.
Directed by Manel Guerrero, Joana
19th
Masó and Arnau Pons. La Capella.
¿Es posible la gestión territorializada y
en red del patrimonio cultural? As part
September 2008.
3rd April 2009.
Canal Cultura. Ayuntamiento de
Archivo F.X.: Dispositivo,
máquina, reloj. Seminar Crear
Lo viejo y lo nuevo. Round table on
Barcelona.
cultura, imaginar país. El trabajo del
artista y las instituciones. Speakers
of the program Translate, Beyond
González Sánchez, Pedro Salmerón
1st February 2009.
Carmen Nogueira and Chiu Longina.
Culture. The Politics of Translation.
Escobar, Isabel Aguirre Urcola, Marta
Pedro G. Romero / Archivo F.X.
Directed by María Luisa Sobrino.
Directed by Georges Yúdice. MACBA.
Klecker and María Morente del Monte.
 artistas españoles /  Spanish
Creación artística e identidades cultur-
Barcelona.
Nuevos patrimonios. With Candela
En la frontera del futuro, reflexiones
Artists. Edited by Rosa Olivares. EXIT
ales. Consejo de Cultura Gallega.
sobre el patrimonio cultural. Dirección
Publicaciones. Ministerio de Cultura.
Santiago de Compostela.
1st April 2008.
general de Bienes Culturales-Instituto
Madrid.
7th September – 30th November 2008.
imperfecto. Memoria y arte contemporá-
Andaluz de Patrimonio Histórico.
De afectos especiales. Pretérito
Archivo F.X.: Publicaciones II.
neo. Directed by Rosa Olivares. Exit
1st December 2008.
Soy el final de la reproducción. Curated
Express magazine, number . Madrid.
by Beatriz Herráez. Sculpture Center.
Lanzaderas. Código Fuente. La remez-
Políticas de museo, políticas de
archivo. Memoria y museo. Directed
cla. El Libro. Edited by Mar Villaespesa.
by Fernando Estévez. Seminar on
th edition by Zemos98. On the occa-
2008
Monasterio de la Cartuja. Seville.
28th March 2009.
New York, USA.
21st March 2008.
museum studies at the Facultad de
23rd July 2008.
Gracián. Directed by Ángela Molina.
sion of the festival Educación expandi-
Geografía e Historia. Santa Cruz de
Tenerife. Canary Islands.
El Archivo F.X.: ¿un reloj?, ¿una
máquina?, ¿un dispositivo?
Art&Co magazine, number . Madrid.
da. La educación puede suceder en
352
La revuelta subterránea. By Jota
353
Chronology
Chronology
Contemporary Art. State Museum of
Manuel Borja-Villel, José Díaz Cuyás,
18th October 2007.
Contemporary Art. Ministry of Culture.
Ignacio Gómez de Liaño and Teresa
A de Archivo. Ayermañana. Registros.
Tomar partido. La crítica del arte.
Thessalonica, Greece.
Grandas. Palazuelo. Proceso de trabajo.
An exhibition curated by Rosa Pera and
Exhibition catalogue. MACBA.
Gonzalo Puch. Facultad de Bellas Artes.
14th – 15th May 2007.
Barcelona.
Cuenca.
table talk with Santiago Eraso and
13th December 2006.
1st October 2006.
13th October – 10th November 2007.
workshop. Special Edition. Editing
Archivo F.X.: Publicaciones I.
Workshop directed by Miren Jaio and
como son. Interview. Exit magazine,
2007
Artistas versus críticos. El Cultural
magazine, newspaper El Mundo.
7th October 2006.
Editando el Archivo F.X. Round
Madrid.
Soy el final de la reproducción. Curated
Oier Etxeberria. Periferiak’07. Centro
Crítica de la mediación. Política
entre vista, notas a siete entrevistas de actualidad. Monographic
by Beatriz Herráez. Castillo/Corrales.
Cívico San Francisco. Bilbao.
course: Políticas del arte. Ideología y
Respuestas. Arte y política: las cosas
number . Madrid.
estrategia en la contemporaneidad.
Paris, France.
30th September 2006.
9 May 2007.
Coordinated by Carlos Jiménez.
¿Vaciar la ciudad? Urban Mutations.
9th October 2007 – 13th January 2008.
Segundo diálogo de los números.
CENDEAC. Murcia.
A Chocolataria. Santiago de Compostela.
Hojas de Libre Circulación y
otras. Macba im/al/at Frankfurter
Teresa Grandas. Palazuelo. Proceso de
1st December 2006.
6th July 2006.
Kunstverein. Curated by Manuel Borja-
trabajo. Round table talk. Museo
Señora Doña Memoria Histórica.
La ciudad vacía: La pel·lícula.
Villel and Chus Martínez. Frankfurter
Guggenheim. Bilbao.
Exhibition for the th Anniversary of
Shown during the season Arquitectura:
the Spanish Second Republic. Open to
lenguajes fílmicos. La ciudad contem-
4th May 2007.
public participation. Muelle de la Sal,
poránea. Directed by Santiago Eraso
Seville.
Tesauro A. T. V. Barcelona .
Ni archivo, ni memoria histórica,
ni pacto político de la amnesia.
Curated by Teresa M. Sala. Van Gogh
Types of Public Art. Directed by
26th November 2006.
Convento de Santa María de los Reyes.
Museum. Amsterdam, Holland.
Fernando Castro Flórez and Miguel
Bibliografxía. In collaboration with
Seville.
Cereceda. Contemporary Humanities
the project Vandalismo y poder en
Course. Universidad Autónoma. Madrid.
Sevilla, de la periferia al centro. Head
researcher, Assumpta Sabuco i Cantó.
Más mal de archivo. Presentation
Heterotopias, di/visions (from here and
4th April 2007.
Team members, Mario Jordi Sánchez,
of artistic projects for the web by the
elsewhere). Curated by Catherine
Un conocimiento por el montaje.
Franciso Aix Gracia. Seville.
David. Thessalonican Biennale of
Interview with Georges Didi-
Contemporary Art. Ministry of Culture.
Huberman. Minerva magazine, number
1st November 2006.
Centro Cultural Conde Duque. Madrid.
Yeni Tzami, Thessalonica, Greece.
. Círculo de Bellas Artes. Madrid.
Portadas, galletas, fundas, cajas,
carátulas… Vinil. So i col·leccionisme.
9th – 16th June 2006.
th
With Ignacio Gómez de Liaño and
Kunstverein. Frankfurt, Germany.
st
th
21 September 2007 – 20 January 2008.
24th May 2007.
La ciudad vacía: Los trabajos.
and BNV Producciones. Dirección
General de Arquitectura y Vivienda.
22nd June 2006.
Museo Patio Herreriano. www.exploradorarte.com. MediaLabMadrid.
Publication. Alternative texts.
La ciudad vacía: El Mundial. Solar
Tesauro: ETEPOTO∏IE∑.
14th December 2006.
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Calle Casta Álvarez. Los Vacíos
Heterotopias, di/visions (from here and
Diálogo de los números. Tres
MACBA. Barcelona.
elsewhere). Curated by Catherine
monólogos y dos diálogos en torno a los
of the old quarter. En la Frontera.
David. Thessalonican Biennale of
trabajos de Pablo Palazuelo. With
Zaragoza.
21st
May –
12th
2006
September 2007.
354
Cotidianos. Activities in the tenements
355
Chronology
Chronology
29th April 2006.
Fernández, Andrea Avaria, Marc
27th January – 16th April 2006.
Rubert de Ventós. Fundació Antoni
Afectos especiales. Art i memoria.
Dalmau, Santiago Subirats, Teresa
Tàpies. Barcelona.
11th July 2005.
Series of debates. Can Xalat. Mataró,
Tapada, Lucrezia Miranda, Nuria
Archivo F.X.: La ciudad vacía.
Comunidad. Fundació Antoni Tàpies.
Barcelona.
Sánchez and María Fernanda Casorio.
Barcelona.
Publicaciones  y su . La Revista
Fundació Antoni Tàpies. Barcelona.
2005
3rd – 7th April 2006.
La ciudad vacía: Arquitectura
prematura. Seminar. Postgraduate
13th – 16th March 2006.
28th December 2005 – 8th January 2006.
La ciudad vacía: Ute Meta Bauer.
El doble. Copilandia, a project by the
magazine, number . Summer. MACBA.
Barcelona.
course in Design, Art and Society.
Seminar on Photography and Archives.
Gratis collective. Sevilla Entre Culturas
Contributions to Public Space.
Masters course in Photography, Art and
Festival. caS. Seville.
Escola Superior de Disseny. Elisava.
Technology. Directed by Pep Benlloch.
Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Barcelona.
Universidad Politécnica de Valencia.
Utz. II Salón del Carbón. La
8th April 2005.
30th – 31st March 2006.
10th February 2006.
Infiltración. CNT. La Carbonería, Seville.
Archivo F.X.: La ciudad II.
La ciudad vacía: The Red Tapes,
.ª parte. Forum on Neighbourhoods.
De(s)montaje. Commentary on the
20th December 2005.
Registros imposibles: el mal de archivo.
film La seducción del caos by Basilio
6th July – 26th September 2005.
Publicaciones . La Col·lecció.
MACBA. Barcelona.
Presentation as part of the season
Directed by Félix de la Iglesia and José
Martín Patino. Sala Joaquín Turina.
Tesauro: NATURA. Publication on
Directed by Beatriz Hérraez and Sergio
Ramón Moreno, with Manuel Delgado,
Centro Cultural El Monte. Seville.
Free Sheets numbers , , and . Neutra
Rubira. XII Jornadas de Estudio de la
magazine, number : “Contra la
Imagen of the Comunidad de Madrid.
Antonio Molina Flores, Gerard Horta,
Santi Barber, Antonio Collados, Aula
2nd February 2006.
resistencia”. Colegio Oficial de
Abierta, Beatriz Preciado, Marina
Excéntricos. Diaries, mail and
Arquitectos de Sevilla. Seville.
4th – 9th April 2005.
Garcés, Jorge Benítez, Carlos Miranda,
María Ruber and Rizoma. Coordinator:
newspapers, coordinated by Enrique
7th December 2005.
with Manuel Delgado and Juan José
Valentín Roma. Available digitally.
Vila-Matas. With Antonio Molina Flores,
Justo Navarro, Alfredo Valenzuela,
La ciudad vacía: The Red Tapes,
.ª parte. Forum on Neighbourhoods.
Lahuerta. La Casa Encendida. Madrid.
Consejería de Obras Públicas y
Transportes. Junta de Andalucía.
José Antonio Garriga-Vela, Francisco
Directed by Félix de la Iglesia and José
31st March 2005.
Seville.
Correal, Laura García Lorca and a
Ramón Moreno. Digitally available.
conversation with Sonia Hernández.
Consejería de Obras Públicas y
Afueras de la política: cultura de
masas, movimientos sociales y
nuevas construcciones visuales.
Fundació Antoni Tàpies. Barcelona.
23rd – 27th March 2006.
The Empty City: FEKS. Seminar.
Archivo F.X.: La ciudad. Workshop
Transportes. Junta de Andalucía.
Seville.
Season on Mediación y construcción de
públicos. Module for the Masters in Art
Bauhaus – Cathedrals Project. Part of
1st February 2006.
program Look. Sala Endanza. Seville.
Alrededores de la ciudad vacía.
9th November – 17th November 2005.
Criticism and Communication. Directed
Coordinator: Juan José Lahuerta.
Alrededores. Seminar coordinated
by Xavier Antich. Universitat de Girona.
10th March – 10th April 2005.
18th March 2006.
Texts by Juan José Lahuerta, Francesc
Subterráneos. Research, workshop
Muñoz, José Luis Oyón and María
by Juan José Lahuerta. With Ángel
Rubert de Ventós. L’Avenç magazine,
González García, Francesc Muñoz,
Fondo F.X. Fundación Marcelino
and seminar coordinated by Manuel
number . Rodalia, la ciutat del subur-
Itziar González, Iván Bercedo, Jorge
Botín Art Fund. Fundación Marcelino
Delgado. With Gerard Horta, Deborah
bi. Barcelona.
Mestre, José Luis Oyón and María
Botín. Santander.
356
357
Chronology
Chronology
24th February 2005.
10th June 2004.
Curated by Horacio Fernández.
cristiano. Edition of Lo nuevo y lo viejo.
El Saco F.X. Paper. Congress looking
Publication available. Fundación ICO.
¿Qué hay de nuevo, viejo? with text by
Madrid.
Roberto Bolaño, Narcís Selles and
into economic relations of the arts in
Tesauro: Badiola / Sierra: retórica y terror, terror y retórica.
Spain. Vegap. Fundación Arte y
Round table organized by Fernando
Derecho. Madrid.
Castro Flórez with Carlos Vidal and
22nd May 2004.
Dimensiones variables. Directed by
Javier Fuentes. La fascinación de la
Destruir el arte, construir la ciudad. Round table talk with Manuel
Valentín Roma. Espai Zero1. Museo
violencia y la cobardía del pensamiento.
El extraño maridaje entre arte y terror.
Delgado. Presentation of the publication
2004
27th November 2004.
Gerard Horta. Part of the project
Comarcal de la Garrotxa. Olot, Gerona.
Tesauro: Biacs. Round table talk and
“Laocoonte devorado. Arte y violencia
Lo nuevo y lo viejo. ¿Qué hay de nuevo,
publication. A propósito de la Biacs:
política”. Artium. Vitoria-Gasteiz.
viejo? Part of the project Dimensiones
Laboratorio Sevilla. Launch of the
variables. Directed by Valentín Roma.
Laboratorios F.X. project. Presentation
políticas culturales. Parabólica, illustrat-
5th – 19th March 2004.
ed magazine. Organized by BNV / arte-
3rd June – 18th July 2004.
Espai Zero1. Museo Comarcal de la
of the guide book Sacer, fugas sobre lo
facto. Sala Endanza. Seville.
Los trabajos. Archive and exhibition.
Garrotxa. Olot, Gerona.
sagrado y la vanguardia en Sevilla.
23rd – 24th November 2004.
by Horacio Fernández. Caja Suiza.
5th May 2004.
and the actors Mercedes Bernal, José
Memoria-Me moriría. “Pensar el
Centro Cultural Conde Duque. Madrid.
Tesauro: Pedro Álvarez. Exhibition
Ramón Muñoz and Javier Centeno.
Attended by David González Romero
Coordinated by Amparo Lozano. Aided
conflicto”. Sessions on political antagonism, memory and history. Debates.
2nd June 2004
With Francisco Espinosa and Isaac
Archivo. Text for Historia de la
Rosa; Antonio Orihuela and Pedro G.
mirada, published in Historias,
Pedro Álvarez y amigos. Vacio9 Gallery.
Casa del Libro, Céfiro and Mundo
Madrid.
Cofrade bookshops. In collaboration
22nd April 2004.
Americanos. Universidad Internacional
de Andalucía arteypensamiento. Seville.
with the Escuela de Estudios Hispano-
Romero. Tierradenadie Ediciones.
directed by Horacio Fernández.
Tesauro: Masa y multitud. Round
Centro Cultural Valverde. Madrid.
Festival Internacional de Fotografía y
table talk: Against the Masses, with
Artes Visuales. Antonio Machado Books.
Antoni Muntadas and Isidoro Valcárcel
Madrid.
Medina. Chairman: Miquel Molins.
Presentación Abierta. Presentation
Coordinated by Fèlix Fanés. Dalí.
of the Archivo F.X. and tour of
1st June 2004.
Cultura de masas. CaixaForum.
MNACTEC. Museu Nacional de la
El Archivo. Internet access to the
Barcelona.
27th October 2004.
Campana sobre campana.
Analogías entre cultura visual y
músicas. Construcción y destrucción de la imagen en torno al
sonido. Conference and images.
2nd March 2004.
Ciència i la Tecnologia de Catalunya.
Sala Diesel. Processos Oberts. A Hangar
Archivo F.X. Developed by the Museo
Patio Herreriano. Program directed by
25th March 2004.
project. Directed by Manuel Olveira.
Arte y sinestesia season. Fundación
Víctor del Río. www. museopatioherre-
Tesauro: Sacer. Interview with David
Terrassa, Barcelona.
Aparejadores. Seville.
riano.org/www.fxysudoble.org
González Romero. Parabólica, illustrat-
(archive). exploradorArte. Patio
ed magazine. Seville.
19th February 2004.
Contemporáneo Español. Valladolid.
13th March – 16th May 2004.
El caso de la máquina de efectos
especiales. Text in the catalogue for
Publication available. Museo Provincial
27th May – 19th September 2004.
Lo viejo y lo nuevo. ¿Qué hay de
nuevo, viejo? Archive and exhibition.
Palau Moja. Generalitat de Catalunya.
de Lugo. Lugo.
Tesauro: Rappel à l’Ordre.
Edition of ten Free Sheets. Published by
Barcelona.
Exhibition Imágenes de historia.
Figura n°  in collaboration with El arte
28th
July –
15th
September 2004.
Herreriano. Museo de Arte
Tesauro: Bataille. Exhibition:
Excéntricos. Curated by Jaime Lavagne.
358
the exhibition Dalí. Afinitats electives.
359
Chronology
Chronology
17th Februrary 2004.
19th January – 7th May 2004.
5th June 2003.
12th March 2003.
Las tentaciones de san Antonio.
Wall, Walk, Waltz. Art Lab and
Presentación Sacer: La ciudad.
Participation in the conversations in the
Workshop. Museo Nacional de
Tesauro: AntimonumentoNonsite-Okupa-No lugar. Lúcidas
catalogue for the exhibition Antoni
Escultura de Valladolid. Patio
fantasmagorías. Proyecciones y sombras
Sevilla y lo sagrado. Chapter , “The
Tàpies Retrospectiva. MACBA. Barcelona.
Herreriano. Museo de Arte
en el arte actual. Doctorate in Fine Arts
City”. Reencuentros. Season of lectures
Contemporáneo Español. Valladolid.
and Categories of Modernity. Sección
at the Escuela de Arquitectura de
11th February 2004.
Tesauro: Curadores. Contribution to
Presentation of Sacer. Fugas sobre
2003
Departamental de Historia del Arte.
Sevilla. Cua4tro. nexus6arquitectura.
Taught by Aurora Fernández Polanco.
Seville.
the project Files, directed by Octavio
31st July 2003.
Facultad de Bellas Artes. Universidad
Zaya for the MUSAC. Leon. Publication
Políticas de la iconoclasia:
destruyendo archivos. Lecture and
Complutense de Madrid.
papers. El giro cultural en el arte con-
30th May 2003.
MEIAC Stand: Tesauro: Cheka.
temporáneo: de la biografía al archivo.
Presentación Sacer: Fugas.
Reproduction of the Psychotechnic
presented at the ARCO Fair. Madrid.
9th February – 13th February 2004.
12th – 20th February 2003.
El archivo F.X. se vende en Arco.
Laboratorio T.V. Launch of the
Directed by Anna M.ª Guasch. El
Presentation of Sacer. Fugas sobre
Cheka (jail) of the Church of Vallmajor
Laboratorios F.X. project. Document and
Escorial. Fundación Complutense.
Sevilla y lo sagrado. Web publication
in Barcelona, . Tomás March
Television: Chelo Gutiérrez, J.J.G
Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Rodulfo&Diana López Gamboa and Mac
number , centrodearte.com. Análisis
Gallery Stand: Tesauro Botín (oro).
del espacio. Nuevas geografías en
Juana de Aizpuru Gallery Stand:
de Paz. City and Society: Curro Aix,
24th July 2003.
proceso. Web magazine and forum
Tesauro Botín (plata). ARCO. IFEMA.
David Gómez and José Pérez de Lama.
edited by centrodearte.com. Madrid.
Palacio de Exposiciones Juan Carlos I.
Criticism and Culture: Mar Villaespesa,
Políticas de la iconoclasia: intercambio simbólico. Lecture and
José Yñiguez and José Lebrero Stäls.
papers. Culto y profanación de las
26th April 2003.
Madrid.
Practice and Art: Salud López, Isaías
imágenes. Directed by Jorge Lozano.
Tesauro: Pabellón del este. Panel
Griñolo and Santiago Barber. History
El Escorial. Fundación Complutense.
with images and text. Standard method
Tesauro: Relacional. Lista de boda.
and Memory: Francisco Espinosa, José
Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
of exhibition. A project by the
A project on relationships by Mercedes
30th January 2003.
Plataforma Cultura contra la Guerra.
Prado and Gloria Prado for MEIAC in
Velasco. Language and Translation:
23rd July 2003.
Opposite the Museo Nacional Centro de
Badajoz.
Nadine Janssens, Carlos Iniesta and
Refutación n.º . Research project
Arte Reina Sofía. Madrid. Exhibition of
Luis Gutiérrez Molina and Custodio
Antonio Orihuela. Philosophy and
and annotated book. Amendments to
materials. Asociación de Artistas
Aesthetics: Manuel Barrios, Juan Bosco
the book Checas de Madrid. Las cárceles
Visuales de Madrid (AVAM). Madrid.
Díaz Urmeneta and Juan Antonio
republicanas al descubierto, by César
27th January 2003.
Hasta el archivo. Round table talk
with Rafael Canogar, Simeón Sainz and
Rodríguez Tous. Anthropology and
Vidal. El Ojo de la Historia.
5th April 2003.
Miguel Cereceda. Art and politics in the
Community: Ángel del Río, José María
Belacqva/Carroggio, Barcelona, .
Tesauro: Fénéon. Presentation of
s. Course on Arte y política en la
Valcuende, Manuel Losada&Marcos
Museo de la Basura, while the hunger
images. Exhibition in tribute to Joan
España de la democracia. Círculo de
Crespo. Flamenco and Others: José Luis
strike of the street cleaners and rubbish
Quer, anarcho-sindicalist militant from
Bellas Artes. Madrid.
Ortiz Nuevo, Luis Clemente and Juan
collectors of Tomares continues. Sala de
Figueras, killed in combat during the
Vergillos. In collaboration with Canal
Estar. Seville.
war against Fascism. Sala Ictineu. CNT.
Sur TV, Universidad Internacional de
Figueras.
Andalucía arteypensamiento. Seville.
360
361
Chronology
Chronology
“Documental” in the Culturas supple-
Foro Social de Sevilla. Produced by the
Altos Estudios de Granada. Universidad
23rd December 2002.
ment of La Vanguardia newspaper.
Archivo F.X. Seville.
Internacional de Andalucía arteypen-
La máquina del arte: los archivos
F.X. Interview with Pedro G. Romero
Barcelona.
by Pilar Parcerisas. Papers d’Art maga-
27th November 2002.
Vitrina de Valencia. Nomenclature
31st May – 8th September 2002.
zine, number -. Fundació Espais
Efectos especiales . La cárcel.
V-1. Archive Culture: Memory, Identity
El taller de Gaudí. Original sound-
d’Art Contemporani. Gerona.
Film show of the Archivo F.X.
and Identification. Project by Jorge
track for the Sala del Obrador at
Publication of Free Sheet “fx numbers
Blasco Gallardo. La Nau. Universidad
Univers Gaudí. Curated by Juan José
, , , and ”. Cultural practice and
de Valencia.
Lahuerta. CCCB. Barcelona.
2002
samiento. Seville / Granada.
17th July – 29th September 2002.
22nd December 2002.
Tesauro: Archivos. Ten entries from
civic action. Series of debates on pro-
the Archivo F.X. Published by Culturas
duction and management of culture and
3rd – 14th June 2002.
12th-13th March – 30th April 2002.
de Archivo. Project directed by Jorge
art. Coordinators: José A. Sánchez, José
A. Gómez Hernández. Vicerrectorado
Laboratorio blanco / Laboratorio
rojo. Launch of the Laboratorios F.X.
La Setmana Tràgica. Archive and
Blasco Gallardo. Fundació Antoni
Tàpies. Barcelona. Universidad de
de Extensión Cultural y Proyección
project. (Program of activities and film
“FX numbers  and ”. Publication of
Valencia. Ediciones Universidad de
Universitaria. Universidad de Murcia.
shows: Reportaje del movimiento revolu-
La Setmana Tràgica. Espai Vau /
cionario en Barcelona, , Mateo
Archivo Alexander Cirici. Departamento
Salamanca. Focus  Collection. Centro
lectures. Publication of Free Sheets
23rd November 2002 – 19th January 2003.
Santos,  mins. ¡Vivan los hombres
de Historia del Arte. Universitat de
El tocino y la velocidad. Text in
libres!, , Edgar Neville,  mins 
Barcelona. Centre d’Art Santa Mònica.
catalogue and  entries in the Archivo
secs. Distribution of Free Sheets num-
Barcelona.
Tesauro Botín. Archive and exhibi-
F.X. Comer o no comer. Centro de Arte
bers  and ). In Seville: Guest artists:
tion. Thesaurus of the city of Santander
de Salamanca.
Julio Jara, Salomé Delcampo, La
de Fotografía. Salamanca.
in the Archivo F.X. Tesauro Botín, five
7th March – 30th April 2002.
Fiambrera. Sevilla: procesos iconoclas-
Capital de la República. Archive,
tas. José Luis Gutiérrez Molina, David
exhibition and lectures. Rector Peset
pieces with  framed and packed
1st November 2002.
photographs. Publication of Free Sheet
Tesauro: La Setmana Tràgica.
González Romero, Francisco Espinosa.
College. Publication of Free Sheets
(Hoja de Libre Circulación) number .
Collaboration. DC. Revista de crítica
Iconoclasia, vanguardia e historia del
“FX numbers ,  and ”. Publication of
 entries for the catalogue. Itineraries
arquitectónica magazine, number -.
arte: Juan José Lahuerta, José Díaz
En el ojo de la batalla. Universidad de
 ‒ . IX Becas de Artes Plásticas.
Modernism. Departamento de
Cuyás, Amador Fernández-Savater. In
Valencia. Valencia.
Fundación Marcelino Botín. Santander.
Composición Arquitectónica.
Granada: Guest artists: Alberto Baraya,
ETSAB-UPC. Barcelona.
Chema López, Bleda y Rosa. Granada:
11th – 15th December 2002.
Tesauro Blasfemias. Slide show and
30th July 2002.
15th February 2002.
corpus iconoclasta: José Antonio
La propaganda como F.X. Lecture.
González Alcantud, Juan Manuel
Slides. Workshop: Arte como práctica de
Free Sheets A and B. Vervarium. Space
Groszstadtarchitektur. Transversal.
Barrios Rozúa, Javier López Gijón.
la vida cotidiana. Antonio Orihuela.
directed by Valentí Roma for
Revista de cultura contemporània maga-
Iconoclasia, Lacan y psicoanálisis:
CAAC, Seville.
Kosmopolis . CCCB. Barcelona.
zine, number 18. Ajuntament de Lleida.
Carmen Ribés, José Luis Chacón, Adolfo
Jiménez. In collaboration with: CAAC,
12th February 2002.
4th December 2002.
22nd July 2002.
Facultad de Biblioteconomía y
Tesauro: Jorn. Text in the catalogue
La checa de Vallmajor. Entries
Recorrido F.X. n.º . Guide to the
Documentación de la Universidad de
for the exhibition Asger Jorn. Fundació
from the Archivo F.X. Publication for
anti-globalization march called by the
Granada and Fundación Euro-Árabe de
Antoni Tàpies. Barcelona.
362
363
Chronology
25th January 2002.
2000
Efectos especiales. Film show.
16th May 2000.
Doméstico’01. Publication of FX Free
Columnas de humo. Lecture. Slides.
Sheet “failure”. Doméstico at Ventura de
Arquitectura y política series. Directed
la Vega. Madrid.
by Juan José Lahuerta. Escuela Técnica
Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona.
2001
1st November 2001.
31st March 2000.
Tesauro: Soutter. Exhibition-Auction.
Humo. Lecture. Slides. Course: ¿Es el
Solidarios . CAAC. Seville.
arte sólo cosa del pasado? Directed by
Nicolás Sanchéz Durá. UIMP. Seville.
2nd October 2001.
Tesauro: Desde la anarquitectura. Lecture. Slides. Workshop:
Thesaurus
Ceramista antes que fraile. Pepa Rubio.
CAAC. Seville.
19th September 2001.
El archivo como F.X. and
Tesauro: Desde el cinematógrafo.
Lecture. Slides. Videos. Course: Hacia
un mundo nuevo, todavía. Directed by
José Jiménez. UIMP. Formigal, Huesca.
26th July – 12th October 2001.
Tabula Rasa. Archive and exhibition.
Antagonismos, casos de estudio.
Publication of Free Sheets “FX number
, FX number  and FX number .
MACBA. Barcelona.
7th June 2001.
Un cielo sostenido por columnas
de humo. Lecture. Slides. Escuela
Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de
Sevilla. Sala Endanza. Seville.
364
Tesauro
Tesauro
$in título
¡Que viva México!
0,10
1.ª Bauhaus
Antropocultura
Antropófagos
Arata Isozaki
Archigram
Archivo Caminante
Archivo F.X.
Archivo Yasmine
ARCO
Aréthuse
ARM
Arquitectos de Voralberg
Arquitectura prematura
Arquitetura fantástica
Arquiteturas biológicas
Art and Crafts
Art Basel Miami Beach
Arteleku
Arthur C. Danto
Asger Jorn
Atelier d’architecture autogérée
(aaa)
Athens Biennial
Atmósferas
Átomos y bits
Aulabierta
Avida Dollars
A
a.f.r.i.k.a. gruppe
Aby Warburg
Acéphale
Ad van Denderen
Adolf Wölfli
Adriano Pedrosa
Agit-prop
Agustín Parejo School
Agustín Pérez Rubio
Ala Plástica
Albert Ayler
Alberto Korda
Alexander Kojève
Alexander Rodchenko
Alexander Vesnin
Alfred Kubin
Allan Kaprow
Allen Ginsberg
Aloïse
Amedeo Modigliani
Anarchy in the U. K.
Anarquitectura
André Breton
André Masson
Andrei Tarkovsky
Angelus
Anna Ajmátova
Anselm Kiefer
Antiglobalización
Antígona
Antimonumento
Antirracionalismo
Antoni Miralda
Antoni Muntadas
Antonin Artaud
Antonio Sant’Elia
Antonio Zaya
B
Balthus
Barret Watten
Barroco
Bart de Baere
Basilio Martín Patino
Benjamin Buchloh
Benjamin Péret
Bernadette Corporation
Biacs
Bicho
Bicho flor
Bienal de São Paulo-Valencia
BijaRi
366
Billete
Black Mountain College
Blast
Blinky Palermo
Bran
Brassaï
Brillo Box
Bruce Conner
Bruno Taut
Bureau d’Études
Burla negra
Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown
Army (Circa)
Clarence Schmidt
Colectivo Situaciones
Colegio de Sociología Sagrada
Collège de Pataphysique
Commercial Album
Concretos
Constantin Brancusi
Constructivismo
Contra Filé
Contre-attaque
Crematorio
Cricot 2
Cristina Iglesias
Critical Mass
Critique
C
Cabaret Voltaire
Camille Pissarro
Capital de la república
Cargo (bis)
Carl Andre
Carlo Carrà
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
Cartulinas
Casa giratoria
Casa Invisible
Casa Maltera
Casas del viento
Catedral del futuro
Cenicitas
Center for Urban Pedagogy
Centro de Cálculo
Chainworkers
Charles Fourier
Charles Mackintosh
Charles Sheeler
Charles Simmons
Cheque Tzanck
Chiara Bertola
Chris Burden
Christian Boltanski
Christian Schad
Cindy Sherman
Citizen Kane
Claire Fontaine
D
Dadá
Dan Graham
Daniel Buren
Daniel Spoerri
Danteum
Das Orgien Mysterien Theater
David Hammons
David o Monumento a Todos los Héroes
de la Revolución de Francia
Day’s End
De Stijl
Deconstrucción
Décor
Descoberta da linha orgânica
Destructivismo
DIA Art Foundation
Dick Higgins
Die Wiener Gruppe
Dinero
Dinero bilingüe
Dinero ciego
Dinero gratis
Dios y el diablo en la tierra del sol
Documenta Kassel
367
Tesauro
Tesauro
Documents
Evelyne Jouanno
Ezra Pound
E
e. e. cummings
Eat-art
Éclairs sur l’au-delà
Édouard Manet
Edtaonisl
Eduardo Paolozzi
El acorazado Potemkin
El capital. El carácter fetichista de la
mercancía y su secreto
El enigma del deseo
El futurisme
El gran macabro
El hombre de Neandertal
El juego lúgubre
El Lissitzky
El martillo sin dueño
El sueño imperativo
El teatro y su doble
Eli Lotar
Enragés
Enrique Larroy
Entartete Kunst
Equipo 57
Escuela racionalista
Escuelas de psicoanálisis
Espacialismo
Espiritismo
Estética relacional
Estrella de Diego
Estridentismo
Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum
Étant Donnés...
Etcétera
Eurocheque
Eva Hesse
Eva Wipf
F
Falansterio
Familisterio
Federica Montseny
Federico García Lorca
FEKS
Felipe Alaiz
Félix Fénéon
Félix Labisse
Fernand Léger
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Fillia
Fluxus
forschungsgruppe_f
Francesco Bonami
Francis Picabia
Frank Gehry
Frank Kupka
Frantisek Lesak
Fred Wilson
Frente 3 de Fevereiro
Friedrichshof Commune
Fritz Wotruba
Fundación Generali
Futuristas
G
Gabriel Alomar
Galería
Gamungsmalerei
George Grosz
George Orwell
Georges Bataille
Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes
Georges Seurat
Gerhard Rühm
Germania
Germania, anno zero
Giacomo Balla
368
Gillaume Apollinaire
Gilles Deleuze
Gino Severini
Giorgio De Chirico
Gordon Craig
Gordon Matta-Clark
Gregory Corso
Groszstadtarchitektur
Grupo de Arte Callejero
Gruppo N
GucklHupf
Guggenheim Museum
Guillermo Santamarina
Gustav Metzger
Guy Debord
I
I’ve got it all
Iakov Chernikov
Ian Hamilton-Finlay
Iannis Kounellis
Iconoclash
Ilya Chashnik
Inkhuk
Inserciones en circuitos ideológicos
International Istanbul Biennial
Intoleranza 1960
Intonarumori
Isabel Carlos
Isaías Griñolo
Isidoro Valcárcel Medina
Ivan Kudriashev
H
Hablar Dinero
Haim Steinbach
Hannah Höch
Hanne Darboven
Hans Bellmer
Hans Haacke
Hans Magnum Enzensberger
Hans Scharoun
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Hans-Rucker-CO
Harmonía
Haroldo Campos
Heiner Müller
Heinrich Hoerle
Hélio Oiticica
Helios Gómez
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Henri Michaux
Henri Rousseau
Hito Steyerl
Hoffmann’s House
holandaman
Horta de Ebro
Hou Hanru
Hugo Ball
J
Jacques Lipchitz
Jacques-André Boiffard
James Lee Byars
James Turrell
Javier Hernando
Jean Arp
Jean Fautrier
Jean Tinguely
Jean Vigo
Joan Fontcuberta
Joan Miró
Joan Salvat-Papasseit
Joaquín Torres-García
Johannes Baader
Johannes Baargeld
John Armleder
John Cage
John Heartfield
John Peter Nilsson
John Ruskin
Jörg Immendorf
José Antonio Hernández-Díez
José de Val del Omar
369
Tesauro
Tesauro
José Gutiérrez Solana
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Maria Olbrich
Juan Muñoz
Jules Doudin
Just what is it that makes today’s homes
so different, so appealing?
Las Agencias
Las siete lámparas
Lauri Firstenberg
Lautréamont
Le Corbusier
Learning from Las Vegas
LEF
Les yeux
Letristas
Libro
Liubov Popova
Living Theatre
Locus Solus
Los ángeles exterminados
Los putrefactos
Lost Magic Kingdom
Louie Khan
Louis Soutter
Louise Bourgeois
Luc Delahaye
Ludwig Meidner
Luigi Russolo
Lulú
Luther Blisset
Lyonel Feininger
K
Kant con Sade
Karl Schmitt
Karl-Marx-Hof
Katharina Frisch
KIAF-Seoul
Koch-Kreuz
Konstantin Melnikov
Kriegsfibel (Gesammelte Werke, Band IV)
Kunstakademie Düsseldorf
Kurt Schwitters
L
L. Platz
L’Afrique Fantôme
La arqueología del saber
La coquille et le clergyman
La Critique Sociale
La edad de oro
La Estación
La Fiambrera Obrera
La moneda viviente
La Nueva Babilonia
La part maudite
La revolución española
La Révolution Surréaliste
La revuelta
La Vía Láctea
Ladyfest
Lahuelgadearte
Land art
M
Macba
Mahagonny
Manifesta
Manuel Ocampo
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
Maquettes-sans-qualités
Máquina
Marc Tansey
Marcel Broodthaers
Marcel Janco
Marcel Marien
Marcel Mauss
María Inés Rodríguez
Mark Nash
Martha Rosler
Martin Kippenberger
370
Masa
Máscaras abismo
Máscaras sensoriais
Masse und Macht
Massimiliano Gioni
Maurofilia
Max Epstein
Max Ernst
Max Pechstein
Max Taut
Maximilien Luce
May Day Parades
Meine Akademie
Meret Oppenheim
Merry Chistmas from Chris Burden
Merzbild
Metafísica
Metafísico
Metamorfosis
MIBI (Movimiento Internacional para
una Bauhaus Imaginista)
Michael Asher
Michael Heizer
Michel de Certeau
Michel Foucault
Michel Leiris
Michelangelo Pistoletto
Mies van der Rohe
Miguel Hernández
Miguel Trillo
Mnemosyne
Modification
MoMA
Moneda restaurada
Mónica Nador&JAMAC
Montarron
Monty Python
Movimiento okupa
Multitud
Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens
Musée du quai Branly
Musée Imaginaire
N
Nadja Rottner
Nancy Rubins
Natan Altman
Naum Gabo
Nave de las Máquinas
Nein
New Harmony
Nicanor Parra
Nikolay Troshin
No lugar
Nonsite
Notice to Guests
Novyi Vavilon
O
Objet trouvé
Objeto específico
Octavio Zaya
October
Office Baroque
Okupa
Okwui Enwezor
Oliverio Girondo
Ombre Rosse
One Dollar Bills
Organicismo
Orientalismo
Orthodox
Os favelados
Oscar Fishinger
Otto Dix
Otto Wagner
P
P. Elaine Sharpe
Pabellón del Este
Pablo León de la Barra
Pablo Picasso
Palacio de Cristal
Parangolé
Partially buried woodshed
Pascal Maisonneuve
371
Tesauro
Tesauro
Passagen-Werk
Paul Celan
Paul Cheval
Paul Delvaux
Paul McCarthy
Paul Signac
Paul Thek
Pavel Filonov
Pedra e ar
Pedro Álvarez
Pedro G. Romero
Peio Aguirre
Pere Noguera
Peter Eisenman
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pierre Klossowski
Postistas
Posmodernismo
Precarias a la deriva
Prisma
Provos
Proyecto Pluja
PRPC
Publix Theater Caravan
Putrefactos
René Magritte
Residencia Matznergasse
Revolving door
Richard Artschwager
Richard Demuth
Richard Long
Richard Murphy
Richard Nonas
Richard Serra
Richard Wagner
Rinzen
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Robert Delaunay
Robert Filliou
Robert Morris
Robert Smithson
Robert Watts
Roger Caillois
Roland Barthes
Roland Topor
Rosa Martínez
Ross Bleckner
Rrose Selavy
Rudolf Steiner
Rúe del Percebe
Q
Queer Nation / Chicago
S
S/t (Serra) n.º 1
S/t (Serra) n.º 2
S/T, 1977
Saadiyat Island Quarter
Saint-Simon
Sala de exposición
Salvador Dalí
Salzburg: Superpolis
Sandra Antelo-Suárez
Santiago Cirugeda
Santiago Sierra
Sculpture in three parts
Secession
Section d’Or
Sensations
R
Racionalismo
Rafael Doctor Roncero
Railroad turnbridge
Raoul Haussmann
Rappel à l’Ordre
Ras
Raúl Deustua
Raymond Roussel
Rayonismo
Reclaim the Street
Relacional
René Clavel
René Green
372
Sex Pistols
Silla Barcelona
Simon Rodia
SITE
Sitesize
Société Anonyme
Sol LeWitt
Soledad Sevilla
Solomon Telingater
Sonia Delaunay
Spirale
Sprayer von Zürich
SPUR
Spurensicherung
Stalker
Stanley Greene
Stephan Sykes
Stéphane Mallarmé
Strategies Against Architecture
Superficie modulada
Superhelden
Supermarioneta
Suprematismo n.º 0
Suprematismo n.º 1
Suprematismo n.º 2
Suprematismo n.º 3
Suprematismo n.º 4
Suprematismo n.º 5
Susanne Ghez
Technologies to the people
Teosofía
The Armory Show
The Atlas Group
The Living Theatre
The Red Tapes
The Rothko Chapel
The White Album
The White House
Thelma Golden
This is Tomorrow
Thomas Hirschhorn
Tierra-aire
Tiqqun
Tony Smith
Torres de Laon
Tranca Rua
Transform
Trepante
Triennale di Milano 1968
Tristan Tzara
Tucumán Arde
Txomin Badiola
U
Ulrich Luckhardt
Unanimismo
unia arteypensamiento
Unovis
Ute Meta Bauer
T
Taberna del Santopalo
Tablas rasas 1
Tablas rasas 2
Tablas rasas 3
Tadeusz Kantor
Taller de Gaudí
Tamarán
Tate Modern
Team X
Teatro Campesino
Teatro de Guerrilla
Teatro Estudio Lebrijano
V
Valerio Adami
Valie Export
Varvara Stepanova
Viaggio in Italia
Vibracionismo
Víctor del Río
Víctor Zamudio Taylor
Viktor Misiano
Vincent Van Gogh
Virginia Pérez-Ratton
Vito Acconci
373
Tesauro
X
Xabier Arakistain
Viva octubre
Vladímir Maiakovski
Vormittagsspuk
Vorticismo
Y
Yeguas del Apocalipsis
Yippie!
Yomango
Yu Yeon Kim
Yuko Hasegawa
Yves Klein
W
Wandlung
Wenzel Hablik
White Zombi
Wiener Aktionsgruppe
Wyndham Lewis
Wilhelm Lehmbruck
William Burroughs
Witte de With
WochenKlausur
Wols
Z
Zemos98
Zero cruzeiro
Zéro de conduite
ZKM
Zweigroscheuzauber
374
ABBEY OF SANTO DOMINGO DE SILOS
MINISTRY OF CULTURE
Abbot
Dom Clemente Serna
Ministry of Culture
Ángeles González-Sinde
OFFICIAL CHAMBER OF TRADE AND INDUSTRY OF BURGOS
MUSEO NACIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFÍA
President
Antonio Méndez Pozo
Director
President of the Cultural Committee
Álvaro Manso Urbano
Deputy Director and Chief Curator
Lynne Cooke
Deputy Director of Management
Michaux Miranda Paniagua
 
”la Caixa”
ROYAL BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE MUSEO NACIONAL
CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFÍA
President
Pilar Citoler Carilla
Vice-President
Carlos Solchaga Catalán
Members
Plácido Arango Arias
José Capa Eiriz
Eugenio Carmona Mato
M.ª Dolores Carrión Martín
Fernando Castro Borrego
Fernando Castro Flórez
Lynne Cooke
María de Corral López-Dóriga
Miguel Ángel Cortés Martín
José Jiménez
Javier Maderuelo Raso
Michaux Miranda Paniagua
Carlos Ocaña Pérez de Tudela
Claude Ruiz Picasso
Francisco Serrano Martínez
José Joaquín de Ysasi-Ysasmendi Adaro
Secretary
Charo Sanz Rueda
PUBLICATION
EXHIBITION
Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos
 May –  September 
Project director
María José Salazar
Co-ordination
Carmen Román Llorente
Conservation
María Meléndez
Insurance
AON
Shipping
Artística Transporte Especial, S. L.
Production:
TEMA, S. A.
BALANCO, S. L.
OFFICENTER BURGOS, S. L.
Project
Pedro G. Romero/Archivo F.X.
Décor
Production: José Oliveras Carpinteros
Concept realisation: Cámaranegra
Direction: Antonio Marín
Photographs: Vicente Novillo,
Museo Español e Iberoamericano de Arte
Contemporáneo. MEIAC. Badajoz
Rappel à l’Ordre
Photographs: Gerhard Illi
Posmodernismo
Documentation: J. Vaamonde Horcada
Donation. IPCE. Ministerio de Cultura
Reconstruction: Inmaculada Salinas
Photography: Claudio del Campo
Antiglobalización
Economic History of the Peseta:
Antonio Marín, Curro Marín
Coin minting: Prados e Hijos, S. L.
El Capital
Archive: Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo
Programme design: Mario Berenguer
Production: Fundació Antoni Tàpies
Concept and Direction
Co-ordination
María José Salazar
Carmen Román Llorente
Every care has been taken to identify the holders
of the authors’ rights. Any unintentional error or
omission must be communicated to the publisher
in writing and will be corrected in subsequent
editions.
Acknowledgements:
Managment and Production
María del Mar Torres
Teresa Ochoa de Zabalegui
Essays
Esteban Pujals
Graphic Design
Filiep Tacq
Text editing
Ana Martín
Translations from Spanish
Catherine Forrest
Laura Suffield
Translation from Catalan
Rossana Huguet
Photographs
Joaquín Cortés (cover and page 3); Gerhard
Illi (flyleaves); Archivo Fotográfico del Museo
Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte
Contemporáneo, Badajoz (endpapers)
Photo-engraving and Printing
Artes Gráficas Palermo, S.L.
© of this edition: Cámara Oficial de Comercio e
Industria de Burgos & Museo Nacional Centro de
Arte Reina Sofía
© of the essays and translations: the authors
© of the photographs: Joaquín Cortés; Museo
Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte
Contemporáneo, Badajoz
Gerhard Illi, Castaño del Robledo, ,
www.illisoft.net
Amaranta Ariño; Constantino Bértolo; Ana
Patricia Botín, Banesto; BNV Producciones;
Manuel Delgado; Nuria Enguita; Manuel
Flores; Antonio Franco Domínguez, MEIAC;
Angustias García Medina; María González
López; Isaías Griñolo; Gerhard Illi; Juan José
Lahuerta; Diana López Gamboa; P. Julián
Puras; Mario Rodríguez; Juan Ruiz Carcedo;
Valentín Roma; P. Sebastián; Pilar Vázquez;
Mar Villaespesa
General Catalogue of Official Publications
http://www.060.es
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Opmaak 1 - Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart

Transcription

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