art as torture??

[piscaries]

i heard this on NPR the other day while driving home from work and figured i'd share it with you guys.

Host Lynn Neary talks with art historian Victoria Combalia about the use of modern art as torture during Spain's civil war 65 years ago. Combalia says the work of artists such as Kandinsky, Klee and Dali was the inspiration for secret cells and torture centers built in Barcelona. She says the torture cells, built in 1938, used geometric abstraction and surrealism to influence and affect prisoners. The torture centers were the creation of French anarchist Alphonse Laurencic.

there wasn't a transcript of the story but here's the real audio stream (http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/atc/20030127.atc.07.ram)

imagine being drivin insane by geomtric shapes?

[pille'ocheoni]

that would be a gift for me..............cubist at heart i guess.and i have a degree in fine srt so i guess torture would be a pleasure.funny though...........i guess abstract angles in a living situation would be kind of funny for about a year.:)

[grobelaar]

I don't know, its one thing to appreciate a painting, but lets say you made a cell and covered every visible surface with a distorted version of reality and subjected someone to that for a lengthy period of time - it might begin to affect your mind. You could literally turn their world inside out - what is real what isn't

What if it was just paintings, there may be sculptures, moving parts, animals, babies that move across the ceiling or whatever.What if the interrogators alternated between asking you real and surreal questions - What color is that smell? You could twist someone totally..

- it would be an interesting experiment - which I'm sure most psychology ethics committees would refuse permission to do..

[LEFTHANDLOU]

Imagine getting stuck in a Francis Bacon painting, now thats fucking torture.

Or crowded up like a Max Beckman painting, haha that would be too much