佛朗哥，比基尼旅游与激进政治：巴塞罗那的长期反文化历史

法兰西时期的巴塞罗那文化和反文化是一个漫长而复杂的故事。这一时期审美激进主义和反动政治之间的过渡、条件和交汇点在西班牙边界以外仍然鲜为人知。人们常常忽略的是战后岁月的物质和精神上的颓废——对于许多西班牙以外的人来说，故事以乔治·奥威尔的《向加泰罗尼亚致敬》(1938)结尾，而佩德罗·阿尔莫多瓦(PedroAlmodvar)却又重拾了这一故事。当它这样做时，就像在哈维尔·塞卡的《萨拉米斯战士》（2001）中一样，它倾向于强调战争的道德困境——比如对法西斯和共和党之间的冲突的悲惨的、兄弟对兄弟的观点——关于国家如何以及为什么容忍40年的更大问题。

奇怪的是，答案部分在于佛朗哥的适应能力。1959年，在经历了20年的自给自足之后，新一代的技术官僚们提出了一系列的经济改革方案，并重新发展这个国家垂死的旅游业。当他们在巴塞罗那的兰布拉斯漫步或在科斯塔布拉瓦上晒太阳时，很少有人能意识到，每年来巴塞罗那旅游的8200万外国游客（几乎是其居民人口的两倍）代表了在辉煌、骇人听闻的贪婪信息下酝酿出来的计划的高潮。离子与旅游部长Manuel Fraga在1960创造了“西班牙与众不同”的口号。即使承认这种刻板印象的摇摇欲坠，弗拉加还是典型的加利西亚人：美国的崇拜者，他肯定知道，独裁者的意识形态权威在来自民主国家的游客潮中无法生存。摇滚乐和毒品已经大量涌入——从弗朗哥在1953年同意主办的美国空军基地和海军基地——但是弗拉加正在玩漫长的游戏。正如社会主义政治家阿方索·盖拉所说，“第一批到达比基尼的游客比许多政治演讲对过渡时期所做的更多。”通过把裸露的肉带到西班牙海滩，放松审查（Con Fraga Hasa la Braga，‘有了Fraga，你甚至可以看到内裤’是当时的格言），Fraga给不安分的人们提供了一个安全阀，这样他就可以在将军去世后把自己描绘成一个普通人。

民主党和改革派。巴塞罗那是少数几个具有悠久旅游历史的西班牙城市之一，如果有明显的低档市场。让·吉恩特的《窃贼日记》（1949）的读者将回忆起他对法国观光客在港口登陆的刻薄描述，其中一人说，他们惊叹于城市红灯区埃尔拉瓦尔风景如画的贫穷。“他们比我们更快乐，”另一个评论。1925年，记者弗朗西斯科·马德里（Francisco Madrid）抱怨巴里奥·奇诺（Barrio Chino）的“倒装”在炫耀他们的“无耻和罪恶”，但几十年来，这个城市的主要景点之一是卖尸者——根据客户的国籍，以滑动的规模提供尸体。1934年，道格拉斯·费尔班克斯热衷于参观臭名昭著的夜总会La Criolla，他和女儿在那里观看了一场以颂歌可卡因著称的拖拉表演。

矛盾的是，正是萨加拉对法西斯当局的容忍，才使得加泰罗尼亚语剧院的复兴成为可能。这种妥协并非罕见，而且它们使任何试图从英雄和恶棍的角度来看待该地区文化历史的尝试复杂化。尤金·德·奥尔斯是右翼批评家、哲学家和加泰罗尼亚主义者，在使安东尼·塔皮斯和豪尔赫·奥泰扎等人物的抽象艺术合法化方面将发挥重要作用。萨尔瓦多达利乍看之下，是一个典型的不顺从者，给弗朗哥发了电报，祝贺他“清洗西班牙的毁灭性力量”，并与约翰列侬一起策划在Camino de Santiago身上带一千个嬉皮士来发现天主教的荣耀。

德国历史学家Hans Mommsen的“弱独裁者”的概念（“经常优柔寡断，只关心他的威信和个人权威，受他目前的随从影响到极致”）在许多方面与Franco有关，尤其是在他的身上。过去十年，当帕金森让他精神受损，越来越依赖他的大臣们。这些年，地下组织蓬勃发展，从同性恋权利团体到加泰罗尼亚解放阵线。在文化领域有一个平行的发展，集体致力于推进美术，但也有漫画和摄影。最后一个是一个显著的展览主题，“La FotoGraveA”创意“Calalunya（1973 – 1982）”（“创意”在加泰罗尼亚的摄影，1973 – 1982）在巴塞罗那的ViReina中心。由加泰罗尼亚摄影界的两位重要人物克里斯蒂娜·泽利希和佩普·里戈尔在瓦伦蒂安·罗姆的指导下策展，展览包括来自玛塔·波娃的广泛主题和摄影媒体。奥德尼斯的肖像巴塞罗那工匠工作室到比格斯·鲁纳的宝丽来的杰出人物的神。在1979年的《Batik》杂志上，概念艺术家琼·丰特库伯塔试图将70年代在加泰罗尼亚蓬勃发展的“创造性摄影”与“艺术摄影”区分开来，后者凭借其自命不凡的艺术摄影沙龙在反动派中变得畅销，就像他写的那样。

从1985年加泰罗尼亚摄影的主要拥护者阿尔伯特·古斯皮（Albert Guspi）拥有的“光谱画廊”（.um）开幕开始，展览就强调了集体的工作，以便为他们在这个国家的作品开辟出一片天地。70年代是70年代，超现实主义的拼贴画比比皆是：一只蜗牛滑过一个熟睡的女人，一只耳朵从墙上长出来，一个裸体女人蜷缩在巨石中，白色的丝带像脐带一样拖下来。但也有城市荒凉的鲜明描绘，如马诺洛·拉吉洛（Manolo Laguillo）的破旧的高楼（1980），以及巴塞罗那一些最具传奇色彩的居民的纪念品，包括亨伯托·里瓦斯（Humberto Rivas）在西班牙描绘的拖曳艺术家——变形金刚——布拉（Violeta la Burra）的美丽肖像。仍然可以在干燥的马蒂尼卖玫瑰，这是该市最好的鸡尾酒酒吧之一。

展览目录反映了在独裁政权即将结束时，摄影师的乞求、借用或偷窃精神。艺术经费稀少，政治代价高昂；慈善事业供不应求，艺术家自身也很穷。生存需要谨慎和偶尔的让步。作为对在民主前夕寻求立足的日益强大的国际社会的生动而有影响的致敬，维莱纳展览提供了许多关于艺术、私人主动性和公共领域之间关系的思考。这些问题在西班牙仍然是公开的问题，而巴塞罗那则是其闪点之一。而对指责亲加泰罗尼亚文化政治的反政府情绪的蔓延和对加泰罗尼亚西班牙语濒危（妖怪媲美的战争在圣诞节应该在美国），带动了全市的，杰出的当代艺术博物馆，被剥夺D Paul B. Preciado和罗马人策划了一个对2015西班牙国王的批判。最近，该中心，巴塞罗那当代文化中心，被称为对伊朗艺术或帕索里尼的罗马展览，举办了法国前总理Manuel Valls宣布他的竞选市长，由中右翼党的领导人的支持，Ciudadanos，Albert Rivera，对西班牙的团结和移民带来的威胁做出了一些煽动性的声明。瓦尔斯竞选准备失败，但政治将继续蚕食艺术在加泰罗尼亚和西班牙各地，只有很少会做艺术的利益。

Culture and counterculture in Barcelona during the Franco years is a long and complex tale. The transitions, conditions and points of convergence between aesthetic radicalism and reactionary politics during the period remains little known beyond Spain’s borders. What is often missed is the material and intellectual decadence of the postwar years – for many outside Spain, the story ends with George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) and only picks up again with Pedro Almodóvar. The literature of Spain’s historic memory barely trickles into English, and when it does, as in Javier Cercas’s Soldiers of Salamis (2001), it tends to emphasize the moral dilemmas of war – such as the tragic, brother-against-brother view of the conflict between the Fascists and Republicans – over the larger questions of how and why the country tolerated 40 years of dictatorship.

Curiously, the answer lies in part in Franco’s adaptability. In 1959 after 20 years of autarky had left the country destitute, a new generation of technocrats proposed a series of economic reforms and the redevelopment of the country’s moribund tourist industry. Few can realize, as they stroll the Ramblas in Barcelona or sun themselves on the Costa Brava, that the 82 million foreign tourists who visit the country each year (nearly double its resident population) represent the culmination of plans hatched under the brilliant, and appallingly venal, Information and Tourism Minister, Manuel Fraga, who coined the slogan ‘Spain is different’ in 1960. Even admitting the ricketiness of such stereotypes, in his caginess, Fraga was typically Galician: an admirer of the United States, he was surely aware that the ideological authority of the dictatorship wouldn’t survive an influx of travellers from democratic countries. Rock music and drugs were already flooding in – from the US air and naval bases which Franco had agreed to host in 1953 – but Fraga was playing the long game. As Socialist politician Alfonso Guerra said, ‘the first tourists to arrive in bikinis did more for the transition than many political speeches’. By bringing bare flesh to Spanish beaches and relaxing censorship (Con Fraga hasta la Braga, ‘With Fraga, you can even see knickers’ was an adage of the time), Fraga offered a safety valve to the restless population that would allow him to portray himself after the Generalissimo’s death as a democrat and reformist from above.

Barcelona is one of the few Spanish cities with a long history of tourism, if of a distinctly downmarket sort. Readers of Jean Genet’s Thief’s Journal (1949) will recall his acrimonious account of French sightseers disembarking in the port and marvelling at the picturesque poverty of El Raval, the city’s red light district: ‘something out of Goya,’ says one. ‘They’re happier than we are,’ another remarks. In 1925, the journalist Francisco Madrid complained of ‘inverts’ in the Barrio Chino flaunting their ‘shamelessness and sin’, but for decades one of the city’s major attractions were hustlers offering their bodies – on a sliding scale based on clients’ nationalities. In 1934, Douglas Fairbanks enthused over a visit to the notorious nightclub La Criolla, where he and his daughter watched a drag show capped off with an ode to cocaine.

The guestbook from La Criolla includes the signatures of the Nazi sympathizer César González Ruano as well as writer Josep Maria de Sagarra, whose hilarious Private Life (1932) is an acid study in hypocrisy and dissoluteness. Paradoxically, it was Sagarra’s accommodation of the fascist authorities that helped make possible the revival of theatre in Catalan, a language suppressed in the wake of the war. Compromises of this kind were far from uncommon, and they complicate any attempt to view the region’s cultural history in terms of heroes and villains. Eugeni d’Ors, a right-wing critic, philosopher and Catalanist, would play an important role in legitimizing the abstract art of figures like Antoni Tàpies and Jorge Oteiza. Salvador Dalí, at first glance the archetypal nonconformist, sent telegrams to Franco congratulating him for ‘cleansing Spain of destructive forces’ and schemed with John Lennon to take a thousand hippies on the Camino de Santiago to discover the glories of Catholicism.

German historian Hans Mommsen’s concept of the weak dictator (‘frequently indecisive, exclusively concerned with the preservation of his prestige and personal authority, influenced to an extreme degree by his current entourage’) is pertinent to Franco in a number of ways, particularly in his last decade, when Parkinson’s left him mentally impaired and increasingly reliant on his ministers. Those years saw a flourishing of underground organizations, from gay rights groups to the Catalan Liberation Front. There was a parallel development in the cultural sphere, with collectives working to advance the fine arts, but also comics and photography. The last of these is the subject of a remarkable exhibit, ‘La fotografía “creativa” a Catalunya (1973–1982)’ (‘Creative’ Photography in Catalonia, 1973–1982) at the Virreina Centre de l’Imatge in Barcelona.

Curated by two major figures in Catalan photography, Cristina Zelich and Pep Rigoll, under the direction of Valentín Roma, the exhibition includes a wide range of subjects and photographic media, from Marta Pova Audenis’s portraits of Barcelona’s artisan workshops to Bigas Luna’s Polaroids of the luminaries of the gauche divine. In the magazine Batik in 1979, conceptual artist Joan Fontcuberta attempted to distinguish ‘creative photography’ as it flourished in Catalonia in the 1970s from ‘artistic photography,’ which had become marketable among reactionary circles ‘with their pretentious Art Photography Salons,’ as he wrote.

Beginning with the opening of the gallery Spectrum, owned by Albert Guspi, a major champion of Catalan photography until his early death in 1985, the exhibition emphasizes the work of collectives to carve out a place for their work in the country. The ’70s being the ’70s, surrealist collages abound: a snail gliding over a sleeping woman, an ear growing from a wall, a nude woman curled among boulders with a white ribbon trailing off like an umbilical cord. But there are also stark portrayals of urban desolation, such as Manolo Laguillo’s decrepit high-rises (1980), and mementoes of some of Barcelona’s most legendary inhabitants, including Humberto Rivas’s beautiful portraits of drag artist – transformista in Spanish – Violeta la Burra, who can still be found selling roses in Dry Martini, one of the best cocktail bars in the city.

The exhibition catalogue reflects the beg, borrow or steal ethos of photographers near the end of the dictatorship. Arts funding was scarce and carried a political price; philanthropy was in short supply and artists themselves poor. Survival demanded canniness and occasional concessions. As a vivid and affecting tribute to an increasingly international society seeking its footing on the eve of democracy, the Virreina exhibition offers much to consider about the relationship between art, private initiative and the public sphere.

These remain open questions in Spain, and Barcelona is one of its flashpoints. While the right blames pro-Catalan cultural politics for the spread of anti-government sentiment and bemoans the endangerment of the Spanish language in Catalonia (a bugbear comparable to the supposed War on Christmas in the US), the MACBA, the city’s pre-eminent contemporary art museum, dismissed Paul B. Preciado and Roma for curating an exhibit critical of the former Spanish king in 2015. More recently, the CCCB, Barcelona’s Centre of Contemporary Culture, known for exhibits on Iranian art or Pasolini’s Rome, hosted the former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls’s announcement of his mayoral campaign, supported by the centre-right party Ciudadanos, whose leader, Albert Rivera, has made a number of inflammatory statements about Spanish unity and the threat posed by immigration. Valls’ campaign is poised to flop, but politics will continue to encroach on art in Catalonia and throughout Spain, and only rarely will it do so to art’s benefit.

_{Main image: Lluís Bover, untitled, 1981, photograph. Courtesy: the artist and La Virreina Centre De La Imatge, Barcelona}