Sade: The ultimate symbol of a radical rebellion

It seems almost impossible to find a cultural space in Barcelona that warns its visitors about the possible impact of the content and does not let underage people through. The Contemporary Cultural Center of Barcelona had to do both for this exhibition. La Libertad o el mal seduces and punishes its visitors simultaneously. Curated by professors Alyce Mahon (University of Cambridge) and Antonio Monegal (Pompeu Fabra University), the exhibition explores the impact that the writings of the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) have had on political culture, aesthetic theory and practice, and philosophy since the beginning of the 20th century. But it does much more than that; it makes visitors doubt their principles. Are these artworks, films, and publications entitled to unsettle in such violent and disturbing ways in the search for creative freedom? Installed in rooms designed with dark corners and uneven vertices, the viewer navigates a space intended to create uncertainty.

Different artists, writers, playwrights, and philosophers have used the Marquis’ literary work to ponder the subject of evil, cruelty, rebellion, the non-normative, and freedom. The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire identified him as the voice of the modern period. From then on, the avant-garde appropriated Sade’s literary creation by placing the erotic, the body, and sexuality at the center of a mechanism engineered to question traditional institutions such as the family, the state, the church, and the law that have often fallen into systemic abuse of power.

A prologue titled Sade and his Philosophy in the Boudoir presents Donatien Alphonse François de Sade; it gives an account of his confinement in prison for crimes of sexual perversion. It includes several copies of the first editions of his works and some personal letters and documents. This material is put in dialogue with contemporary artworks like “Googlegram: Sade” (2023) by Catalan photographer Joan Fontcuberta, a collage composed of more than 6,000 images that appeared on screen when typing the word “Sade” in the Google search engine. There is also the three-channel screening of the American artist Paul Chan “Sade for Sade’s Sake” with shadow figures, in which acts of sex and violence are staged in a loop in the manner of a mechanized theater. For this section, some fragments of the legendary film Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) by the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini are projected.

The curatorial script does not dwell much on the historical aspect; instead, it immediately deviates to the present, in which desire and consumption are linked to the violence and cruelty mediated by the screens and devices of the posthuman condition.

There are four exhibition spaces: Transgressive Passions explores Sade’s influence on the artistic and literary avant-garde of the 20th century in Europe. It includes the famous “DAF de Sade Monument” (1933) by Man Ray, drawings, and engravings by Salvador Dalí, Otto Dix, Roberto Matta, and Alberto Giacometti. The drawings by André Masson, made in 1928 to illustrate the book Histoire de l’oeil by George Bataille, and the original drawing used in the illustrations created for the same book by Hans Bellmer in 1940, stand out. The chapter ends with photographic documentation of “120 minutes dedicated to the Marquis de Sade” (1960), which elaborates on the idea of cultivating the rights of people to exercise their autonomy of thought above established regulations. According to Lebel’s statements, Sade was experimenting to achieve individual and social freedom.1 The action led to the arrest of French artist Jean-Jacques Lebel for obscenity.

The following section, Perverse Passions, exhibits the works of artists from the second half of the twentieth century who openly break the taboo around non-normative sexual practices and transgression and experimentation with eroticism as an expression of the being. Amid censorship, scandal, and intolerance, artists such as the North American Robert Mapplethorpe and the collective Quimera Rosa have challenged the system with works that shake expectations and move the limits of what art can do and be. The Catalan collective Quimera Rosa defines itself as a “laboratory of experimentation and research on identities, body and technology”2. On this occasion, they collaborated with Post-Op to generate the video installation “Philosophy in the Dungeon,” in which the viewer is located in the center of 4 screens and subjected to readings of Sade and witnesses their BDSM practices.

Mass culture, including comics and fanzines, is mixed with unique works to explore the topic of sexuality after the proposal of the countercultural revolution of the 1960s.

The transition to the following sections occurs with two pieces of documentation. One is the installation of the records and elements used in Jean Benoit’s 1959 “Execution of the Will of the Marquis de Sade” in the home of the Surrealist poet Joyce Mansour. The other is the only known television interview of George Bataille.

The final chapters Criminal Passions and Political Passions, revolve around a vision antagonistic to the exploration of freedom. The pieces included address abuse, cruelty, the grotesque, and violence. They include works by Sira-Zoé Schmid, Paul McCarthy, Laia Abril, Domestic Data Streamers, and fragments of the film “Funny Games” by Michael Haneke.

It is not only about art and artists but also a current reflection on many issues that have driven us to an extreme place of no return. The exhibition implements mechanisms to update Sade as a thinker, for example, the documentation of social experiments conducted at Yale and Sandford in the early nineteen sixties in which obedience to authority despite moral convictions was studied. In this same vein, it includes four fictional dialogues between current thinkers and thinkers for whom Sade was a reference on topics such as the figure of the victim and state violence. They thus include records of the alleged conversations between the philosopher Marta Segarra and Simone de Beauvoir; Marina Garcés and Gilles Deleuze; Laura Ledadot and Maurice Blanchot and Ster Jordana and Michel Foucault.

Political Passions focuses on the abuse of power of the government, the church, the military, and other establishments. The work of Teresa Margolles “Modern Horrors” consists of 313 tabloid newspaper covers with images of violence in today’s Mexico. Marcelo Brodsky makes interventions on archival photographs of colonialism to denounce the cruelty exercised on colonized nations, while Kara Walker denounces the unthinkable abyss of slavery in the European colonial campaign, and The Polish artist Blalla Hallmann refers in his grotesque and comic paintings to the atrocities of Nazism.

Sade ended his days in a psychiatric hospital, where he continued to write as he had done during his multiple imprisonments. This time, he wrote, among other things, a play titled “Persecution and Death of Jean-Paul Marat,” which he then put on stage with the inmates. The exhibition at the CCCB ends with an epilogue developed under the title The Scene of a Revolution. With a fragment of the work Le retour de Sade by Bernard Noël and audiovisual and photographic samples of works by Albert Serra, Candela Capitan, Angelica Liddell, and Shu Lea Cheang.

In the rooms, a journey is generated between fascination and repulsion, and the viewer is shaken from one extreme to the other as desire, debauchery, freedom, perversion, evil, humanity, power, and consumption are juxtaposed without allowing a resolution of the conflict. Sade is considered perverse and self-indulgent but also a revolutionary and liberator. Beyond the polarized judgments, the exhibition makes possible a state in which Sade’s thought is instrumental in reevaluating today’s human condition.