Amino Acidos: an unpublished Spanish protest album, c. 1968

The entire album is presented in a pdf file here:Amino Acidos (web).pdf

In this kinetic album, the succession of plates proceeds like a suite of film shorts produced in the method of an exquisite corpse, that is, short quick collaborative expressions of organized chaos, cinematic in movement, but exceptionally graphic in execution, and highly articulate to ears willing to listen.

The content of this work is steeped in the spirit of the counterculture, and the three young Spanish artists express without reserve their desire to break free of the repressive archaic society that was Spain at the end of the 1960s. The artists’ concerns are of course parallel with those of the Parisian students of May 1968, the hippies of San Francisco, or the rock-and-roll counterculture sweeping the United States and the West. The album wears this influence on its sleeve, and uses the visual language of psychedelia, Pop art, graphic novels/comix, and a raw quality of neophyte art to express the desire for change—i.e. the work is not about prettiness or ‘high art,’ but graphic punch.

What is remarkable is that the work was produced in a tightly ruled Spain during the time of General Franco—many of the topics that are explicitly commented on here, such as the church’s hypocrisy, the military, evolution, or sexuality to name only a few, would have been sufficient to land the artists in hot water. That they placed at the center of the work the controversial Spanish writer Fernando Arrabal around the time when he was the subject of arrest and legal scrutiny for blaspheme and denigrating the Spanish state, was not only brave, but in many ways a political statement. The work reveals an effort to denounce the received ideas of their contemporary society on every level: politics, religion, sexual orientation, and even the role and politics of language (as evident in the section “Masturbatory Talk”).

Amino Acidos, for all its youthful vigor, is also quite sophisticated and hopeful. Not only a shout of protest, the work also contains a thread of continuity that runs through it, connected by images and words.

Although Amino Acidos is unified by visual and topical themes, the three young artists who have collaborated to create this exuberant work have achieved something more: the accumulated repetition of graphic themes and figures opens the “doors of perception” to numerous interpretations, and the work demands deeper scrutiny and analysis. As the imagery bursts off the page there remains a significant base beneath whose breadth and depth will support scholars from a variety of disciplines.