BLOODY MIDDLE AGES, MUSEUM OF TORTURE, HISTORICAL PEEP-SHOW
A specific sub-category of historical wax museums is the "museum of torture" intended to evoke the "dark Middle Ages" to the viewer. These mostly touristic and sometimes heritage-industrial enterprises build on the assumption that our modern age and culture actually lacks the intensive experience of pain, while in fact its existence is portrayed day by day through the media. The exhibition embraces half a millennium showing the visitor "an imitation of the uses of the Spanish garrote, the French guillotine, the American electric chair, and the German iron maiden." The spectator is shown scenes of decapitation, hanging, breaking on the wheel, impalement, racking, and many other horrible scenes. "Unfortunately, in my experience, a doll museum does not attract such a large audience as it would deserve, that's why I decided to widen the scope of attractions. I think that in this world of today full of atrocities, one can draw the attention to good also by showing people the bad." – This is what Tibor Török, inventor of the museum of tortures wrote about his idea. Although the museums of torture visualize the horrors of an "age long past", they are modern institutions. They offer a "real" 3D experiences of the torturing of another human beings, often through professional "artistic", "film-like" and scenery-centric techniques. |
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Viacheslav Klykov
is a well-known sculptor and political activist in Russia, editor of the journal Derzhava ('State') which uses the keywords of nineteenth-century official nationalism in its motto (orthodoxy – autocracy – national principle). His works receive government support and are located all over the country. Some of his sculptures reproduce the images of princes, saints and other personalities known in the medieval Rus'. On the photos reported here (taken, in part, from a 1995 issue of Derzhava), we seem him in his atelier, with the statue of Saint George Killing the Dragon, and with a relief prepared for the monument to the victory of the Soviet Army in one the battles of World War II, on Prokhorovo Field. The monument was designed by Klykov in the form of a medieval Russian bell tower. |
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