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| Vladimir Lenin, et. al: Graveyard of Fallen Monuments, Moscow, 2007 |
Today, my
local newspaper had several different articles concerning the recent opposition
to Confederate monuments, and the efforts to remove them. Beyond the reporting
hullabaloo of the events in Virginia and elsewhere, there were also two that
were almost like sidebars. One was an
editorial by Rich Lowry, in which it was pointed out that Robert E. Lee himself
did not believe in erecting monuments to the confederacy. The other was an article about a statue of
Vladimir Lenin, 16 feet tall, by Emil Venkov, originally from Slovakia, but now
residing in a park in the Fremont neighborhood in Seattle.
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| Heroic Soviet Soldier, Moscow 2007 |
Ten years
ago, on a visit to Moscow, and after visiting the usual sights, the subway, Red
Square, etc. (and even seeing a set of nesting dolls from the 2007 San Antonio
Spurs, which I could kick myself for not buying), we visited a park that our
guide wryly called “The Park of Fallen Idols.”
Its official title was the “Graveyard of Fallen Monuments,” and it
housed a large collection of images of Lenin, Stalin, other Soviet Officials
from the first two-thirds of the 20th century, and socialist-
realist
images of Heroic Workers, etc.
I am told
that these are still in what is now an extended park, called The Muzeon Park of
Arts, now with the adjacent Krimsky Val Building housing the Tretyakov Museum’s
Modern Art Division and the Central House of Artists, and that a lot of
contemporary sculpture and installations are also to be found there as well.
When I saw
it back then, I thought that this was a terrific solution of what to do with
images of heroes gone out of political correctness or fashion. I understand that Vilnius and Budapest also
have obsolete monument parks.
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| Benedict Arnold https://www.flickr.com/photos/rob-the-org/2327711764 |
What if we
could set aside a public space to put all of those monuments that are obsolete,
at least for the present way of thinking, of the majority? Not only a passel of Confederate generals
If you really wanted
to see them, you could go there.
could be parked there, but, according to whoever’s ideology is ascendant whatever
other former monuments to demoted heroes—Benedict Arnold, maybe, or Joseph
McCarthy, or Nixon?
Human
history is full of images of fallen idols; we have been destroying them ever
since the Israelites smashed images of Baal, and probably a long time before
that. Isis and the Taliban are still
doing it.
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| Joseph McCarthy |
Art
historically, I think that the majority of these images over the centuries aren’t
very good as works of art (how many equestrian generals decorate public parks—and
not just in the U.S., and does anyone know or care who they are)?
As humans,
we seem to have this primal urge to memorialize things, to make images of them,
even though orthodox Islam and Judaism, and some Christian denominations, among
other belief systems, decry it. Sometimes,
the images can transcend their original context and convey a more powerful
human emotional message. For this Euro-American
centered art historian two immediately come to mind. One is Picasso’s Guernica, which I first saw as a child when it was camping out during
the Franco regime in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. It’s so stark, the agony of its message so
powerful, that it transcends any specific war and speaks for any and all of
them.
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| Picasso: Guernica, Madrid Museo del Centro de Arte Reina Sofia |
The other
is Rodin’s images commemorating the Burghers
of Calais. It commemorates a group of 15th century civic leaders
of Calais, who were ready to sacrifice themselves to save their city. This isn’t an event that anyone remembers,
and many people are forgetting Franco’s bombing of the Basque town Guernika 80
years ago in 1937 too. But Rodin’s
images are universal: they could stand in for Holocaust victims or any other
martyrs you can name, much as can Picasso’s agonized people and animals. Maybe this is why Rodin’s Burghers exist in twelve sets of casts that
are located from Calais itself, to Copenhagen, Washington, Seoul and Tokyo.
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| Rodin: Burghers of Calais: Washington, Hirshhorn Museum |
The symbolism
and durability values of monuments is a can of worms, and I don’t really don’t
want to go there; one person’s hero or heroine can, or might at any time to
come morph into a villain. The vision and
personifications of barbarity is what we make it at any given time.
________________________________________________________________________________
The two cited articles appeared in the August 20, 2017 San Antonio Express-News. Rich Lowery’s article is entitled “Heed
Robert E. Lee’s words on monuments to Confederacy, which appears in Section F,
p. 3, the other, without a byline, but taken from the Washington Post, is found in Section A, p. 13. It is entitled “Seattle’s statue of Lenin is
drawing scrutiny too.”
Wikipedia’s
article on the Muzeon Park of Arts in Moscow:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Monument_Park is not
terribly up to date, and the park’s official website’s domain has expired, so
there may be changes afoot.
A nice introductory article on the Burghers of Calais is at the Khan academy website:
For Picasso’s
Guernica: https://www.pablopicasso.org/guernica.jsp
And for a strange Charlottesville Guernica analogy, at least to one
journalist, see the photograph at:
https://thewire.in/169117/picasso-guernica-ryan-kelly-charlottesville/ (note. I couldn't load this link. You'll have to copy and paste.)
