Sunday, August 20, 2017

Retirement Home For Ex-Heroes (Or Their Statues, Anyway)

          
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.

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.
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.

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.
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.


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.
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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:


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.)






 


 

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