Monument to Transformation
City Gallery Prague, Prague, Czech Republic
Currently showing in the City Gallery Prague’s municipal library, curators Vit Havránek and Zbyněk Baladrán take the fitful, groaning transformations that followed 1989’s Velvet Revolution as the subject for ‘Monument to Transformation’. In the context of institutional and curatorial attempts to amend 20th-century art history to include countries long sequestered behind the Iron Curtain – a revision that is a fundamental goal of Tranzit, one of the exhibition’s organizing institutions – ‘Monument to Transformation’ focuses on post-’89 change in locations as far flung as Afghanistan, Mexico, Indonesia and the former Yugoslavia.
Structurally, the exhibition begins with the local and the literal. Beneath historical Czech protest banners from ’89 plays David Černý’s Ruzovy Tank (Pink Tank, 1991), which comprises footage of Černý and his art-school friends painting a tank – originally installed as a victory monument following World War II – bubble-gum pink, turning it into a kitschy anti-memorial. Like Černý, Anatoly Osmolovsky first became active as an artist during the Velvet Revolution and in his early work sought to reform Soviet symbols. In photographic performance documentation of Way to Brobdingnag (Osmolovsky/Mayakovsky) (1993) – one of many works here previously shown at documenta 12 – Osmolovsky, perched on the shoulder of a giant statue of Vladimir Mayakovsky, whispers into the Russian poet’s ear. In the ‘90s, Osmolovsky’s work often referenced Russian avant-garde artists, hoping to rehabilitate them from associations with restrictive Soviet aesthetics. Here, Osmolovsky’s position, travelling childlike on the shoulder of a giant, exudes kinship with and admiration for the Soviet-approved socialist.
Deimantas Narkevičius, a Lithuanian of the same generation, also tracks traces of Communist ideologues in The Head (2007), a video which narrates the removal of a monolithic sculpture of Marx’s head in the east German city of Chemnitz (formerly Karl-Marx-Stadt) to make way to rebuild a church that once stood in its place. Iconoclasm was a primary post-’89 step, but, as Narkevičius’ contemporary perspective indicates, supplanting socialism with religion – an acknowledgment of how the ruling party treated socialist heroes as saints – did not eliminate its influence. Instead, now-invisible Utopian symbols continue to hold considerable sway over populations in post-Soviet states.
The physical destruction wrought by occupying forces – in this case, both the Soviet and American armies – is the subject of Afghan artist Lida Abdul’s What We Saw Upon Awakening (2006). The silent video records black-clad men pulling on white ropes attached to a half-destroyed building near Kabul; as they twist and strain, the men create a tangled web but make no headway in toppling the remaining stones.
Constructing new symbols, rather than resurrecting discarded ones as documented in Narkevičius’ work or smoothing the scarred landscape as in Abdul’s, is an equally fraught endeavour. In Them (2007), Artur Żmijewski invites different Polish religious and political groups to each create a coat-of-arms for Poland, a workshop process that degenerates into accusations of fascism and retaliatory arson. Żmijewski’s contrived situation deliberately provokes the destructive hostility latent in Černý‘s gesture and Narkevičius’ cool documentation, a strategy that fatalistically emphasizes just how irreconcilable differences can be, rather than expressing change or nudging it along.
Nationalism is likewise the subject of Greek artist Vangelos Vlahos’ Greek Renovation of the Former Parliament Building in Sarajevo, 1992 (2007). Vlahos’ architectural models of the parliament building and his archives of printed and highlighted newspaper articles track Greece’s €13.5 million donation to rebuild Bosnia’s parliament – shelled in the civil war of the mid-‘90s – as strategic jockeying for power in the Balkans, capitalizing on the region’s intractable ethnic conflict.
If Černý’s initial iconoclasm speaks of a spirited belief in sudden and final transformation, then Sharon Hayes’ video, Ten Minutes of Collective Activity (2003), reflects a humbler approach. Hayes filmed 22 people sitting together in rows for ten minutes, each person fidgeting for the duration. After the ’89 revolution – which, for all its revolutionary fervor, delivered halting transformation – Hayes’ contemporary meditation on collective engagement, like ‘Monuments to Transformation’ as a whole, revises expectations for immediate change.
Anna Altman
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