Edit András
Public Monuments in the Construction of a Historical Past (and Future)
The paper focuses on the exchange of public monuments, the demolition of Socialist monuments, and on the erection of national or religious ones in their very places, as a concomitant phenomenon of the transition from Socialism to Nationalism. The fight over the symbolic control of public space is in the center of the essay. It examines how the emptied out public space after the collapse of Socialism is used and abused by different political interests and how this process is reflected by contemporary art projects. The cases and interventions that are most interesting are the ones that comment on competing collective memories of the past as well as on the diverse visions of the future.
One of the main arguments of the paper is that without proper analyses and mourning of the Socialist past, one can’t confront the present predicaments of culture, namely Nationalism. It analyses the consequences of the collective amnesia that has been common in those countries where the political changes were negotiated and the conflicts (among them participation in State-Socialism) were set aside in order to gain an agreement between the representatives of the old and new regime. After a while the analysis of the past came to be associated with the extreme right-wing witch-hunt. As the ex-Communists also had an interest in forgetting their past, the working through the past appeared to have reached a deadlock, making it impossible to go through the painful mourning process. So, the Socialist past became a taboo issue. The paper examines the problematic nature of the glorified, mythic historical national past also, as well as the aim of homogenizing the public arena.
As for the specific examples, they come from the periphery of the ex-colonizer, the Soviet Union, and from the Baltic, where the changeover has been the most dramatic. The other focal point is Hungary and its neighbours, Slovakia (Komarno, Bratislava) and Romania (Transylvania), host-countries of Hungarian minorities. The symbolic politics of the home-country expands to the border zones of these countries, causing a lot of ethnic tension and counterreactions by local extremists. Hungarian and Slovakian artists collaborated on critical art projects reflecting on the poisoned situation. Concerning Transylvania, the situation is quite different, as it always has had a peculiar position on nation-building. The analysis makes a comparison between recent political attitudes and aims and their premise in the twenties and thirties.