***** All over Eastern Europe, every day for some months, cities have been overseeing the removal of busts, statues, bas reliefs and pictures of Lenin. These are images that are hated by many, hated because they are understood and perceived as synecdoches for equally despised communist regimes. But, of course, Lenin was always much more than this simple representation. And there is indeed some sense of the idea of Leninism which survives today, survives despite the wholesale removal of his public effigies, survives the very fact that these monuments were ever built in the first place. Perhaps the removal of these massive monuments is not totally incommensurate with some of the original ideas of Lenin, particularly those ideas he had about a revolutionary public art. This is not to say that I think that the monuments should necessarily be removed, destroyed or displaced (on this matter I can confess only to the most profound ambivalence), but what I want to recognize is that the Lenin of 1917-1918, the Lenin of "On the Monuments of the Republic"[17] might never have approved of the original erection of the bronze statues, in Bucharest or elsewhere. Insofar as this idea(lism) of Lenin can be said to be remembered today, I want to briefly examine Lenin's relationship to the question of public art as it emerged during the immediate months after the October Revolution.
By the time of the 1917 revolution, Lenin had already insisted that art under socialism should no longer serve the elite of society, "those 10,000 suffering from boredom and obesity; it will rather serve the 10's of millions of labouring people, the flower of the country, its future".[18] In order to further this aim, Lenin proposed what he called a _Monumental Propaganda_. This was to be a so-called "people's" art, one that would become part of everyday life, assisting in the ideological shaping of a new revolutionary mass consciousness. Lenin argued that this Monumental Propaganda should be produced through the posing and installation of slogans and other "quickly executed forms." Even more important to Lenin were "the statues -- be they busts or bas reliefs of figures and groups."[19] The statues were _not_ to be made of marble, bronze or granite, but on the contrary, were to be extremely modest in their production, and should take advantage of cheap and readily available materials such as plaster. Lenin felt that these works should react to the moment, that their objective was always to instruct within the context of particular celebrations. Above all, wrote Lenin, "Let everything be temporary."[20] And with these words addressed to Lunacharsky, Lenin announced the beginning of a massive project (much of it centered around May Day celebrations) to install dozens of plaster statues and busts, each one celebrating a revolutionary figure or event. Very few of these works survived more than a few months, and almost none remain in any form today, as Lenin and the artists involved must have anticipated. Some of the works were crudely executed, others crudely conceptualized, while others were extremely radical insofar as they challenged the whole notion of _permanence_ with regards to public monuments and statuary. Particularly interesting is Nikolai Kolli's _The Red Wedge Cleaving the White Block_ (1918). In this work Kolli seems to parody and question the whole historical project of the permanent public monument, a monument that relies on the height and unassailability of a stone plinth from which it towers over the publics that move within its domain. The plinth is also the site of the official inscription, of the command to respect of Kings and Dictators. In plaster form, what Kolli is splitting open, is the very support system of all monuments. It seems to suggest the absurdity, within the revolutionary context, of erecting yet another bronze statue on the physical supports of historically inscribed tyranny -- the plinths that have borne the weight of cold terror.
This work by Kolli was produced within the context of other works by artists which consisted in temporary modifications and additions to existing statues and monuments. And if the revolution did produce its fair share of "cultural vandalism," it is also the case that many at the time thought that this exercise of destruction was not only unnecessary, but actually counter-revolutionary.[21] As the artist Alexander Blok put it at the time: "Even while destroying we are still the slaves of our former world: the violation of tradition itself is part of the same tradition."[22]
Not quite the Abbe Gregoire, and perhaps not sharing his archivist's imperative for conservation, but nevertheless, Blok's demand, his perception is part and parcel of a more complex and interesting approach to the art of the past. Moreover, it is an approach which I believe is not at all contrary to Lenin's desire that contemporary public works be temporary....
...Public art is literally an art creating a public, an art creating society -- one that may or may not be commensurate with any real body of people in a real time or place. On the other hand, the work of research, historiography and connoisseurship will continue nonetheless: there are records, photographs, texts, withness accounts, sometimes even the actual objects. As the early street art of the Russian Revolution demonstrates: permanent bronze works they may not be but the record of their interventions, what Gregoire might have called their inevitable didactic presence, lives on....
[17] V.I. Lenin, "On the Monuments of the Republic" (April 12, 1918), _On Literature and Art_ (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967) [18] V.I. Lenin, _Complete Collected Works_, V.12 [19] A.V. Lunacharsky, "Lenin o monumentalanoi propogande," _Lenin i izobrazitelnoe iskusstvo_ (Moscow: 1977), quoted in Vladimir Tolstoy, "Art Born of the October Revolution," _Street Art of the Revolution_ (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990) [20] A.V. Lunacharsky (ibid) [21] In the essay "On the Monuments of the Republic," Lenin does in fact 'order' that those "monuments erected in honor of tsars and their minions and which have no historical or artistic value are to be removed from the squares and streets and stored up or used for utilitarian purposes." He did however order that such a program of adjudication and removal should be done under the auspices of a special commission made up of the People's Commissars for Education and Property of the Republic and the chief of the Fine Arts department of the Commisariat for Education. Together they were to work with the Art Collegium of Moscow and Petrograd. This does suggest that Lenin was sympathetic to the idea that politicians alone would be unable to decide which works were of 'merit,' etc., and that he felt it necessary for 'experts' to be consulted. Despite, for example, the fact that many hundreds of religious icons were destroyed, it is still the case that Lenin's approach to the art of the past was significantly more sophisticated than either the legislature of the French Revolution and many of the current 'post-communist' governments in Eastern Europe.... [22] Blok's sensibility has, by and large, been lacking in present day Eastern Europe....*****
Those who are planning a massive demo in New York might appropriate Lenin's idea of public art. How about staging a mock-fascist rally in honor of Rudolph Giuliani, complete with giant plaster monuments commemorating the achievements of Il Duce? At the same time, on the streets, we can stage Brecht's _The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui_ while enjoying spectacles of book burnings and exhibitions of "degenarate art."
Yoshie