Posted on 12/09/2004 1:12:16 PM PST by Red Badger
In Moscow, a sculpture of a pickle will commemorate one of Russia’s beloved snacks. 38 designs were judged by Muscovites in a popular vote for the most original concept. Ten finalists were selected for the second round, after which the winner will be cast in bronze. The contest is organized by the Knyazev production center which wants to unveil the statue as “a monument to a truly Russian snack”.
Constructing random monuments is all the rage in Russia. After decades of the obligatory statues of Lenin and Stalin on every town’s main square, people are acquiring a taste for sculptures that honor everyday things or overlooked characters from Russian culture.
Famous poet Alexander Pushkin is an ever popular monument item, and a cultural figure that is a constant source of folklore. However, a new sculpture in Pskov region depicts not the poet, but a hare that supposedly ran across Pushkin’s path in 1825, when Pushkin was fleeing exile to St. Petersburg. Being the superstitious Russian that he was, Pushkin changed plans considering the hare a bad omen. Good for him, since it saved him from participating in the Decembrist uprising against the regime that led many of his friends to the scaffold. 175 years later Russians honor the hare for stopping Pushkin and giving him 13 more years of productive writing. Despite the hare’s efforts, Pushkin didn’t live to see 40: he was killed in a duel in 1837.
One new statue in the Moscow metro commemorates the misery of all homeless dogs. Entitled “Empathy”, the dog sculpture is situated in a metro passage where two years ago a stray dog was viciously butchered by 22-year-old model Juliana Romanova. Romanova reportedly set her Staffordshire terrier on the dog, and then stabbed it six times with a kitchen knife. She was later declared insane and locked up in a mental hospital. The statue is in memory of all mistreated canines and depicts a dog sitting on a granite pedestal and scratching out fleas.
Other new projects feature products that are symbolic for a particular city, or beloved Russian foods. One such sculpture will be a tribute to the processed cheese “Druzhba” (friendship). This year the cheese turns 40 years old, and many consider it a true symbol of the Soviet era.
In Minusinsk, Krasnoyarsk Region, the mayor announced a contest for the best design of a tomato sculpture, to be set up on the central square. In Novgorod, pensioner Nikolai Zaryadov has constructed a makeshift potato monument in his home village: a two meter pipe with a large rock, presumably a potato, on top. At the foot of this potato shrine is the inscription “Thank you Columbus, thank you Peter the Great, for our beloved vegetable!” Zaryadov says he constructed the sculpture so that the current generation of Russians can remember that the vegetable saved millions of people from starvation.
Why the sudden urge to put up quirky statues? The city hall of Angarsk (north-east Russia), which plans to construct a sculpture of a marmot, wants to “attract tourists and to put people in a good mood”, but there are also historical and cultural causes.
In an interview with Rossiiskaya Gazeta, the assistant director of the Tretyakov gallery, Alexander Morozov, commented on this new trend for monument construction: “We have an urge to fill our daily lives with signs and symbols that bring back memories. I think this initiative comes from the people themselves. We never had any pop art when it was popular in the U.S.” Indeed, monuments in Russia were traditionally meaningful and demanded reverence, since the subject matter was always serious: first, war memorials, then statues of communist leaders and famous writers.
Monuments always have a symbolic power over public space, and their history has social, not just artistic, significance. In the Moscow suburb where I grew up there was always a statue of Lenin next to the local “House of Culture”. First he lost his hand, then his head. Then overnight Lenin disappeared. The empty pedestal was too shocking for the local communists, and they addressed the local city government for some kind of replacement. The local city government came up with the brilliant idea of crowning two old pipes with a small white Lenin head. This hideous construction was toppled in a matter of weeks and the whole monument replaced with a flowerbed. Goodness knows what will appear next; a turnip? We wait in fear.
it was obviously the lesser of two...(ducking for cover)
Another example showed a "before" picture of a statue of Lenin is some Russian city square, and the "after" picture was a statue of Bob's Big Boy in the same square.
At about the same time, cartoonist Art Spiegelmann weighed in with the New Yorker with a similar view of how to alter Soviet statuary to something that made a point with minimal expense. His example was the Workers' and Peasants' Monument that showed a male worker and female peasant striding together while each held on to a single hammer and sickle. Spiegelmann suggested simply removing the front of the pedestal, which would make it look as though the worker and peasent were about to step off a cliff into the abyss.
They should put up a big statue of a beaver so that people can visit and say: "Hey, nice beaver...."
Instead of a Marriot Hotel, the Marmot? Well, it sure beats Holiday Inn Express for a name.....
(sigh)
The first thing that leapt to mind on reading this snippet, was a huge concrete turnip. I don't know why.
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