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How Life imitates Art (or the Fate of a Political Corpse)
video, text, photo-archive
(research conducted during a residency in Seattle, USA)
2006
Political Corpses
In every new political regime, the statues from the past periods are treated like real enemies.
The monuments become the target of a collective unbending (their destruction usually does not happen due to an official ordinance).
At the beginning, the communism destroyed all the badges of bourgeoisie and aristocracy. The bronze of those statues was often melted and reused for casting new monuments and statues representing Lenin, Stalin or other symbols of the proletariat (hammers, ploughs, tractors, workers and robust peasants).
Later on, depending on communism stages, the figures that didn't suit anymore the ideology were removed from pedestals.The history is repeating.
The communist symbols were eliminated by the furious crowd after 1989. Some of them were totally destroyed or ritually ignited, others ended up by being thrown aside and hidden in backyards waiting to be recycled for material.
The (hi)story of Seattle Lenin statue:
1988:
A 5 meters tall bronze statue of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was erected in Poprad, Slovakia. The statue was created under commission from the communist Czechoslovak government by the Bulgarian sculptor living in Slovakia Emil Venkov (b. 1937).
1990:
After 1989 fall of communism, the big Lenin statue was removed from the main city square. It was stored for 3 years in city council's yard. Nobody knew what to do with the statue, nor where to take it. The city council planned to sell it to a Slovak Steel corporation (VSZ Kosice) which offered around $380 for it (for 7 tones of bronze). The city councilors also offered to give the statue to anyone that can sell it and take it away.
1993:
One day Mr. Anton Danko, the director of the Poprad winter-stadium decided to sell it and convinced the American entrepreneur Lewis Evan Carpenter to buy it for $13,000 (the original costs for the sculpture were more than $40,000). Mr. Anton Danko used the money to buy a PC and a car (Skoda Favorit Pick-up). Mr. Carpenter is happy to save the statue from melting down and mortgages his house to transport it to Seattle. His big plan is to open an Eastern European pub in Seattle, with Slovak food, Czech beer and Lenin statue as the welcome symbol ante portas.
The group called "Poprad's 1st basic organization of the Comunist Party" makes public a protest letter concerning Lenin's export to USA. Few days later, someone threatens the mayor of Poprad with killing his family members and putting a bomb in the city hall if they will allow Lenin to leave the country. After analyzing the anonymous letters and discovering more punctuation and grammar errors the mayor decides to not take the threats seriously.
1994:
Mr Carpenter dies in an unfortunate car accident on Stevens Pass and the statue lay in a pasture behind his house. Carpenter's family put it up for sale with the idea of melting down the bronze to be used for something else. There impends a fatal end for Lenin, just like in Slovakia. Mr. Carpenter's mother, Lydia, calls sculptor Peter Bevis from Seattle hoping he could help her commercialize the Lenin bronze. To recover the statue debt, Carpenter's family made an arrangement to loan it to the Fremont district until a buyer emerged. Asking price: $150,000.
1995:
The statue is placed up in Fremont, a district of Seattle, at the corner of N 34th St & Evanston Ave N, near a Cold War era rocket also displayed as public art.
2006:
Currently it stands two blocks northward at the intersection of Evanston Ave N, N 36th St, and Fremont Place, nearby a falafel shop. The Carpenter family continues to seek a buyer for the statue. The asking price grew to $250,000, up from a 1995 price tag of $150,000.
The statue was controversial and remains so.
How Life Imitates Art
The artistic merits of a socialist-realistic work cannot just be tear away and radically detached from it's hitherto character. Severed from the political, historical and ideological relations, the socialist art can be understood as a mere style, as a specific configurations of signs and nothing more. But a historical, political and geographical shift can give these works another meaning and a different significance. They become translated into new entities, gain new connotations and illustrate new paradoxes. The statue of Lenin in Seattle attests to an animated afterlife of the insignias of former communist regimes.
This sculpture gains suddenly bigger value and deeper conseguences than it ever had. This is how life becomes art, how life circumstances, faults and inadvertency turn into "conceptual" art practices. Seattle Lenin explores the trope of the spatial and cultural "translation" of a statue representing Lenin from one socio-political and historical background into another. This movement illuminates the connections and dissimilarities between post-communist countries and USA. The statue's voyage not only reveals the workings of an increasingly globalized market, it also brings into contact two cultures and two critical discourses at a time of theoretical revamping.
The integration of the statue into a capitalist market system (the statue is still for sale today) and its recontextualisation rescues this sculpture from obscurity of monuments that have over time become condemned and lost their initial signification. Time produces permanently differences, and the statue of Lenin represses the preponderance of temporality and historicity through its utopic dimension and spirit. Today, it became an environmental element interacting with its surrounding: a glowing red star and sometimes Christmas lights have been added to the statue for Christmas since 2004. For the 2004 Solstice Parade, the statue was made to look like John Lennon. During 'Gay Pride Week', the statue is dressed in drag. Other appropriations of the statue have included painting it as a clown or using it as an advertisement stand.
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