Abstract
There has been a significant shift of artistic interest in “dealing” with socio-political dilemmas. In the schematic field that is exploring how art can examine some of the injustices that are occurring worldwide, an overwhelming number of symposia, conferences, projects, research, exhibitions, and books pair up the term “art” with words such as “conflict”, “reconciliation”, “justice”, “politics”, and others. This chapter proposes to examine how the role of artistic practice as a form of monument building can present itself as a relevant format for understanding political and historical shifts occurring in the region of former Yugoslavia. Highlighting the uses of counter-memorial aesthetics as a valid reference to understanding why artworks can be presented as monuments, the chapter provides insight into how these works can offer a new perspective on how the effect of Europeanisation on history and memory is being critically observed by artists.
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Notes
- 1.
Victoria and Albert Museum, “Holocaust Memorial International Design Competition Display” (2017).
- 2.
UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation and Cabinet Office, “Adjaye Associates and Ron Arad Architects win UK Holocaust Memorial International Design Competition” (2017).
- 3.
Rhodes Must Fall Oxford Wordpress.
- 4.
There are of course many other examples of forceful removal of monuments in order to change the political landscape and enabling a new national identity namely after regime changes.
- 5.
Iconoclasm or the deliberate removal or destruction of monuments, images or cultural heritage sites is not a recent occurrence but has been a part of history dating back to ancient times when it appeared first as religious iconoclasm, an attack on religiously significant figures and places.
- 6.
For example, the work of Dutch artist Jonas Staal, whose politically activated work borders between political activism, performance, and visual art. Another example, from former Yugoslavia, could be the group Four Faces of Omarska, who are mentioned in greater detail later in the chapter. The group also collaborated with London based Research Centre Forensic Architecture, that was recently nominated for the Turner Prize in 2018, perhaps the most prestigious prize given to a British artist or collective for exceptional presentation of their work. With such a nomination and a win by the collective Assemble in 2015, we can see that institutions have significantly shifted their views of how contemporary art is assessed and defined, broadening and erasing the rigid boundaries.
- 7.
I use the term monument as a way of commenting on what the artwork is attempting to do, critique the state of monument building and the forms of prioritising victimhood.
- 8.
Paul Connerton’s division of seven different types of forgetting gives the broadest and clearest presentation of how the act of forgetting is used as mode of manipulation but also as a form of allowing for society to survive a difficult past.
- 9.
Ideas and concepts around the present absence had already at this time appeared in the arts, for example Bruce Nauman’s work A Cast of the Space under My Chair from 1965 and was followed by artists like Rachel Whiteread.
- 10.
Monument Against Fascism was unveiled in 1986 in Hamburg-Harburg and created by Esther Shalev Gerz and Jochen Gerz.
- 11.
Ester Shalev and Jochen Gerz.
- 12.
The competition for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Berlin had a number of interesting proposals that were closer in style and concept to a counter-monument than a monument. The competition lasted longer than expected, beginning in 1994 with a winning proposal that was not well received by the government and followed by a second competition in 1997 which was won by the architect Peter Eisenmann, who had initially worked with the artist Richard Serra on the design, but Serra later pulled out of the competition because of creative differences. James Young describes (in a lecture given on April 29, 2007, a keynote speech for the Witnessing Genocide Symposium) these creative differences as being due to the fact that Eisenmann wanted to make the structure friendlier to the public.
- 13.
An example of this can be seen in the small town of Grahovo in Slovenia, which was the site of a Second World War battle between the two mentioned groups. A Partisan monument (obelisk with red star) was built to the victims of Nazism, built in 1968, while the other, unveiled in 2014 to commemorate the deaths of Domobranci, is a stone wall built in front of the obelisk partially obstructing the view.
- 14.
In the introduction of Politics of Regret, Olick describes his path of understanding of the two main scholars of collective memory, Halbwachs and Durkheim but in his text with Joyce Robbins Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices, he describes the use of collective memory already in the beginning of the century by Hugo von Hoffsmanstahl, who was referring to ancestral lineage of memory.
- 15.
Gal Kirn (2014). In his essay, Kirn points out that memorialisation in Yugoslavia started with transnational monuments, which can be divided into three aesthetic types. The third type developed in 1960s when Yugoslavia began to feel the first effects of liberalism, such as didn’t exist before and were not meant to be part of the socialism that was being practiced. With growing gaps in social classes, and unemployment, these artists faced the task of creating monuments that were meant to speak of a future of unity, not solely based on the victimisation of the past but rather evoke a thought in the audience of a bright future.
Kirn claims that with these monuments, which explored a more socialist modernist aesthetic, many of which were built on the exact sites of the events, which they commemorated, and were larger than life in size, some expanding into whole parks, spaces for people to gather became the true first counter-monuments, which later on James E. Young described in his observation of developments of memorialisation in Germany.
- 16.
Grupa Spomenik (Monument Group) functioned between 2002–2010.
- 17.
See Vučkovac (this volume) for a detailed discussion of this case.
- 18.
The notion of the mass of bodies forming an annual monument was a notion that came out of a discussion between myself and Four Faces of Omarska member Srđan Hercigonja in an interview, 19 March 2017.
- 19.
Theodor Meron, quoted in Bašić.
- 20.
This information was extracted from an interview with Miladinović, 3 October 2018.
- 21.
I never found an image of this monument, but it was described to me during a conversation with Hodžić in 2014 in Prijedor.
- 22.
Reuters Online (April 26, 2007).
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Bajec, M. (2021). Effects of Europeanised Memory in “Artworks as Monuments”. In: Milošević, A., Trošt, T. (eds) Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans. Memory Politics and Transitional Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54700-4_6
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