The Collapse of the Statues or What Can & What Cannot Be Buried?

Abstract

This article is devoted to the fate of monumental works of the Soviet period in the years 1991-96. In August 1991, after the abortive coup, a number of the best-known Moscow monuments were knocked off their pedestals by crowds of angry iconoclasts. This event prompted an international team of artists to come up with the idea of transforming Moscow into a »garden of totalitarian sculpture«, thus conferring on former works of propaganda a kind of archival status. On the face on it, the idea seemed excellent for many reasons. Its only drawback was that those involved in the project lacked the distance that would permit them to toy with terror and its referents. The project was shelved. Moscow-based photographer Igor Mukhin, on the contrary, started documenting the decay of thousands upon thousands of provincial monuments at the grass-root level. It turned out that they were succumbing to bad weather conditions, spontaneous acts of barbarism and lack of care more than to a deep political considerations. Benjamin’s and Derrida’s texts on Moscow are put to use in order to define the status of the »present moment« in Russian history (highly repetitive in its alleged uniqueness). The »unheard-of« quality of the present proves to be one more collection of traces.