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Notes
1CitationDavid M. Herszenhorn and Andrew E. Kramer, “Crowds Topple Lenin Statue as Civil Uprising Grows,” New York Times, 9 Dec. 2013.
2CitationBenjamin Forest and Juliet Johnson, “Post-Communist Monuments Project” (http://postcommunistmonuments.ca/wp/). The news section of the website catalogues several of these incidents.
3 See CitationMartin Ehala, “The Bronze Soldier: Identity Threat and Maintenance in Estonia,” Journal of Baltic Studies 40.1 (2009): 141–143. The Bronze Soldier controversy can be seen as a continuation of an earlier one surrounding the Lihula statue.
4 See CitationTaline Ter Minassian, ed., Patrimoine et architecture dans les états post-soviétiques (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013).
5CitationSiobhan Kattago, “Commemorating Liberation and Occupation: War Memorials Along the Road to Narva,” Journal of Baltic Studies 39.4 (2008): 435–436. Kattago analyzes how the Soviet rhetoric of antifascism simplified and glorified its military actions in Estonia during WWII.
6 See Ehala, “The Bronze Soldier,” 144–145. Ehala identifies four different meanings assigned to the statue by competing interest groups in regard to the events of 1944.
7 The ways the film represents teenagers using these sites matches my own casual observations during visits in 2007.
8CitationRobert Musil, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago, 2006), 61.
9CitationWerner Fenz, “The Monument is Invisible, the Sign Visible,” October 48 (Spring 1989): 75.
10 See CitationMiwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); CitationSuzanne Lacy, ed., Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1994); and CitationMalcolm Miles, Art, Space and the City: Public Art and Urban Features (London: Routledge, 1997). In place of conventional sculptures, many artists, public art critics and curators advocated for the disappearance of the autonomous art object in favor of discourse, site-specificity and community.
11CitationJames E. Young, “The Counter-Monument: Memory Against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry 18.2 (Winter 1992): 271.
12 Ibid., 273.
13 See CitationThomas Stubblefield, “Do Disappearing Monuments Simply Disappear? The Counter-Monument in Revision,” Future Anterior 8.2 (Winter 2011): 1–11. Stubblefield offers an insightful critique of Young's theory of the counter-monument.
14 See CitationPierre Nora, “Between Memory and History,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–24. Young uses Nora to help construct a theoretical genealogy for this claim.
15CitationPaul Connerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting,” Memory Studies 1.1 (2008): 59–71; CitationHarald Weinrich, Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). Weinrich provides a history of philosophical attitudes toward forgetting.
16 See CitationPeeter Kaasik, “Common Grave for and a Memorial to Red Army Soldiers on the Tõnismägi, Tallinn: Historical Statement,” Tallinn: Estonian Foundation for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity, http://valitsus.ee/static/ClientFiles/download/482 (accessed 8 Feb. 2014). The Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs commissioned this history of the monument and justification for its removal. It was published on the official website of the Estonian government in 2007; it has since been removed.
17CitationConnerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting,” 62.
18CitationMaurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 51.
19 Musil, Posthumous Papers, 64.
20 See CitationLouis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 170–177. Althusser's theory of interpellation offers a useful model for understanding the encounter between ideology and an individual subject.
21 See CitationTara Zahra, “Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis,” Slavic Review 69.1 (Spring 2010): 93–119. Zahra recovers the history of Central European populations who were indifferent to the nationalist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Perceiving indifference as a decision rather than an omission is a critical interpretive turn.
22 The teenage participants are Ilja Alpatov, Erich Hartvich, Madis Mäeorg, Sille Paas, Ronald Pelin, Olena Romanjuk, Häli-Ann Reintamm, Mari Tammesalu and Steven Vihalem. Other parts of the project include a short film documenting the improvisation workshops leading up to the film, a series of still photographs and a published roundtable discussion on the Bronze Soldier controversy.
23 This reading is based on the 30-minute, single-channel version. It has a meditative quality that highlights the monumental landscapes and their use by the teenagers. This quality disappears in the shorter version with its quicker cuts across three screens, one of which is almost always used to move the narrative forward.
24CitationHal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 171–203. Foster critiques the phenomenon of the artist as ethnographer. See also CitationKwon, One Place after Another, 126–137: Kwon distinguishes between different models of interaction between artists and collaborators in new genre public art practices. An “invented community” is one that is brought into being by the collaboration.
25CitationLolita Jablonskiene, “Political Refractions: Cities, Societies, and Spectacles in the Work of Anu Pennanen,” Framework: The Finnish Art Review 8 (2008): 94.
26 See CitationAndreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). While the monumental connotes power, the political form that that power takes and the ends to which it is used varies.
27 See CitationMichel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). de Certeau's distinctions between place/space and strategies/tactics offer ways of reading these everyday activities as contestations of power. See CitationQuentin Stevens, “Visitor Responses at Berlin's Holocaust Memorial: Contrary to Conventions, Expectations and Rules,” Public Art Dialogue 2.1 (Mar. 2012): 34–59. Stevens also explores unauthorized or unintended uses of memorials, using the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin as a case study. The key distinction between that monument and the Soviet ones in Tallinn is that the latter are ignored and neglected by the city government. The teenagers in the film break implicit rather than explicit rules of use at the sites.
28 See CitationMarc Augé, (New York: Verso, 1995), 82. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity
29 See CitationConnerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting,” 66–67. Connerton identifies planned obsolescence as yet another type of forgetting.
30 See CitationAndres Kurg, “The Cold War, Sex and the City,” in A User's Guide to Tallinn, ed. Mari Laanemets and Andres Kurg (Tallinn: Estonian Academy of Arts, 2002): 101–103; and CitationSakari Nupponen, Aikamatka hotelli Viruun [Time travel to the Hotel Viru (Helsinki: Ajatuskirjat, 2007).
31CitationAndres Kurg, “Estonia: The Remarkable Afterlife of the Linnahall Concert Hall,” Architectural Design 76.3 (2006): 53.
32 Personal interview with Anu Pennanen on February 6, 2007, Helsinki, Finland.
33 The original marble sculpture in the collection of the Art Museum of Estonia is just 142.5 cm. (55 in.) high.
34CitationMerike Teder, “Eesti kõrgeim skulptuur valmib sügiseks” [Estonia's tallest sculpture will be completed by the autumn], Eesti Päevaleht, 15 Apr. 2004, http://epl.delfi.ee/news/eesti/eesti-korgeim-skulptuur-valmib-sugiseks.d?id = 50981527 (accessed 2 Jul. 2015).
35CitationNicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2002), 31.
36 See CitationCharlotte Bydler, The Global Art World Inc.: On the Globalization of Contemporary Art (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2004); and CitationStewart Martin, “Critique of Relational Aesthetics,” Third Text 21.4 (2007): 369–386. Both offer critiques of participatory, project-based art in regard to neoliberalism and service economies. See CitationClaire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Autumn 2004): 51–79 and Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 138–155. CitationBishop critiques the ways that relational aesthetics and other participatory art practices tend to theorize community and democracy.
37 Sasha CitationSenderovich, “Goodbye, Lenin?,” New York Times, 9 Dec. 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/opinion/goodbye-lenin.html (accessed 2 Jul. 2015), para. 12.
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Notes on contributors
Paul Wilson
Paul Wilson is an assistant professor of art history at Ithaca College in New York, where he teaches Contemporary Art and Museum Studies with a research focus on art practices after 1990. His article “What's the Time in Vyborg? The Counter-Restoration of a Functionalist Monument” (2012) in Future Anterior investigates a collaborative art project by Liisa Roberts that intervenes in the politics of post-Soviet memory in Vyborg, Russia. Wilson's other research on Finnish and South African artists has appeared in journals and anthologies in the United States and Europe.