Ideas for Statuesque Make-Overs

Every once in a while someone puts together an exhibition that is more significant for its spirit and ideas than for the specific works of art it contains. “Monumental Propaganda” is a case in point.

Prompted by a call for proposals by emigre artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, the show consists of Russian, European and U.S. artists’ conceptions of ways that Russia’s legacy of massive Socialist Realist monuments, glorifying Soviet leaders and military triumphs, might be restyled to fit in with contemporary realities.

Organized by the savvy Independent Curators Inc. of New York, the exhibition represents unusually sophisticated programming by the Muckenthaler Cultural Center, where it is installed through Feb. 26.

It must be said that this show--which consists of case after case of drawings, collages, photographs and texts (some of which have not been translated from the original Russian)--has the scholarly appearance of a library display.

Reproducing the proposals in book form (perhaps in an expanded version of the accompanying catalog) might have been better than circulating them internationally as an art exhibition.

Still, the ideas are the thing. Although Komar and Melamid’s project may seem arcane to Southern California viewers--we don’t even have conventional monuments, unless you count the airport statue of John Wayne or such innocent paeans to American consumerism as Bob’s Big Boy--it raises larger questions about the purpose of monuments in any culture.

Erected to commemorate a person or an event in terms of heroism or nationalism, traditional monuments ignore the flaws and injustices of real life. This sweepingly judgmental bird’s-eye view of history could not be more at odds with the relativistic and anti-heroic approaches of contemporary history and contemporary art.

Witness Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial, arguably the best U.S. monument of the past 50 years. Refusing to glorify the war or invoke familiar images of heroism, Lin instead soberly allotted equal time to the inscribed names of each of the dead.

But how to make the transition from heroic to anti-heroic monument? Lin was reviled in some quarters for her lack of overt patriotism.

In Russia, where the population had been drilled for centuries under the czars to feel utterly powerless, the climate was right for extraordinary levels of state-imposed hero-worship under the Soviets. Most spectacular was the public enshrinement of Lenin’s embalmed body in Moscow, a display meant to function much like icons in the discredited Russian Orthodox Church.

Of course, such showy displays of public piety inevitably provoked private skepticism, expressed more often than not with the droll, anarchic humor that is particularly Russian and Eastern European.

This was the spirit of dada, the international art movement that flowered in the late ‘teens and early ‘20s. (The same years also saw the flowering of avant-garde experimentalism in pre- and post-Revolutionary Russia, before the deadly era of Socialist Realism.)

The dada spirit informs many works in the exhibition that tweak the self-importance of Soviet monuments. Art Spiegelman repositions the two heroic figures on the Monument of the Proletariat and Agriculture in Moscow so that they appear to be leaping blindly into space.

Mac Adams’ funnel-like abstraction, “The Dialectical Space Between Marx & Engels,” reduces the glorification of Marxist theory to sheer absurdity--the literal shape of the space between the two theoreticians on a well-known statue.

Some transformations impishly disregard the original purpose of the statues, treating them simply as prominent scaffolding for novel public conveniences. Eli Kuslansky would turn Motherland--the huge statue of a woman commemorating the Soviet defeat of the Nazis in the Battle of Stalingrad--into a global communications conduit with the addition of a satellite dish and TV monitors.

Joseph Kosuth goes so far as to remove statues of Lenin from their bases, the better to wryly salute the “tradition of abstract art” they embody. (The sardonic humor in this piece is aimed at a Soviet bureaucracy that at first tolerated, then clamped down on, its great abstract artists of the 1920s.)

The capitalistic free-for-all in contemporary Russia prompted such ironic offerings as Constantin Boym’s transformation of a statue of Lenin into an endorsement for Nike.

A few of the proposals depart from the realm of wry comedy to send a more overtly critical, elegiac or even hopeful message.

Gail Rothschild and Stephen Furnstahl would cover a tractor statue in sheepskin to protest the 60 million acres of grazing land violated by Khrushchev’s farming program in Kazakhstan in the mid-’50s. Komar and Melamid propose a pulsing electronic message (“Leninism”) for Lenin’s mausoleum, symbolizing the “rapid passage of human life” and “the vanity of Utopia.”

The most brightly visionary proposal is Petah Coyne’s idea of using salvaged metal from toppled sculptures to make the armatures of 10,000 onion-shaped “chandeliers” (mimicking the dome shape of Russian churches) that would be tethered to 100 churches, synagogues and historic buildings throughout the former Soviet Union.

At dusk, each chandelier would be lit and, the artist writes, “the skies would be filled with their glow.”

For all their differences, the proposals naturally share a belief in the primacy of the individual imagination over corporate or bureaucratic dogma. In a world run by enlightened artists, there would be no traditional monuments, just open-ended public works about specific events that let viewers make up their own minds.

* “Monumental Propaganda” continues through Feb. 26 at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center, 1201 W. Malvern Ave., Fullerton. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. $2 for adults, $1 for students and seniors, free for ages 12 and under. (714) 738-6595.