Ars: časopis Ústavu Dejín Umenia Slovenskej Akadémie Vied (43.2010)

2. GwAzr PL M%2rA.

Flungary, socialist statues were placed in the Statue
Park on the outskirts of Budapest [Fig. 1], a local
version of Madame Tousseauďs Museums, mostly
for Western tourists, secluded from the local public
sphere. The rigidly structured park, considered as an
autonomous aesthetical project by itself, could not
really provide proper site for memory work for lo-
cal inhabitants A I would argue that more likely this
is the reason of profound ignorance of the Statue
Park by local inhabitants and not sélective memory
abandoning politics inherent in the monuments, as it
is frequently argued by Western scholarsA Likewise,
Soviet monuments were collected into a remote Feld,
Grùtas Park in Lithuania [Fig. 2] and elsewhere in
the région.

See TURAI, H.: Past Unmastered: Hot and Cold Memory
in Hungary. In: TA'A Taxi, 23, 2009, No. 1 (Socialist Eastern
Europe. Ed. R. FOWKES), pp. 97-106.
^ This argument was used by Bill Hirst and Jonathan Bach
in the discussion after the section "Everyday memory" of


Meanwhile, memorial muséums, the official sites
of memory, were established in several countries
of the region well before their societies could hâve
corne to terms with their recent past. AR in all, élé-
ments of the sociaHst past were coRected and put
aside in quarantines. The ready-made, pre-packaged
pubRc spaces for remembering the past excluded
the pubRc.
The very hrst rehection on the issues in play
came from outside of the geopoRtical terrain, from
Komar and Melamid, Russian émigré artists who had
stayed in New York since the late seventies. They
proposed an exhibition in 1992, with the initial call
for projects: "What is to be done with monumental
propaganda?"^ They asked artists to give ideas of
TA LAAr of TA TA'A NTJR
The New York School for Social Research,
New York, 4 — 6 March 2010.
^ Ed. D. ASHTON. New York 1994.

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