Description
Keynote presentation. If 'things' are conceptually defined in opposition to objects, then shadows – those surfaceless, mobile, and enigmatic object counterparts – should offer a fertile way of thinking about them. Things gather relations – are at the nexus of them – we are told. This presentation will consider a specific 'urban thing' into which much, perhaps impossibly much, is gathered: the shadow cast by Josef Stalin's Palace of Culture and Science (PKiN), the gargantuan high-rise building gifted to the shattered city of Warsaw in the aftermath of World War II. Although this difficult inheritance endures as the contemporary city's most obvious landmark, it remains, at the same time, its most debated and troubling building. Focusing specifically on the building’s shadow, in the presentation I will discuss recent artworks and architectural projects that picture its exorcism, which is to say the detachment or dissolution of the historical memory that is the inevitable double of the material fabric of the building and that is gathered into the thing-like figure of the shadow. Through this case study, and in relation to a range of material that includes the art of Komar and Melamid, and recent literature on memory and oblivion, the essay develops larger points about the complications of post-socialist attempts to forget, and concludes by interpreting a recent proposal – put forward by a group that includes the celebrated film director Andrzej Wajda – to found a museum of communism in the labyrinthine cellars of the Palace. Where Komar and Melamid’s painting The Origin of Socialist Realism (1982–83) slyly reworked the famous origin of painting myth recounted in Pliny’s Natural History in order to depict the inscription of the shadow of Stalin as the founding gesture of socialist realism, the museum of communism proposal comes to replay this scene but in reverse. For now, instead of the absorption of Stalin’s shadow into the building, it is the shadow of the Palace that is detached and rematerialised in anthropomorphic form (thus transmuting it from 'thing' to 'object') – a colossal fallen and beheaded statue, the memory of a planned but never-realised monument to the leader that the promoters of the museum perversely find themselves obliged to construct in order to enact its symbolic execution.| Period | 11 Apr 2015 |
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| Event title | The Urban Thing |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Auckland, New ZealandShow on map |