Here's an interesting story out of Russia about a proposed monument to former president of Russia Boris Yeltsin that was rejected out of hand by the competition committee and by representatives of Yeltsin's Family.
After a competition that involved over 6,000 entries, the winner was declared to be the young artist Dmitri Kavarga, whose black metal sculpture was called Biomorphous Black Monster.
Here's a picture I found of the biomorphous black monster on the BBC News website:
It looks like some kind of infernal ab machine, if that isn't redundant. As the article points out, the stated reason for rejection of the BBM was that it has not been 10 years since Yeltsin's death, though why then they were having a contest at all is a little puzzling. In rejecting the proposed monument, a spokesperson for the State Duma's commission for monumental art also called Kavarga's work "slapdash and ambiguous," so apparently there were at least some aesthetic considerations that were made as well.
Kavarga himself said of his work that it "symbolized destruction and break-down, the swallowing-up of orderliness by chaos." (Again, very much like an ab machine.) And this is a view of Yeltsin's reign that is not unheard of. For anyone interested in learning more about Russia in the nineties with Yeltsin at the helm I highly recommend Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinsky's wonderful book The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy, a gripping and detailed account of the slapdash and ambiguous Yeltsin years.
The statue would have stood in Lyubyanka Square, not far from Red Square and the Kremlin, and in front of the old KGB headquarters, currently the FSB headquarters. For many years, the square was the home to a monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, which was the muscle behind the Red Terror.
After a competition that involved over 6,000 entries, the winner was declared to be the young artist Dmitri Kavarga, whose black metal sculpture was called Biomorphous Black Monster.
Here's a picture I found of the biomorphous black monster on the BBC News website:
It looks like some kind of infernal ab machine, if that isn't redundant. As the article points out, the stated reason for rejection of the BBM was that it has not been 10 years since Yeltsin's death, though why then they were having a contest at all is a little puzzling. In rejecting the proposed monument, a spokesperson for the State Duma's commission for monumental art also called Kavarga's work "slapdash and ambiguous," so apparently there were at least some aesthetic considerations that were made as well.
Kavarga himself said of his work that it "symbolized destruction and break-down, the swallowing-up of orderliness by chaos." (Again, very much like an ab machine.) And this is a view of Yeltsin's reign that is not unheard of. For anyone interested in learning more about Russia in the nineties with Yeltsin at the helm I highly recommend Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinsky's wonderful book The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy, a gripping and detailed account of the slapdash and ambiguous Yeltsin years.
The statue would have stood in Lyubyanka Square, not far from Red Square and the Kremlin, and in front of the old KGB headquarters, currently the FSB headquarters. For many years, the square was the home to a monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, which was the muscle behind the Red Terror.
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