Interview with Jean-Baptiste Naudy (Société Réaliste) by Dorothée Charles, French Embassy in New York, on the occasion of the exhibition Monument to Cold War Victory at Cooper Union (Oct 7-Nov 7 2014) +++ D.C.: Could you explain your project in this exhibition? J.-B.N.: This project is a part of a series which is entitled Mesomemorial. Meso- as “in between two things”, and -memorial as in memorial monument. It is dealing with places which have two contradictory monuments standing one next to the other. Our project consists of making a single monument from two separate ones. We model in 3D both objects then we use morphing software find an intermediate shape. D.C.: You show two photographs and one sculpture. Can you describe these two images? J.-B.N.: The Monument of Victory is the first image in this series. This monument is in Budapest’s central square, which is called Freedom Square. It is a very important square. From there the street runs straight to the national Parliament. The Embassy of the United States is also there, as are the headquarters of the national television station and the national bank of Hungary. It is the only place where Hungarians have preserved a communist-era sculpture. It is a unique thing in Budapest. They removed all the communist-era sculptures, except for one, and placed them in a park outside the city, which is called “the park of sculptures.” The one that they kept is in the central square, and it’s called Obelisk of the Red Army Victory. D.C.: Why did they keep this one? J.-B.N.: It is an obelisk which was built by the Red Army to celebrate the liberation of the city from Nazi Germany. They kept this monument not in memory of the German occupation but to celebrate the end of the occupation. In 2011, on the hundredth anniversary of its creation, twenty-five meters from the original sculpture, they installed a two meter wide, two meter high monumental bronze sculpture of Ronald Reagan walking towards the obelisk. Conceived by Hungarian conservative politicians, the idea was to remind the public of the pain caused by the Soviets after the beginning of the Cold War, and that Reagan had ended this war. This square became very touristy, with tourists photographing themselves shaking hands with Reagan. It is very funny. The hand is now polished. It is like the foot of Saint-Peter in Rome! D.C.: And what is represented in the second image ? J.-B.N.: It is called Aura of Stagnation. Ronald Reagan is shown from twelve different angles which overlap. In the exhibition titled Monument to Cold War Victory, this image shows that by winning the Cold War the Americans became Soviet, without being aware of it. For fifty years, American lived in this imperial paranoia, they developed an infrastructure of State, a culture of global war which made them fall into military totalitarianism without being aware of it. I had a discussion with a friend from Kazakhstan who knows the post-Soviet situation well, the police atmosphere, the permanent terror, people spying on one another, and he told me that it is the same thing in the United States. There are policemen everywhere, might as well call them the army. There are cameras and everything is under surveillance. There is no public space. There are cities where we see the extremes of rich and poor, as in Moscow. It is the country which is controlled by the oligarchy, by a few corporate families, exactly as in Russia today. D.C.: How did you make one monument out of two? J.-B.N.: With these two monuments, we made a sculpture, Mesomemorial: March of Victory, which is at the same time anthropomorphic and architectonic. It is at the same time an architectural object and a human figure. Ronald Reagans head enters the communist star. It is this sculpture which will be presented at the exhibition Monument to Cold War Victory at Cooper Union. It is one meter wide and twenty high, in aluminum and weighs thirty-five kilos. It is presented on a base which is one meter high. The head of the sculpture is at the level of the height of the head of Reagan. D.C.: When did you create it and for which event ? J.-B.N.: We created it in February 2014 for the exhibition ‘amal al-ğam‘ (Mixture) in Budapest. We would like to continue this series, in particular in the United States where there are many very interesting situations like that one. D.C.: What do you think of the 9/11 memorial? J.-B.N.: In a public space, a monument is the incarnation of official ideology. To have a sculpture of Charles de Gaulle on the Champs-Elysées in Paris, that is ideology. Just like Abraham Lincolns statue in Washington DC. What does the text in front of the sculpture say? That Abraham Lincoln was a tolerant 19th-century Republican, and that he alone abolished slavery. But it is a lie that Steven Spielberg repeats in his movie. You will notice that there is no memorial for Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, even though it deserves one. For September 11, the memorial has to represent an abstraction (all the dead people) and national solidarity. Around this memorial, there are several buildings built and in construction. The first one is called One World Trade Center. This title says that the Americans are trying to convince themselves that New York is still the capital of the world: culturally, financially, morally, politically. Which is wrong and also a pure ideological construction. The 9/11 Memorial will be visited for the next fifty years by schools and tourists with the idea of the fundamental necessity of the United States protecting their power in the 21st century in the name of the imperialism, of the war against the terrorism, which is a political myth.
Posted on: Wed, 08 Oct 2014 19:51:35 +0000
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