"For the Belgrade exhibition, the collective will erect one
part of the Tatlin monument – a 1:1 ratio fragment from the centre
of the construction – as a monumental sculpture in public
space, between the Museum of Contemporary Art and the building of the
former Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party, now Business
Centre Usce. Although the monument occupies a symbolic space, which epitomises
both the discourse of Yugoslav modernity and the modernism of the socialist
era (an appropriate context for Tatlin’s monument, and equally suitable
for Tatlin himself), it does this in a space of proposition, rather than
through the factual realisation of the ephemeral part of the construction.
This sculptural realisation represents a steel construction weighing 11
tones, devoid of specific visual qualities or aesthetic value that would
indicate the background it originates from. Therefore, the artistic declaration
becomes decisive factor in recognizing the identity of this object, whose
open gaps pose a question: Tatlin, original or fake; trick or truth?
In the vein of Marcel Duchamp and his 55 cc of Paris Air, part of Tatlin’s
Monument to the Third International raises our suspicion in the grand
manner of the 'art of suspicion', and this mental game broadly encompasses
institutional order in which the object functions – in this case
the programmatic and the status setting of a public sculpture. Whatever
the case may be, should the monument be built, it will likely become the
largest ready-made ever made; it would concurrently call into question
its own status as a ready-made (for its absurd, gigantic dimensions),
and its own identity of a public sculpture in an urban space (for the
mental game of truth and deception it sets off). "
Jelena Vesic , Belgrade, 2007 |
