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The Familiar Converted into the Other
Le Chevalier de Jaucourt noted in the eighteenth century that “In every period
of history, those who have governed people have always made use of paintings
and statues, the better to inspire the feelings they wanted them to have, be it in
religion, or in politics” (cited by Warner 1996 (1985)). The issue of fundamental
significance is the category of subjects, which have at their disposal the real power
enabling them to initiate and realise projects of monuments at a given time and in
a given place. This directly translates into a possibility to ban, withhold or reshape
the concepts of commemoration undertaken by the groups that are hostile, unac¬
cepted or subordinated (in practice often those who are ‘invented’ as Others). The
monuments are the reflection of the existing relations of power and inequality
throughout the country, or even throughout the whole region. “(...) it is because
images are used to express, impose and legitimize a power that the same images
are misused in order to challenge, reject and delegitimize it” (Gamboni 2007: 27).
Creating images with the help of monuments never appears as an abstract problem,
rather it always seems to be an ideological project. This aspect is especially clearly
visible in the context of totalitarian and authoritarian systems. The aim of the
monument founders is to commemorate the familiar. However, these images can
undergo the process of othering, against the will and intention of their founders.
Monuments serve certain groups in their attempts to reach specific goals in
suiting their interests: “Symbolic rule over a given territory requires the construction
of material group signs, such as plates with names in the mother tongue of a given
group, monuments (...) etc. (...) Symbolic rule allows, then, to rule sensu stricto.
Arbitrariness of such a rule is hidden behind the symbolic rule, which appears to
people as rule over things only” (Nijakowski 2006: 109). Monuments serve to
emphasise and propagate certain concepts, ideas and values. Ideological influence
of material representation consists in this case of marking and stressing differences
and in transforming social, political and cultural heterogeneity into a cohesive
homogeneity. Monuments, in comparison with other artistic representations,
emerge as the most powerful ‘tools’ for power and inequality within the public
space, since only those groups which possess real power, without necessarily having
social support, are capable of establishing them, and, which is even more important,
capable of providing them with the relevant rank and protection—and thus, the
possibility to last. Such groups also decide on the formula of visual representation,
the patterns of which are later on repeatedly reproduced.
It is necessary to stress that all images and their visual representations are cre¬
ated and function within a given time and space, and that this influences how
they are socially and culturally experienced. “This point makes us aware that the
proper reading of a situation, the recognition of the point, can be accessed only by
those who belong to the cultural collective” (Demski 2013: 73). It would be naive
to think that the monuments to Red Army soldiers erected on the order of the
authorities under conditions of a totalitarian system reflected the will of the com¬
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