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The Familiar Converted into the Other live through our activities and social relations; let us add that the images of the familiar and the Others are not, in that respect, an exception. In contrast to a sculpture or a painting the identity of a monument’s creator does not significantly influence its evaluation, value or reception (Wallis 1985: 315).8 However, the problem of the “multiple voices” of the monuments may be related to the “surplus value” of the images’, since this value leads to unintended consequences, surrounding monuments with newly created meanings and values, at variance with the original intentions of their creators and founders. In the case under discussion here, it would denote not only the conversion itself of the image of the familiar into the image of the Other, but the very possibility of such a conversion. The Figure of the Red Army Soldier on a Pedestal What visual elements could, then—ignoring for the time being the political circumstances—justify the fact that the figures on the pedestals were perceived by some as Others? The most characteristic features of monuments to Red Army soldiers were monumentality and realism, which resulted from their affiliation to the specific period and artistic tradition called socialist realism. There was no room for any experimentation. The changes that took place in Eastern Europe after the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 held no greater influence over the form of the monuments. It appears that one of the significant mechanisms responsible for the process of othering in the context of monument art was creating specific spatial relationships between the objects and their observers. The most important variable was the distance measured both horizontally and vertically. The size was also not without significance. From the point of view of an observer, distance is always measured from that person, from his or her own bodily person, placed at a certain point in space. ““Distance’ denotes a level of accessibility, but also a level of interestedness” (Tuan 1987: 66). Figures of the Red Army soldiers were often placed on high pedestals. The monuments were constructed on top of plinths, often with steps leading towards these plinths. These measures ensured that Soviet monuments, as a rule, were not the ‘everyday monuments. The statues were not placed at the eye level of passers-by, they could not have been touched with an outstretched hand, the viewers were divided from the monument by certain architectural ‘barriers’ which increased the distance between the viewers and the objects. This lack of physical proximity between the observers and the objects widened the physical distance, § Naturally, there are deviations from this rule. For example, in the case of the monument of Red Army soldiers in Olsztyn, it was the person of the artist—Xawery Dunikowski—and not the aesthetic value of the concept that was decisive for the inclusion of the monument in the register of historic monuments in 1993. ° “Surplus value” is created when the image gains value that seems disproportionate in relation to its actual meaning. An object may be overvalued or undervalued (Mitchell 2005: 76). 375
