Monumental Endeavors: Sculpting History in Southeastern Europe, 1960–2016

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dc.contributor.advisorMansbach, Steven Aen_US
dc.contributor.authorIsto, Raino Eetuen_US
dc.contributor.departmentArt History and Archaeologyen_US
dc.contributor.publisherDigital Repository at the University of Marylanden_US
dc.contributor.publisherUniversity of Maryland (College Park, Md.)en_US
dc.date.accessioned2019-06-21T05:31:46Z
dc.date.available2019-06-21T05:31:46Z
dc.date.issued2018en_US
dc.description.abstractThis dissertation focuses on monumentality and the ways it has developed in the sociopolitical conditions of late socialist and postsocialist Southeastern Europe. It examines monumental production in this region between the 1960s and 80s, and the artistic practices that constitute responses to socialist monumentality undertaken in the postsocialist period in the republics of the former Yugoslavia and in Albania. It considers the relationship between ways of remembering the Second World War and the monumentalization of what is often referred to as ‘actually existing socialism.’ Additionally, it explores how legacies of socialist monumentality have affected contemporary artists working in relation to socialist heritage and to more recent traumatic experiences, such as the wars coincident with and following Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Southeastern Europe’s modernity has been a particularly conflicted one, both geopolitically and culturally. Home to an overwhelming number of (frequently overlapping and amorphous) ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups, the region is notable for the hybrid and disparate ways political and cultural actors—from dictators to democratically elected officials—have attempted to cultivate a collective historical consciousness. Monuments serve as particularly rich examples of the ways politicians, artists, and publics navigate collective values and contest both projected pasts and futures. The transition from late socialism to postsocialism provides diverse examples of how public monuments in countries such as Macedonia, Croatia, and Albania relate to debates on ethnicity, gender, political economy, and class-consciousness in the context of continued redefinitions of Europe’s borders and culture as a whole. Furthermore, ongoing attempts to preserve, restore, relocate, or destroy socialist-era monuments offer a rich and complicated body of evidence for the ways that histories are repurposed, especially the histories of the Partisans’ transnational antifascist struggle during the Second World War. This dissertation argues that many contemporary artists from Southeastern Europe have focused precisely on the ambiguous and conflicted meanings of socialist monuments, and have avoided treating monuments as monolithic forms associated with official ideological forces, in need of demythologization. Instead, these artists have turned to monuments in order to address the disparate histories of struggle that have given rise to Europe’s current sociopolitical situation.en_US
dc.identifierhttps://doi.org/10.13016/jjjb-1ul9
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/22084
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledArt historyen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledEast European studiesen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledModern historyen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledAlbaniaen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledContemporary Arten_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledModernismen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledMonumentsen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledSculptureen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledYugoslaviaen_US
dc.titleMonumental Endeavors: Sculpting History in Southeastern Europe, 1960–2016en_US
dc.typeDissertationen_US

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