Markings

“Nothing so invis­i­ble as a mon­u­ment.” —Robert Musil

For most of her adult life, my mother, Danuta Rago, was a pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher in Poland. In the early sev­en­ties she trav­elled to the Asiatic republics of the ussr and to Siberia. Her assign­ment was to take por­traits of happy mem­bers of the col­lec­tive farms and pic­tures of the great­est indus­trial projects of the Soviet empire, such as the mas­sive hydro­elec­tric dam on the Angara River at the town of Bratsk, to be used as illus­tra­tions in heav­ily cen­sored Polish pub­li­ca­tions. When I looked through her archive recently in prepa­ra­tion for an upcom­ing his­tor­i­cal exhi­bi­tion of Polish women pho­tog­ra­phers, I found among her neg­a­tives of that time sev­eral images of mon­u­ments to the fathers of the Bolshevik Revolution that stood out from the rest of the mate­r­ial: slightly skep­ti­cal shots of Lenin, Marx and oth­ers, tow­er­ing over irrev­er­ent native pop­u­la­tions. Such images could not pos­si­bly serve the intended edi­to­r­ial pur­pose and would per­haps even jeop­ar­dize the careers of her edi­tors if pub­lished at that time.

I imag­ine that my mother was sur­prised to find such famil­iar mon­u­ments at the far­thest reaches of the Soviet empire. They looked exactly like those she knew from her trips to East Germany, Czech­o­slovakia and Bulgaria, and those that I grew up with in Warsaw. They were not really com­mem­o­ra­tive: local pop­u­la­tions regarded them largely as ter­ri­to­r­ial mark­ers of the empire, not unlike musk and other sub­stances that serve the same pur­pose for animals.

These bronze, cast-iron, stone and con­crete impe­r­ial emblems have all but dis­ap­peared from Warsaw’s pub­lic space, which is now crowded with com­mer­cial imagery on an unprece­dented scale. In the autumn of 2007 , faces of Pierce Brosnan, many storeys high, loomed over almost every street in the city cen­tre, sev­eral of them wrapped around the for­mer head­quar­ters of the now defunct Communist Party. The only text on these ads was the brand name Wolczanka, which is a cloth­ing man­u­fac­turer. My first reac­tion to the uni­for­mity and sheer size of these images was per­haps sim­i­lar to my mother’s response to the moun­tain­ous effi­gies of Lenin in the past. Was I encoun­ter­ing titanic forces mark­ing the ter­ri­tory and claim­ing own­er­ship of its inhab­i­tants? Or, as Marx once pre­dicted, had his­tory returned to Warsaw’s pub­lic space to replay itself as a farce?