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Kitchen Table Kibitzing Friday: We Demand Peace [1]
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Date: 2025-05-02
The socialist realist art of the Soviet Union retained a sense of its Romantic and Classical origins especially in sculpture. Artist Vera Muchina survived WWII and in 1950 designed a sculptural ensemble titled We Demand Peace, related to the Korean civil war. The issue for monumental sculpture was to be able to scale up the same expressive lines and mass that were developed in maquettes or models, as with the gigantic sculpture atop the Russian pavilion at the Paris Eposition of 1937.
The current Trump attempt to create a national sculpture garden of “American Heroes” diverts resources and attention to reenact the disneyfication of American memory as “realistic” figurative sculpture, and erase modern art.
I would make my submission for Alex Trebek’s sculpture to that competition using the Worker from Kolkhoz as a source, replacing the hammer with a replica of an index card upon which is printed the Jeopardy Daily Double.
The 3-D printer plans are available for a smaller work: "We demand peace!" (Russian: Требуем мира!) is a multi-figure sculpture set in Moscow in the park "Muzeon". It was made in 1950 in response outbreak of the Korean War, by the sculptor Vera Mukhina, together with Nina Zelenskaya [ru], Zinaida Ivanova [ru], S. V. Kazakov, and A. M. Sergeyev.www.myminifactory.com/... Vera Ignatyevna Mukhina (1889-1953) – Soviet sculptor. In 1947-1953 was member of Presidium of the USSR Academy of Arts. Academician of the USSR Academy of Arts, People's Artist of the USSR and Laureate of the Stalin Prize on five occasions. Two identical copies of this monument were made. One of them remained in Moscow and was installed at VDNH near Mira Avenue, and the second one was sent to Pyongyang. The Moscow monument stood on VDNKh until 1994, after which the "Museon" was moved. There the sculpture stood in incomplete form: only three of the six figures were represented, the rest were stored in the museum's storerooms. By the beginning of the 2010s the monument was in a bad condition, there were a number of fragments. In 2012-2013, the restoration of the sculpture was carried out, the lost fragments were restored according to the gypsum original kept in the Russian Museum.[2][3] Vera Mukhina decided to make a sculpture "We demand peace!" in 1950, after learning about the war in Korea. Together with her, the creative team worked on the monument: Nina Zelenskaya, Zinaida Ivanova, Sergey Kozakov and Alexander Sergeev. Vera Mukhina called her work "agitational sculpture". It was specially made by the method of galvano (electrical welding) from light metal to facilitate transportation to various international conferences dedicated to the world. "We demand peace!" (Russian: Требуем мира!) is a multi-figure sculpture set in Moscow in the park "Muzeon". It was made in 1950 in response outbreak of the Korean War, by the sculptor Vera Mukhina, together with Nina Zelenskaya [ru], Zinaida Ivanova [ru], S. V. Kazakov, and A. M. Sergeyev. The sculptural composition "We Demand Peace" includes six figures going in one direction. Three figures in the middle - a black man, a Chinese and a Russian - go with their hands clasped behind the defeated banners of the German army. They symbolize nations that are striving for peace. To the left is a blind invalid of war in a shabby European soldier's uniform, to the right - a Korean mother raising a dead child.[4] These figures are reminiscent of the victims of the war. In front of all there is a beautiful young woman with a child. From her outstretched hands flies a pigeon - a symbol of peace.[5] This figure, apparently, represents a bright peaceful future, to which humanity aspires.
What this collection of figures implies is a kind of ensemble that reappears in the 1965 Rent Collection Courtyard by artist Wang Guanyi and students from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. Its reproduction by Cai Guo-Qiang’s Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard, created for a section of the 1999 Venice Biennial.
Imagine entering the Venice Biennial (a biannual art exhibition) and coming face-to-face with a clay sculpture of a man whose arm has fallen off, or whose nose is crumbling from his face. You may wonder if this was a mistake. Did the artist forget to fire his sculpture in the kiln? Or did you wander into a studio filled with unfinished or discarded artwork? In actuality, this degradation was a key conceptual component of Cai Guo-Qiang’s Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard, created for a section of the 1999 Venice Biennial designed to showcase the work of emerging artists. Cai’s work won the prestigious Golden Lion Award. rent collection courtyard at gwangju art biennale 2010 Cai’s sculpture consisted of life-sized representations of peasants paying rent to a ruthless landlord. Rather than emerging from the artist’s imagination, the figures were recreations of the most famous socialist realist sculpture from the Chinese revolutionary period under Mao Zedong—Rent Collection Courtyard. The sculpture was created in 1965 by artist Wang Guanyi and students from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. It consists of 114 fired-clay figures and illustrates the exploitation of the peasantry by landlord Liu Wencai. Wang Guanyi’s sculpture was effective political propaganda for the Communist Party of Mao Zedong, who took control of China in 1949, because it testified to the oppression of the peasantry by landlords, a feudal system, which Mao sought to overturn. The suffering of the peasants is apparent through such details as a young boy being whipped, a woman being separated from her baby, and an old man struggling to push his large bag of grain towards the landlord. Typical of Mao’s utilization of visual art as an educational tool, this sculpture was made as part of a political campaign titled “longing for the sweet through remembering the bitter,” meant to encourage the populace to be thankful for the blessings of their current communist reality by contemplating the horrors of the feudal past. From the Maoist perspective, under the old system, peasants were exploited and mistreated by the bourgeois class, while under communism, they were considered heroes within a system of class struggle. However, 42 years later, Cai Guo-Qiang’s Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard was not a verbatim recreation of the original sculptural tableau. Rather, it contained important differences that opened possibilities for a new political critique. [...] The original Rent Collection Courtyard represented a certainty in the power of art to express a clear and sustained political message, no matter how many times it was copied or where it traveled. Cai’s iteration, however, introduced new negations: not just a negation of feudalism (as in the original) and socialism (a common interpretation), but also a negation of modernist assumptions that artworks are closed systems of meaning that do not change within new contexts, that global biennials are always at the service of the art market, and that global capitalism (as represented by the art market) is a sustainable economic model. smarthistory.org/... x x YouTube Video
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