Should we take out the sledgehammers?

[pachyderm]

By now many of you have heard of the controversy over that moving of a bronze military memorial in Estonia from the city center to a military cemetery. There's now talk here in Poland to remove various Red Army memorials. In Praga, the neighborhood on the east side of Warsaw, there's a monument (http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomnik_Braterstwa_Broni) that the city government wants to remove to a cemetery and in its place build a consolidated tram station (currently there are tram stops all over the place in the area). Unlike the Estonian incident, it's not as motivated with political or cultural unrest since it's jokingly referred to here as the Four Sleeping Soldiers.

I'm curious what your views are on the subject in general -- can monuments/memorials be moved elsewhere if they're "in the way"? Should they be trivialized when they commemorate an unpopular (then and now) event in history? And what about memorials erected by either liberating or occupying forces (depending on one's point-of-view)? What if the American government erected such a memorial in Iraq (as unlikely as that may be in the near future)?

[sculptor]

As Julius conquered Bologna, he commissioned Michaelangelo to design and cast a bronze statue of himself.
When Julius fortunes faded, and the Bolognese re-rebelled, they promptly melted down Michaelangelo's Julius, cast it as a canon, and fired it in the direction of Rome
Maybe a tad shy of the fate of the false Demetre at the hands of the Russians, but it made it's point quite succinctly

At-least, the Estonians didn't melt the thing
a monument/statue is fundamentally different from unattached sculpture
in that, it commemorates a specific victor and symbolizes an attendant point of view.
As the winds of change change the viewpoint, the monument's commemorative symbolic function becomes as annoying to some people as an ithyphallic Jesus might be to others
With a perceived deference to moving the annoyance rather than destroying it, one might think that we are becoming a more civilized and tolerant species.

(fingers crossed and all that)
Rod Patterson

[GlennT]

I like the solution that occurred somewhere in a former communist country, which one I unfortunately do not remember. What they did was to put all of the statues of Stalin, Lenin, Karl, and Groucho Marx :rolleyes: in a park, I guess it could be called a theme park. That way, the sculptural tributes to that bizarre episode in human history were not lost to the cause of education, the curious public, tourists, and historians. At the same time these images did not have to haunt, oppress, intimidate, or otherwise bring up nightmares for the people that lived under their shadow at the original locations.

GlennT

[evaldart]

History, humanity and nature have their own sledgehammers. What survives and what doesn't will vary from one individual, regime, race, SPECIES to the next. Much to the dismay of Charlton Heston those apes saw no archeological value in the Statue of Liberty, its demolished crumblings only a lost reminder of the vanquished.