IMG MGMT: Turbo Sculpture

(Editors note: IMG MGMT is an annual image-based artist essay series. Today’s invited artists are Vvork, a daily art journal run by Aleksandra Domanović, Georg Schnitzer, Christoph Priglinger and Oliver Laric. Vvork has curated shows at Galerie West in The Hague, MU in Eindhoven, Platform3 in Munich, part of the Foto Biennale Mannheim Ludwigshafen Heidelberg and is currently planning an evening at the New Museum in New York in October.)

After the highly publicized Bruce Lee monument was erected in Mostar, a city and municipality in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2005, a series of similar ventures were initiated in rural Serbia. Some sociologists describe the glorification of nonpolitical celebrity figures as the result of an identity crisis caused by the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, a period when a once functioning multi-ethnic unity collapsed. Serbian artist Milica Tomić, for one, is concerned. She calls the statues “a dangerous joke in which history is being erased and replaced by Mickey Mouse.”

Although she does not say it, the development of Turbo-folk, a musical genre originating in Serbia and emerging from pop-folk, is emblematic of the 90’s crisis in ex-Yugoslavia. The term was coined by singer-songwriter Rambo Amadeus in the late 1980s, who sang, “Folk is the people. Turbo is a system of injecting fuel under pressure into the motor cylinder with internal combustion. Turbo-folk is a burning of a nation. Turbo-folk is not music. Turbo-folk is the beloved of the masses. Awakening of the lowest human desires. I did not invent Turbo-folk, I gave it its name.”

At the time, the term was nothing more than an intentionally humorous combination of two contradictory concepts – “turbo,” evoking an image of modern industrial progress and “folk,” a symbol of tradition and rural conservatism. But the political and economic turmoil of the early 1990s Yugoslavia rendered the society labile enough for the concept “Turbo-culture” to gain momentum. With all its exaggerations, inordinateness and random amalgamations of both local and global ornamentations, Turbo eventually became a prefix for social and media phenomena of the war and post-war period. As a result, terms such as Turbo-politics, Turbo-TV, Turbo-architecture, Turbo-urbanism, etc. developed. Turbo-sculpture describes the recent rise of interest and popularity in public monuments dedicated to nonpolitical celebrity figures.

On Saturday, November 26, 2005, Mostar, unveiled a bronze statue of Bruce Lee. Located in the city park Zrinjski, the life-sized monument stands 1.68 meters tall and is a symbol of solidarity in the ethnically divided city. The first of its kind in the world, another statue was revealed one day later in Hong Kong marking what would have been the Chinese star’s 65th birthday. Spearheaded by the youth group Mostar Urban Movement, the collective saw the Bruce Lee project as a means of questioning iconic celebrity figures by mixing high grandeur with pop culture and kung fu. The group described Bruce Lee as “far enough away from us that nobody can ask what he did during World War II” and “part of our idea of universal justice–that the good guys can win.” Bruce Lee was chosen by organizers as a symbol of the fight against ethnic divisions. For the dysfunctional community of Croats, Serbs, and Muslims living in Mostar, Lee, an American of Chinese descent and a famous martial arts actor, represented a bridging of cultures. The unveiling ceremony of the statue saw the attendance of local Bruce Lee fans, representatives of Germany which had bankrolled the project, as well as Chinese officials.

Only a few hours after the unveiling, the monument was vandalized. A group of teenagers defaced the statue and stole the nunchucks, leaving the site littered with wine bottles. It is now in storage awaiting reparation.

The general enthusiasm about the Bruce Lee project led the weekly newspaper Slobodna Bosna to publish a suggestion for building a monument to the local partisan hero Vladimir “Valter” Perić in Beijing. The role of Valter was portrayed in the 1972 film Valter Defends Sarajevo. A huge success in China, Valter’s name and picture were even printed on Chinese beer stickers.

The village of Žitište in Serbia repeatedly suffers heavy flooding, gaining a disaster-prone reputation. Fed up, the locals decided to erect a statue similar to the pre-existing monument in Philadelphia, PA, of Rocky Balboa, a boxer played by Sylvester Stallone in the film classic Rocky. The sculpture was to revive the village’s reputation and economic state, as it is one of the poorest cities in northern Serbia. Initiated by the Citizens Association Rocky Balboa Žitište, a three-meter high statue was revealed August 18, 2007 in the village center.

Cameraman Bojan Marčeta, a 28-year-old who both came up with the idea and raised the money to commission the statue, explained the impetus behind the figure chosen. “Nobody from the wars of the 1990s or from the former Yugoslavia deserves a monument, because all our leaders did was to prevent us from progressing,” said Marčeta, “My generation can’t find role models so we have to look elsewhere. Hollywood can provide an answer.”

On February 27, 2007, the village of Međa — located on the Serbian border of Romania — announced they would build a monument to Johnny Weissmuller. Born in Međa in 1904, and known for his role of Tarzan, residents said their choice to commission a statue of Weissmuller was inspired by the announcement of the Rocky monument in Žitište. Dragan Pusara, an assistant to the mayor, told reporters Tarzan was a fitting icon for Serbs because he began with nothing, but managed to survive the jungle against all odds. Tarzan, he added, would transcend the ethnic divisions of Međa – home to Serbs, Hungarians and Serbs of German descent – because he belongs to everyone. “After World War II, hundreds of displaced people arrived here with their families and one piece of luggage, and they needed to be strong to survive just like Tarzan,” he said.

After singer and former pin-up model Samantha Fox agreed to perform at the 2007 Dani Estrade Awards in the Serbian city of Čačak, plans were underway to erect a statue in her honor. Due to offensive remarks made by the public during the concert, the crowd jeering “Show us your tits!”, Fox failed to show up for the dinner given in her honor by politician Velimir Ilić and the monument project was subsequently dropped. Officials boasted that the statue would be larger than Rocky, but so far the only sign of Fox’s likeness is an empty pedestal with the word “rumors” written on it.

Israeli artist Michael Blum made this story a subject of his project The Rumor (Or How Samantha Fox Helped Čačak Reach Fame) [pictured above] with an empty plinth standing for the possible sculpture in front of the Nenežda Pertović gallery in Čačak.

The Turbo-sculpture trend continued with the statue of Bob Marley, uncovered on August 23, 2007, during the music festival Rock Village in Banatski Sokolac, Serbia. In a conciliatory symbolic gesture, both Croatian and Serbian musicians were on hand for the event; Croatian rock star Dado Topić and Serbian musician Jovan Matić together unveiled the statue. “Bob Marley promoted peace and tolerance in his music,” explained the event organizers.

By the end of 2008 a new building initiative for a monument to the hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur was raised by the Belgrade youth organization Rad i vizija (Work and Vision). Rappers gathered around the hip-hop forum Rad i vizija to discuss the best place to honor Tupac Shakur. So far Marinkova Bara, one of Belgrade’s poorest neighborhoods, is favored because, as Rad I Vizija notes, “there’s no place in Belgrade that looks more like a ghetto than this.” The Belgrade suburb is predominately inhabited by gypsies. According to monument planners, the area where the statue will be mounted is poorly lit and considered unsafe. This is meant to highlight the inferior position of the Roma people and set a role model for socially deprived youth.

The initiative calls to mind a project by Italian artist Paolo Chiasera, who launched his Tupac Project on the Internet encouraging discussion among the hip-hop and web community. He then constructed a life-size statue of Tupac on top of a pedestal about 5 meters tall for the exhibition “(my private) Heroes.” Permanently positioned outside the Gehry-designed museum MARTa Herford, the monochrome statue not only signifies a crossover between hip-hop and art, but acts as a monument to the decline of monuments. Following the exhibition in Herford, the Tupac Monument lost its monumentality when the artist set it in a concrete wall marking Bologna’s most well known meeting place for hip-hop fans. As there are four Tupac statues produced by Chiasera, a possible new home for one of them is Marinkova Bara. The artist expressed interest when informed about the Serbian initiative.

After October 2000, following the change of regime in Serbia, Turbo-culture entered its own transitional phase. While war time Turbo-culture was mostly associated with exaggerated nationalism, almost pornographic kitsch and crime glorification, the post war Turbo-sculpture phenomenon boldly contrasts nationalist xenophobia while retaining its stylistic identity.

Recently, a Belgrade jury of artists and intellectuals appointed to commission a monument to the victims of the wars of the 1990s found they could not agree on whom to honor. Mileta Prodanović, a Serbian writer and painter who was on the committee, said the commission’s failure reflected the ideological vacuum left over from the time of Milosevic. “These Hollywood monuments are a subversive response [to the governments of that time], “which they are mocking,” he said. “People realize that many of our soldiers in the wars of the 1990s were criminals who stole, robbed and killed. So people are searching for alternative role models and this is a healthy rejection of nationalism,” stated Prodanović. But artist Milica Tomić, who also served on the jury, said she feared these new heroes imported from films and popular culture were just an excuse to avoid facing up to the bloody history of the Balkans. “This turning to Rocky or Tarzan is unhealthy and dangerous,” she said. “We need to find a way of representing our grief, our responsibility and our despair. Until we do that, Serbia cannot come to terms with the present and the future.”

There is also a diaspora of Yugoslav heroes making sculptural appearances in other parts of the World. Nikola Tesla, claimed by both Serbs and Croats, for example, is immortalized in Niagara Falls Canada, the monument a gift of Yugoslavia to the United States in 1976.

Dražen Petrović was a Croatian basketball player whose rising NBA career was tragically ended by his death in 1993. On April 29, 1995, a statue commemorating Petrović’s significance to the world of sports was erected in front of the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, thus making him only the second athlete to receive this honor. In 2006 another monument was uncovered in Zagreb in front of Dražen Petrović Memorial Center.

Tito’s inclusion in the Non-Aligned Movement (an international organization of states considering themselves not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc) led to numerous personal and group monuments outside of Yugoslavia.

Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, claims that the well-known ecologists’ motto “think global, act local” has been reversed in US politics to “think local, act global.” As a counterweight to the non-ceasing import of western idols to the Balkans, it would do the West some good to reverse roles in cultural exchange by honoring heroes outside of their own geographic borders. Maybe statues to Milla Jovovich, Maxo Vanka, Vlade Divac, Dragutin Tadijanović and other great Yugoslav figures wouldn’t hurt.