How many more Dimitri Popović monuments does Cetinje need, so that the city can repay its famous artist?
I am wrong to think that the situation is reversed in relation to Kennedy's catchphrase - Dimitrije should not ask what he can do for the city, but what Cetinje can do for Dimitrije.
And it can be a lot.
In the last ten years, three monuments, three terrible markers, one for Njegoš (and who else?), then the well with the snake, and finally Princess Xenia.
If kitsch is measured by the degree of banality of associations (A. Mol), then Dimitrijeva Ksenija is not a princess but the queen of kitsch. She is the empress of kitsch. If every wound is next to the heart, then this metal mimesis is, if you'll forgive me, in the middle of the heart of that lizard, Malovaro, wrapped in cellophane small glory that is sweetened by tradition like a narcosis.
Nothing is alive there, because everything has faded away. The feeling as you approach that road model is like stepping on a grave marble. The princess sits alone with a book, so that we can see how it is read; with with a sword, so that we can enter the mood of the alpine spa from the end of the nineteenth century.
In a word, anachronistic boredom.
That's why it's good that last Sunday the professor of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Svetlana Racanović, said publicly and loudly at the opening of the Montenegrin Art Salon, in front of the mayor of Cetinje and the entire political elite, that monuments must be discussed seriously in the future. Going beyond the protocol, Racanović took the floor after the awarding of the Salona award and spoke what others are whispering about.
The professor spared the leaders embarrassment, but subtly let them know how barbaric they are at work. And how many barbarians we can best see when we visit the monument to Les Ivanović, another pearl of Cetinje, a new work by the sculptor Zlatko Glamočak.
What can I say, it just needs to be cordoned off, because the poet was attacked by some kind of scarf, while he stands proudly like a pedestrian with a limp scroll in his hand. At Princess Xenia's you have a bench to sit down and cry, but here you just look at the pain on Les's shoulders and it doesn't feel good to you. If it's any consolation, at least the first version of the monument was abandoned, in which the greatest melancholic of Montenegrin poetry was depicted as a salon hunk ready to whistle at the first passer-by.
And here we come again to Dimitri, the maestro of many salons, an anatomist of the first rank who shone on the scene more than half a century ago as a kind of late reflex of surrealism, a Renaissance tentacle of drawing skill in which critics have less and less faith as the years have gone by. In the end, he ended up with a toned Severina splattered with fake blood, hand in hand with Anastasia Miranović and her printed dresses, but also in this monumental landing on the hometown.
If it is also from Dimitri, it is a lot. If it is also from uncle Zlatko, it hurts again. Therefore, thank you to Dr. Svetlana Racanović for coming forward, for sensibly and courageously telling the leaders that they were exaggerating, and for helping the rest of us fight for our country with her expertise.
Because monuments are a struggle and places of aesthetic decision where a society should go. It's better that Montenegro doesn't exist if in 2022 we have to dress it up in bronze and fill the parks with princess-figurations that slip out of the hands of our famous geniuses from scattering.
When the Croatian war authorities in '92. ordered to detonate the monument on Blažuj hill near the village of Kamenska, when the magnificent monument to the victory of the revolution of Vojin Bakić was destroyed, it was obvious that a memory was being killed. Monuments sometimes get in the way because they remind us of value, in Bakić's case of high modernism, which stunned the world with its artistic power. The Croatian government wanted to destroy the memory of Yugoslavia and attacked Bakić. Demolishing the monument destroyed the idea.
If we are going to demolish Montenegro, we should not detonate anything, but sow monuments like this, which may look poor, but powerfully scream in the opposite direction of everything that is authentic in the art of our time.
There is, however, another plan that I can suggest. After Racanovićka, it's time for other art theorists, critics, artists and activists to stand up against the usurpation of public space and the turning of this country into an open museum of wasted fantasies, sad statues that seem to have fallen out of the trailer of a small-town traveling theater.
Bonus video:
