AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

The Committee for Tacit History
Courtesy The Committee for Tacit History.
www.coldwarvictorymonument.com
The Committee for Tacit History is issuing a call for proposals for a
Monument to Cold War Victory, an open-call competition for a public monument
commemorating the outcome of the Cold War. Artists from around the world are
encouraged to submit proposals by November 1, 2012.

Monument to Cold War Victory is a conceptual project by the artist Yevgeniy
Fiks, taking the form of an open-call, international competition for a
public, commemorative work of art. For over two decades, public signifiers
of the Cold War, such as the Berlin Wall, have been framed in terms of
destruction and kitsch. A monument created at the moment of its own
destruction, the Wall encapsulates the continuing geopolitical imagination
of the conflict as linear, continuous, binary, and terminal: the culmination
of a now-historicized narrative of competing empires. But while the impact
of half a century of sustained ideological conflict still reverberates
through all forms of public and private experience-from Middle Eastern
geographies of containment to the narrative structures of Hollywood-it has
yet to be acknowledged through a public and monumental work of art. The Cold
War, the longest and most influential conflict of the twentieth century, has
no publicly commissioned commemoration in the United States.

This project examines the enduring genre of war monuments, memorials, and
institutionally framed and commissioned artworks. How might the legacy of
the Cold War, in all its complex material, social, and cultural forms, be
visually articulated? In what ways might the notion of \"victory,\" implicit
in all retroactive commemorations of conflict, be interpreted? Can the
traditional, formal structure of the monument, and the historical
revisionism endemic to that form, be redefined?

Artists are invited to participate in this project by submitting a proposal
for a public monument commemorating the outcome of the Cold War by November
1, 2012. All submissions must be made through the website:
www.coldwarvictorymonument.com. Submissions should include: a one-page
narrative text on your proposed work and its relationship to the legacy of
the Cold War, the notion of \"victory,\" and its reevaluation (if any) of the
monument form; a visual schema in the form of three images; and an artist
CV. A select number of finalists will be awarded a stipend and the
opportunity to further develop their proposal for an institutional
exhibition. The submitter of the winning proposal will be awarded a cash
prize, and their concept will be implemented and installed in a publicly
accessible location, to be determined, in the United States.
Monument to Cold War Victory will be juried by a distinguished panel of
cultural and intellectual figures, including Vito Acconci, FF Alumn, Susan
Buck-Morss, Boris Groys, Vitaly Komar, FF Alumn, Viktor Misiano, and Nato
Thompson.
For further information, contact curator Stamatina Gregory,
stamatina@coldwarvictorymonument.com

This project is initiated by The Committee for Tacit History, an
international curatorial collective and research body dedicated to
furthering interdisciplinary, practice-based investigations in history and
visual culture.

from Franklin Furnace