Appropriating the ex-Cold War

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine readings of the signs of an ideological context now encapsulated in history while the signs themselves, now decontextualised, remain as elements in contemporary visual culture. Examples include statues of Lenin removed to a forest park, sections of the Berlin Wall re-sited in North America, a schematic emblem of the hammer- and-sickle used as a restaurant sign, and the word “revolution” as the name of a chain of bars. The author begins by outlining a context in which to reconsider visual traces of the Cold War, and note the contrast between the acceptable re-placement of a section of the Berlin Wall in New York (with graffiti on the West side) and the fear of an underclass evoked by similar, but locally produced, graffiti elsewhere in the city. The author deals with Jean Baudrillard’s idea that an economy of signs has replaced an economy of things, using the hammer-and-sickle emblem, and bars called Revolution as an illustration – but note also that Baudrillard’s position is contested in the social sciences. The author looks in more detail at the case of the Grūtas sculpture Park (known as Stalin World) in Lithuania, where a number of collected Soviet-period statues are now on public display.