In ancient Greek, ágalma means “ornament” or “gift.” It refers to images and statues that were used in temples as votive offerings to gods. “False memories,” a well-known phenomenon from psychopathology, refers to trauma-driven, imagined events that show as real in the subject’s memory.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus, opening credits series 1-4.
See, for example, The Contemporary Art of Trusting Uncertainties and Unfolding Dialogues, ed. Esther Shalev-Gerz (Stockholm: Art and Theory, 2013); and Katarzyna Murwaska-Muthesius, “Oskar Hansen and the Auschwitz ‘Countermemorial,’ 1958–59,” ARTMargins Online, May 20, 2002 →.
See, for example, Adelheid Wölfl, “Im mazedonischen Geschichtsgruselkabinett,” Der Standard, May 14, 2014 →.
The Neutrality Arch is a seventy-five-meter-tall monument topped with a rotating, gold-plated statue of Niyazov. It cost anestimated $12 million to build. Recently, it was built even taller. See Richard Orange, “Turkmenistan rebuilds giant rotating golden statue, The Telegraph, May 24, 2011 →.
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The project’s finances are far from transparent, so the exact cost is difficult to confirm. But one statue, Warrior on a Horse, is estimated to have cost €7.5 million alone. Most of the statues and buildings were claimed to be of local significance, and since it was officially initiated by the municipal government of Skopje, the project could bypass any parliamentary discussion.
Viktor Shklovsky, The Knight’s Move (1919–21), written in Petrograd, Moscow, and Berlin, quoted in Svetlana Boym, “Tatlin, or Ruinophilia,” Cabinet 28 (Winter 2007–08) →.
Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 97. Derrida cites several authors who have examined the use of the expression “rogue state” in foreign policy, including Noam Chomsky, Robert S. Litwak, and William Blum.
For a discussion of the theoretical and philosophical interpretations of this dispute, see The Renaming Machine: The Book, ed. Suzana Milevska (Ljubljana: P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute,2010). This book is based on a cross-disciplinary curatorial project comprised of ten different events (exhibitions, conferences, and seminars) that took place in Ljubljana, Skopje, Pristina, Zagreb, and Vienna in 2008–2010. The book examines the arbitrariness of names, the problematic issue of equating names with identity, and the implications of the erasure of memory through renaming. In addition, for extensive research into the political arguments involved in the dispute between Macedonia and Greece, see Zlatko Kovach, “Macedonia: Reaching Out To Win L. American Hearts,” Scoop World, Feb. 26, 2008 →.
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005), 23. According to Agamben, the emergence of camps in the Nazi period signaled that the state of exception had become the rule, transforming society into an unbounded and dislocated biopolitical space. See also Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998), 166.
Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (London: Prentice Hall, 1982), 4.
See Jasna Koteska, “Troubles with History: Skopje 2014,”ARTMargins Online, Dec. 29, 2011 →.
In his “Analytic of the Sublime” (1790) from The Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant locates examples of the sublime not only in nature but also in the human condition. He famously argued that the sublime, unlike the beautiful, “cannot be contained in any sensible form but concerns only ideas of reason.” Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Walter S. Pluhar (Indiana: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 99.
The ruling coalition that has been in power since 2008 (and that was recently reelected in parliamentary and presidential elections in April 2014) is formed by two major right-wing parties, the VMRO-DPMNE (consisting primary of officials of Christian-Macedonian descent) and DUI (consisting primarily of officials from the Muslim-Albanian minority).
The concept of ágalma was introduced by Lacan in the context of his writing about Socrates’s “Symposium” in his Seminar VIII (1960–1961). See Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre VIII: Le transfert (Paris: Seuil, 1991) →. Lacan always insisted that the term object petit a should remain untranslated because the “a” in objet petit a stands for “autre” (other).
Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre X: L’angoisse (1962–1963) (Paris: Seuil, 2004).
Donald W. Winnicott, “Transitional objects and transitional phenomena: A study of the first not-me possession,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 34 (1953): 89–97. See also Winnicott’s Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971).
Lacan, quoted in Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2006), 129.
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York; Verso, 1989), 54.
Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 118–119. For a complex discussion of names, empty signifiers, and populist rule, see the chapter entitled “The People and the Production of Emptiness,” 67–124.
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 54.
Ibid.
Helena Smith, “Macedonian statue: Alexander the Great or a warrior on a horse?,” The Guardian, August 14, 2011 →.
See Suzana Milevska, “The Internalisation of the Discourse of Institutional Critique and the ‘Unhappy Consciousness,’” in Evaluating and Formative Goals of Art Criticism in Recent (De)territorialized Contexts (Paris: AICA Press, 2009), 2–6 → [PDF]
This text was written during Suzana Milevska's term as Endowed Professor for Central and South Eastern Art Histories at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, a co-operation between the Academy and ERSTE Foundation.