A DISCUSSION OF MEŠTROVIĆ’S INDIANS IN THE CITY OF CHICAGO: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CULTURE, SPACE, IDENTITY AND PUBLIC SCULPTURE (original) (raw)

2024, Narodna umjetnost

As part of the debate centering on the Black Lives Matter movement, the Chicago Monuments Project Commission was established in 2021, with the task of reviewing the meaning of public art, its role, message, form and medium. The discussion concluded in the summer of 2022, and it touched upon the ideological background of the pair of Indian sculptures by Ivan Meštrović, made in New York and Zagreb in 1926 and 1927, and erected in the public space of the city of Chicago in 1928. Statements by Dalibor Prančević and Barbara Vujanović, experts on Meštrović’s work and modern sculpture in Croatia, dominated the media coverage. Prančević and Vujanović “defended” the Indians because of their formal qualities and for being part of Croatian national art, relating them to the wider urban context of Chicago and considering the conditions and the circumstances of their placement in Chicago’s public space. In contrast, Nikola Vukobratović and Ivana Hanaček approached the issue from the point of view of postcolonial studies, according to which the promotion of narratives about white race supremacy and moral superiority means presenting inaccurate and/or humiliating characterizations of Native Americans. The discussion primarily revolved around whether the Indians present a selective and one-sided view of American history and whether they caricature and stereotype Native Americans, riding on the tension between the opposing opinions of the experts and the general public. Postcolonial theory primarily deals with the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, the colonial and the postcolonial in the past and the present, and in the case of the Indians, the discussion concerned homogenized stereotypical images of others and the subtle construction of subjects from the point of view of a group antithetical to the dominant position, about which stereotypes are constructed and which is understood through these stereotypes. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the reception of the sculptures from their creation until the present day.