Andreja Siliunas, Harvard University

The Art of Westernizing: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Public Art in Post-Soviet Lithuania

This talk is based on my dissertation research, which examines the global processes through which national symbols are constructed and deconstructed amid populist movements.  I study these visually mediated political dynamics from post-Soviet Vilnius, Lithuania, through case studies of graffiti, monumental sculptures, and memorial plaques.  In this talk, I focus on one chapter, in which I analyze several hundred works of political street art made in response to a 1991 Soviet crackdown on Vilnius, commonly referred to as “Bloody Sunday.”  In rendering the local event, artists constructed visual narratives that were decidedly transnational in scope, and more complicated than the binary messages typically observed in graffiti, murals, and other forms of political iconography, in that they embedded international spectators directly into their visual representations of the local imperial conflict.  I use network theory and methods, adapted to visual systems of communication, to analyze these complex narratives.  My analysis reveals two recurring triadic tropes used by political street artists to inspire action abroad: that allies who are loyal to one another should share friends and enemies, which has been formalized in Heider’s structural balance theory, and that there is power in numbers, from Caplow’s theory of coalition in triads.  Artists evoked these tropes to strengthen transnational solidarities within the Eastern Bloc and pressure leaders in Western Europe and the U.S. to recognize Lithuanian independence.  This chapter brings together insights from cultural sociology and social network analysis to build theory on the internationalization of collective memory in the context of rapid, yet uncertain, political change.