Combined Reports, RIA Novosti and The Moscow News - The Moscow State Duma has rejected a proposal made by the museum ART4.RU to erect a surrealist monument to the first Russian President Boris Yeltsin on Lubyanka Square, claiming the project to be "slapdash and ambiguous."
In September 2007, ART4.RU announced that a competition would take place to come up with a monument to Boris Yeltsin, to be installed on the central Moscow space in front of the FSB headquarter.
Six thousand people participated in the vote, and the winner of the competition was young artist Dmitry Kavarga, who presented an abstract project called "biomorphous black monster," which "symbolized destruction and break-down, the swallowing-up of orderliness by chaos."
The State Duma's commission for monumental art, however, rejected the proposal.
"A monument to a person can be erected only after a minimum of 10 years after their death," the press-office of the commission quoted the chairman, Lev Lavrenov, as saying.
In response, the museum stated that "as long as the city continues to order monuments which multiply grief in the whole of the city's historical center while labeling the initiatives of progressive museums as ‘slapdash and ambiguous,' we will continue to find ourselves in visual hell", newsroom.com reported.
"The sculpture is planned to be formed out of black metal," Igor Markin, the director of the ART4.RU museum told RIA Novosti. "People remember the Yeltsin era to be a time of destruction," he said on a previous occasion, when talking of the radical project.
Members of the late president's family have stood against the installation of the monument. After Kavarga's project was presented to the public, information posted soon afterwards on the official website of the Boris Yeltsin Foundation indicated that the family of Russia's first President were against the displaying of such a monument, wherever this may be.
"We object to proposals to install such a monument anywhere," the foundation told RIA Novosti.
"Members of Boris Yeltsin's family have had nothing to do with the shortlisting of the models for the monument nor the selection of the winner, nor the approval of any model," said a statement from Yeltsin's family.
The first private museum of modern art, ART4.RU opened in in May 2007 on the initiative of art collector Igor Markin.
Organizing this competition for the monument to Russia's first President and its installation on Lubyanka Square is the museum's most high-profile project so far.
