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

Abstract

Public art objects are powerful tools by which people describe, explain, critique, and attempt to change their social conditions. Today, as populism and nationalism continue to rise on an international scale, such symbols are frequently mobilized to adjudicate competing historical narratives and political claims. By analyzing debates around such public art forms, this dissertation builds on the work of a long line of scholars interested in how visual cultural objects mediate political discourse across diverse corners of the world. I argue that we do not fully understand these globally ubiquitous, visual modes of political contestation due to tendencies that others have referred to as “methodologically nationalist.” Scholars too often confine their analyses to national borders, ignoring how such symbols are produced, interpreted, and manipulated in dialogue with people abroad to disseminate global histories, influence international politics, and/or shape identities that span national borders, such as those unifying residents of regions. I examine these transnational processes from an important yet understudied area – Lithuania, a country in the Baltic region. Based on thousands of archived images and texts, in-depth interviews with key informants, and twelve months of ethnographic observations in Vilnius, Lithuania, I chart debates over national history and identity as they played out in the production and removal of three genres of public art – street art, monumental sculptures, and memorial plaques – from 1988 to 2021. I find that the debates surrounding these symbols have been strikingly transnational, both in content and form. Emigrants and regional neighbors have played especially important roles, which they have taken on both passively, as audience members, and actively, as producers or critics of national symbols. I show how local actors have designed and interpreted public art objects to reinforce international alliances, challenge national “enemies” abroad, and signal membership in regional communities. These case studies make clear that people and events beyond national borders can fundamentally influence the ways in which local actors memorialize a nation’s history and project its political future.