Abstract
The paper presents a topic of a re-interpretation of the Czech socialist past conducted in the fields of the contemporary art theory and practice. How does young generation of artists and theorists interpret material monuments coming from the era of socialist past in Czechoslovakia (1968 - 1989)? The paper focuses namely on public sculptures, monuments and postcards.
The contribution is led by a current need to conduct more research work in the area of art practice in the discipline of memory studies (Huyssen 2003, Saltzman 2006, Erll 2011). It emphasizes an importance of contemporary art projects as a medium allowing circulation of memory as well as creating its new meaning.
Art works cover the very character of process of mediation; they connect individual and collective levels of memory plus they store and re-interpret material objects of the past (van Dijk 2007, Erll and Rigney 2009). An explication of our problem lies in a dialectical relationship between the classical term of the sites of memory (Nora 1998) and contemporary notion of the memory places (Truc 2012).
A rigid official relationship to the object is conflicted with a vivid personal connection. This exposure of collision and mutual dependence does not point out only to a special relationship between communicative and cultural memory and different ways of politics they have been using.
It directs more to Warburg's topic of the memory of art. It questions the way how memory of art works in contemporary art pieces and how it can be defined from the perspective of Hoskin's new memory (2001), a conception based on (re)mediation?