I’m going to guess that probably, if the artworld really wanted to hit Russia where it hurt, the priority would be to take all necessary steps towards stopping oligarchs from using art sales to launder money. Still: while there might not be any direct threat to the Engels statue as such, the incident remains characteristic of what might just be the artworld’s hottest new trend: the well-meaning, but ultimately clumsy and poorly-conceived attempt to reckon with the hell of the war in Ukraine. Courtesy Manchester International Festival photo: Joel Fildes Which is good, because let’s face it: responding to the illegal invasion of Ukraine by taking down a statue which might well be taken to represent Anglo-Ukrainian friendship, depicting a German thinker whose ideas the rulers of Russia violently reject, would have been really fucking stupid. HOME have since issued a statement claiming that taking down the statue was never their intention – they really only wanted to do something to ‘consider its meaning in the context of the illegal invasion of Ukraine’.
Last week, controversy ensued when HOME said that they were in discussions with the artist over the statue in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (leading many to assume that they were planning to remove it). Scenes from austerity Britain intermingle with the statue’s joyous reception – a messenger from another world, a visitor from the new humanity the Soviet revolution once promised, but failed to deliver. But in Manchester, at the peak of the Corbyn movement, he feels like a figure of the future: his ideas are a source of hope. Ah, what times Engels and I had! To others, he is not just a funny antiquated curiosity, but rather something actively dangerous: to walk the way to Engels would be to trip backwards into tyranny. To some people, the sight of Engels is a source of nostalgia – his presence really brings them back: the smell of a perfume worn by someone you know rationally you were always going to break up with anyway. In Ukraine, the statue is gawped at as a relic of a bygone age – he is someone whose ideas, when they were put into practice, failed. Over the course of Engels’ transportation, Collins films the reactions of passers-by.
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What it presents to us – and thus, what the Engels statue as it stands in Manchester is able to symbolise on an ongoing basis – is nothing short of the full complexity of the contested legacy of communism today.
It had had to come down, but after that, no-one had been quite sure what to do with it – like so much else of the past.Ĭeremony is a fascinating film, and not just because it provides viewers with the singularly comic sight of watching this decayed socialist realist Engels statue bobbing west across Europe on the back of a big truck. When Collins found the Engels statue in Ukraine, it had been cut in half, and left behind some farm buildings: just old communist-era junk. In Condition, Engels provided the empirical story behind the philosophy which Marx was developing at the time, describing a world in which – to put this in the language of Marx’s 1844 essay ‘Alienated Labour’ – the more workers produce to enrich factory owners like the Engelses, the more said workers ‘lose their own reality,’ to the point of ‘starving to death.’īut despite Engels’s importance, there had never previously been any public monuments in Manchester to his work – in stark contrast to the former Soviet Union, when Engels statues were pretty much everywhere (of course these two facts are very much related). He was helped in this work by Mary Burns, his long-term partner, a working-class Irish woman he met on the factory floor. In the early 1840s, just before he started collaborating with Marx, Engels began writing a book based on his observations of poverty there, The Condition of the Working Class in England (originally published in German in 1845). It’s still standing in Tony Wilson Place, outside the city’s HOME art centre.Įngels spent much of his life in Manchester, where his (extremely wealthy industrialist) family owned a number of factories (in many ways his thought was exemplary of that most philosophical of all instincts: ‘fuck you dad’). In 2017, the artist Phil Collins transported a statue of Friedrich Engels – the Ringo to Marx’s rest of The Beatles – from the east Ukrainian village of Mala Pereshchepina, where in Soviet times it had stood in the town square, to the centre of Manchester, where it was greeted with hope and joy, as chronicled in Collins’s film Ceremony (2017). We could be stopping oligarchs from using art to launder money instead we’re banning Russian film directors and worrying about a statue of Engels
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