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  Hollywood Ten | 2015

Project proposal for ‘Monument to cold war victory’ which is a conceptual project by the artist Yevgeniy Fiks, taking the form of an open-call, international competition for a public, commemorative work of art. http://coldwarvictorymonument.com/ Selected for shortlist by the jury (Vito Acconci, Susan Buck-Morss, Boris Groys, Vitaly Komar, Viktor Misiano, Nato Thompson) to be presented and completed in 2017 in the Wende Museum, Los Angeles (US). The monument consists of an intervention: to the well-known iconic landscape-text on the hillside of Mount Lee in the Hollywood Hills the word “TEN” would be added. The material (metal painted in white) shape and size of the letters (14m high) would coincide with those of the original text. The project refers to the group of people working in film industry known as the Hollywood Ten, cited in 1947 for contempt of Congress and blacklisted after refusing to answer HUAC (House Committee on Un-American Activities) questions about their alleged involvement with the Communist Party. The group was only a small part of the hundreds other blacklisted entertainment professionals who were denied employment in the field because of their political beliefs or associations, real or suspected. These various blacklists together with other measures such as banning their names from movies’ credit lists, harassment, intimidation and so on, besides being part of the ideological warfare, also manifested an anti-Semitic aspect by targeting many immigrants from the Soviet Union with Jewish background . The monument highlights the role of the media in shaping the cold war narrative expressed in the cinematic cultural propaganda of the worldwide victorious Hollywood film production. This contributed significantly to the creation of both the ideologies of the cold war and modern consumerism, which finally achieved its global victory in the Western world.