In a small park near Kutaisi City Hall and the Opera House is the Glory to Labour Monument, one of the city’s more unusual surviving pieces of Soviet public art. Designed by the architects Vakhtang Davitaya and Shota Bostanashvili and completed in 1981, the complex celebrated the workers who powered Kutaisi’s factories and wider industrial economy.
The monument consists of a series of circular stone frames, platforms, short staircases and bronze figures representing workers. It’s all a bit complex to the untrained eye, and mine is certainly not trained. Unlike a conventional monument with a single obvious viewpoint, this was designed to be entered and explored from different directions. There were no arrows or explanatory leaflet, so I adopted the established artistic technique of wandering around and attempting to look thoughtful.
Another figure stands in front of a large abstract metal form, with the vertical element rising behind him and giving the sculpture an almost religious appearance. The individual workers do not seem intended as portraits of named people, but as idealised representatives of collective effort and industrial achievement. Very Soviet.
The empty platforms and staircases are partly explained by the original idea behind the complex. It was intended to operate as a changing cultural space, with sculptures by different artists temporarily displayed before being moved into an art gallery. The architecture would remain while the statues and visitors became changing participants within it. This also explains why some of the staircases now lead nowhere, rather than this being an unusually honest representation of Soviet economic planning.
The surviving Georgian and Russian lettering makes the monument’s purpose rather clearer, celebrating labour and the people responsible for Kutaisi’s industrial development. Parts of the complex are now stained, damaged or marked with graffiti, but enough survives to retain the scale and ambition of the original installation. Georgia has an understandably complicated relationship with its Soviet inheritance, so the survival of monuments such as this is not necessarily guaranteed.
I rather liked the whole arrangement, partly because it was possible to walk around and through it rather than merely standing in front of a statue. I almost certainly spent longer examining it than the workers being celebrated would have considered productive, although I’m still not entirely sure that I understood what I was looking at. Fortunately, that has never prevented me from writing about anything before.