The political aesthetics of the Armenian avant-garde

The journey of the 'painterly real', 1987–2004

Angela Harutyunyan

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780719089534
• eBook ISBN: 9781526114396
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

This book addresses late-Soviet and post-Soviet art in Armenia in the context of turbulent transformations from the late 1980s to 2004. It explores the emergence of 'contemporary art' in Armenia from within and in opposition to the practices, aesthetics and institutions of Socialist Realism and National Modernism. This historical study outlines the politics (liberal democracy), aesthetics (autonomous art secured by the gesture of the individual artist), and ethics (ideals of absolute freedom and radical individualism) of contemporary art in Armenia and points towards its limitations. Through the historical investigation, a theory of post-Soviet art historiography is developed, one that is based on a dialectic of rupture and continuity in relation to the Soviet past. As the first English-language study on contemporary art in Armenia, the book is of prime interest for artists, scholars, curators and critics interested in post-Soviet art and culture and in global art historiography.

1 Between the ideal and a hard place: the conceptual horizons of the avant-garde in Armenia

Art as the avant-garde of the contemporary

This chapter interrogates the historical relationship between ‘contemporary art’ and the ‘avant-garde’ from the perspective of late Soviet and post-Soviet cultural discourses. Further, the chapter defines one of the key conceptual figures of the book, the concept of the ideal in a historical materialist understanding. From a historical materialist perspective, concepts do not precede or even coincide with the conditions and discourses to which they refer. Instead, words and terms become concepts only after the ‘fact’, after the material transformations of the conditions of production have brought about a conceptual engagement with those conditions in order to make sense of them. This engagement takes place through the realization that a qualitative change has taken place from one period to another, one that has brought about a consciousness of these very changes that distinguish one epoch from another.¹ For example, modernity is a belated epochal designation for the consciousness brought about by capitalist modernization; postmodernism is what Fredric Jameson calls ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’ that was realized in the 1980s to reflect post-war transformations that signalled the arrival of consumer culture and the emergence of the global finance industry. Following the historical materialist approach, it can be argued that ‘contemporary art’, whether considered as part of Jameson’s postmodernism or as that which subsumes postmodernism, arrives when the set of practices constituting it have been superseded by another kind of cultural and discursive paradigm that has not yet been named. It is not accidental that in the past decade a lively debate has emerged on the relations between an epochal contemporaneity and contemporary art, even triggering some to ask, ‘What was contemporary art?’²

Given that concepts do not simply arise out of previous conceptual relations, but are embedded in the very material historical conditions they belatedly respond to (though this is not to deny relations between the concepts themselves), any kind of work that puts together various concepts in relation to each other should necessarily involve a historical endeavour to situate these concepts in the conditions of their emergence and circulation. Thus, what I define as my field of historical inquiry by deploying the term ‘contemporary art’ in Armenia cannot be taken for granted either conceptually or historically. ‘Contemporary’ is not a given in any context, and especially in a place where it developed according to a different set of assumptions and presuppositions than what we are familiar with from recent art history textbooks that include ‘contemporary art’ as a periodizing concept. Most pertinently, ‘contemporary art’ in Armenia as a conceptual entity might not abide by the diachronic distinction between ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ understood as both epochal and qualitative transformations in twentieth-century Western art. The concept ‘contemporary’ in the context of art in Armenia enters into a complex synchronic relationship not only with ‘modern’ but also with ‘avant-garde’ art, ‘alternative’ art and ‘postmodern’ art, at times coinciding with globally assumed designations in the post-1989 world and at other times diverging from these. The complexity arises especially because ‘contemporary art’ here since the 1980s has identified itself as ‘avant-garde art’ (and not neo-, retro- or post-avant-garde as in some late and post-socialist Eastern European contexts). Throughout this book I use the terms ‘contemporary’ and ‘avant-garde’ interchangeably in order to do justice to their historical mobilization in the Armenian context as well as to show their aesthetic, theoretical and conceptual linkage. And it is precisely because of this uncommon linkage that the two terms with their various historical and theoretical implications need to be situated.

In 1972 an unprecedented kind of museum opened in Yerevan, the first and only museum in the Soviet Union to showcase modern art, meaning in this case aesthetic formalism with a national content. The museum was (and is) called the Modern Art Museum. It seems that there is no tension involved here – the Modern Art Museum showcases modern art. However, in the Armenian language its name is not the Modern but the ‘Contemporary’ Art Museum. The Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (the ACCEA), which opened in 1994, more than two decades after the opening of the Modern Art Museum, also uses the word ‘Contemporary’, in both English and Armenian versions of its name. However, apart from painting and sculpture it showcases art in a ‘post-medium’ condition, to borrow Rosalind Krauss’s terminology:³ installation, video, photography and performance. Here, both the name and the practices it describes coincide with what is designated in the West as contemporary art, as does the mission of the ACCEA to provide institutional support for and even to construct this kind of art. Even if in Armenian, the Modern Art Museum and the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (the ACCEA) share the word ‘contemporary’ –

[jamanakakic], they nevertheless focus on different generations of artists and different aesthetic regimes. The semantic convergence of modern and contemporary can be attributed to the influence of the Russian language, which has only the word sovremennyi [cовременный] to designate both. The Armenian language does in fact have two separate words for modern and contemporary –

[ardi] and

[jamankakic]. The second entered into circulation in contemporary art circles in the early 1990s to distinguish it from modern art, but this distinction is still not reflected in the Armenian name of the Modern Art Museum.

To complicate things further: the Armenian artists who are the protagonists of this book and who are identified as ‘contemporary’ artists did not call themselves such until at least the early to mid-1990s. The earliest written use of the term ‘contemporary’ I have encountered is in the announcement of the exhibition Under the Influence: Contemporary Crossover Art in Armenia, organized by diaspora Armenian curator and gallerist Charlie Khachadourian in collaboration with local art critic Nazareth Karoyan.⁴ Given that the ACCEA was also established by a diaspora Armenian artistic couple – Sonia and Edward Balassanian – perhaps it would not be inaccurate to conclude that the term ‘contemporary’ first entered into circulation as a concept imported in by diaspora cultural figures.⁵ This is not to say that ‘contemporary’ as a term did not have currency prior to this importation. However, until the early to mid-1990s the term had not designated any understanding of art qualitatively different from what had come before. If in Eastern Europe and in other former Soviet contexts ‘contemporary art’ was largely imported and institutionalized by the Soros Centers that opened throughout the 1990s, in Armenia it was the diaspora that introduced the term to distinguish so-called ‘post-medium’ or ‘installation art’ from national fine arts. What the artists themselves most often favoured in terms of self-designation in the late 1980s and early 1990s was avant-garde and/or alternative art. It was only from the mid-1990s onwards that ‘avant-garde’, ‘alternative’ and ‘contemporary’ started being used interchangeably.

Art historian and curator Octavian Esanu considers the emergence of contemporary art in post-socialist countries in relation to a set of structural and institutional changes brought about by the introduction of a market economy and political liberalism. His central thesis is that what was called ‘contemporary art’ (this includes the new institutions of art, a new understanding of artistic production and aesthetic experience, the redefinition of artistic skill and so on, as introduced and promoted by the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art across Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space) represents a qualitatively different artistic experience and institutional structure than that operative in the Soviet system under the aegis of the Union of Artists.⁶ ‘Contemporary’ here is understood as the totality of those institutional practices that are constituted with the aid of managerial tools driven by models of economic governmentality (where the economic logic governs all spheres of social activity) and their political logic of liberalism. Esanu equates contemporary art with art in post-socialism.

In Armenia the transformations and re-institutionalization of post-Soviet art under the label of the ‘contemporary’ have been part of broader national processes revolving around the national agenda and linked to cultural figures from the diaspora and their ambition to reshape the cultural politics of Armenia after independence. The precepts of managerialism only played a secondary role in the emergence of the institution of contemporary art, even though curators and artists often borrowed from the toolbox of neoliberalism and the market economy and from the political ideology of liberalism. Even though conceptually displaced, institutionally Soviet art (both official and unofficial) continued to exist during the 1990s in a transformed fashion and under the guise of the national fine arts as an oppositional pole to ‘contemporary art’. In Armenia the temporalities of the contemporary, most often a matter of synchronicity with the outside world, and of the avant-garde as a state at the crest of social and cultural transformation, have coexisted alongside the transformed remnants of Socialist Realism in its national articulation.

In the early 1990s yet another conceptual actor arrives on the scene: ‘postmodernism’. For some critics, such as Karoyan, the postmodern came to replace the ‘avant-garde’, since postmodernism was what most accurately described both the cultural conditions of art production (increased communication and globalization) and the strategies and techniques employed in artworks in the late 1980s and early 1990s (such as quotation and appropriation). Karoyan himself utilized the poststructuralist theoretical tools of critical postmodernism only from the mid-1990s on. Prior to his turn to poststructuralist methodologies he regarded postmodernism solely from the perspective of the conservative anti-modernism of Trans-avangardia, New Wild, Neo-Romantik⁷ and the like. Karoyan’s shift towards postmodernism, which he began to regard as the new cultural condition of avant-garde art in Armenia, was motivated by his interest in art as a cultural and communicative tool rather than an autonomous sphere of creativity.⁸ In addition, for Karoyan the ‘postmodern’ came to replace the term ‘avant-garde’, which he so much disliked for its totalizing aesthetic and political connotations.

Contrary to Karoyan’s insistence on ‘postmodernism’, the artist Arman Grigoryan insisted on the term ‘avant-garde’. Grigoryan used the latter term as both a descriptive and normative category for the unofficial art of the period (though as Chapter 2 shows, ‘unofficial’ is not a very accurate designation in the context of Armenian art history). Karoyan then came up with the contradictory term ‘national avant-garde’ in order to reconcile his bias towards postmodernism with Grigoryan’s ‘avant-garde’. Karoyan’s ‘national avant-garde’ denoted an art that was radical and innovative in terms of its aesthetic qualities as well as particularly strong in terms of its national content.⁹ Thus, for Karoyan, it was an avant-garde without the universalist ethos of the historical avant-gardes.¹⁰ Where Karoyan and Grigoryan agreed, however, was that ‘avant-garde’ art of the 1990s was an alternative to the official fine arts – an assumption that was institutionalized through the ACCEA’s annual festivals of ‘Alternative Art’ from 1994 onwards, and one that has prevailed until today. In this view, art produced outside of official state art institutions is conceived as forming an alternative to both the official art of the Soviet Union (Socialist Realism) and later on, to its remnants, and to the Armenian modernism of the 1960s and 1970s supported by the Modern Art Museum in Yerevan. Thus we can identify three main artistic paradigms that shared the local artistic scene: the remnants of the Socialist Realism (figurative art in service to a fading and disintegrating ideology) of the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period, Armenian modernism (aesthetic formalism in service to the nation) and contemporary art (post-medium art in service to the liberal understanding of individual freedom). And these three main actors do not succeed each other historically, but often coexist within the same temporal frame while referring to different and often conflicting sets of institutional and artistic practices.

If the main conceptual actors of this book, in turn, are ‘contemporary art’ and ‘avant-garde art’, other marginal designations are also at times applied to tease out the conceptual nuances of these two terms. For example, ‘hamasteghtsakan art’ and ‘pure creation’ are used in relation to the 3rd Floor’s and ACT’s practices respectively, whereas the terms ‘national avant-garde’ and ‘national postmodern avant-garde’ are used in relation to Karoyan’s conceptualization of the 3rd Floor’s practices. Throughout the book a nuanced distinction between ‘contemporary art’ and ‘avant-garde art’ is drawn: if contemporary art denotes the field of post-socialist artistic production in its broader contours (the institutional, stylistic, theoretical and art practical aspects of art-making), the avant-garde is used on occasions when the actors of the contemporary art scene positioned themselves in the vanguard of the very scene they were part of.

From the perspective of West European and North American art history, ‘avant-garde’ and ‘contemporary art’ are regarded as periodization concepts that are intermediated by the High Modernism and the neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s. Depending on the periodization one finds most convincing, their amalgamation in the Armenian context needs to be situated in terms of broader art-historical and theoretical discussions over periodization and qualitative transformations. This is not a mere exercise in identifying chronological boundaries, but is primarily an attempt to discuss the concepts and their relations both theoretically and historically, and in terms of broader world historical shifts. The overarching question in the discussion that follows is whether the deployment of ‘contemporary art’ in the Armenian context corresponds to the theorization of contemporary art and contemporaneity in the wake of the art-historical global turn in the last de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of plates
• List of figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Between the ideal and a hard place: the conceptual horizons of the avant-garde in Armenia
• 2 The ‘painterly real’ of contemporary art: resurrected ghosts, living heroes and saintly saviours on the 3rd Floor, 1987–94
• 3 Suspending the ‘painterly real’: ACT’s procedures of ‘pure creation’, 1993–96
• 4 The revenge of the ‘painterly real’: national post-conceptualism, 1995–98
• 5 The reign of the ‘painterly real’ and the politics of crisis, 1999–2004
• Select bibliography
• Index