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Lilit Sargsyan

Art and Ethnicity - New Encounters between Armenia and the Diaspora

By Lilit Sargsyan 

When we talk about closing the cultural gap between Armenia and the diaspora we must keep in mind the different mentalities that divide Armenians in the RA and Armenians living in various foreign countries. Often, RA Armenians perceive diaspora Armenians as tourists. Conversely, diaspora Armenians regard RA Armenians and the historic homeland in terms of a perceived vision, an archetype of inherited memories. In Armenian art, the homeland has been presented as a fabled land of paradise since it has traditionally been linked to a sense of loss and longing. But today, it is necessary to “de-mythify” the homeland and recognize it as the realization of long held dreams and aspirations. Today, when diaspora Armenians set foot on the real soil of Armenia, their visions of “land” and “home” are transformed into potential capital investment. We must also recount the cultural investment made by diaspora artists and activists to contemporary art in Armenia during the years immediately succeeding independence. One needs to only mention the contributions of Charlie Hachadourian or Balasanians. If the problems facing diaspora Armenian artists were previously only the subject of abstract or pedantic discussion in art circles, recently, due to a number of personal and government organized initiatives, we have witnessed more practical tendencies to close the local and diasporan art gap. In this process, individuals and institutions see the resolution of the issue in their own way, based on institutional factors, personal opinions, motives, ideological and aesthetic preferences, mental and cultural levels, etc. If the meeting and drawing closer together of the RA and dispora art communities is based on the ethnic principle, a government strategy beyond art, then arising from an internal meeting of art and ethnicity is a composite of complexes and issues characteristic of post-colonial societies. In addition to emotional feelings of patriotism, what can serve as the ideological base for unification, especially in contemporary art? The question whether “art produced by an Armenian in the diaspora is actually Armenian or not” is always relevant to the Armenian cultural agenda. The same can be said of contemporary art in Armenia. “Non-national in form”, a deformed upshot seen within the contemporary global human value system, comprises a large segment (and already disappearing) of Armenia art. Thus the question - whether it is national or not. If we are able to create a configuration of contemporary art that would display and preserve the works of local and diasporan, as well as foreign artists on a universal aesthetic basis, then this would go a long way to alleviate the intricate web of   national – non-national, Armenian – non-Armenian and local – global relations. We would finally get to see ourselves in others, and others, in us. The idea of bridging the art of Armenia and the diaspora expresses the search for commonality, whose irrefutable standard is ethnic birth, genetic memory code. However, when the “national” definition is projected on to contemporary art, everything gets messed up and confused. To define it as “national”, an attempt to attribute it to form, leads us into the labyrinth of false Soviet formulae. One of the reasons why contemporary art in Armenia is sentenced to a marginalized existence is that the national is limited/equated to form. The latter, in turn, is compressed all the way till false ethnographic signs. The stereotype of “national form”, in turn, stems from Soviet propaganda regarding the culture of subject republics. If the content of Soviet “high” art had to be socialist, then the form was to be “national”. How can we then identify the “national form”; with what cultural, visual and aesthetic standards? As a rule, in widespread commercial conceptions brought down to the lowest common denominator; using ethnographic daily life elements, with stylized signs of the natural world, flora and fauna, architectural monuments; rugs, ornaments, garb, jugs and pitchers, clay huts, heaps of harvested grass, apricots, pomegranates and grapes, mountains and valleys, poplar trees, sheep, romantic shepherds, Zvartnots, Etchmiadzin, Garni-Geghard… Understandably, in a sense, this is also a public relations method, but never a standard of the “national” in art. Today, even the symbols of the Genocide have been included in the list of “national brands”, something that has a speculative commercial sense to it. The market not only forms taste but conceptions/notions as well. A glaring example of this is the Armenian souvenir. Yes, tourism in the country is being promoted and “packaged ethnography” or “cultural brands” – “simulacra of Armenianism” (Simulacrum (plural: -cra), from the Latin simulacrum which means "likeness, similarity") The kind-hearted art criticism of the Soviet Union regarding national cultures called all of this “brilliantly expressed national coloration”. So let us pay credit to the real color landscape. Armenian painting was displayed to the brotherly republics and the “big brother” and later to the world with its radiant palette. But perhaps this radiant coloration captivated Armenian painters due to a hidden sympathy with Armenian miniature art as well as the Fauvists and Expressionists? Nevertheless, before the advent of Soviet Armenia and nationalization, the world renowned masterpieces of Martiros Sarian of the 1910’s and 1920’s were created within the realm of international fine art of the day and influenced by it. Genetic memory is expressed in even deeper aesthetic conceptualizations. The “nationalizing” myth of Armenian painting’s brilliant colors began to collapse when Hakob Hakobyan and Harutyun Kalents came to Armenia. When Minas, then a student in foggy Leningrad, painted probably the most expressive, most intense and brilliant in terms of color, the most emotive “Djadjour” landscape painting, he was far from being inspired by nature but rather by internal emotion. Hakob Hakobyan gave a completely different take of the same Syunik natural world with a graphical metaphysical interpretation of a mountain. Now, which is the national in the coloration? Recently we had heard jokes asking what is best – to be a good person or to be a good Armenian? We can reformulate the question – what’s best; to be a good Armenian or a good artist? The contrast between “good person” (= “good artist”) that arises in this stale rhetoric, is a symptom of “good Armenian” that mostly disturbs the process involving the meeting of the ethnic principle and art. During recent Armenian-Diaspora meetings regarding the art field, there was also a Pan-Armenian Forum of Fine Art organized by the RA Ministry of the Diaspora. It resulted in the creation of an association given the task of regulating relations between the two art communities. If the external-show component of this “event’s” organization was palpable, what was also clearly evident was the unpreparedness of the Diaspora Ministry to get involved in the art field. What remains unclear is the association’s aesthetic-ideological principles in the art arena. A different strategy was adopted by Gevorg Kasabyan when he called for an assembly of the world’s Armenian abstract artists; a website was created. When the first exhibition of the group took place at the Yerevan Contemporary Art Museum in August, local abstract artists and those who had left Armenia during the past twenty years participated. Gevorg Kasabyan’s organizational activities in the field of contemporary Armenian art are conditioned by the motivation to assist and promote “pure art”. If contemporary art is generally overlooked in Armenia, then there is a unique problem facing abstract art. As the carrier of an absolute spiritual-aesthetic idea, it is destined to be pushed out of the market and public sphere, and its supporters are to be limited to a narrow circle, or exactly the opposite; remaining on the external aesthetic level and moving away from internal content, it transforms into commercialized “decorative abstractionism.”. Abstract art is the art of spiritual ecology and it begins before receiving visual forms. The organizational work and creation of Kasabyan are accompanied by “instructive” interventions in the spiritual ecology of the field. If this individual initiative to assemble Armenian artists, based as it is on the ethnic principle, restricts aesthetic preferences and aims, then the idea of Sahak Poghosyan to create a new depository and Armenian foundation for contemporary art can be characterized as truly “pan-national”. One of the founders of Armenian post-modernism, after a twenty year odyssey, he achieved a truly  artistic and political incredible feat when he brought, on his own recently, his  three tons of creative works from the New World to our wastelands of the Old World; furthermore he got the thing through customs. In 1936, when Yervand Kochar relocated to Soviet Armenia from Paris, he wound up in another agency other than customs. The near absurd experience of Sahak Poghosyan to get his works through Armenian customs set a precedent. According to custom’s rules, in order not to pay custom duties, the artist was forced to get a note from the Cultural Values Appraisal Committee of the RA Ministry of Culture stating that the freight was comprised of his personal works and that they had cultural value. Thus, it turns out that the government de-facto recognized the works of contemporary artist Sahak Poghosyan as having cultural value. It remains for us to recognize the entire inventory of Armenian contemporary art of the independence period in a similar vein. The issue regarding relations amongst the contemporary art community, individual initiatives and the state system, has become a hot topic as of late. We still cannot predict how the matter will progress but we can argue that signs of a new approach exist. One thing is clear. It is of strategic importance for any government to focus its attention on contemporary art.

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