David Kareyan

What we hate is in reality the object of our love Nietzsche

Art often borrows forms from life, though sometimes we encounter directions in art, which oppose life and venture to replace it. New forms of art debunk snippets of public morality that should have evolved but persevere instead through stereotypical mentality.

This section of the exhibition entitled The Body: New Figurative Art in Armenia displays works that reflect on the axis body-art-socium, that has elicited great interest in the Armenian cultural scene within the last decade. It contains documentary material, casting a glance in retrospect over the new forms of perceiving the body in post Soviet Armenia. Notions of the spiritual and the bodily changed along with the transformation of public morality through the 20th century. Perceiving the human body in a cultural discourse is the exclusive function of post-ideological cultural processes among us. For lack of space it may be impossible to fully present here the specifics of the cultural movement, which can conventionally be called “the art of resistance,” although the existence of several dozens of impressive works of art and critical studies allowed to perceive and present it as a particular cultural process. In the month of October, 1999, an exhibition opened at the ACCEA (NPAK), entitled The Crisis, which coincided with the terrorist attack in the Parliament of the Republic. The emotional shock led a group of artists revert to extreme means of expression to capture the terror of war, famine and chaos, more a premonition of the future than a reminiscence of the past. The topical air of the exhibition shocked the viewers, particularly the journalists. Many exhibits, like the life-size cardboard tank by Tigran Khachatryan, became model images through the subsequent decade for an emerging movement of resistance, which displayed the liberation of the body as a fight against hierarchic repression. Another exhibition in the year 2000, entitled Civic Commotion, which brought together fine arts, cinema, theatre, music, etc., transformed into a veritable movement, wherein the voice of the youth already became heard in the newly independent Republic of Armenia. The Incest rock band took on stage for the fist time during this exhibition. This endeavor by several girls (Tsomak, Nata, Nara, Asia) reminded more of an act of protest than a concert performance. Opting for incest (which was institutionalized at the dawn of civilization and urged the human mind forward) as the name of their band, they intended to nauseate the audience to fully experience the bitter fruits of physiological delusion. It turned out that even thinking about the origins of civilization could evoke disgust. Whereas to assure regular daily digestion an average consumer only needs to refrain from thinking about the truth, not to mention the origins of civilization. From early childhood on people are made to get accustomed to live without thinking, such a stupefying effect, for example, is attained through most nursery rhymes. When Nata, the front woman of Incest, intersperses the truth of life onto the idyllic lines of a nursery rhyme, the whole thing culminates in throwing up, thus affirming that truth is detrimental to digestion. The roles and scenarios constraining us through fairy tales and nursery rhymes over and over guide us into deadlocks, stagnation and, ultimately, into Petty-Minded Panic.

Viewing the carnal as the spiritual had an important role and significance in the process of liberalization. Perceiving culture as a system of communication, rather than ‘loot,’ was predominantly the contribution of female artists. In 2001 Sonia Balassanian organized an exhibition Collapse of  Illusions, it was unique in format and stood out by a predominance of well-considered selection of quality works. It resembled a great theatrical feat, where the spectator seemed to be moving across the stage from one performance to another, becoming a player in the act. This medley of installations, videos and performances struck a chord not because of its innovative formal achievement, but rather thanks to bringing artists together, affording them the exceptional experience of working together. The video performance No Return, shown at the 2003 Gyumri International Biennale was the result of this experience. The footage was mine and Yeva Khachatryan provided the soundtrack, the act was conceived by us together with a group of artists. We wanted to capture in it the striving of modern man to return to traditional society and the impossibility of it. This video performance presented the contradictions and confusion that reigned in the post Soviet society. It was constructed of juxtaposed images: the present and the future, culture and violence, the individual and the society, etc. The pivot of all phenomena is the man: bound towards the future, ending up in the past and foregoing the present.

In almost all of my works and those of my friends between 1999 and 2005 there was an attempt to externalize forbidden desires. Desires that were transfigured, unrecognizable, often even unnamed, that could be perceived as non-existent. Human desire is contradictory by nature, although we often perceive it as transgressing the boundaries of the acceptable. We were attempting to understand man. Was it at all possible to live without violence, what was the native habitat of man? Why culture, while clearly a compensatory mechanism, still fails to clarify the perimeter within which man may acknowledge to be in its natural milieu? Why do men believe that the woods or the ocean are their natural allies? We were trying to stir these questions in the viewers, reverting to aesthetic and psychological counterpoints. In 2005 I put together a project Resistance Through Art at the 51th International Venice Biennial, involving Diana Hakobyan, Vahram Aghasyan, Sona Abgaryan and Tigran Khachatryan. Since mid 90s these artists had been most active participants in Armenia in almost all vibrant artistic exploits outside of Soviet legacy institutions. Their works most antagonizingly present the “revolutionary rehabilitation” of farming culture, the mass hysterical-insane outbursts emanating from industrial modernization. These are clashes one may witness when the ideology pushing towards a unipolar world meets the reality. When Diana Hakobyan displays in her video the roles ascribed to a woman alongside the findings of sociological surveys, one wonders whether it is possible to resign to the cruelty and injustice that govern this world, whether it is possible to create a society where self-admiration and power do not engage in a “luring game.” Images flickering in a rock’n’roll rhythm over three monitors create a dynamic sequence, reminiscent in its visual impact of the contribution of the 1960s and 70s emancipation processes to the liberation of public morality. However weak or unnoticeable were in Soviet Armenia the effects of early Soviet libertarian processes, the idea of the equality of sexes no longer may be subjected to another, however important, objective. The sexual liberation of the West since 1960s allowed most people to feel their power over their own destinies. One may transform residences, occupations, gender, skin color, or just about everything else. Diana Hakobyan tries to awaken the memory of onlookers, sucking them into the process of liberalization of the 60s, a long and winding narrative, continually clashing with neo-patriarchal eruptions justifying the “logic of power,” mindless exploitation and consumption.

The next wave of resistance came about with the emergence, in 2009, of the group Art Laboratory. Unlike the proponents of bodily art that preceded them, these artists, rather than bringing politics into the territory of art, blended art into politics. With their artistic performances they ruptured closed social systems, attempting to liberalize them. In 1999 the group Art Laboratory inaugurated a project called Resistance at the Mkhitar Sebastatsi educational institution. The contributors maintained that merely presenting the history of liberalization in art constituted an act of resistance in and of itself. Artists that view the truth of the body as struggle against ideologies, using aesthetic and psychological counter points display the “confrontation of the carnal and the spiritual,” as an echo of a world long gone, which nonetheless may jeopardize our very existence with its reverberations.

Armenian-English translation by Artashes Emin