The Fragile Body and the Damaged Subject: A Decade of Crisis and Resistance (1998–2008)

If in the early to mid-1990s, performative actions in Armenia were, to a large extent, launched by situational or strategic collectives and groups as interventions—as correctives to institutional operations of the state and the artworld—and motivated by the desire to communicate beyond the regulated boundaries of “systems” and borders, then the late 1990s marked a shift toward individual actions, enclosure within interiority, and exploration of the body as fragile and the subject as damaged and violated. In the meantime, the earlier emphasis on text, factorgraphic strategies, ephemeral “fixations,” and interventions had been replaced by the newly available medium of video and multimedia installation often involving theatrically infused live performances focused on the body as a site of antagonism toward the social and the political, tout court. The body in these actions served as the tragic locus of the irreparable schism between nature and culture, as a site of technologically inflicted hyper-alienation. This transition from collective actions and interventions to solo performances and video was partly a reaction to the sociopolitical transformations taking place in Armenia in the late 1990s. Fermented amid social and political upheaval, these transformations were experienced as violent and tectonic.

The wild and unregulated free-market reforms of the early 1990s prepared the ground for the rise of the new oligarchy in Armenia while the Karabakh war with neighboring Azerbaijan and Armenia’s 1994 victory inflamed nationalism. Yet it was another political event that triggered a shift in general sentiment, from post-Soviet optimism to imminent disillusionment. On October 27, 1999, several gunmen entered the Armenian parliament, held the deputies and ministers hostage for hours, and subsequently killed the popular, newly elected prime minister and speaker along with six other political figures. In the aftermath of this carnage, which was almost fully televised since the session of parliament taking place at the time of the terror attack was being broadcast live on national television, president Robert Kocharyan usurped political power (which he would retain until the bloody crackdown on oppositional protests in 2008). The 1999 parliament shooting was experienced by contemporary Armenian artists as a cataclysmic event, one heralding the end of post-Soviet aspirations for the construction of a democratic nation-state led by a progressive liberal government. Politically and economically, the newly sovereign state promoting free-market reforms and liberal democracy had given way to a convenient marriage between ethnocentric nationalism and neoliberalism. The official cultural policy of the 1990s of representing Armenia as an ancient yet modern and progressive nation began to fade in the face of “one nation, one culture” rhetoric under the umbrella of Christianity, an identity that became both ideologically expedient and commercially lucrative for the new nationalist elites. Contemporary artists were relegated to the margins of this new social order, foreclosing their embrace of dominant social and cultural narratives or their artistic participation within the country’s official institutions. If, in 1998, the artist known as Sev could have an exhibition at the National Assembly triggering art critic Vardan Jaloyan’s anxiety over art’s identification with power, after the 1999 parliament shootings, the relationship between state institutions and dominant cultural narratives on the one hand and the contemporary art scene on the other could be defined only in negative terms.¹

Meanwhile, the late 1990s were also marked by a triumph of postmodern mediatization of the public sphere, where the world onscreen came to be perceived as more real than the social reality, which was replete with contradictions.² In contrast to the deceptive spectacle of media representations, contemporary artists used the technology of video to signify resistance and “truth.” Here, the performing body being screened for display served as a conduit to an authentic reality, one beneath and beyond the cultural “screen.” Video as a medium of subversion, truth, and exposure in Armenia had its roots in the early 1990s in the form of sexually explicit content on VHS tapes.³ The proliferation of video was technically possible because the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (ACCEA) imported cameras, DVD players, TV monitors, and projectors, which it then made available to artists, while the theatrical and ritualistic pathos of performative practices found nourishment in theatrically infused multimedia performances by New York–based Iranian Armenian artist Sonia Balassanian, whose aesthetics were promoted by ACCEA’s theater department.

The triangulation of theatrical video-performance, the conception of the fragile body as a site of violence, and the belief in art as a means of resistance was crystalized in works made by David Kareyan between 1999 and 2007. From ritualistic sacrifice (Dead Democracy, 1999) to eating the victim’s flesh (Eucharist-450, 2000) and splitting bones with an electric saw (Gastritus, 2002), Kareyan displayed the body, often naked, on a video monitor set among incongruent materials such as earth, plants, bones, and fleece to signify the subject’s alienation and estrangement from nature (fig. 1). Kareyan’s work of this period counterposed art’s promise of de-alienation with the false sublation of alienation within the social sphere—where the technologies of the cultivation of the self in a society in which standardized consumerist desires and behaviors promised fulfillment but instead mass-produced conformity. These social technologies of desire shaped the body as an image of power (in edified, upstanding form), while at the same time, subjugated it. The effects of political control and consumerism were inscribed on the body of the normative subject, whose complicit performance of militarism, patriotism, and conservative morality naturalized patriarchal domination. These ideologies produced autoerotic subjects whose frustrated desire could only be expressed through a primordial return to mud (The World Without You, 1999) or invoked through the impossible return to murder and incest (Sweet Repression of Ideology, 2000).

The culmination of these series of videos and performances was Kareyan’s No Return (subtitled Suicide for Eternal Life, Oral Hysteria, Speech Capability Paid [for] by Madness) of 2003.⁴ Realized in collaboration with curator Eva Khachatryan, this three-channel video installation was composed of a central screen showing a Bill Viola-esque video of Kareyan in a white nightshirt digitally superimposed on fire (in different versions of the work, the images on the screens vary) and two side screens showing montages of found footage from documentary films and world news reports of various recent turbulent events superimposed on politically charged signs and words. An audio piece composed of electronic bits and lyrics by early twentieth-century Armenian poet and writer Yeghishe Charents played in reverse accompanied the videos, as did a live performance involving seven female figures, most of whom were members of the punk band Incest, dressed up in hooded black gowns and drumming on tin plates and logs (fig. 2).  

These works echoed Sonia Balassanian’s multimedia theatrical performances of the same period, which were infused with myth and ritual. Balassanian’s performances, in turn, referenced Armenian ecclesial traditions, enacting victimhood, sacrifice, and various rituals of domination and subjugation (Shadows of Dusk and Collapse of Illusions, 2000; and There Might Have Been, 2003, ACCEA). The construction of a total environment that overwhelmed the audience with its production of affect combined video projection, ready-made objects, voice, music, performance, and other media and encompassed the entirety of the viewer’s sensorial sphere, a Gesamtkunstwerk of sorts. Often, such as in Collapse of Illusions, this total environment also functioned as a grand theatrical setting that accommodated other artists’ performances (including those by David Kareyan, Karine Matsakyan, Sona Abgaryan, and Diana Hakobyan, among others). Collapse of Illusions was formed through multiple discrepant activities performed by subjects in solipsistic self-enclosure and constituted a negative side of reality in which everything was as it is in the social world but nonetheless dysfunctional, futile, and completely deplete of time and context. Sewing, knitting, hammering nails, dancing, and “cooking” book pages in tar were performed in a dystopic, atemporal landscape littered with media images, objects, artworks, and debris.

Several artists in the early 2000s produced videos and performances exploring the body as a fragile yet subversive locus of sexuality, eroticism, and desire. Tigran Khachatryan’s videos pursue sexually explicit content montaged onto signifiers of youth subcultures and remixed with ready-made references to film and pop culture. Repetitive and futile masturbatory gestures—or their metaphorical representation through juxtaposition of image and rhythm—often follow the structure of male orgasm (such as in the “explosive scene” of the gas stove burning and being extinguished in Romeo, 2003). This image of the virile subject appears alongside the figure of a male subcultural antihero as an average representative of a bored and jaded generation (Stakler, 2004). In a 2002 performance titled Bread and Cheese, filmed in the medieval monastery Ayrivank, the artist, dressed as a punk soccer fan mimicking a soccer player from the Turkish national team (Umit Davalan), approached a miniature football field lined with white paint, sat in front of the camera, and proceeded to eat bread and cheese (fig. 3). As viewers of the recording of the performance soon realize, the camera positioned in front of the artist was not filming the performance but rather displaying a soccer game. The action of eating bread and cheese evokes a common Armenian adage that one must eat a lot of bread and cheese in order to become an adult.⁵ The saying is often used in a derogatory sense to indicate that someone needs to grow up or mature. This “rite of passage” experienced by the young punk recalls an ironically enacted oedipal patricide that took place at a site of patriarchal authority, that is, on church grounds. However, instead of assuming the father’s place after the symbolic murder, Khachatryan’s male subject remains forever juvenile.

If the male body in Khachatryan’s work is at times virile and sexually provocative (such as in his series of “Garage” film productions including Romeo, 2003; Theodicy, 2005; and Entertate, 2010),⁶ and at other times bored and indifferent, in Harutyun Simonyan’s video performances, it is fragile and vulnerable. Simonyan’s performances are framed in a decontextualized and compressed space in which the naked artist assumes a fetal position onscreen—as in a womb (Untitled, 2001). Simonyan’s naked body dances, slips, and tumbles in a room covered with black linoleum and smeared with Vaseline (Untitled, 2003), it falls asleep (Sleep, 2001), and it performs the feminine work of sewing and attempts to don a feminine dress that is too small (Untitled, 2001; fig. 4). The sexualized male body is masochistically exposed to voyeuristic scopophilia as the audience “infiltrates” the artist’s private space. Yet, masochistic exhibitionism and exposure here do not unambiguously grant the viewer visual control over the fragile body; the subject is also protected and sheltered by the screen/womb in the fantasy of a return to its maternal origin. In Lusine Davidyan’s video Untitled (2003), the embryonic state unfolding on the TV monitor is not a prelapsarian fantasy of the whole and undivided subject but rather the horror of certain and predetermined death. An abstracted form of a body flickers onscreen while a black text on the white wall behind it issues the verdict “Embryonic Death Embedded in Your Body,” echoing the lyrics of heavy metal band Slayer: “Embryonic death, / Embedded in your brain.” The temporality of Simonyan’s work is a regression to the ahistorical and pre-subjective time before birth, to the mother’s body, while Davidyan’s is that of the anterior future—that is, of a future that will have happened in the past.

If the above-described works confine the body to a claustrophobic self-enclosure refusing any relationality or “outside,” other artists of the same generation explore the intersubjective dimension of bodily communication. In Sona Abgarian’s videos of the early 2000s, friendship is conceived as a medium of intersubjective exchange in which play and violence, communication and its failure, appear as rudimentary forms of sociality. In Untitled (2001), two female subjects (the artist and her friend, Astghik Melkonyan) assume a four-legged position and engage in a play of love and envy, empathy and violence, as they circle, hug, and bite each other (fig. 5).

Diana Hakobyan’s videos of the early 2000s position the active body as disruptive to the induced passivity of media spectacle and consumerism as she engages with the deconstruction of the rhetoric of mediatized images and social clichés. In I Can’t Believe in Your Dreams (2002), the artist is seen skipping rope in a series of close-ups (of her face, abdomen, chest, or legs), while her action is rhythmically interrupted by shots of a hammer smashing panes of glass inscribed with social ideals such as “Collaboration,” “Productivity,” “Success,” and “Imagination” (fig. 6). In another, the artist boxes against a pane of glass covered in illegible scribbles in red paint. This figure of the female artist as warrior against social clichés and consumerist desires can be traced to an earlier work by Karine Matsakyan. In 1995, as part of her solo exhibition Triumph of the Consumer at Charlie Khachatryan Gallery, Matsakyan walked into a butcher’s shop with a toy gun and “fired” at hanging flesh (Suicidal Tendencies, 1995).

Anna Barseghian’s 1999 performative photograph taken in a men’s bathroom in the Grand Théâtre de Genève intervenes in the sexual division of intimate spaces. The image shows the artist dressed in a black ceremonial costume, like that worn by a widow or a theatrical performer (fig. 7). She is standing still and upright at a urinal, her back to the viewer. The contrast between the artist’s stern and austere appearance and the “hooliganism” of the act, the assumption of a phantasmal phallus by a conservatively dressed female figure, juxtaposes two incongruent notions, thus estranging the social reproduction of sexuality as it is conducted through the demarcation of segregated sights and signs. 

Up until the early 2000s, these actions were not overtly framed as feminist—with the exception of Barseghian’s work, among a few others.⁷ A shift in framework took place in about 2002–3, when Sonia Balassanian on the one hand and Austrian curator Hedwig Saxenhuber (who was visiting Yerevan) on the other, encouraged an explicitly feminist framing of women artists’ work concerned with the social reproduction of sexual divisions, gender roles and anti-patriarchal manifestations, and the body. The feminist exhibitions Women’s City curated by Arpine Tokmajyan, Heriqnaz Galstyan, and Narine Zolyan in 2004 and Rocks Melting in the Depth of the Earth in 2004 and Women’s City by Eva Khachatryan in 2005 were testament to this shift toward revealing explicitly feminist concerns through a language and discourse of difference and identity characteristic of US third-wave feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. First displayed at the festival Rocks Melting in the Depth of the Earth, artist and musician Tsomak’s video juxtaposes her frantically dancing naked body with a video of a dancing stripper filmed in a club in Yerevan, whereas Sona Abgaryan’s work shows the artist buttoning her blouse, taking it on and off in awkward movements, as a first-person account of violence against women runs in the subtitles.

Astghik Meklonyan’s work Bokhcha (2004) likewise engaged with traditional feminine roles and tasks. But this engagement was not guided by a subversive reperformance of sexual roles. Rather, it was carried out through an exaggerated over-performance in which the female subject became the object of her own labor. In Bokhcha, the artist’s body was wrapped and de-subjectivized and barely visible among other colorful and patterned wraps as she moved slowly through them (fig. 8). These wraps made of blankets and sheets functioned as signifiers of the household labor undertaken by women, while also evoking the experience of displacement and migration. Indeed, “bokhcha,” a Turkish word assimilated in Armenian slang, designates a self-made wrap that immigrants, nomads, travelers, and the displaced use to carry their belongings.

The dominant paradigm of Armenian performative art practices in the late 1990s and early 2000s could be construed as one of a critical deconstruction of socially imposed gender roles, sexual identities, and forms of subjectivization. In this context, Azat Sargsyan’s performative interventions propose another strategy: not to rearticulate the body, identity, and subject in order to subvert dominant discourses but rather to annihilate the very material upon which this ideology conducts its wicked schemes—that is, the subject itself. In Azat (free) Hanging on Freedom Square on the Independence Day (2000) the artist hung upside-down from a streetlight (fig. 9). The title of the action plays with the artist’s name Azat which in Armenian means freedom and is repeated in the name of the iconic Freedom square where the demonstrations for Armenia’s independence took place throughout the late Soviet period. According to the artist, through the action he was commenting on independent Armenia’s actual dependence upon larger geopolitical forces.⁸ A photograph shows the artist anthropologically opposite the human orientation and iconographically in contrast to the statue of Armenian composer Alexander Spendiaryan in the background on the right. This reversal or repositioning as a means of annihilation of the subject was performed in Welcome (1999), which took place at the exhibition After the Wall in Stockholm in 2000 and in 2002 at the São Paulo Biennial.⁹ This time, the artist positioned his body horizontally as a doormat and lied there for two hours to mark the entrance to the exhibition space. This willful self-objectification as a lowly, abject doormat beneath visitors’ feet marked a desire for the obliteration of subjectivity, a desire that reached its extreme in Azat’s subsequent performances involving death and the politics of its commodification.

In Welcome to Armenia, Museum Under Heaven (2003) commissioned for the exhibition L’environement du corps génétiquement modifiable, curated by Barseghian and Nazareth Karoyan, the artist studied the economy of cemeteries, especially the real-estate speculations through which municipal burial grounds in Yerevan spread toward residential neighborhoods. They had become “last destinations” for expat Armenians who lived abroad but dreamt of being buried in their homeland. Azat showed funerary accessories across the city, including a guide to the cemetery “Armenia,” placing the country itself as a cemetery under heaven. The artist, wearing a black garment with a white painted inscription “Welcome,” was photographed next to funerary statues and tombs (fig. 10). His identification of Armenia as a place of death exposed the commodification of this myth and positioned it as an object of touristic consumption.¹⁰ Continuing identification with death and dying, this subject was finally obliterated in the impossible act of witnessing one’s own funeral (the Gyumri Biennial of 2008¹¹). 

Azat’s works recall the 1980s practices of unofficial artists of the Soviet Union, for whom disappearance and death became a means of escaping the watchful eyes of the Soviet apparatus. But, paradoxically, this self-annihilation was also a road to absolute freedom (“Azat” in Armenian means “free”). Enacted in the 2000s, Azat’s anachronistic dissidence was a reminder of the ghostly reverberations of a world that had supplied negative content for the conception of art as a free space for dreaming, a conception formative for contemporary art in Armenia and performative practices within it. This world was the disappearing landscape of Soviet modernity. In the 2000s, when identification with the social context could no longer be secured, the artist’s social function could no longer be affirmed. To be sure, amid conditions of increasing alienation, the imaginary world of artistic creations became a shelter of sorts, a compensatory mechanism, while the artist became ever more marginalized in the context of rampant nationalism and neoliberalism. The return of Armenia’s first president Levon Ter-Petrosyan, a liberal democrat, to politics in 2007 opened up a space for renewed participation in politics and public life for artists, a space that was soon to be violently shut down as the outgoing president Kocharyan announced martial law and, on March 1, 2008, issued a deadly crackdown of the opposition.

Editors’ note: Read the Introduction and Part I of this series here, and Part II here.

Author’s note: The research for this three-part article was commissioned by ARé Cultural Foundation in 2022. Some parts are informed by earlier research conducted for my monograph. See Angela Harutyunyan, Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the “Painterly Real,” 1987–2004 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

The post Performative Gestures and Limits of Resistance in Armenian Contemporary Art (1987–2008), Part III appeared first on post.

Performances of Politics in a Nation-State (1991­–98)

Armenian performative practices and “art actions”¹in the 1990s were characterized less by grand gestures of plentitude and excess and more by austere, minimal, and often barely visible acts engaging with the triviality of the everyday, intervening in “closed systems” of communication, overidentifying with or ironically repeating forms and procedures of the newly constituted liberal democratic state after the collapse of the USSR and its official rituals, and demarcating institutional boundaries of art. In the maelstrom of rapid transformations set in motion by the dissolution of the old world, many artists embraced the newfound quasi-anarchic freedom, the reestablishment of communication with the outside world, and the possibility of participating in the construction of the new world and new state. In the mid-1990s, for the first time, contemporary art from the Republic of Armenia was presented abroad under the aegis of its ministry of culture.²In this context, the artistic avant-garde largely positioned itself as the self-appointed vanguard of the culture of the new state as opposed to a resistant subculture. Its agenda often (but not always) coincided with that of the cultural politics of the new republic—to represent Armenia as a progressive nation with an ancient culture that was finally joining the progressive and free family of nations on the international stage.

The 3rd Floor ultimately dissolved in 1994 in part because of a crisis of resistance³but also because of the need to institutionalize, which came in conflict with the movement’s inherent anti-institutional stance, paving the way for a generation of artists who saw themselves as the avant-garde of the independent republic. This generation, which made its collective entry to the Armenian contemporary art scene in 1994–95 under the name ACT,⁴conceived of the the artist as the engineer of a new world—and promoted the artistic notion of a “pure creativity.”⁵This term denotes a conceptual procedure for cleansing artwork of subjective, material, institutional, and other determinations not integral to creativity as well as adopting concrete strategies for making the process of doing so visible through “fixation (inscription)” (documenting everyday objects and gestures), “intervention” (intervening in public spaces or “closed systems”), “inspection” (carrying out explorations and studies of sites, systems, and spheres), and “display” (presenting the results of the former procedures as works of art). At the same time, ACT understood art and the political sphere of the state as separate institutions, each constituted by its own procedural mechanisms, and collectively aimed to demystify both.

Beginning in 1993, David Kareyan, a key member of the group, was working on a project he called “POLIT-ART,” which involved three strategies borrowed directly from liberal democratic political practices—referendum, demonstration, and agitation—and was realized as collective actions upon the formation of ACT a year later. For the exhibition Act of 1995 in the Ex-Voto Gallery, Kareyan prepared leaflets titled “POLIT-ART,” “Referendum,” “Agitation” and “Demonstration,” and “Actayin hosank” (Actual stream). After using a megaphone to announce these same words through an open window, he threw the leaflets at the audience gathered below (fig. 1). He enacted a “referendum” the same year, in January 1995, at the exhibition of Armenian art held at the Museum Bochum in Germany.⁶Art Referendum incorporated a transparent ballot box labeled “referendum.” An archival photograph reproduced in several newspapers and periodicals shows the artist standing behind the box holding a pen in one hand and casting his vote with the other. The process appears to have been carried out with the utmost seriousness as the artist’s gaze is fixed upon the action he is performing (fig. 2). Viewers were likewise invited to mark and cast a ballot. Finally, in his seminal action Art Demonstration, which he undertook with ACT and other artists as part of Yerevan-Moscow: The Question of the Ark, an exhibition at the Modern Art Museum in Yerevan, Kareyan enacted democratic expression in the form of an artistic action. This much-discussed work is a perfect example of ACT’s identification with and use of political procedures integral to liberal democracy within an artistic form of “pure creativity.”⁷.

On July 12, 1995, during the opening of Yerevan-Moscow, and exactly one week after the constitutional referendum in Armenia in which the first constitution of the independent state was approved, ACT, together with several other artists, marched along the main avenue in Yerevan (fig. 3).⁸They covered an artistically defined public space—the area between the statue of early twentieth-century Armenian modernist painter Martiros Saryan (1880–1972), which was also the site of early youth exhibitions in the early 1980s, and the Modern Art Museum. Approximately twenty people carried banners with slogans in Armenian and English, most of which were written in black letters on a white background, calling for “Interventions into Systems,” “World Integration,” “Polit-Art,” “Decentralization,” “Market Relations in Art and Economy,” “Realization,” “No Art,” “Art Referendum,” “New State, Art, Culture,” and “Demythologization”; issuing demands such as “Expel the Information Monsters from Rationality”; proclaiming that “Every Small Mistake Can Result in Big Catastrophes”; and asserting that “Creativity Will Save Humanity.” After reaching the museum, their final destination, the artists hung the banners on the wall as part of Yerevan-Moscow. In this action, the politics of “pure creativity” directly met the pure creativity of politics, as the slogans were both formal interventions in the art institution as well as manifestations of democratic proceduralism in the form of a public demonstration.⁹

ACT’s affirmative strategies of overidentification with the political forms of the liberal democratic state through performative actions could be considered unique in contemporary art in Armenia in terms of relating affirmatively to the state and its institutions. As opposed to this, the gestures of ritualistic mimicry by older-generation conceptual artist Grigor Khachatryan (born 1952)—most of which were ironic and often grotesque—related to the mechanisms of the constitution of power and authority. Khachatryan’s work renders political institutions simply as forms through which power and authority are enacted as and through ritual. He performatively assumed “absolute power” through self-mandated award ceremonies (the “Grigor Khachatryan award”), self-aggrandizing declarations (“You are within the radius of the sexual rays of Grigor Khachatryan”), pseudo-institutions (“Center for Planning Accidents”), ceremonial renewing of street plaques ( “Groghneri poghots” or “Writers’ Street”), and “official meetings” (hosting then Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili in the room specially designated for official meetings as part of the Armenian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011). The fictitious persona created by the artist “cannibalizes” the artist’s body as raw material and uses it in repetitive rituals. In the Grigor Khachatryan award ceremony (“tested” in 1974 and held occasionally since 1990),¹⁰there are a minimum of three  “Grigor Khachatryans”—firstly, the name denotes the artist-author who conceived of the honor; secondly, it appears in the self-referential title of the award; and finally, it is evoked in the trophy itself, which is in the form of the artist’s body—enabling the awardee to literally hold Grigor Khachatryan in their arms (fig. 4). Khachatryan’s actions are not confined to the rituals that constitute officialdom. Indeed, for many years, with humor and irony, he has been rendering everyday mythologies strange (television interventions on Ar TV such as the series City, which he produced with Suren Ter-Grigoryan in the 1990s), deeming national myths banal (Vanna Lich, Gyumri Biennale, 1998), and depicting male friendship as a fantasy of recovering a primordial and infantile state of jouissance (Aratez, with Norayr Ayvazyan, 1993). Khachatryan’s gestures are repetitive and often tautological, a logic that is constitutive of power for its own sake. As sarcastic and antiheroic as his performances might seem, his signature laughter, which often accompanies them, invokes the figure of a joker as truth-teller in the face of power, as a romantic whose heroism is precisely in his antiheroism.

Performative iteration as an intervention into institutional systems, combined with the conception of the artist as an itinerant whose role is to demarcate the boundaries of art’s permissibility characterizes several actions conceived by a loose group of conceptual artists in the mid-1990s. Initially affiliated with the activities of New York–based Iranian Armenian artist Sonia Balassanian (born 1942) in Yerevan since 1993 and ultimately with the foundation of the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (ACCEA) carried out by Balassanian and her husband, Edward Balassanian, in 1995, artists Karen Andreassian, Ara Hovsepyan, Samvel and Manvel Baghdasaryans, and Gagik Charchyan organized an unofficial intervention in the Tbilisi Biennial of 1996. The Biennial coincided with the artists’ schism with Balassanian and became a tacit protest against ACCEA, which organized the official Armenian Pavilion.¹¹Inspired by the rhetorical question posed by scandalous Russian artist Alexander Brener: “Why haven’t I been invited to this exhibition?” (“Почему меня не взяли на эту выставку?”), artists went to the biennial with so-called geopolitical cards (also the title of the intervention), carrying their own name tags along with those of famous artists and acting as representatives of a fictitious foundation called “Local Global.” On the one hand, the intervention voiced a locally articulated discontent with ACCEA’s collaboration with artists other than the group through a construction of a fictitious and situational counter-institution;¹²on the other, it brought to the surface a key problematic for post-Soviet Armenian artists—that of the desire to participate in a global art world through a language and means characterizing conceptual art.¹³It is especially the latter aspect that informed their expedition the next year to the German city of Kassel.

In 1997, the same group of artists—a collective that was situational rather than long-standing or cohesive—organized an unofficial intervention in the authoritative documenta X curated by Catherine David in Kassel (fig. 5). GEO-Kunst Expedition documented the artists’ journey from Yerevan to the exhibition. Once in Kassel, the group created a pseudo-official letterhead with the logo of the documenta, thus hijacking the institutional trademark. The artists posted copies of this fake stationery across the city with a call for the public to post messages or artworks on them. They conceived this intervention as providing a space on the stationery of the prestigious art event to post a message or an artwork, so that anyone could claim participation in the documenta. The letterhead thus acted as a sort of  parasitic institution created by the uninvited guests. Thus, the Armenian artists were inserting themselves into the global contemporary art context that had allegedly bypassed them.¹⁴This self-insertion was understood quite literally as the artists made sure to be photographed with David and to have the curator perform as an “artist” in the unofficial documenta by having her sign their fake letterhead. For a moment, the unofficial artists and official curator changed places.

All the examples discussed here point to a shift in late Soviet period discourse, aesthetics, and political attitude in performative artistic practices in Armenia. If the unofficial artists of the perestroika avant-garde conceived of their actions in terms of resistance toward official institutions, the artists in the early years of independence positioned themselves affirmatively in relation to the newly evolving state and its cultural discourses. They often did so through actions, performances, and artistic gestures that mimicked state rituals and forms of democratic participation.

The research for this three-part article was commissioned by ARé Cultural Foundation in 2022. Some parts are informed by earlier research conducted for my monograph. See Angela Harutyunyan, Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the “Painterly Real,” 1987–2004 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

Editors’ note: Read the Introduction and Part I of this series here, and Part III here.

Author’s note: The research for this three-part article was commissioned by ARé Cultural Foundation in 2022. Some parts are informed by earlier research conducted for my monograph. See Angela Harutyunyan, Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the “Painterly Real,” 1987–2004 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

The post Performative Gestures and Limits of Resistance in Armenian Contemporary Art (1987–2008), Part II appeared first on post.

Series Introduction

This series of three articles presents a selection of the performative practices in Armenian art in the late-Soviet and post-Soviet periods, practices that would herald the separation of nonofficial artists from the official Soviet cultural discourses and practices, and subsequently, in the 1990s, mark the institutionalization of nonofficial or semiofficial art as “contemporary art.” These practices were often not only symptomatic but also, at times, prognostic of broader sociopolitical developments in late-Soviet and post-Soviet Armenia.

The twenty years covered here—from 1987 to 2008—are conditionally demarcated as the period of transition from the late-Soviet to the post-Soviet condition (with an ideological implication of being a transition to liberal democracy)¹ and ultimately to a marriage of neoliberalism and nationalism in the 2000s. The political and cultural discourses of glasnost in the 1980s would herald the onset in the 1990s of market capitalism, with its “inhuman face” (in contrast to “socialism with a human face”)²combined with the construction of the liberal democratic nation-state on the ruins of Soviet modernity. However, in the later 1990s and throughout the 2000s, market capitalism and liberal democracy were decoupled, and late capitalism’s Armenian variant triumphed alongside the ideology of neoliberalism under the protective umbrella of political authoritarianism. This periodization, however, is not solely guided by political events. It also follows the internal development of performative practices as they unfolded within the complex contradictions and tensions of the late-Soviet and post-Soviet conditions. If in the late 1980s and throughout most of the 1990s, artists participated in the construction of a new state and in its cultural discourses through collective actions and interventions in the public sphere, in 1999–2008, with a few exceptions, they conducted solo performances and actions. If in the first instance, artist collectives laid claim to social participation and engagement, in the second, individual artists explored the embodied, sexed, damaged, and annihilated subject violated by political and social forces of control and repression.

As part of the explosion of political and cultural practices that challenged the officially sanctioned discourses, institutions, and narratives—and that encouraged a spirit of reformism licensed by Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist agenda within the framework of perestroika and glasnost since the mid-1980s—performative gestures executed in the context of multimedia and multi-genre exhibitions therein formed within and in response to perestroika’s imperative of reforming official institutions from within.³Here, performative acts and actions came to signify unmediated communication between the artist and their public, an aspiration for the late-Soviet Armenian avant-garde artists. In their very origin, performative acts, as discreet as they may seem—whether Happenings and art actions in the late 1980s and 1990s or performance and video art in the late 1990s and 2000s—shared one fundamental characteristic: they were undertaken in opposition and resistance to dominant political and cultural discourses and narratives, even in moments when they adopted an overtly affirmative tone.⁴ The performative gesture became a necessary means for pointing toward and critically challenging the boundaries of institutions, disciplines, discourses, established cultural narratives, and dominant aesthetic regimes at a time when the relationship between the center and the margins of culture was shifting and unstable.Attached to the advent and institutionalization of semiofficial and nonofficial art in the late Soviet period (which in the 1990s came to be referred to as “contemporary art”)⁵and part of the broader context of overcoming the medium-bound imperatives of officially sanctioned art, performative practices carried with them the dilemmas and ambiguities characterizing late-Soviet and post-Soviet avant-gardes: the desire to remain marginal and resistant (even if political conditions were at times ripe for occupying “the center”), self-institutionalizing, and yet—espousing a quasi-anarchic anti-institutional rhetoric—adopting grand and absolute gestures that aimed to constitute their own artistic context as more real than reality itself and ultimately being formed by the negation of the Soviet historical experience. 

Part I

1980s: Resurrected Ghosts, Underground Heroes, and Saintly Saviors

The show “Happening,” which opened in Yerevan in 1982 and was curated by V. Tovmassyan, was an important show. Vigen Tadevossyan . . . presented a huge balloon that was constantly being filled with air. There was a wonderful poet named Belamuki. But focus was on two actors who, in a very strange way, resembled Salvador Dali and Picasso.

“To be honest, it was neither a happening nor a performance, but theatre directed by the sculptor Vardan Tovmassyan. I was not invited to the above-mentioned exhibition, and a month later decided to make a performance entitled “Exit to the city.” . . . For about an hour we were screaming texts edited from politically oriented newspapers and art magazines. The speech of Henry Igityan (the first and “irreplaceable” director of the Museum of Modern Art since 1972) that followed the performance was very typical of the times: “Our people do not need your experiments” (we performed both “Happening” and “Exit to the City” in his museum space). It meant that neither my friends nor I could have exhibitions there any more, not to mention at the Artists’ Union. We had to exhibit on the streets, at the conservatory, and the education worker’s house.”⁶—Arman Grigoryan

This quote from artist Arman Grigoryan’s recollection of the early to mid-1980s art scene in Yerevan is one of the very few published statements on performative artistic gestures in Armenia at the time. But Grigoryan’s testimony is more than symptomatic. Indeed, it not only reveals the discontent that he and his peers experienced with nonofficial artists of the 1970s generation, it also places them antagonistically in relation to the “officially oppositional” Museum of Modern Art and its founding director.⁷The museum was the first of its kind in the USSR. It presented works by the 1960–70s generation of artists who entered the scene because of the Thaw, Nikita Khrushchev’s liberalization of culture. In their work, they reflected on national and ethnic themes with modernist form and positioned themselves as oppositional to orthodox Soviet culture, although the very foundation of the Museum was licensed by the Soviet state. Given this anti-institutional ethos, one would expect the Museum to be a natural ally of the younger generation of rebellious artists. However, acting from a position of defense of high modernism and its national spirit, the Museum responded negatively. The anti-institutional ethos—even when enacted from within an institution, as was already the case with the Museum of Modern Art in Yerevan—was to characterize the first large artistic/cultural movement of nonofficial artists in Armenia: the 3rd Floor. The assumption that truly free art has the power to break away from institutional boundaries and conventions was to become formative for contemporary art in Armenia and serve as a key signifier of the resistance and subversion attached to performative practices. These practices were often seen as a means of revealing the truth that the deceptive facade of official narratives and institutions concealed. As the figure of truth, the performative gesture occupies a structurally marginal and, at times, subterranean position vis-à-vis the official institutions.

In 1987 young art critic Nazareth Karoyan—as if echoing Grigoryan’s retrospectively expressed discontent with the Museum of Modern Art in Yerevan—first discovered and then meticulously categorized the garbage accumulated on the roof of the Museum. The pile of trash was documented in an inventory that Karoyan presented the same year at the Union of Artists’ official meeting, to the distress of many of those present. It is interesting that garbage, as a signifier of contradictions hidden behind the beautiful facade of official cultural politics, was not merely revealed but also categorized and itemized. This conceptual gesture was among the triggers for the 3rd Floor’s first exhibition, held that same year, and marked the movement’s mission, which was to reform cultural institutions from within and resist official culture from its very margins.

In the same year as Karoyan’s “garbage action,” a group of artists embarked upon the reformation of the Union of Artists of Armenia. This first event was more of a festival than a coherent exhibition, and it took place in the conference hall located on the third floor of the Union, a space not designated for exhibitions. It was the location of the organization’s first convention that gave the movement its name: “the 3rd Floor.” The 3rd Floor came into being in 1987 when several young artists were invited to be part of the youth division of the Union.

Ideologically, the movement presented a mixture of romantic liberalism, nationalism, and libertarianism, with anarchist dreams of omnipotence and contradicting ideologies that often went hand in hand. Its members romanticized symbols of Western consumerism and subcultures to the degree that they had come to denote ideals of individual freedom and autonomy. The critique of Soviet culture through its opposite other—signs of capitalist consumer culture as inherently democratic—situates the 3rd Floor within the intellectual climate of the late-Soviet and socialist intelligentsia’s romantic alliance with liberal democracy. In the practices of those involved in the 3rd Floor, these ideals were understood from an artistic perspective: the citizen’s freedom was equal to that of the artist’s “absolute and universal right to mix different artistic styles and images on the surface of the canvas.”⁸The Union’s seminal 1988 performance Hail to the Union of Artists from the Netherworld: The Official Art Has Died reenacted the opposition to the Soviet and its cultural policy on metaphorical terms.

On December 12 several artists in the movement dressed as the resurrected dead and, like their heavy-metal heroes, strode into one of the Union of Artists’ conventional exhibitions and declared the death of official art. In this Happening, recorded under two different titles—The Official Art Has Died and Hail to the Union of Artists from the Netherworld—they made their way silently through the exhibition hall, viewed traditional paintings hung on the walls of an art institution defending Soviet official orthodoxy, and recognizing the symptomatic significance of their action, took photographs of themselves in various groupings and positions before walking out. (fig. 3) This event crystalized the 3rd Floor’s belief in the incommensurability of art as a space for free creation and the institution ruled by the tyranny of banality: if art is the collectively constructed dream of underground heroes, the institution is the counterimage of the conventional domain of a properly dead and officially sanctioned reality.⁹

Within the framework of perestroika’s belief in change from within, the 3rd Floor oscillated on a thin and delicate line between official recognition and rejection, occupying both the cultural mainstream and its vanguard margins. The official discourse of the pre-perestroika period of stagnation, identified with the Soviet experience as such, returned in the practices of the 3rd Floor’s members as a trauma never able to be articulated but rather transformed through the recurring return of various invented and real personages. These personages were born from the anti-Soviet realm. Sometimes they occupied the margins of official discourses, styles, forms, and techniques; at other times, they hid underground from the watchful eyes of the Soviet collective consciousness. The “Soviet” recurred in the haunted figures of ghosts and “authoritarian personages,” such as a character found in the works of Grigor Mikaelyan (known as Kiki), who was, at that time, part of the 3rd Floor. Kiki constructed and consistently pursued the “revelation” of Bobo, a disembodied fictional character with no particular shape or form, whose name is commonly invoked to scare children. In Kiki’s series of abstract paintings, which materialize through performative gestures, Bobo is the secret service agent, the KGB officer, the immaterial eye that controls: he is the scarecrow for the dissident intelligentsia. The figure of Bobo had to be constantly reconstituted, constantly in process, never fully materialized. (The first Bobos appeared in the mid-1980s, and they continue to appear today.) This figure would be indexed through a performative action enacted on a canvas spread out on the floor around which the artist circled in mad movements as they threw paint in scribbly brushstrokes (or rather “broomstrokes,” as Kiki would always use a broom). The canvas itself became a site of exorcism of the official and ideological. This character’s formal features include two circles created through the expressive gestural application of paint and sometimes enclosed in a triangle, while its repetitive reconstitution reveals the compulsively repetitive structure of trauma—a repetition that paradoxically recurs as a unique event each time it is reproduced. The canvas appears as a space of psychic discharge upon which the repressed returns.¹⁰

In the framework of the 3rd Floor’s exhibitions, artist Ashot Ashot executed several performances that made metaphysical claims of transcendence through the overcoming of “facts.” For this, Ashot Ashot adopted a self-designated strategy called afaktum, which comprised deliberate and methodic reduction of matter and speech to their basic elements, pointing toward “permanent art.” A photograph of his performance A Structure of Communication for the 1989 exhibition 666 shows a woman standing in the middle of the action with threads diagonally stretched from her head to the ground and forming a web around her. (fig. 5) Here, communication is revealed as a cultural imperative of a supposedly closed world opening to the outside, but as soon as it is revealed, it is demolished: the threads are subsequently unthreaded and destroyed.

Another underground hero of the netherworld Sev (Herik Khachatryan) used performative actions to produce objects from scrap metal. His adopted persona was itself performative, involving his signature black clothing, a color reaffirmed in his artistic name (sev in Armenian means “black”).¹¹As early as 1985 (since his first encounter with Kiki), Sev had been visiting junkyards, collecting scrap metal, and welding it in front of audiences as objets, a practice that is ongoing. A photograph from 1987 records one such expedition to the Yerevan Thermal Power Plant with photographer Aram Udinyan. (fig. 6) In this image, both protagonists are squatting next to materials they have gathered. One can only imagine Sev’s “sinister” visage, dressed all in black, marching with a fire torch and manipulating metal in front of bewildered audiences in the late-Soviet years. Sev’s work was directly inspired by postwar Neo-Dada and Nouveau Realism, which he encountered for the first time through catalogues and slides introduced by art critic Nazareth Karoyan.¹²In a 1989 action, the artist paid homage to his idol of Nouveau Realism César (César Baldaccini; French, 1921–1998) during the 3rd Floor’s visit to Paris for the opening of their exhibition. The artist executed a reverse summersault in front of one César’s assemblages. (fig. 7) For Sev, artists of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde, such as Kazimir Malevich (Russian, born Ukraine, 1878–1935), César, and Alberto Burri (Italian, 1915–1995) were his guides and inspiration toward a countercultural understanding of art as a sphere of freedom.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s the imperative formulated by the late-Soviet anti-Soviet artistic avant-garde in Armenia was the revelation of the authentic yet subterranean layers of reality as truth that had been distorted and falsified behind the ideological facade of official lies. The allegorical personifications of this subterranean truth were various netherworld dwellers, as in the case of the 3rd Floor’s 1988 Happening, or antiheroes whose painterly materialization invoked deep-seated scopophobia (Bobo’s main feature are the two empty circles that gaze back from their void without forming an eye—a “location” of the scopic drive that circles around the organ but never dwells within it, as per Lacan’s formulation of the gaze)¹³ and the surpassing of the empirical and factual in search of a quasi-mystical pure reality (as in the work of Ashot Ashot). But paradoxically, these anxieties of visibility were not revealed through disappearance and immaterialization but instead through loud gestures and actions of excess and plentitude that were positioned as constituting a counter-sphere to the official and the ideological. Ultimately, the 3rd Floor was striving for cultural and social visibility.

Aesthetically, the artists associated with the movement engaged with painting in an “expanded field” in order to exceed it from within, through the body and temporality: artists of the Happening walked through an exhibition of paintings with their faces painted, Bobo was invoked in paintings, and Ashot-Ashot “overcame” paint by spilling it over the model’s body. Painting here was both affirmed and surpassed through its multimedia expansion, and this dynamic of affirming a traditional medium while exceeding its specificity and, at times, negating it altogether rhymes with the structural positioning of these gestures from within the official discourse and in resistance to it. In other words, these performative gestures were articulated from within the margins of the officially sanctioned glasnost policy as its avant-garde. Retrospectively, however, the 3rd Floor artists often situated their exhibitions as a resistant and anti-institutional subcultural response to what they perceived as the violence of the official culture that hindered freedom and creativity. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and Armenia’s independence, this understanding of avant-garde art as a mode of subcultural resistance to the dominant culture entered a certain crisis. As the Soviet world was disappearing through fast-paced privatization, financial collapse, de-modernization of urban spaces, and socially induced historical amnesia of the recent past, to the late-Soviet avant-gardists, the 1990s promised a reconciliation between art (imagined as a realm of free creation) and dominant culture (understood as a regressive and repressive mechanism of conformity).

Editors’ note: Read Part II of this series here, and Part III here.

Author’s note: The research for this three-part article was commissioned by ARé Cultural Foundation in 2022. Some parts are informed by earlier research conducted for my monograph. See Angela Harutyunyan, Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the “Painterly Real,” 1987–2004 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017)

The post Performative Gestures and Limits of Resistance in Armenian Contemporary Art (1987–2008), Part I appeared first on post.