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FROM CULTURAL POLITICS TO THE POLITICS OF PURE REPRESENTATION: THE ARMENIAN PAVILION IN VENICE
epress.am
06.23.2011
The article below was provided by Angela Harutyunyan, an art curator
originally from Armenia but now based in Egypt who attended the
opening of the Biennale di Venezia (the Venice Art Biennial) earlier
this month.
The Armenian Pavilion at the 54th International Art Exhibition
of la Biennale di Venezia (the Venice Art Biennial) entitled
"Manuals: Subjects of a New Universality" conceptually deals with the
relationship of the particular with the universal in the context of
identity and offers various aesthetic solutions to the politics and
economics of survival.
By overidentifying with the attributes of the dominant power, Grigor
Khachatryan's National Center for Planning Accidents (pictured, below)
presents power as a theatrical act and a performance. In a designated
room in the Armenian Mekhitarist Mourad Rafaelian College (also known
as Palazzo Zenobio) Khachatryan has reproduced a room for official
meetings with attributes such as a central carpet, a long table,
soft office chairs, tall natural flowers placed along the length of
the table as well as photographic documentation of previous official
meetings. Even the attendant of the Pavilion automatically becomes
Khachatryan's secretary.
Mher Azatyan's installation (pictured, below) delves into a formula for
survival in verbal and visual fragments of the everyday. The ruins of
soviet universality-photographic snapshots of abandoned and accidental
objects and sites are uncomfortably crowded on the walls of the hallway
connecting two larger rooms, as if the positioning of one photograph
intervenes into the space of another. As opposed to this piling up
of the visual fragments, Azatyan's texts seem to breathe freely in a
larger room where they appear and disappear according to the viewer's
movements in the room. Azatyan's short samples of "minimalist poetry"
are either collected from the vernacular language or "authored" by the
artist. Even though most of them are authored, nevertheless, they are
collectively produced utterances that structure everyday communication,
or often the lack of it: "We burn wood, and another winter will pass,"
"The bee produces honey. What does the artist produce?" and "Money
doesn't like equality."
The narrative of the Manuals concludes with Astghik Melkonyan's
guidebook on daily survival or instructions on how to manage one's
monthly salary (pictured, below). The construction made of steel and
Plexiglas carries various prescriptions useful especially for artists
living in the socio-economic conditions of today's Armenia. Both
Melkonyan's work and the Odyssey of its transportation to Venice
epitomize the cultural politics in contemporary Armenia as well as
raise fundamental issues related to the status of the artist as well
as art's symbolic and material value.
On Jun. 4, during the crowded opening of the Armenian Pavilion, the
doors of the room reserved for Melkonyan's installation were locked. A
note was hanging with an inscription that due to the "loss" of the
work during its transportation, a second opening was scheduled on Jun.
10. The reason for this failure was the fact that various elements
of the construction were forgotten and left behind in Yerevan. What
followed where haphazard, uncalculated and ultimately failed attempts
to manufacture and construct the installation from aluminum, until
a decision was made to open the Pavilion without Melkonyan's work.
However, neither the curator's neutralizing ascription of
responsibility to a third person, nor the celebratory attitude of
the organizers could conceal the fact that in case of the Armenian
Pavilion it was not the artist who appeared in the center of the
project - instead, it was the glitter of pure representation spiced
up with a large audience, clinking wine glasses and even the presence
of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili who visited the Pavilion
in a move of cultural diplomacy.
What lies between the curatorial team's initial mission to use the
Pavilion as an opportunity to locally intervene into the cultural
politics and the project's ultimate destiny as pure representation is
a long and painful negotiation of power, establishment of professional
positions vis-a-vis the Ministry of Culture and the commissioner and
manifestations of these positions. The curatorial team consisting of
Vardan Azatyan, Ruben Arevshatyan and Nazareth Karoyan experienced
some "casualties" before Venice as Azatyan formally withdrew from
the team three weeks before the opening of the Biennale.
According to Azatyan's interview to Epress.am, the main reason for his
withdrawal was the delay of financial resources that the commissioner
was to secure. This created a situation when the failure of a single
miniscule detail could result in the collapse of the entire project.
However, behind Azatyan's solely pragmatic decision stand serious
professional considerations with ethical consequences which have
ramifications for cultural politics. In a situation when a failure
to oversee small details due to the lack of finances threatens
the entire project, curators are forced to find situational and
momentary solutions. This can create conditions in which not only
their professional integrity is threatened as the production of the
project is essentially out of their control, but also their working
relationship with the artists and the responsibility towards the
project. But most importantly, according to Azatyan, "as a result,
the vicious work method common in Armenia was again employed - based
on sacrifice... Instead of carrying out their direct duties, they
[public institutions] act as symbolic bureaus, which in the name of
the 'homeland', in the name of 'the nation's honor,' are 'authorized'
to exploit and decimate the country's most expensive resource -
human energy."
Instead of becoming a catalyst to have an impact on local
cultural politics in Armenia, the Pavilion (even if it is an
engaging exhibition) turns into a space for pure representation
where the curators (willingly or by default), organizers and those
accompanying them project their phantasmagoria (related to power and
recognition), where the contact with contemporary art becomes a matter
of "lifestyle" and the artist turns into a tool to fuel these desires
and associations. When art is measured according to how many tons
it weighs, representation as an event becomes the guarantor of the
project's success, situationism turns into the only possible working
method and the artist appears as merely a reason to secure the success
of the event, then it is pointless to expect a curatorial position,
reflection or responsibility. What might seem a simple failure to
bring together one installation is a symptom of deeper processes and
attitudes within the cultural politics in Armenia.
To expect responsibility from the Ministry of Culture or the
commissioner is in vain since, according to Karoyan, they are
"inexperienced" in the organization of the Pavilion or dealing with
the contemporary art scene. But also, Arevshatyan's and Karoyan's
decision at the time of Azatyan's withdrawal to carry on with
the project and "save" it, arguably, did not allow the official
institutions and their actors to realize their share of responsibility
and gain "experience." In this situation, the whole responsibility
by default lies with the curators whose most important task (apart
from playing cultural politics with public institutions and their
private appointees) is to closely engage with an artist's practice and
provide the best possible conditions for the production of the work and
subsequently, the exhibition. This is possible only when the artist's
practice appears at the center of the project. Within our specific
economy and distribution of resources, it is the curator's task to
enable the artist as much as possible to become the main economic
subject as well as the subject of aesthetic decisions. The curator's
task is not so much the mediation and translation between the art
work and its publics (only those works need "medical hermeneutics,"
if we borrow Boris Groys' term, that need to be "saved"). Neither is
it the desire to slice a bigger pie of art's symbolic economy, but to
be attentive and serious about the most trivial of administrative,
organizational and formal details - starting from the artist's
accommodation to the preparation of the press release.
Finally, it is the curator's task to work with the artist, and not
at the expense of the artist. It is only then we can celebrate the
representational success of the Pavilion when the experience of its
organization results in an impact in the local cultural policy. The
participation in the world's oldest and most prestigious Biennale
certainly involves a branding operation and carries with it cultural
capital that can translate into the local cultural politics. This
involves a changed attitude towards the artist's practice, a demand
from public institutions to provide access to its resources for the
producers of contemporary art and its discourses as well as active
involvement in the dominant politics of representation.
When the artist's experience with the Biennale ironically becomes
identical to the content of her work (a manual of how-to-do with
the per diem and accommodation and how to construct a laborious
installation out of nothing) and turns into a strategy and tactic
of survival, then we can easily conclude that the cultural politics
of the Pavilion have failed, even if the representation of the event
has succeeded.
All photos property of and provided by the artists.
epress.am
06.23.2011
The article below was provided by Angela Harutyunyan, an art curator
originally from Armenia but now based in Egypt who attended the
opening of the Biennale di Venezia (the Venice Art Biennial) earlier
this month.
The Armenian Pavilion at the 54th International Art Exhibition
of la Biennale di Venezia (the Venice Art Biennial) entitled
"Manuals: Subjects of a New Universality" conceptually deals with the
relationship of the particular with the universal in the context of
identity and offers various aesthetic solutions to the politics and
economics of survival.
By overidentifying with the attributes of the dominant power, Grigor
Khachatryan's National Center for Planning Accidents (pictured, below)
presents power as a theatrical act and a performance. In a designated
room in the Armenian Mekhitarist Mourad Rafaelian College (also known
as Palazzo Zenobio) Khachatryan has reproduced a room for official
meetings with attributes such as a central carpet, a long table,
soft office chairs, tall natural flowers placed along the length of
the table as well as photographic documentation of previous official
meetings. Even the attendant of the Pavilion automatically becomes
Khachatryan's secretary.
Mher Azatyan's installation (pictured, below) delves into a formula for
survival in verbal and visual fragments of the everyday. The ruins of
soviet universality-photographic snapshots of abandoned and accidental
objects and sites are uncomfortably crowded on the walls of the hallway
connecting two larger rooms, as if the positioning of one photograph
intervenes into the space of another. As opposed to this piling up
of the visual fragments, Azatyan's texts seem to breathe freely in a
larger room where they appear and disappear according to the viewer's
movements in the room. Azatyan's short samples of "minimalist poetry"
are either collected from the vernacular language or "authored" by the
artist. Even though most of them are authored, nevertheless, they are
collectively produced utterances that structure everyday communication,
or often the lack of it: "We burn wood, and another winter will pass,"
"The bee produces honey. What does the artist produce?" and "Money
doesn't like equality."
The narrative of the Manuals concludes with Astghik Melkonyan's
guidebook on daily survival or instructions on how to manage one's
monthly salary (pictured, below). The construction made of steel and
Plexiglas carries various prescriptions useful especially for artists
living in the socio-economic conditions of today's Armenia. Both
Melkonyan's work and the Odyssey of its transportation to Venice
epitomize the cultural politics in contemporary Armenia as well as
raise fundamental issues related to the status of the artist as well
as art's symbolic and material value.
On Jun. 4, during the crowded opening of the Armenian Pavilion, the
doors of the room reserved for Melkonyan's installation were locked. A
note was hanging with an inscription that due to the "loss" of the
work during its transportation, a second opening was scheduled on Jun.
10. The reason for this failure was the fact that various elements
of the construction were forgotten and left behind in Yerevan. What
followed where haphazard, uncalculated and ultimately failed attempts
to manufacture and construct the installation from aluminum, until
a decision was made to open the Pavilion without Melkonyan's work.
However, neither the curator's neutralizing ascription of
responsibility to a third person, nor the celebratory attitude of
the organizers could conceal the fact that in case of the Armenian
Pavilion it was not the artist who appeared in the center of the
project - instead, it was the glitter of pure representation spiced
up with a large audience, clinking wine glasses and even the presence
of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili who visited the Pavilion
in a move of cultural diplomacy.
What lies between the curatorial team's initial mission to use the
Pavilion as an opportunity to locally intervene into the cultural
politics and the project's ultimate destiny as pure representation is
a long and painful negotiation of power, establishment of professional
positions vis-a-vis the Ministry of Culture and the commissioner and
manifestations of these positions. The curatorial team consisting of
Vardan Azatyan, Ruben Arevshatyan and Nazareth Karoyan experienced
some "casualties" before Venice as Azatyan formally withdrew from
the team three weeks before the opening of the Biennale.
According to Azatyan's interview to Epress.am, the main reason for his
withdrawal was the delay of financial resources that the commissioner
was to secure. This created a situation when the failure of a single
miniscule detail could result in the collapse of the entire project.
However, behind Azatyan's solely pragmatic decision stand serious
professional considerations with ethical consequences which have
ramifications for cultural politics. In a situation when a failure
to oversee small details due to the lack of finances threatens
the entire project, curators are forced to find situational and
momentary solutions. This can create conditions in which not only
their professional integrity is threatened as the production of the
project is essentially out of their control, but also their working
relationship with the artists and the responsibility towards the
project. But most importantly, according to Azatyan, "as a result,
the vicious work method common in Armenia was again employed - based
on sacrifice... Instead of carrying out their direct duties, they
[public institutions] act as symbolic bureaus, which in the name of
the 'homeland', in the name of 'the nation's honor,' are 'authorized'
to exploit and decimate the country's most expensive resource -
human energy."
Instead of becoming a catalyst to have an impact on local
cultural politics in Armenia, the Pavilion (even if it is an
engaging exhibition) turns into a space for pure representation
where the curators (willingly or by default), organizers and those
accompanying them project their phantasmagoria (related to power and
recognition), where the contact with contemporary art becomes a matter
of "lifestyle" and the artist turns into a tool to fuel these desires
and associations. When art is measured according to how many tons
it weighs, representation as an event becomes the guarantor of the
project's success, situationism turns into the only possible working
method and the artist appears as merely a reason to secure the success
of the event, then it is pointless to expect a curatorial position,
reflection or responsibility. What might seem a simple failure to
bring together one installation is a symptom of deeper processes and
attitudes within the cultural politics in Armenia.
To expect responsibility from the Ministry of Culture or the
commissioner is in vain since, according to Karoyan, they are
"inexperienced" in the organization of the Pavilion or dealing with
the contemporary art scene. But also, Arevshatyan's and Karoyan's
decision at the time of Azatyan's withdrawal to carry on with
the project and "save" it, arguably, did not allow the official
institutions and their actors to realize their share of responsibility
and gain "experience." In this situation, the whole responsibility
by default lies with the curators whose most important task (apart
from playing cultural politics with public institutions and their
private appointees) is to closely engage with an artist's practice and
provide the best possible conditions for the production of the work and
subsequently, the exhibition. This is possible only when the artist's
practice appears at the center of the project. Within our specific
economy and distribution of resources, it is the curator's task to
enable the artist as much as possible to become the main economic
subject as well as the subject of aesthetic decisions. The curator's
task is not so much the mediation and translation between the art
work and its publics (only those works need "medical hermeneutics,"
if we borrow Boris Groys' term, that need to be "saved"). Neither is
it the desire to slice a bigger pie of art's symbolic economy, but to
be attentive and serious about the most trivial of administrative,
organizational and formal details - starting from the artist's
accommodation to the preparation of the press release.
Finally, it is the curator's task to work with the artist, and not
at the expense of the artist. It is only then we can celebrate the
representational success of the Pavilion when the experience of its
organization results in an impact in the local cultural policy. The
participation in the world's oldest and most prestigious Biennale
certainly involves a branding operation and carries with it cultural
capital that can translate into the local cultural politics. This
involves a changed attitude towards the artist's practice, a demand
from public institutions to provide access to its resources for the
producers of contemporary art and its discourses as well as active
involvement in the dominant politics of representation.
When the artist's experience with the Biennale ironically becomes
identical to the content of her work (a manual of how-to-do with
the per diem and accommodation and how to construct a laborious
installation out of nothing) and turns into a strategy and tactic
of survival, then we can easily conclude that the cultural politics
of the Pavilion have failed, even if the representation of the event
has succeeded.
All photos property of and provided by the artists.